I was going to write a blog entry on the Riverdale terror plot in the Bronx and talk about how Americans should worry about native-born Islamic radicals as much as worry about foreign ones getting into the country, how treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem gets better results, how we have to arrest them over here even if we try to fight them over there, and how we should be more vigilant at what goes on in our own backyards.
Except the facts don't seem to back up any of that.
The four men arrested in New York for plotting attacks on synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and firing a missile against a military plane makes for a heck of a story - and, as the New York Post proved, incendiary copy - but it turns out that, once again, the federal government has caught "terrorists" that can barely operate a forklift, let alone carry out a terror plot.
One newspaper notes that the ringleader, James Cromitie, is a pot-smoking high school dropout, co-defendant Laguerre Payen was on antidepressant medication and was illiterate, and that none of the four men were cognizant enough to realize that the FBI agent who nabbed them was not the weapons dealer he claimed to be - and was in fact leading them into a trap.
One of them couldn't even keep his pants on in court.
The entire case is based largely on the alleged gang's association with the unidentified FBI informant; all anyone knows about this agent is that he or she pleaded guilty in 2002 to a fraud scheme, according to this paper.
Like the "mind control" cult in Miami that had allegedly planned to blow up the Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago, this gang of four apparently is too dunderheaded even to incapacitate an Olympic figure skater. But you probably won't hear that from the American mainstream media.
I learned all of this from the Canberra Times, a paper in Australia.
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