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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Who says we can't foil terrorist plots without torture?
Posted by Jill | 6:02 AM
Yes we can:
Four men were arrested Wednesday night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.

The men, all of whom live in Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New York City, were arrested around 9 p.m. after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars outside the Riverdale Temple and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Center, officials said. But the men did not know the bombs, obtained with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were fake.

The arrests capped what officials described as a “painstaking investigation” that began in June 2008 involving an F.B.I. agent who had been told by a federal informant of the men’s desire to attack targets in America. As part of the plot, the men intended to fire Stinger missiles at military aircraft at the base, which is at Stewart International Airport, officials said.

[snip]

n April, Mr. Cromitie and the three other men selected the synagogues as their targets, the statement said. The informant soon helped them get the weapons, which were incapable of being fired or detonated, according to the authorities.

Mr. Kelly told Jewish leaders Wednesday evening that the attackers planned simultaneous attacks, and the men planned to leave the bombs in the cars in front of the two synagogues, drive back to Newburgh and retrieve cellphone-detonating devices and then proceed with the attack on the air base — simultaneously shooting down aircraft while remotely setting off the devices in the cars.

On Wednesday night, they planted one of the mock improvised explosive devices in a trunk of a car outside the temple and two mock bombs in the back seat of a car outside the Jewish center, the authorities said. Shortly thereafter, police officers swooped in and broke the windows on the suspects’ black sport utility vehicle and charged them with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States and conspiracy to acquire and use antiaircraft missiles.


See? THIS is how it's done. This isn't a bunch of guys who like to get dressed up like ninjas and talk, and therefore you have nothing on them that's likely to hold up. You get in early, you set it up so that you can catch them in the act with them unaware that their "weaponry" is useless, and then you swoop in.

Very nice work by the FBI here.

By the way, just for the benefit of Mr. Richard B. Cheney, who insists that the Bush Administration kept America safe, but only AFTER 9/11, let me remind him of this:
The FBI failed to seize at least five opportunities to intercept two 9/11 hijackers before the attacks, including two instances in San Diego County when the terrorists lived with an FBI informant and were befriended by a subject of a previous FBI investigation.


And don't tell me that prior to 9/11, there was a "failure of imagination." There had already been an attack on the World Trade Center, there was the infamous August 6 PDB, and a great deal of other information that an Administration not already involved in two public relations disasters and already obsessed with Iraq would have been able to put together. It took three tries to get any convictions of the so-called "Liberty City Six", the aforementioned ninja-costumed bumblers. Funny how when an administration doesn't have a vested interest in having a terrorist attack happen to provide it with an excuse to invade a completely unrelated country, the FBI is capable of doing crackerjack work like this.

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3 Comments:
Blogger Bob said...
Same impression I had. This one was serious. The Fort Dix bunch (the paintball boys) were fools, never a real threat, & received excessive sentences.
5/21/09, 3:16 PM  
Anonymous Online Surveys said...
Kudos to the agents who foiled this. The war on terror remains on track, despite our president thinking that we have lost our way.
5/22/09, 8:58 AM  
Blogger Jayhawk said...
Well, read on folks. This one is turning out to be another one where the leader and facilitator was the FBI informant. This was about as real as the guys in Florida who asked the FBI to give them combat boots in order to practice their close order drill in preparation for blowing up the Sears Building in Chicago.
5/22/09, 12:37 PM  
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