Thanks to a tip from an alert citizen and solid followup by federal counter-terrorism investigators, disaster seems to have been averted at Fort Dix. It’s strangely comforting to know that while conspiracies are all too real, they can nonetheless be thwarted.
The citizen was a clerk at an electronics store who was asked by a customer to transfer a video to a DVD that showed 10 men shooting weapons at a firing range and calling for jihad, or holy war.
The clerk went to authorities, who infiltrated the group and discovered the scheme to assault the Fort Dix Army base and murder U.S. soldiers with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The suspects also talked about attacking other military bases. “If we didn’t get that tip, I couldn’t be sure what would happen,” said U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie.
We can’t help but be reminded of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and wish that authorities had taken seriously the tips from parents, school officials and students who reported the violent website, essays and video in which the two attackers tested weapons later used on classmates.
The message for all of us in the Fort Dix case is to keep our wits about us without becoming paranoid – and to take responsible action if something seems amiss. We know all too well from Columbine and more recently Virginia Tech that madmen don’t always act impulsively. They take the time to hatch their plots. In both campus tragedies there were red flags that no one took seriously as the attackers planned their moment.
We have to wonder how it was that one of the Fort Dix suspects could have used his pizza delivery job to scout the military base without raising suspicions. It may be that the military needs to raise its own awareness – or cancel its pizza deliveries.
The six Fort Dix suspects, all Muslims from Yugoslavia, Jordan and Turkey, were apparently not tied to any international terrorist group but were rather what authorities are calling a “brand-new form of terrorism,” involving smaller, loosely created groups that are not directly connected to al-Qaeda but are inspired by its ideology. Though some were in the United States illegally, others were not. They lived ordinary working lives, which seems all the more reason to be on guard.
FBI agent J.P. Weis said, “They operate under the radar.” All the more reason for Americans to practice vigilance.
