Liberman Blogs About Homegrown Terror

Joe Lieberman (CfL-CT) keyed a piece for The Hill's Congress Blog today, discussing the foiled terrorist attack plotted against the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey that sought to massacre an untold number of American soldiers.

The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing today, our fourth on Islamist radicalization, took on a special sense of urgency with the arrests Tuesday of six would-be terrorists who are accused of plotting to force their way into Fort Dix, New Jersey, with automatic assault rifles and kill as many American soldiers as possible.

Though the plotters were immigrants (three of them illegal immigrants), they've all been in the U.S. since childhood and as Lieberman correctly points out, they appear to have been radicalized (whatever that might mean - brainwashed, seduced by the dark side of the Force, irrationally peeved about a cruddy lot in life, etc.) here at home.

What Lieberman also correctly points out however - a point that seems be very secondary to the primary media theme of the "homegrown" (i.e. non-boogedy-boogedy-neocon-scare-tactic-foreign-Islamofascist) brand of the terrorism - is the fact that the cell is absolutely aligned with the ideology and dogma of Al Qaeda and any like-minded terror network.

Though there is no evidence at this time of an operational link to Al Qaeda, there is quite clearly an ideological link — Osama bin Laden’s radical message reached across cyberspace and traditional borders and poisoned the hearts and minds of these six men in New Jersey.

Indeed, they believe that America is inherently the enemy of Islam and that righteous Muslims must carry out murderous remedies against the infidels.  The fact that they received this programming remotely via far-flung cavecasts and DVDs is simply a testament to the increasingly borderless nature of Al Qaeda 2.0.

This is not the first terrorist plot against the U.S. since 9-11 to be stopped before it could be carried out, and it most surely will not be the last to be attempted. But it is another wake-up call to the American people that there are people in this world who so hate our American way of life that they are intent on wantonly killing Americans.

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Update:  Michelle rounds up coverage of and reaction to the Fort Dix Six's bail hearing this morning, where their lawyers revealed that - wait for it - they were entrapped!

Well, that's a load off.  Conspiracies of and by our own government are so much more palatable than the creepy jihadi kind.