I stumbled onto a story on a right-wing blog about a "anti-war moonbat who shot a soldier"; the story complained that the MSM was burying the story, but that if the victim had been gay, it would have been national news. So I followed up on the story and searched the web for more information.

What I found surprised me:

Cross-posted from Blue's on Third, Progressive Voice for NJ-03 (home of Fort Dix)

Ever since 9/11, the Republican Party has consistently been a party based on using fear to achieve its political ends. So it's certainly no surprise that the Republican candidates for president would follow that strategy. When six men plotted to sneak into Fort Dix, here in New Jersey's 3rd district, and shoot up the garrison there, they were foiled. Thank God. But the headlines it created were ripe for just the kind of fear politics Republicans like John McCain love to peddle, despite the fact that the Fort Dix plot was likely nowhere close to operational:

We're supposed to believe that these folks are so sophisticated that they could storm Fort Dix and kill hundreds of soldiers when they still hadn't been able to acquire the weapons needed after almost a year of surveillance.  These guys are so competent that they took videos of themselves yelling "Allah Akbar" during practice target practice and had them dulicated at a local video store.

Does anyone ever stop and think about how all those Bush lovin' folks in the south and the mid west, who vote Republican because they think Bush will protect them, have absolutely no chance of getting attacked by terrorists?

That's right. No chance. None. It simply ain't gonna happen.

I remember how infuriating it was to do GOTV for MoveOn.org in West Des Moines, Iowa, in November 2004, and have people look at me suspiciously (it was pretty obvious I was from California and not a local Iowan)and tell me that they wouldn't vote for Kerry because their guy would do a better job of protecting them.

Several times, I almost blew my thinly veiled cover and said, "Look buddy, let's be honest, I'm from San Francisco. You know it. I know it. But please, do you actually mean to tell me that you're scared of Al Qaeda hijacking a plane and flying it into a Dairy Queen in downtown Des Moines?"

Earlier this month, the FBI announced the capture of six immigrant Muslims in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The six stood accused of plotting a terror attack on Fort Dix in New Jersey, as well as an attack on a Pennsylvania Navy installation.
While details of the case remain sketchy, what’s known is the fact that the FBI and U.S. intelligence began monitoring the group’s moves, communications and transactions as early as January 2006; going as far as sending in an intelligence asset posing as an al-Qaeda operative to gain the group’s confidence. That asset later became a key figure behind a sting operation, and the eventual arrest of the group.

Sorry if I'm late, but of all the inanity about the Fort Dix Six, I thought this summed it up best.

[Promoted from the Diaries - MB]

The Columbia Journalism Review's "real time media criticism" site has a short, but powerful, criticism of the way that "stuff of farce" terror plots are too much of what we get from the Bush/Cheney/Rove Republican Department of Justice in the domestic war on terror.

These informer-assisted indictments usually happen at a time, like now, when the Bush/Cheney/Rove regime's popularity is at a low ebb.

Almost every one is more akin to disinformation -- the deliberate dissemination of false information, in these cases, about the real level of the terrorist threat -- than to the essential truth about real domestic terrorist threats.  

The latest instance is the Fort Dix Six, who were evidently encouraged to be more violent by their FBI informant.

Paul McLeary of the CJR sees a pattern of the Bush/Cheney/Rove regime making terrorist mountains out of loudmouth molehills -- the Miami "Seas of David" "plot" in particular.

More below.

Quite a lot has already been written about the collective IQ of the six wannabes who planned to attack Fort Dix, now being held without bail in Philadelphia. It’s a bit like the Shriners planning to win the Daytona 500 with a clownmobile.

They aren’t the first idiots to think about an assault on the fort. The Weather Underground, the violence-prone faction that destroyed Students for a Democratic Society, planned in March 1970 to use a nail-bomb at a dance of non-commissioned officers and their civilian dates. Instead, three members blew themselves up in a premature explosion in their Greenwich Village townhouse bomb factory.  

What hasn’t gotten much attention in the Fort Dix case is what Orcinus pointed out yesterday in That law-enforcement approach:

But what does stand out about the case is that it was in fact predicated on a long and careful investigation by the FBI -- one that took, in fact, 16 months to put together.

That is to say: These arrests were based upon the law-enforcement approach to terrorism.

Funny that the chief cheerleaders for declaring this case a model of the Future of Terra in America haven't acknowledged that fact.

Malkin provides a nice, clear example. In previous posts, she has complained about "the limitations of the law enforcement approach to terrorism", and sneered at Democrats for supposedly adopting "the Clinton law enforcement approach to terrorism" (a sneer repeated here). She also has approvingly cited NRO's Andrew McCarthy saying that

the law enforcement approach to terrorism, where terrorists get the advantage of our generous due process standards (including discovery about informants), is nuts -- we have to tell the bad guys too much.

Of course, we've yet to see all the parameters of what that law-enforcement approach was about. Was, most importantly, the role of the infiltration to record and monitor, or was it, as in past FBI instances, something more? But that, we can expect, will come out in court. You know, in court, in the course of the rule of law, the very thing all-but-completely missing at places such as Gitmo and the secret prisons supposedly now emptied.

Says Orcinus:

The Bush approach has been to treat terrorism as though it were a phenomenon mostly related to unrest in the Middle East, the product of brown-skinned fanatics for whom the only adequate response is the full force of American military might. This approach largely treats terrorism as though it exists only in conjunction with a handful of states -- the "Axis of Evil" -- that support it, and containing it means bombing and killing its supporters out of existence. ...

