Credit Police Skill--and Luck

As an FBI official described it, this week’s raid on a bomb factory in New York that led to the arrest of eight alleged terrorists was carried out with perilously little time to spare. Even as law enforcement officers moved in the suspects were blending the chemical fertilizer and diesel fuel that in the right combination can yield an enormously powerful explosive. It was just such a bomb that killed six people and injured more than a thousand when it was detonated beneath the World Trade Center on Feb. 26.

Credit skilled police work for thwarting what authorities say was a plan to wreak destruction and mayhem in the New York area by setting off bombs in two tunnels underneath the Hudson River between Manhattan and New Jersey, by bombing the U.N. building and FBI offices and by committing a number of political murders. Credit luck as well. This time around, the FBI says it had a confidential informer in the small group, which allegedly was in the process of moving ahead with what could have been the most destructive acts of terrorism ever carried out in the United States.

The informer was not only able to penetrate the group, said to be composed of Muslim extremists, but also was reportedly able to capture on video and audiotape much of the plotting and bomb making that went on. The trials of the suspects could display some extraordinary felonious instances of “Candid Camera.”

Two of the suspects are said to have bragged to the informer of their involvement in the World Trade Center bombing. Six of them are associated--as were suspects now in custody in the World Trade Center case--with a mosque in Jersey City where the militant cleric Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman preaches. Abdul Rahman, though he has long been on the State Department’s list of known terrorists, was able to enter the United States legally through a supposed administrative snafu. Incredibly, he remains here, in a country he detests, while an immigration judge considers his petition for political asylum.

This week’s arrests seem to have stopped cold a potentially devastating plot. But what has also been shown again is how vulnerable an open society like ours remains to attack from within. Careful targeting and monitoring of suspected terrorists are imperatives that ought clearly to be at the top of the intelligence agencies’ agendas.