Terror Bust in NYC
It appears that this home grown terrorist cell in New York City was never particularly close to seeing their plans come to fruition since they were well-surveilled by law enforcement for quite some time. Which is how it should be. It’s good work by the FBI and the NYPD.
Among other things, I think this is a reminder that while international issues should of course be of some concern to the U.S. government, it’s very difficult to draw a straight line between events in Afghanistan and America’s vulnerability to terrorism. The reason this plot was a danger at all was that the plotters were in the United States of America and the reason it was never that big a danger was that law enforcement was doing a good job and had the situation under control. It’s hard to see how the existence or non-existence of a “safe haven” of some kind on another continent could have made a difference.
30 Responses to “Terror Bust in NYC”
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May 21st, 2009 at 9:01 am
It’s hard to see how training and contacts would have made a difference, really?
If they met some people who plugged them into a terror network and/or trained them to make their own explosives, they wouldn’t have had to go door to door asking for plastic explosives, they could have had them without having such a high profile, and we’d be much less likely to know about the plot
May 21st, 2009 at 9:02 am
I’m sure that Mr. abb1 is in morning today.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:05 am
I’m waiting for SLC to point out that several of the perps were surnamed Williams.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:07 am
SLC,
Yes, it’s surprising how Mr. Yglesias’ blog is a haven for habitual Jew-haters. Or perhaps not, given that Mr. Yglesias isn’t a particularly observant Jew. (Judaism forbids legalized butchery of unborn children as well as pork eating, both of which Mr. Yglesias endorses.)
May 21st, 2009 at 9:08 am
No “straight line”? That’s the year’s understatement. Why is it that we are lead to believe that our enemies (N. Korea, Iran, etc.) are lead by crazy people who want to blow up the US but crazy people (these four must be crazy) who want to blow up buildings (whether they be a federal building in OK or a synagogue in the Bronx) are cunning terrorists with links to, where else, the middle east.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:12 am
At first scan this looks like more of the “let’s find some idiots and give them fake bombs so we can have some practice” terrorists we’ve been doing for the last 8 years. Not sure this says anything about our readiness for anything real.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:16 am
Do we get to torture them now?
May 21st, 2009 at 9:16 am
All this underscores is the importance of good intelligence gathering being crucial in preventing such attacks.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:29 am
I think you are right about the safe havens, but if you had better governance across the middle east there would probably be less terrorism. Its not that terrorists are plotting in their safe havens, its that when people live in unstable countries, or are forced to flee to countries where they aren’t accepted, they can become radicalized and start planning terrorist activity. Also we don’t want Pakistan’s nukes to become available to the highest bidder.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:35 am
Re Don Williams
Actually, I hadn’t noticed that but, since the perps were all black Americans, I assume that they are not related to Mr. Williams who, I assume, is a honky.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:35 am
I sure hope these terrorists aren’t locked up in American prisons. We’ll be in terrible danger!
May 21st, 2009 at 9:39 am
How many people did we waterboard and subject to EIT’s to break this terror cell? Tell me, tell me! It couldn’t have happened without EIT, could it? You can’t catch these ticking time bombs without EIT, Jack Bauer and Dick Cheney said so!
BTW, I agree with TJ at 9:12am. The Feds will have a tough time showing that this wasn’t entrapment. If it wasn’t, though, it’s another triumph of traditional law enforcement over the spy game fantasies we’ve been subjected to.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:43 am
I think you’re being a bit too blase about Afghanastan, Matt. It wasn’t just a “safe haven” it was a training ground — Al Quaeda had a network of fully-functioning camps providing folks like these with the kind of expertise that could have made them harder to notice and track.
On the whole, though, big ups to the NYPD and the FBI, who presumably accomplished this disruption without waterboarding anyone, rounding up busloads of foreign-looking civilians, or listening in any time someone picks up an overseas phone call.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:59 am
Hector–
Although it’s OT, since you went there, I have to point out that you are (willfully?) misrepresenting the teachings of some form of Judaism. Conservative and Reform Judaism in the United States are both officially on record as pro-choice, and even the Orthodox position, which condemns abortion in general, commands it in some circumstances.
