Letter to the Editor of Florida Times-Union from Special Agent in Charge James Casey

Recently, the FBI’s New York Office arrested four men who were plotting to plant explosives outside a New York synagogue and fire surface-to-air-weapons at U.S. military aircraft. While the full details of this plot have yet to be disclosed, I am concerned about the tone of the AP article appearing in Friday’s Times-Union, which continues a long line of press reporting questioning the viability of terrorist plots in the United States.

In Friday’s piece, the AP said, “They were amateurs every step of the way. They had trouble finding guns and bought cameras at Wal-Mart to photograph their targets. One was a convicted purse snatcher.” The story goes on to say they were arrested, “following a long line of homegrown, headline-making terror plots since Sept. 11, 2001 that never came close to reality because the FBI inserted itself in the earliest stages.”

I think it is important for Americans to consider that had 19 young men been arrested on September 10, 2001, with nothing more than box cutters, duct tape, and a plan to fly hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and Washington, D.C., landmarks, the story of those arrests might have had the same patronizing tone. Unfortunately we know how the story unfolded on September 11th. And while the plot still seems amateurish in retrospect, in the words of the 9/11 Commission Report, it was “good enough.”

Our brains are wired to perceive threats as more likely when they are closely related in time to events which have recently occurred. Thus while most could not imagine the events of September 11 in the days or weeks before, and while the homegrown terrorist plots that have recently been disrupted seem amateurish and unlikely, more than 80 percent of Americans were convinced another attack was imminent right after September 11th. Don’t we all drive a little more carefully with our children in the car after seeing a tragic accident? Or check the batteries in our smoke detectors when there’s been a deadly fire in our neighborhood? Yet the probabilities of an auto accident or house fire were always there—we just became more attuned to them because of real events close in time to our newfound vigilance.

I would like the citizens of north Florida to know that whenever they hear the FBI has disrupted a terrorist plot, it is not because we have inserted ourselves in at the earliest stages. Every such action is always done in close coordination with our law enforcement and intelligence community partners to insure we have gleaned all possible intelligence concerning the plotters and their infrastructure, and that we have carefully weighed the risk the terrorists might do something outside of our knowledge.

Protecting the United States from terrorist attacks is the highest priority of every FBI field division, and the men and women of the FBI are committed to never losing their vigilance about the risk of an attack, no matter how far from 9/11 we move. We should always drive safely with children in the car, check our smoke detectors regularly, and be on the offensive in the fight against terrorists here at home.

James Casey
Special Agent in Charge
FBI, Jacksonville

NOTE: A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the May 27, 2009 edition of the Florida Times-Union.