No Terrorism Ties Here -- Move Along

What should be the reaction to finding Muslim men designing and testing a drone aircraft capable of carrying 600 pounds … which could be explosive?

If you are the FBI, it’s “never mind.”

Andy McCarthy:

WNBC News in New York City reports that the NYPD, working with Suffolk Country police and the FBI, have concluded there are no terrorism ties to be concerned about in connection with their discovery that a man, described only as an Egyptian engineer who entered the U.S. on a Sudanese passport, has designed an unmanned aerial vehicle capable of carrying more than 600 pounds of explosives.

The engineer was assisted by a small group of men whom investigators surveilled as they drove a white van onto a tarmac, jumped out, and ground-tested the drone. There was no observation of the UAV ever getting into the air.

The testing of the drone was done in the dead of night on a little used airstrip in Calverton, Long Island.

I find this more than a little alarming, notwithstanding the assurances of police that "no ties to terror" have been found...

Do law enforcement agencies have a habit of dropping the ball on this sort of thing? Why, yes, they do. Wishing to avoid the charge of racial profiling.

McCarthy again:

...as I recount in Willful Blindness, the first known activities of the jihadist cell that eventually killed Meir Kahane in 1990, plotted to kill Hosni Mubarak in 1992, bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and was stopped a few months later in the midst of plotting to bomb other New York City landmarks, was the FBI's investigation of paramilitary training over several weekends in July 1989. The Muslim men in question — who at the time were not known to have ties to any established terrorist organizatoin but went on to carry out the aforementioned plots — piled into vans at a radical mosque in Brooklyn and traveled to a shooting range where they conducted shooting practice with a variety of weapons, including AK-47s. The FBI closed the investigation when the men discovered they were under surveillance and complained that they were being harrassed.

The shooting range they chose for the training was in Calverton, Long Island.

I'm rather glad they chose the NY Metro area.