Breakthrough! "Five Muslim Immigrants ..."
12/22/2008
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That's how the Associated Press article on conviction of the Fort Dix Five (originally the "Fort Dix Six," but one previously pled guilty to a gun charge) starts out:
Five Muslim immigrants were convicted Monday of plotting to massacre U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in a case that tested the FBI's post-Sept. 11 strategy of infiltrating and breaking up terrorist conspiracies in their earliest stages. The men could get life in prison when they are sentenced in April. (5 convicted of plotting to kill Fort Dix soldiers, by Geoff Mulvihill, Associated Press, December 22, 2008)
The same article is running in the Washington Post, at least in the online edition this afternoon, so the Beltway folks might get a little dose of reality. [Update: Oops! The WaPo has already substituted their own story in that same URL, and its first sentence includes "five foreign-born Muslim men," but that's not at the start of the sentence.]

In the New York Times version, the fact that those convicted are Muslim immigrants doesn't show up until the third paragraph, but we'll take what we can get.

Of course, there was a price to be paid by the American nation for those convictions. From the Associated Press story:

The FBI asked two informants – both foreign-born men who entered the U.S. illegally and had criminal records – to befriend the suspects. Both informants were paid and were offered help obtaining legal resident status.
Naturally, the defense lawyers tried to lay the whole thing on the FBI's informants. But given how the whole affair started, that seems like a stretch:
The yearlong investigation began after a clerk at a Circuit City store told the FBI that some customers had asked him to transfer onto DVD some video footage of them firing assault weapons and screaming about jihad.
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