The American Mind

The FBI thwarted a planned terrorist attack on New Jersey’s Fort Dix. Six ethnic Albanians prepped for the attack by planning paintball and firing guns in the Poconos. The group was arrested when they tried buying guns from an FBI agent:

Federal investigators last night arrested six men who were planning a heavily-armed armed attack against soldiers at Fort Dix as part of a jihad against America, according to two law enforcement sources.

The men had conducted surveillance of the Army base and were caught allegedly attempting to purchase AK-47s to carry out their plan, one of the sources said.

The bust came after several of them were lured to a meeting with an arms-seller who turned out to be a secret FBI informant, said both sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the arrests.

The would-be attackers, ethnic Albanians who had been under surveillance by the FBI for months, practiced by shooting paintball guns and real weapons in a rural area of the Poconos, one source said. They also allegedly watched jihadist videos in which Osama bin Laden urged them toward martyrdom.

ABC News reports the terrorists were U.S. residents [via Hot Air].

Not to get morbid or to give then enemy any ideas but this plan was both smart and stupid. After the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks I expected al Qaeda to strike again and again instilling fear in the population. There was a cocooning effect after the Twin Towers and Pentagon were hit. It would have been worse and more damaging to the economy if once a week or a couple times a month gunmen struck a grocery store or a truck bomb exploded outside a shopping mall. Think of the current season of 24 where the U.S. is crippled by relentless terrorist attacks leading up to the nuking of part of Los Angeles.

There weren’t any organized U.S. attacks afterwards. Either al Qaeda prefers the spectatular or I overestimated their capabilities. I’m going for the former because it wouldn’t be that hard to plan an attack, remember Tim McVeigh. Remember what tipped off the FBI was this group going to a shop to have their anti-American video burned to DVD. They might not have been caught if they were smarter by sticking with shotguns and hunting rifles and owned a computer with a built-in DVD burner.

“Sources: 6 Charged with Plot to Kill Fort Dix Soldiers”

“Six Arrested in New Jersey Islamic Terror Plot”

UPDATE: James Joyner might have found a reason Fort Dix was a target:

In 1999, it sheltered more than 4,000 ethnic Albanian refugees during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

An AP story has only four of the men from Yugoslavia (still Kosovar Albanians?) along with one Jordanian, and one Turk. It’s very likely they’re all Islamists. I may be simplifying things a lot but this shows that their hatred of the U.S. isn’t about foreign policy alone. The U.S. helped stopped Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and is working to give them independence. Yet these Kosovar Albanians wanted to strike out at the U.S. Talk about ingratitude, or we must be killed because we’re infidels.

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin posted portions of the federal complaint and also mentions three of the men are illegal aliens. The problem isn’t that they’re in the U.S. illegally. It’s that they’re Islamists wanting to kill U.S. troops. But it will rile up Lou Dobbs and the close-the-border crowd.

UPDATE III: Pajamas Media readers, please subscribe to TAM either by RSS feed, adding TAM to your personalized Google or Yahoo page, or e-mail. Details are to your right. You don’t want to miss out of my commentary and analysis of politics, economics, books and culture.

UPDATE IV: There’s debate at Steven Taylor weblog on whether the planned attack on a military base meets the definition of terrorism.