As for pork eating, Reform Judaism does not forbid it and a large percentage of American Jews eat pork. I don’t know what Mr. Yglesias’s sub-sectarian affiliation is, but there is likely nothing amiss or unusual about his position on reproductive choice or obeying the laws of Kashruth.
As for this blog being a home for anti-Israel types, it’s unfortunate that there are so few thoughtful commentators on the Arab-Israeli conflict and so many feel the need to side the Islamist-Nationalists in the Palestinian camp or the right-wing chauvinists in the Israeli camp.
The Internet has taught me well the lesson that anti-Israel jerks and pro-Israel jerks have one thing in common: they’re all obstreperous jerks.
May 21st, 2009 at 10:03 am
[the war on terrorism] is primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation
natch
May 21st, 2009 at 10:13 am
Re SLC at 10: “Actually, I hadn’t noticed that but, since the perps were all black Americans, I assume that they are not related to Mr. Williams who, I assume, is a honky.”
—————-
200 proof. Presumably. Although we honkys reared in the South know that it’s best to not look too closely around the family’s woodpile.
May 21st, 2009 at 10:22 am
Tapir Boy,
Evidently you are not too familliar with the commenters on this blog. They include:
- Mr. Hack, a convicted smack addict and armed robber who threatened to murder a bank teller in the service of his Nihilist beliefs and his smack habbit
- Mr. Fareed, a deranged Islamist freak who pretends to be Zoroastrian
-Mr. Steve Sailer who believes that Asian men should stop trying to score white women because we are all effeminate p*ssies
And a motley crew of assorted other Jew-haters. I don’t know why these looney tunes hang around Mr. Yglesias blog, but I have my suspicions.
May 21st, 2009 at 10:35 am
Re Hector
Don’t forget Mr. abb1, Mr. Arnold Evans, Mr. Dan Kervick, Mr. Trevor, Mr. Ed Marshall, and Mr. Don Wiliams amongst other Israel bashers who post here.
May 21st, 2009 at 10:38 am
Re Don Williams
200 proof. Presumably. Although we honkys reared in the South know that it’s best to not look too closely around the family’s woodpile.
Like the 7 children Thomas Jefferson had by Sally Hemmings.
May 21st, 2009 at 10:43 am
“It’s hard to see how the existence or non-existence of a “safe haven” of some kind on another continent could have made a difference.”
Perhaps not to this particular plot, but c’mon. The advantages of having a “safe haven” are pretty damn obvious, whether it’s for Islamic terrorists, Somali pirates or good old fashioned mobsters.
Mike
May 21st, 2009 at 10:54 am
Re SLC at 19: “Like the 7 children Thomas Jefferson had by Sally Hemmings.”
——–
Allegedly had.
We alumni of Mr Jefferson’s University are about as transparent on that particular woodpile as Bibi is when discussing the settlement issue.
You got a mean streak, SLC. I like that in a person.
May 21st, 2009 at 11:08 am
I was struck by this line from the BBC report.
If he had a gun? Yes, this definitely sounds like a highly organized and dangerous terrorist.
May 21st, 2009 at 11:16 am
Isn’t this pretty close to entrapment, at least from what we see so far?
May 21st, 2009 at 11:30 am
The Somali pirates aren’t a good example, since their job involves a boat, and boats require care and feeding; not to mention that their pirating job involves being near a high traffic waterway. The mobsters are a better example, and most of their safe havens were close to where they lived and did their business.
The Taliban having space in Afghanistan is useful for their operations in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but far less so for planning an attack in NYC.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Re Mbunge at 20: “The advantages of having a “safe haven” are pretty damn obvious, whether it’s for Islamic terrorists, Somali pirates or good old fashioned mobsters.”
————–
Hmmm. I have an idea for where Al Qaeda could do paramilitary training: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob_Creek_Gun_Range
May 21st, 2009 at 12:15 pm
In contrast, any anonymous office building will do for training in countersurveillance, burglary, covert communications,etc.
