Slashdot Mirror
FBI Foils Attack by Monitoring Chat Rooms
An anonymous reader writes "A planned terrorist attack on New York City was reportedly foiled by FBI agents who monitored chat rooms frequented by extremists. Lebanese authorities captured an Al Qaeda member who confessed to the plot, and stated that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had pledged financial and other support for the operation. Although the planning for the operation was not far along, according to U.S. officials, they had already been monitoring the plot for a year." From the article: "A government official with knowledge of the investigation said the alleged plot did focus on New York's transport system, but did not target the Holland Tunnel. New York senator Charles Schumer said: 'This is one instance where intelligence was on top of its game and discovered the plot when it was just in the talking phase.' The Holland Tunnel is protected not just by bedrock, but also by concrete and cast-iron steel. One counter-terrorism source told the Daily News it was doubtful a plot to blow it up would be feasible, saying huge amounts of explosives and a detailed knowledge of blast effect would be necessary."
Since you seem to be alarmingly confused as to the defintion of "public", here's a lot of detail around what parts of SWIFT were public.
Yeah it's on a right wing site, but I read Kos too and haven't seen anything this detailed on there.
If it was so public how come Belgian's own government didn't realize it was there?
So unless you can find some information countering facts raised there...
One year ago a number of explosions rocked the Tube in London. As you know, the tunnels weren't damaged for the most part. All that would happen (God forbid) if anyone tried to blow up a tunnel would be to cripple the traffic in Manhattan (which pretty bad as is) but it would take a lot of explosives to actually destroy a tunnel from within if it's a tube. Another example - Moscow Metro Feb 6, 2004, when an explosion happened in a packed rush-hour train. Also no damage to the tunnel. However, when some idiots were installing a billboard illegally above a metro tunnel (also in Moscow), they successfully managed to penetrate the tunnel using a pile that was being driven, right into a train that happened to be in the tunnel at that exact moment. Thankfully nobody was hurt in this incident. See this Pictures of the pile: here and here. View topside and another pic
-Palal
http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr116.html
Mod point free since 2001
All of the material in the NYT article was already public.
First the easy part: McVeigh was Oklahoma City, not Kansas City.
Now for the real issue: Do you have any idea how hard it is to dig tunnels through rock with explosives? You dig holes into the rock. You put explosives into the holes. You carefully tamp each of the charges. You set off the explosives in their neat little holes in the rock. And what do you get?
A few feet. That's all.
Yeah, the terrorists would set off a bigger explosion. But it wouldn't be tamped - the force of the blast would escape both directions along the tunnel. For "gravity" to work for you, you'd first have to crack the rock enough that it's no longer structural. (It's not just the concrete and steel that holds all that rock up. The rock holds itself up.)
And if a tamped explosion only breaks a few feet of rock, a bigger but untamped one isn't going to do much more...
Right. And most of their "plans" were at the instigation of the FBI informer.
Similar to the Lodi case, where some poor schmuck was railroaded by the FBI. If he had been left alone, he'd never have done anything, but the FBI informant basically cajoled and incited him. Even then it was never proven that he had attended any terrorist camps. The court prevented a former FBI agent from testifying in his behalf.
These "high profile" cases the FBI is coming up with are pretty disgraceful. All they are uncovering are gullible people that can be convinced to do or say stupid things by a paid informant. If the FBI has uncovered any serious threats, hopefully they're using the info to work up the chain of command (and we're not hearing about them, of course) to actually disrupt terrorist networks.
But what we're seeing so far is the FBI setting up some clowns to take a fall and provide publicity.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Wow there are a bunch of replies to the grandparent that completely miss the point. The point wasn't that they were using those powers, the pont was that if they can catch the people anyway, why do they need those powers?