bryant | (no subject)

(no subject)

130 homemade hand grenades, a grenade launcher, another 70 hand grenades rigged to be fired from a rifle, a machine gun, a short-barrel shotgun and 2,500 rounds of ammunition.

Muslim radicals planning an attack on an army base? Nah. Five militia members in Alabama plotting to kill a bunch of Mexicans.

Oddly, this does not get as much press as the Muslims. Some domestic terrorism is just more interesting, I guess.

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Well, duh, I mean -- Southern Redneck militias how many freakin' times have we seen that? I mean, it's *so* 1860's.

later
Tom

funny how that works.

What strikes me as amazing is that on the one hand we're being told what a lucky break it was that the FBI caught those guys in New Jersey and whew what a relief and so on, and on the other hand everything I've read about them indicates they were about as competent as the Three Stooges. They were under observation and infiltration before they even came up with the idea of attacking the Army, their plan was to attack not a civilian target but the single group most likely to fight back with minimal casualties, and they never even came close to getting their hands on real weapons. They played paintball. Jeez, this is terrorism's A-game?

Terrorism's A-game is busy doing suicide bombings and killing 14 people during Cheney's Afghanistan visit. :/

Or plotting to bomb abortion clinics/shoot gynecologists.

I'm way more scared of good ol' boys with a leetle bit of ambition to blow shit up than I am of these clowns in New Jersey. Good ol' boys can generally shoot straight.

Also: domestic anti-abortion terrorism is never interesting.

Also: domestic anti-abortion terrorism is never interesting.

Especially when it happens on the five year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

You want the news to pay attention to a cluelessly unsuccessful suicide bomber? Maybe if his truck had exploded, or if he'd killed someone. Or if he'd been dark-skinned, non-Christian, or attacking something more important than a women's health clinic - say, a bank or a doctor's office that treated men.

I live about thirty seconds from where the folks in NJ were captured. Literally. It's right down the street from my old high school, and around the corner from the Wawa where I get snacks for tabletop gaming days. That said, the feds & company were so quiet about the arrests that I didn't hear about them until after the story showed up on the news. If the NWO was working overtime that day, I didn't notice. Of course, I guess that's the point...

Now that I think about it, I also lived about a minute away from the post office where the anthrax-tainted mail was found back in 2001. It was, in fact, the post office branch that handled all the mail that came into my off-campus apartment, and where my roommate had dropped off Magic cards he was selling on eBay only a couple days earlier.(That was a fun day or two while he fretted about anthrax symptoms). And again, until it showed up on the news that night, I had no idea what was going on just down the street.

Memo to Pete: Pay more attention!
Memo to terrorists: Quit following me! ;-)

Yeah, isn't it weird to see Cherry Hill described in the national media as "a Philadelphia suburb about 20 miles from Fort Dix"? (example)

I mean, it is 20 miles from Fort Dix, but that's not what it is. It's as though the terrorists were plotting to hit the North Jersey oil refineries, were arrested in Murray Hill, and the description of Murray Hill being given in national media was "a New York community only 10 miles from the vulnerable North Jersey petrochemical industry."

In my mind, Cherry Hill is the rich part of Camden County with the slightly upscale local mall in it. (that is, it's upscale but not obviously made for people richer than us, unlike say the malls at King of Prussia or Willow Grove Park)

Fort Dix, on the other hand, is that military base you eventually go past if you take 38 or 670 going the wrong way out into the boonies. Looking at the map, it appears you'd eventually wind up there if you took 70 the wrong way too, though you'd go through a lot more of the boonies first.

It's weird to have the level of familiarity inverted the way it is in these news stories.

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