And if I wanted to develop some nasty bio-weapons, I would go to Harvard or to some commercial company in the US, Europe or Australia –not some shithole desert in Iraq.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:24 pm
What safe havens are good for is keeping your leadership cadre, financial assets and strategic plans safe and uncompromised. You can’t waterboard Bin Laden if the Chinese let him hide out in western China , for example.
It is also very difficult to TRANSMIT info securely from within a hostile area –it is much easier to broadcast high value info into hostile areas via shortwave/one time pad encryption From safe havens. Sleepers can not be detected if they merely listen to shortwave broadcasts to receive orders , for example. Which is why you used to be able to hear all those numbers being recited on shortwave broadcasts to the USA from Cuba.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:51 pm
“The Taliban having space in Afghanistan is useful for their operations in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but far less so for planning an attack in NYC.”
Since terrorist leaders rarely want to die themselves, it’s fairly important for their planning that they have a place to hide where military/law enforcement can’t get at them.
Mike
May 21st, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Since terrorist leaders rarely want to die themselves
Well, the ones that survive long enough to become leaders, yeah. If they had wanted martyrdom they would have achieved it already. The dynamics of being a REMF in a terrorist organization must be… interesting.
In any case, in sufficiently flexible organizations, “leader” is defined principally by the absence of living people who outrank you.
This is both why leaders are less important than they look (if they weren’t occupying that leadership position, someone else would be, very likely to similar effect) and why targeting them is less effective than it seems like it ought to be (someone else moves up and does something very similar to the previous leader), across a wide range of human activities. People are inherently predisposed to hero worship, so they tend not to believe this, but serious study of the dynamics of organizations confirms it repeatedly.
(This does vary somewhat for elections and revolutions, which come in with the specific intent of changing policy and often replace several layers of personnel to do so. But an outside assassination can rarely accomplish this effect.)
May 22nd, 2009 at 10:01 am
“It’s good work by the FBI and the NYPD.”
Oh, please.
The details are already emerging, the fact that one of these “dangerous jihadists” is a schizophrenic, that their fearless leader is a stoner, that will undoubtedly place this case squarely in the same category with all of the other incidents our secret police agencies have unveiled as “dangerous terrrorist plots” that they are protecting us from. I give it about two months before the tiny updates about this case appear on page 15, you know, the ones that will tell us that the idea of actually doing anything violent was foisted on this group of hapless misfits by the FBI undercover agent in their midst.
Not that anyone who has been paying attention would have to have waited on the news about the schizophrenia or the stonerism, or the upcoming revelations about the fact that what has been uncovered is basically an FBI agent provocateur and the gullible, even outright mentally impaired, band he was able to get to agree, notionally, to his scheme; to know that this was a complete non-story created out of whole cloth to give the GWOT some air of reality. Even the initial report, in its screaming headlines, announced that this dangerous terrorist group was planning, not only to bomb synagogues, which I guess would conceivably be within the means of even lone crazies, but to bring down Air Force planes — I guess, the tactical air that would swarm to the defense of the synagogues — with missiles. Or wait, was that death rays emanating from their fingertips? Both seem about equally plausible, and this element of their “plot”, reported in the very first items about this non-story, was the tell, the sure sign that this was a band of deluded idiots led by an agent provocateur.
Not that the four alleged perpetrators are the most deluded idiots in this story. That would be you and me, the taxpayers who have allowed all those FBI squads that used to cover actual crime, and the White Collar Crime squads were particularly hard hit in this process, be redirected to protecting us against literal schizos whose paranoid fantasies are amenable to content provided by an FBI undercover agent among them. Jeez, these aren’t even strong-willed schizos, since they let other folks feed them delusional content, but mere shadows of what we expect from true full-blooded, actually dangerous, crazies. They’re a disgrace to CPS sufferers everywhere!
Well, a chronic paranoid schizophrenic has the excuse of his illness for his paranoid delusions. What’s our excuse? Why do supposedly sane people throw good money after the notion that there are terrorist cells hiding everywhere in the land, just waiting for a lapse in the vigilance of our FBI and NYPD secret protectors to leap out and wield their death rays to kill us all in our beds? Damn, who forgot to put the thorazine in the water supply?