prison recruitment

To mark the closing of a new year Time Magazine published an article about how the year 2009 saw an "unprecedented surge" of terror activity on US soil. There have been 32 planned attack since the tragedy of 9/11. Some of the more well known cases included the shooting at the Fort Hood military base in November. The murder of a soldier by a Muslim convert in Little Rock, and in January, the arrest of a Long Island convert who pleaded guilty to helping Al Qaeda with a plot to blow up a train in Penn Station. The spokespeople for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claim that these events do not point to a trend and the charge that Muslim Americans are being radicalized in US Mosques if false. What do you think about this? There is plenty of evidence that points to the fact that this is untrue and four of the cases outlined in the article are about Americans who converted to Islam and then carried out their plans. One of the lessons learned in 2009 is that the internet has become a breeding ground for terrorist training activity. American Muslims are encouraged to stay in the US rather than travel to Pakistan or Afghanistan and commit isolated acts of terror. Brian Jenkin's a RAND corporation expert suggests that many of the young men carrying out these attacks were at a very impressionable age when the attacks on 9/11 were carried out. He says that "some would have been inspired by it and caught up in the jihadist narrative". Thankfully, Americans are becoming more aware that this threat is here and more people are contacting their local officials when they see something suspicious. I wonder what 2010 will bring?

Now that the terror plot to bomb two NY synagogues and a shoot down a plane at Stewart Air Force Base in Newburgh has been foiled, family members are running to the defense of the suspects. The party line amongst those close to the terrorists is that they are not terrorists at all.  Rather, they are career criminals that were enticed with cash and other amenities by an FBI informant trying to egg on the group to commit a terrorist act.  According to the wife of one of the suspects, the entire plot was conceived by the FBI, and those trying to commit the vicious acts were just pawns in a game.