Domestic terror plot foiled

From The Washington Post:

CHERRY HILL, N.J., May 8 -- A group of would-be terrorists, allegedly undone after attempting to have jihad training videos copied onto a DVD, has been charged with conspiring to attack Fort Dix and kill soldiers there with assault rifles and grenades, authorities said Tuesday.

Five men -- all foreign-born and described as "radical Islamists" by federal authorities -- allegedly trained at a shooting range in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains to kill "as many soldiers as possible" at the historic Army base 25 miles east of Philadelphia. A sixth man was charged with helping them obtain illegal weapons.

FBI and Justice Department officials said the arrests were the result of a 16-month operation to infiltrate and monitor the group. It was portrayed as a leaderless, homegrown cell of immigrants from Jordan, Turkey and the former Yugoslavia who came together because of a shared infatuation with Internet images of jihad, or holy war.

Authorities said the group has no apparent connection to al-Qaeda or other international terrorist organizations aside from ideology, but appears to be an example of the kind of self-directed sympathizers widely predicted -- and feared -- by counterterrorism specialists. The defendants allegedly passed around and copied images of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the martyrdom videos of two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers.

I would not take any comfort in the fact that these morons weren't a part of a larger international organization. The fact that domestic Muslims can just spontaneously detonate this way is worse. Rather than just monitoring international communications and flagging those who are in regular contact with suspicious persons in the Middle East we now have to assume that pretty much any Muslim in the US is a potential terrorist and take the appropriate steps.

Oh, and as for how they got caught:

The FBI first got wind of the alleged plot in January 2006, after an unidentified store clerk alerted police to a video that showed the men firing assault weapons, calling for jihad and yelling "God is great" in Arabic, officials said. The men had submitted the video file to the store so that it could be copied onto a DVD, authorities said.

Thankfully it takes a cretin to actually believe the ranting of the pedophile prophet so we at least have the advantage of the fact that the enemy are going to be retards.