Scary stuff. A bomb plot in Dallas foiled by the FBI
Men accused of unrelated bomb plots in Ill., Texas - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090925/ap_on_re_us/us_bomb_plot_arrest)

I am surprised more of these nutjobs haven't tried something like this. Thank goodness the FBI gave them a dud instead of the real deal.

Even more weird since my wife and son and I walked around the courtyard and fountains there the weekend of the OU-BYU game. I can certainly see why the little cretin found it an attractive target.

I don't know how I feel about the way they are handling these little cells. Shouldn't there be a better way than encouraging them to follow through with and help them design the plots and then give them fake bombs to use?? I don't know. I'm glad they weren't successful. But I bet there are a lot of them out there and not all of them are going to be as trusting to allow undercover FBI into their plots. Especially since it is common knowledge that this is how they are stopping them.

I don't know how I feel about the way they are handling these little cells. Shouldn't there be a better way than encouraging them to follow through with and help them design the plots and then give them fake bombs to use?? I don't know. I'm glad they weren't successful. But I bet there are a lot of them out there and not all of them are going to be as trusting to allow undercover FBI into their plots. Especially since it is common knowledge that this is how they are stopping them.

If you look at the background and ages of some of the plotters, I don't think they know better. Their "handlers" are letting the ambitious, eager ones have a go at it and hope they succeed. All it will take is one of them and the country goes back into pucker mode.

I think the investigative approach in these cases is to do everything they can to make the perpetrators think they are going to succeed in the hopes that as many of them as possible will emerge and be captured. It is my understanding that the way these things have been working out is that a plan can be very much in the near-go stage, but if any inkling that word get outs prematurely, the operation is scrubbed completely and those involved disappear like slime into the woodwork. That's my guess why they let this operation proceed with "fake bombs" because it let them think the operation was not detected.

The critical thing to understand is that these operations are *completely* at odds with almost everything conventional criminal law enforcement has known as "traditional" organized criminal behavior. They are essentially rewriting many of the manuals on how to combat this evil 21st century threat - waged in many cases with decidedly "non-21st century" tools.