According to many online reports and bloggers in the days since the case broke, Defreitas and his co-conspirators apparently had no technical knowledge, no military training, no money and no explosives.
As the New York Times has reported, at the heart of the "conspiracy" was a 63-year-old retired airport cargo worker, Russell M. Defreitas, who the complaint says talked of his dreams of inflicting massive harm, but who appeared to possess little capability of planning or executing a terror attack.
“Capability low, intent very high,” a law enforcement official said of the suspects.
Law enforcement officials and engineers also dismissed the notion that the planned attack could have resulted in a catastrophic chain reaction; system safeguards, they said, would have stopped explosions from spreading. Many experts have gone on the record with doubts that simple dynamite would have been enough to penetrate even the one fuel tank in question.
According to Neal R. Sonnett, a former federal prosecutor who was chief of the criminal division in the United States attorney’s office in Miami, “There unfortunately has been a tendency to shout too loudly about such cases. [The JFK case] has a bit of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight to it.”
As the Daily Kos has blogged so entertainingly, the JFK case is just another reminder that Bush's "War on Terror" has become a load of crap. The JFK plotters had no ties to Iraq, the Middle East, or Al Qaida. Furthermore, no illegal wiretaps or torture were needed to crack the case-- just good old-fashioned policework.
The Angry Rakkasan has also recently blogged about other recent so-called "terrorist" acts (which I have summarized below):
1. Miami Bomb Plot to Attack the Sears Tower
In June 2006, FBI agents arrested seven men in Miami it said had "sworn allegiances to al Qaeda." According to a federal indictment, the men were conspiring to "levy war against the United States. The BBC reported that although the FBI asserted that the group had "sworn allegiance to al Qaeda"—they actually had no contacts with it. Furthermore, according to the FBI, no weapons were found in the Miami warehouse, and the seven had not posed any immediate danger. When pressed, Deputy FBI leader John Pistole said the plot had been "aspirational" rather than "operational".
Court records released since then suggest that what Gonzales described as a "deadly plot" was virtually the pipe dream of a few men with almost no ability to pull it off on their own. Gonzales later acknowledged that the ringleader was nowhere near carrying out a terrorist act. At the hearing, the FBI had to admit that they found no evidence that any of the men involved had met with any real terrorist, received e-mails or wire transfers from the Middle East, possessed any al-Qaeda literature, or had even a picture of bin Laden.
2. The Hudson River Bombing Plot
Several weeks after the Miami "plot" was broken up, the FBI announced that three terrorists had been arrested after planning to bomb underwater train tunnels in New York City in order to flood lower Manhattan. According to the FBI, it was a "plot that involved martyrdom and explosives and certain of the tubes that connect Jersey and lower Manhattan."
A day after the initial story broke, the Washington Post reported: "Authorities said there was no evidence that the plotters had taken any actions, such as buying explosives or sending money. They cast doubt on the feasibility of initial reports, which first appeared in the New York Daily News, that terrorists sought to flood Lower Manhattan and the Financial District by bombing tunnels. Two anonymous U.S. counterterrorism officials discounted the ability of the conspirators to carry out any attack. One said the alleged plot was "not as far along" as described and was "more aspirational in nature." The other described the threat as "jihadi bravado," adding "somebody talks about tunnels, it lights people up," but that there was little activity to back up the talk.
3. The Fort Dix Attack Plot
On May 7, 2007, six "terrorists" were arrested in New Jersey after allegedly plotting to kill soldiers on the Fort Dix military installation. After the arrest, the FBI proclaimed: "Today we dodged a bullet. We had a group that was forming a platoon to take on an army." So how did these terrorist masterminds get caught? Answer: They made a tape of themselves shooting assault rifles and screaming for jihad. Then they brought it to a New Jersey Circuit City store for transfer to DVD. The store clerk took one look at it and then called the cops. To many, the six come off more as moronic troublemakers than as actual terrorists.
In his blog, The Angry Rakkasan summed up: "The longer we allow our government to confuse these ignorant assholes with real, hardened, international terrorists, the more ultimate danger we will be in."
While terrorism will likely be a low-level threat to our nation for a long time, it's beginning to seem that normal law enforcement can handle the task without resorting to torture gulags and/or the surrendering of our consitutional rights.
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