4 Charged In Plot To Blow Up Fuel Lines At JFK
According to NewsChannel4's Jonathan Dienst, three people were arrested and one other was being sought Saturday in connection to a plot to blow up jet-fuel lines at John F. Kennedy International Airport, officials said.
Four people have been charged. One is in custody in New York. Three suspects in total are in custody. One is still at large in Trinidad.
According to sources, the suspects have been identified as: Russell Defreitas, Abdul Nur, Kareem Ibrihim and Abdul Kadir.
Sources said a cargo worker at JFK allegedly began to plot attacking the US last July or August. The cargo worker sought help in carrying out a plan and went to an FBI informant, who gathered information about the plot.
The cargo worker is a U.S. citizen with roots in Guyana. Sources said he be a former government official in Guyana.
Sources said counter-terrorism officials have been following the plot for a little less than one year.
These guys apparently weren't very good: the first plan they came up with to blow the pipelines just wouldn't work. But that doesn't mean they weren't a real threat; when al-Qaeda's first assault on the World Trade Center failed in 1993, they went back to the drawing board and succeeded the second time. I see no reason to suspect these would-be jihadis wouldn't be just as persistent, which means we couldn't take a chance on them being just as successful.
It also illustrates the nature of the war we're fighting: the renewed jihad isn't a centralized battle of massed battalions -- or, more accurately, it won't always be. This is a distributed, decentralized war in which inspiration, money, and some direction is taken from "al-Qaeda central" and other Salafist/Wahhabist sources, but groups come up with their own plans and conduct operations on their own initiative. As the recent terror plot in Canada showed, they don't even need any direct connection to al-Qaeda to be part of the jihad.
And I think this is partly the source for the difference that's been described as "9/11 vs. 9/10" views: that is, the difference between those who believe we're in a war and those who don't. The "head in the sand" crowd (Yes, my sympathies are showing.) don't see large armies and great fleets on the horizon, so they think police work will be sufficient* to handle this nuisance, and we can get back to living at "the end of History." They can't believe this slow-motion jihad is a real threat, a clear and present danger.
It is, and it's going to be with us for a long time.
*(Before someone says "Well, police work got these guys," yes, but we likely don't know the whole of it. The story says the plotters went to an police informant. That may be true, but it may also be a cover for information revealed by the kind of secret counter-intelligence programs about which the New York Times so graciously blabbed to the world, programs that uncovered a plot to blow up airliners in Britain in the last year. Given the threat we face, simple police work is not sufficient, and we need to use measures commonly thought of as military.)
(hat tip: PJM)
LINKS: More at Little Green Footballs and Hot Air, including connections to radical Islam in Guyana and Trinidad, and a link to the complete criminal complaint. The Anchoress reflects on how the Right and Left see these plots, while Michelle Malkin is all over this with updates.
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