Fort Dix shows homegrown threat, pitfalls

Pipe dream or pipe bomb?
In an atmosphere of fear like that in the U.S. and parts of Europe, it is sometimes hard to separate the significant threat from the pipe dream. In a large number of headline-grabbing plots, particularly in America, homegrown terrorists seem to have been long on cataclysmic imagination and short on ability to carry out their plans.

Newspapers screamed with fire and brimstone when arrests were made in an alleged plot to flood lower Manhattan by blowing up underwater commuter tunnels, but the scheme was later revealed to be little more than a fantasy.

Canadian officials shook up their countrymen last June by announcing they had broken up a homegrown terror scheme in which 17 males were plotting to bomb buildings. A defense lawyer added to the sensation by saying the suspects were also accused of planning to break into Parliament and behead the prime minister and other officials.

The Sears Tower plan was barely in its infancy when the alleged plotters were arrested. And Jose Padilla, who the government originally accused of seeking to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city, was not close to getting his hands on such a weapon. The charge is no longer part of the case against him.

Still, the Madrid train attack shows that even unaffiliated terrorists can make a series of blunders but unleash carnage if authorities are caught off guard.

In the weeks before the attack, police stopped a car carrying several of the eventual bombers on a highway leading to Madrid, but they didn't find the explosives hidden inside. Authorities even had one of the ringleaders under surveillance in a drug inquiry, but failed to realize his taped conversations were about a terror plot.

Lack of skills foils plots, aids investigators
An attempted terror attack last July 31 in Cologne, Germany, saw two suspects smuggle bombs made of barbecue gas canisters with alarm-clock trigger mechanisms onto two trains in suitcases.

The head of Germany's Federal Crime Office, Joerg Ziercke, said plans for constructing the bombs were found on the Internet, but the plotters diverged slightly from the blueprint, so when the detonators went off they didn't fire the bombs.

Crucial clues — like DNA evidence and fingerprints — were left behind because the two were counting on the bombs obliterating all the evidence. They were also caught on surveillance tapes planting the bombs and traveled on their own passports. One was arrested in Lebanon, the other in Germany before he could flee.

"In general the train bombers didn't seem to be very well skilled in technical things, but they were skilled enough to construct those bombs that might have functioned," said Manfred Murck, deputy head of the state agency that tracks extremism in Hamburg, Germany.

"They are not experts but it's not too difficult to learn how to construct a bomb if you have some time and some logic."

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