The Fort Dix Six

There seems to be more than a hint of entrapment in the role the government informant played in helping arrange the planned attack. Back in November one of the plotters called a Philly police officer and told him that he'd been approached by someone "who was pressuring him to obtain a map of Fort Dix, and that he feared the incident was terrorist-related."


http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/014075.php

Foiling terrorist plots against the United States is no laughing matter, and with the arrest of six men in New Jersey yesterday who were allegedly planning to attack Fort Dix, the threat has been brought home once again.

http://www.cjrdaily.org/behind_the_news/post_35.php

It's hard for the press not to run with stories of possible domestic terrorism, and for good reason -- it's serious and scary business. That said, not all plots are created equal, and lumping them all together into one grab bag of thwarted domestic terrorism cases is something reporters should avoid, especially given some of the absurd plots that have been uncovered over the last couple years. This is not to say that all leads shouldn't be investigated -- they should -- or that anyone discovered in any stage of planning an attack shouldn't be scooped up -- they should-- but we've seen a couple of cases in the last few years be blown way out of proportion, and that makes us wonder what the Fort Dix story will become.

The New York Times this morning offers a good example of this grab-bag coverage when it says that the Fort Dix case is "the latest in a series of plots, targeting sites in the United States, that authorities said they have foiled. These included one last June in which seven arrests were made in Miami after the authorities described suspects talking about blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the F.B.I.'s Miami headquarters. In June 2003, the authorities said they thwarted a plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, and in 2002, six Yemeni-Americans from Lackawanna, N.Y., near Buffalo, were arrested and linked with Qaeda interests."

As we all remember, the men who were planning on blowing up Chicago's Sears Tower and the F.B.I.'s Miami headquarters last year -- the hilariously confused "Seas of David" group -- were so inept, so deluded, that the "plot" was the stuff of farce. Yes, the group swore fealty to Al Qaeda (or more precisely, to an informant posing as an Al Qaeda representative), which is enough to put them under surveillance and haul them in for questioning, at the very least. And what they wanted to do was serious enough to make them a threat, albeit one that was overblown by both the Justice Department and the press at the time.