Jury selection begins today in the trial of five foreign-born Muslims from the Philadelphia area charged with planning a jihad-inspired attack on the Fort Dix military base. Trading Markets.com reports:
The government’s case is built primarily around secretly recorded conversations made by two cooperating witnesses who befriended the defendants. Those conversations, prosecutors say, detail “plans to attack Fort Dix and kill American soldiers” and include “discussions of the supposed justifications for such attacks rooted in radical jihadist ideology.”
But defense attorneys contend their clients talked a bigger game than they intended to play, portraying them as easily manipulated individuals led into a plot by paid FBI informants who created a conspiracy out of hollow words and empty threats. “Any conspiracy that plots death and destruction has to be taken seriously,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who teaches at Georgetown University and who is following the trial of the so-called Fort Dix Five.
Expert witness Hoffman said that there are no stereotypical “homegrown” terrorists and that each case has to be evaluated on its own.