The Threat in Our Midst

The men who gathered inside the small Bronx apartment were tense, and they chatted nervously before the ceremony. The participants, among them a New York Citymusician and an emergency-room doctor from Florida, had allegedly gathered to meet a "brother" from Canada who called himself Ali. The brother had come with a message—from "Sheik Osama."

"You are in the belly of the enemy," the man from Canada warned, and cautioned his audience to be careful whom they spoke to. "The oppressors are everywhere." Once it was clear they all understood, the jazz musician bent to his knees, clutched the visitor's hand and took a solemn oath. He pledged to be "one of Islam's soldiers ... on the road to jihad." The doctor allegedly did the same. Then they each embraced the oath giver, the final step in Al Qaeda's sacred initiation ritual.

An audiotape of that extraordinary scene played in a federal courtroom last week as one of the initiates, Dr. Rafiq Sabir, a graduate of Columbia University Medical School, stood trial on federal charges that he provided material support to terrorists. What Sabir and the others didn't know when they attended the ceremony two years ago was that the man administering the oath was not really a jihadist, but Ali Soufan, an undercover FBI agent who had spent the better part of his career hunting Qaeda operatives.

Sabir's defense lawyer has cried entrapment. The accused himself later testified he had no idea that the Sheik Osama he was heard pledging his loyalty to was the Qaeda terror chief named bin Laden. But the musician, an accomplished jazz bassist named Tarik Shah who once played with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, has already pleaded guilty to a terror-related charge. So have two other men in the case, a Washington, D.C., cabdriver and a Brooklyn bookstore owner. The FBI counts the case as one more victory in what it considers to be its top-priority mission: finding would-be terrorists before they can carry out their plans.

Federal officials say the case—along with a half dozen other recent investigations—is part of a worrisome trend: copycat jihadist cells that spring up inside the United States without any concrete connection to Qaeda central or other foreign terror organizations. Concerns were reinforced last week when the Justice Department announced it had busted a plot by six men—including four ethnic Albanians, three of whom had entered the country illegally more than 20 years ago—to attack Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. The Feds say the men undertook firearms training in the Pocono mountains and conducted surveillance of Fort Dix and other U.S. military facilities. But they weren't exactly professional conspirators. The men made a video of themselves shooting guns and shouting "God is great" in Arabic, and took it to a local Circuit City to have DVD copies made. A store employee, alarmed by the content, called the police. The group ended up talking to undercover federal informants about acquiring weapons, including fully automatic assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. (The men were charged but not indicted last week.)

Homegrown groups lack the expertise of terrorists who undertake training in Qaeda camps, which probably makes them more prone to blunder. But terrorists overseas do aim to encourage such freelancers, who—in theory—are harder to identify and track because they can pop up anywhere. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are now using sophisticated English-language videos and Web sites to inspire followers in Europe and America to start their own jihadist cells. "We have seen an increase in the number of self-radicalized groups that use the Internet ... and are not organized by overseas groups," FBI Director Robert Mueller told reporters last week.