NEW YORK - September 22, 2009 - It has a familiar ring: “Investigators are looking for about a dozen more people in connection with a wide-ranging terror investigation that has already netted arrests in Colorado and New York City, a source familiar with the investigation said Tuesday.”

That’s the lead sentence of a CNN “breaking news” report filed Tuesday about a frantic search for alleged terrorism plotters within the United States. But a closer inspection of the story - and that of others in the past week - reveals that despite the hoopla, federal authorities have yet to charge the men they’re accusing of a terror-related crime.

In fact, they’re only actually charged with lying to federal agents. But you wouldn’t know that from reading the headlines.

Problematic in this and other recent reports is the use of anonymous law enforcement sources, who repeatedly hype alleged ties to al Qaeda, identify “persons of interest,” and detail dramatic but unspecified plots.

These sources, notes CBS’ Alex Sunby, began “clicking off all of the elements of their perennial song-and-dance number in terror-plot cases; this time from New York to Denver to Washington and back. The prejudicial leaks from law enforcement; the prompt (and promptly repeated) links to al Qaeda; the dramatic headlines, the identification of a ‘person of interest;’ the assurances that no particular target had been specified; the intercession of an overwhelmed defense attorney; the denials, the meetings, the breakdown in talks, and finally, the arrest (late at night, but with the tipped-off news cameras hovering above and about).”

“We’ve seen various iterations of the perp-walk parade hundreds of times before, in cases that merited the attention or not, and certainly dozens of times since September 11, 2001,” Sunby continues. “Often, way too often, the government has in the end been able or willing to prove far less than the initial (and often hysterical and hysterically received) allegations - (which are) distributed (typically without challenge) via cable television and the Internet. For example, off the top of my head, I give you: Zacarias Moussaoui, who was not the ‘20th hijacker,’ Jose Padilla, who was not the ‘dirty bomber’, and John Walker Lindh, who was not the ‘American Taliban.’”