Were the Fort Dix plotters caught too early? How do you trace command and control on the Internet?

Josh Meyer and Erica Hayasaki provide some interesting new details on the Fort Dix plotters at the Los Angeles Times:

Christopher J. Christie, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said the men were in the final stages of a plot started in late 2005, if not earlier."They were at the point now where they wanted to obtain the automatic weapons," Christie said. "That would be the final piece in their plan, the final weaponry they needed to create carnage at Ft. Dix."

But, as usual, things are never so simple in these terrorism cases where authorities have to arrest people before the crime is committed. As one unnamed FBI official - unnamed because he was not authorized to speak - told the Times, "When — or if — they were going to shoot, we don't know."

By the time this group goes to trial, I wonder if the the jury will be able to appreciate the fears that led to their arrest. These fears were expressed by J.P. Weis, the FBI special agent in charge of the South Jersey Joint Terrorism Task Force, who said the "authorities 'dodged a bullet' by arresting the suspects when they did."

"In fact, when you look at the type of weapons that this group was trying to purchase, we may have dodged a lot of bullets," he went on to say. "We had a group that was forming a platoon to take on an army. They identified their target, they did their reconnaissance. They had maps. And they were in the process of buying weapons."

"Luckily, we were able to stop that."

Indeed. But again, let's hope the prosecution can summon up what Weis was feeling when the time comes, and the young men have long since repented what their lawyers will surely describe as their misspent youth.

But there's another interesting angle to this story, as the Times notes:

Christie said authorities found no evidence that the men were connected to an international terrorist movement [i.e., Al Qaeda]. But he said they had used the Internet to obtain "jihadist material, which they used as both educational and inspirational for their cause."

Now recall this recent report from Al-Sharq al-Awsat, the London-based Arabic daily and it all starts to make perfect sense, this idea that Al Qaeda wannabes don't have to wait to get their marching orders from that cave in Wazirstan:

Abdul-Rahman al Hadlaq, supervisor of the Interior Ministry's Good Counsel Committee, says that 80 percent of the recruitment of youths by terrorist organizations is now achieved via the Internet after other avenues of recruitment have come under control such as the distribution of booklets and inflammatory audio cassettes that call for fighting and jihad.

Al Hadlaq told Asharq Al-Awsat that the online terrorist recruitment goes through several stages; the first stage begins with a curious youth who merely wants to read the content on hard-line websites. This is followed by the second stage of empathy with those that run the Jihadist sites that is followed by individual action to prove the sincerity of allegiance and loyalty to the group.

After that, Al-Hadlaq continued, the host of the radical website then begins to screen and gather information on the potential recruit before he is allowed to join the organization, which leads to the fifth and final stage that involves exposing the influenced and sympathetic youths to inflammatory Jihadist photographs and propaganda films that help the brainwashing process.

Al-Hadlaq attributes the exploitation by radical organizations of the internet to several tempting factors, most significant of which is the low cost of reaching a large number of people in various countries, followed by the Internet’s multimedia capabilities, and the ability to use the internet under numerous aliases.

As Al-Hadlaq went on to tell the Arabic newspaper: "These groups now avoid using old tactics, such as meeting in mosques; they now meet in cafes and sports clubs."