A guy makes dirty bomb...

[enos]

... but he wasn't muslim, so nobody cares.

Jonathan Stray » Maine Man Tries to Build Dirty Bomb, No One Cares

There was pretty much one media story about this, and it was a local paper
Report: 'Dirty bomb' parts found in slain man's home - Bangor Daily News

Seeing as Bush and Co. got really trigger happy on brown people who spoke funny languages if they seemed remotely dangerous, why was a home grown terrorist ignored? Because you can't justify a foreign war with him?

[baldheadeddork]

This isn't the first time this has happened, enos. Five years ago the feds totally lucked into breaking up an advanced and very sophisticated plot by a white supremacist and anti-federal government group, and there was barely a word said about that.

One evening two winters ago, a man in Staten Island, N.Y., absent-mindedly flipped through his mail. Inside one envelope was a stack of fake documents, including United Nations and Defense Department identification cards, and a note: “We would hate to have this fall into the wrong hands.”

It had. The package, intended for a member of a self-styled militia in New Jersey, had been delivered to the wrong address.

From that lucky break, federal officials believe they may have uncovered one of the most audacious domestic terrorism plots since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. Starting with a single piece of mail, investigators discovered an enormous cache of weapons in Noonday, in East Texas, including the makings of a sophisticated sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands of people.

BTW - the guy who built that sodium cyanide bomb got a plea deal where he was only sentenced to eleven years in prison. Any guesses how long the feds would have wanted if his first name was Abdul instead of William?

[enos]

Oh wow, I didn't know about that one.

Though I think the response to these home grown ones is closer to the appropriate response. I.e. don't inflate things bigger than they are, like they like to do with muslims. Terrorists are criminals not some evil villain masterminds.

There were some 60 arrests for terrorism charges since 9/11, and AFAIK the only conviction was the 20th hijacker (who wanted to be found guilty and executed). Even with things stacked in their favor, prosecutors didn't have enough on any of the others. Some got convicted for other lesser things, some let go. But Bush got the political benefits of claiming a terrorist arrest, and we lost a few more civil liberties.

[cacapants]

Wow. I remember the way the government immediately blamed arab terrorists (their words) for the Oklahoma City bombing, instead of looking in their own back yard. This is eerily similar. Good thing they caught it.