This has many ramifications, not the least of which is that emphasizing the military component to any effective assault on terrorism -- and there are instances, such as Afghanistan, when a military solution indeed is required -- has an extraordinarily negative effect, particularly if military operations are undertaken through fraudulent circumstances, as in the invasion of Iraq. ...

Any kind of serious War on Terror needs to have the flexibility to respond proportionately and nimbly to various terrorist threats as they manifest themselves, and in this respect a military emphasis is simply too musclebound to be effective. A comprehensive approach will emphasize intelligence and law enforcement -- especially global law enforcement, the very concept of which is anathema to the Bush administration -- while reserving its military options, fraught as they are with multiple collateral hazards, solely for the rare circumstances that warrant them.

Certain people will never, ever get this, in great part, because it is not in their "American Century" interests to get it.

Addendum from the AP:

He railed against the United States, helped scout military installations for attack, offered to introduce his comrades to an arms dealer, and gave them a list of weapons he could procure, including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

These were not the actions of a terrorist, but of a paid FBI informant who helped bring down six Muslim men accused of plotting to kill U.S. soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix.

Those actions have raised questions of whether the government crossed the line and pushed the six men down a path they would not have otherwise followed.

It is an argument - entrapment - that has been made in other terrorism cases, and one that has failed miserably in this post-Sept. 11 era. ...

One of the men, Tatar, called a Philadelphia police officer in November, saying he had been approached by someone who was pressuring him to obtain a map of Fort Dix, and he feared that the incident was terrorist-related, according to court documents.

"It could be a defense, that he felt he was being pressured to do things and actually called law enforcement to report it," said Sohail Mohammed, a lawyer and Muslim community leader in New Jersey who is not involved in the case.

ABC News is reporting this morning a breaking story that there is an imminent threat to the US/German opperated bases in Germany unless and Until Germany pulls out of the Nato involvement in Afganistan.

Law enforcement officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com that U.S. air marshals have been diverted to provide expanded protection of flights between Germany and the United States.

"The information behind the threat is very real," a senior U.S. official told ABC News.

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble told reporters, "The danger level is high. We are part of the global threat by Islamist terrorism."

Why is this not surprising...

He railed against the United States, helped scout out military installations for attack, offered to introduce his comrades to an arms dealer, and gave them a list of weapons he could procure, including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

These were not the actions of a terrorist, but of a paid FBI informant who helped bring down an alleged plot by six Muslim men to massacre U.S. soldiers at New Jersey's Fort Dix.

As most of you may have heard, six men were arrested for planning to a plot to attack a military base. Ok, let's see here: no real 'terrorist-training' background, no military training of any sort, no 'militant' training, and they wanted to attack what? A military base? And they believed that a military base would be a cake-walk, of course. How STUPID and RECKLESS can people get? The point is not that being untrained makes this any less of in the ranks of being 'bad', but that it doesn't deserve the media treatment it is receiving. So, tomorrow, if a 16 year old kid makes plans to bomb the Empire State Building with his Walmart remote-controlled car, would that be counted as a serious terrorist threat? Doesn't this smell like another attempt to ward off attention by a beleaguered Bush administration (esp. from its Attorney General)?

Rest easy, America. We are safe. With Tuesday’s arrest of six more terrorists, we can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that our government is shielding us from the world’s most diabolical minds.

God bless.

Thanks to the keen insights and vigilant guard of a Circuit City employee turned Sherlock Holmes, the United States has sniffed out another terrifically concealed sleeper cell that threatened to destroy the very foundation of everything we hold dear. On the importance of this citizen’s actions, don’t take my word for it. Just listen to U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie:

"If we didn't get that tip, I couldn't be sure what would happen."

More...

Yesterday I wrote about the Fort Dix Six, and how their super-duper terrorist plot (which involved ambushing a heavily fortified military facility with six people) was foiled by a New Jersey store clerk.  I wrote about how this "hero" and other service-sector workers of this kind are consistently disrespected by the American economy.  Well, now we know a little more about that store clerk, which confirmed everything I said.

He worked at Circuit Freakin' City.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing


click to enlarge

So today we added the Fort Dix Six to the lexicon, a band of terrorists so ruthless, so cunning, so methodical, so assured of success, that they taped themselves shooting guns in the woods and handed them over for dubbing to a retail store.  Now, let's put aside the fact that this terrorist cell appears to be about as good at terrorism as the group in Miami who used to smoke pot and talk about waging a full ground war against the US, but didn't have enough cash for boots.  And let's put side that the US Attorney in the case, Chris Christie, has come under scrutiny for politicizing his office to investigate Democrats.  Let's put aside all skepticism about the timing of the announcement or the ability of the plotters to pull anything off or how the whole episode shows that effective law enforcement is the key to protecting America.

Let's talk about the unsung hero of this story.  Let's talk about the clerks.

MSNBC just reported that a possible terror plot was foiled in New Jersey. The plot was against Fort Dix. They said the terrorist were going to storm the military base. The terrorist were of Yugoslavian and Albanian descent

This is as much as I know for now but i do hope the Media stresses the Yugoslavian and Albanian descent and the fact it didn't come from what we consider the Middle-East.