Would Terrorists Have Spared People?

Here’s a round-up on today’s indictment of three men plotting to blow up financial buildings in New Jersey, New York and D.C. The three suspected terrorists were charged with conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction, providing material support and resources to terrorists, and conspiring to damage and destroy buildings.

Did you find it odd that there’s nothing in the indictment about conspiring to cause injury and death to people in the process of damaging and destroying buildings? Perhaps it’s a “legal” thing, but why is the inevitable harm to people not included in terrorist indictments citing plots to blow “things” up? Maybe someone can explain to us.

Anyway, a four-count indictment accuses Dhiran Barot, Nadeem Tarmohammed and Qaisar Shaffi of scouting the New York Stock Exchange and Citicorp Building in New York, the Prudential Building in Newark, N.J., and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in the District of Columbia.

U.S. officials charge that Barot, a senior al-Qaida figure, was sent to the United States at behest of Osama bin Laden to scout prominent financial targets. The indictment states all three men were engaged in surveillance of financial buildings as part of a plot that envisioned using "weapons of mass destruction".

The plot against the U. S. interests ran from August 2000 until August 2004, when the men were arrested in the United Kingdom on terrorism-related charges. The United States will seek extradition of the suspects after British authorities wrapped up a case charging them of plotting attacks in the United Kingdom.

Officials told FOX News that other potential targets included the American Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Bros., Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve Bank, Bear Stearns, AIG, MetLife and JP Morgan Chase.

More on the story from the counterterrorism blog.