Tuesday, May 08, 2007

There's going to be a lot of chest-pounding and feces-throwing among right-wingers very soon, in response to the arrest of six men in an alleged plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The right-wingers are going to say that liberals are evil because the government broke up this plot and liberals don't want the government to do what's necessary to break up plots like this.

So let me just point you to this, from WNBC:

Investigators told Newschannel 4's Jonathan Dienst that these arrests are the result of a tip to the FBI and use of an informant to track the suspects.

And from there, let's go to the Newark Star-Ledger:

...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....

The men ... had videotaped their practice sessions in the Poconos, the source said. That videotape, in which they railed against America, led to their arrests.

The men made the mistake of bringing it to a retail store seeking to get a copy burned to a DVD, according to one of the sources. A store employee who later watched the tape called the FBI who began immediately investigating.


So apparently no warrantless wiretapping led to these arrests, no torture of suspects in overseas prisons, nothing liberals have objected to in the Patriot Act. Remember that when you're told that these arrests prove that we can't trust liberals and Democrats.

In fact, what led to these arrests, apparently, is something right-wingers might object to -- a video processor calling the FBI after watching people on a tape shooting guns. I'm surprised that that isn't already illegal, as the result of pressure from the gun lobby. But maybe that's a fight for another day.

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UPDATE: I should add that it won't surprise me if it turns out that there's a lot less to this plot than current reports are suggesting -- an overhyped terror arrest would go very nicely with the "did we really kill a top al-Qaeda guy?" reports coming from overseas lately.

Whatever the case, we'll also hear that this proves that "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here," even though we are fighting them over there and these guys are here anyway (and they came from Albania, where no one's suggesting we start a surge).

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AS I WAS SAYING: This may be a lot less frightening than some reports are making it sound. From CNN:

While authorities are glad to have arrested them, the individuals are "hardly hard core terrorists," one law enforcement source said.

Another source said that while the allegations are "troubling," they are "not the type that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up."


I think this is a hint that law enforcement has seen signs that they're incompetent bumblers even beyond the fact that they were stupid enough to get their video commercially processed.

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MORE: As Barbara notes at the Mahablog, the NRA doesn't think the law should prevent terror suspects from buying guns.

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