Terrorism in the USA:threat & response

[Ken White]

NYPD Intelligence Division: The Homegrown Threat.

Let's try to stay on topic. I'll also point out that this in not a political weblog; for anyone who wishes to make political commentary, there are plenty of weblogs out there that welcome such comments. Here, we avoid it and try to stick to the subject of threads.

Thanks, Guys.

[Ron Humphrey]

NYPD Intelligence Division: The Homegrown Threat.

Let's try to stay on topic. I'll also point out that this in not a political weblog; for anyone who wishes to make political commentary, there are plenty of weblogs out there that welcome such comments. Here, we avoid it and try to stick to the subject of threads.

Thanks, Guys.

I probably should have just left that one alone

Although in my own defense, since my crack team of defense lawyers are on vacation; I did try to make the answer as apolitical as possible

[bourbon]

Ponce,

I may just happen to share some of your sentiment, I've even mistakenly crossed the apolitical line here in some posts. We both may even agree that the term 'terrorist' is malleable and oft bastardized. That said, I think we can delineate between Guy Fawkes and say; a Mohamed Atta, Mohammad Sidique Khan, or Adam Gadhan. The NYPD article - which is excellent btw - illustrates the 'homegrown threat' as far more than "someone who has decided to do something against the dictators that are at this time running the government."


Thread Related:
The Fort Dix Conspiracy, By Amanda Ripley. Time, Dec. 06, 2007.

A TIME investigation of the Fort Dix case shows that it is indeed an important prototype. Six years after 9/11, the U.S. government has begun to settle on a strategy for finding and stopping potential homegrown terrorists before they strike. Fort Dix offers a case study of this new and sometimes precarious method. The model is called pre-emptive prosecution, and like other pre-emptive strikes of late, it is risky. It means relying on often unreliable informants to infiltrate insular communities, and it means making arrests before anything close to a terrorist attack actually happens. The process sometimes ends with a trial but not necessarily a conviction, and that may be beside the point. It is, in all, a messy and unsatisfying ordeal, and possibly the best available option.

Decent article on the NYPD's intel division:
The Terrorism Beat: How is the N.Y.P.D. defending the city?, by William Finnegan. The New Yorker, July 25, 2005.