Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be considerably more caution in the blogosphere today over the announcement that the feds have arrested six men who were planning to attack soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, than breathless reports yesterday that an explosion in a Las Vegas parking garage was a terrorist attack.
That is well and good, because the preliminary reports call to mind those feckless Miami-based terrorist wannabes who were going to take a bus to Chicago and blow up the Sears Tower. Or something.
These alleged terrorists had been under surveillance by the FBI for months, practiced by shooting paintball guns and real weapons in a rural area of the Pennsylvania Poconos and allegedly watched jihadist videos in which Osama bin Laden urged them toward martyrdom.
Captain Ed cut to the chase at Captain’s Quarters in noting that these guys do not appear to have the smarts of typical Al Qaeda operatives insofar as they made a videotape of their training sessions and then went to a retail store to get it made into a DVD.
He adds:
Is this al-Qaeda? It could be, but I’m not sure that true AQ jihadis would be that dumb, at least not twice. I’m also thinking that AQ would not have chosen Fort Dix as a target. It could just be AQ-inspired fanatics who managed to screw up just enough to get caught.
Good points. Fort Dix is about as low-priority a military target as exists in the U.S., but it was a convenient one being only a few miles from where the men lived. Four are said to be ethnic Albanians, and it is possible that some or all of them had lived at the base in 1999 when it sheltered more than 4,000 ethnic Albanian refugees during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
In any event, stay tuned.
More here.