All of us want to be safe. All of us want our families to be safe. If the seven young men arrested in Miami truly did plan to blow up the Sears tower than we should all rejoice in their interception.

I just want us to have our eyes open to not only the potential for abuse and entrapment from the use of confidential informants, but the F.B.I.’s mixed, troubling record on the use of informants in the past. During the 60s, 70s and 80s the Ku Klux Klan, a domestic terrorism organization with a well-known penchant for murder and bomb making, was so successfully infiltrated that today seeing their white hoods makes you laugh instead of fear for your life. The F.B.I. has flipped so many wiseguys in La Cosa Nostra that they now make more money being extras on The Sopranos than in racketeering.

And yet the F.B.I.’s history of infiltrating civil rights groups, the Black Panther Party and peaceful anti-war groups, along with its “ghetto information project,” represents the most scary, most Orwellian aspects of our federal government. In all of the high-profile Black nationalist cases I’m aware of it was the F.B.I. informant themselves that suggested and lead the planning of the violent action that landed the rest of the group in jail.

This administration, with its active, aggressive contempt for the civil rights of its citizenry needs to be watched very, very carefully. Though this case in Miami doesn’t involve Muslims, if we want to still be able to recognize the America that we live in we cannot allow the war on terror to become a war on Arab-Americans the way the F.B.I. waged war on African-Americans in the 60s.