"It's not exactly al-Qaeda," said one law enforcement official. Indeed, the 4 home grown terrorists caught after an FBI sting operation were not trained by the terrorist group or funded by them.
But they were inspired by them. And to ignore the fact that 3 of the suspects were radicalized by Islamic extremists in prison only points to the folly of thinking that you can treat terrorists as "criminals" and not as people at war with the United States.
The timing for President Obama couldn't be any better. He is scheduled to deliver a speech on national security today where he will talk about the fate of the nearly 300 prisoners at Guantanamo.
But the New York cell never had any chance of being successful due to some good work by the FBI who penetrated the group and sold them useless explosives to blow up a synagogue as well as a non-working Stinger missile that they were going to use to bring down a military transport. Michael Daly, Allison Gendar, and Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News have some background to the thwarted attack:
The FBI and NYPD busted a four-man homegrown terror cell Wednesday night that was plotting to blow up two Bronx synagogues while simultaneously shooting a plane out of the sky, sources told the Daily News.
The idea was to create a "fireball that would make the country gasp," one law enforcement said.
Little did they know the plastic explosives packed into their car bombs and the plane-downing Stinger missile in their backseat were all phony - supplied by undercover agents posing as Pakistani militants linked to Al Qaeda.
"If there can be any good news from this terror scare it's that this group was relatively unsophisticated, penetrated early, and not connected to another terrorist group," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). "This incident shows that we must always be vigilant against terrorism, foreign or domestic."
The suspects - three U.S.-born citizens and one Haitian immigrant - at least three of whom were said to be jailhouse converts to Islam, were angry about the deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan, sources told The News.
This incident should crash the comfortable assumptions of many in the Obama administration who, it appeared, were trying to soft pedal the War on Terror by changing its name ("Overseas Contingency Operations") and generally scaling back efforts to keep the issue of terrorism ("Man Caused Disasters") front and center.
Let's hope they take the message to heart.
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