Curses, foiled again!

Why we should be sceptical of “major terror plots”

5 May 2025

Few details have been released so far regarding the alleged by the combined heroism of counter-terror police, MI5, and elite soldiers from the SAS. All we have been told is that the suspected attack was , that the terrorists had planned to “target a specific premises”, and that it involved several Iranian nationals.

However, without being privy to any secret information, I can confidently assert that, like so many of the so-called terrorist plots over the past few years, this one too is likely to be a study in alarmism and incompetence — on the part of the terrorists, our government, and the media.

Are most terrorists dumb?

First, the terrorists. It is almost certain that the men who have been arrested are either extremely incompetent, or the victims of entrapment, or both. Most recent terrorist plots in the US and the UK since 9/11, such as the JFK airport plot, Fort Dix, and the Miami 7, have been hopelessly unrealistic, shamefully amateurish, and had little to no chance of success. Yet they were hyped by government officials and the media as major threats.

Take the , for example, in which six men allegedly planned to enter a US Army base disguised as pizza delivery men, shoot as many soldiers and Humvees as they could, and then retreat without losses to fight again another day. Rather than practising their covert plot, well, covertly, they went to a public shooting range and proceeded to video themselves shooting at targets while screaming about their radical agenda. Then, to get the tape converted to DVD, they took it to their local branch of , a consumer electronics retail company. The “DVD Converting Guy” happened to notice that the entire videotape was chock-full of guns, anti-American tirades, and dudes talking about how they were totally going to charge the Fort Dix military base and whack some GIs. He contacted the police, who in turn contacted the FBI.

Or take , who was nabbed in 2000 along with two others for plotting to set off suicide bombs in the New York City subway. Zazi, who had received training in an al Qaeda camp in Waziristan, aroused suspicions in part by buying large amounts of hydrogen peroxide and acetone products from beauty supply stores in the Denver area. Federal agents were on his trail before he was close to mounting the operation.

Or take the attempted . Two men — one a medical doctor, the other studying for his PhD — planned to crash their propane and petrol laden Jeep Cherokee into an airport terminal. Their education did them little good. The men steered the SUV, with flames spurting out of its windows, into a security barrier. The fiery crash destroyed only the Jeep, and both men were quickly apprehended; the driver later died from his injuries. (The day before, the same men had rigged two cars to blow up near a London nightclub. That plan was thwarted when one car was spotted by paramedics and the other, parked illegally, was removed by a tow truck. As a bonus for investigators, the would-be bombers’ cell phones, loaded with the phone numbers of possible accomplices, were salvaged from the cars.)

Believe it or not, this sort of bungling is extremely common in the world of terror. You might think that terrorism isn’t exactly rocket science. You might think it’s something pretty much anyone can do. But, incredibly, most wannabe terrorists still manage to fuck it up. Despite the initial press frenzies, the actual details of the cases frequently turn out to be more than bin Laden or Mohamed Atta.

The truth is, of course, that it’s actually not that easy to mount most sorts of terrorist attacks. Building bombs and incendiaries is hard, especially when it comes to the detonator. Making a complex device go off all at once requires considerable technical know-how. Quite often, the detonator will go off while the explosives don’t. That said, it doesn’t seem that many would-be bombers are very well trained, as is clear from Afghanistan, where it’s fair to say that the Taliban employ the world’s most incompetent suicide bombers: one in two manages to kill only himself. And this success rate hasn’t improved at all in the many years they’ve been using suicide bombers, despite the experience of hundreds of attacks — or attempted attacks. In Afghanistan, as in many cultures, a manly embrace is a time-honoured tradition for warriors before they go off to face death. Thus, many suicide bombers never even make it out of their training camp or safe house, as the pressure from these group hugs triggers the explosives in their suicide vests. According to several sources at the United Nations, as many as six would-be suicide bombers died in July 2009 after one such embrace in Paktika.

It’s a set up!

Incompetence aside, it’s often unclear whether those arrested are actually guilty of terrorism, or if the police created a crime where none existed before. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn’t have ordinarily done. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist.

Entrapment is a very real possibility in the majority of alleged terrorist plots that have been foiled by UK and US security services in the past two decades. Most cases have involved police informants or undercover agents who arguably pushed or enabled the suspects to escalate their plans, raising questions about whether the alleged crimes were in fact created by the security services themselves.

In the US, several studies, journalism investigations, and human rights reports (especially post-9/11) have shown that many high-profile terrorism cases involved FBI informants or undercover agents who played a major role in instigating, enabling, or supplying the means for the plot. A 2014 Human Rights Watch / Columbia Law School report found that almost 50% of the federal terrorism convictions since 9/11 resulted from informant-based sting operations, often raising concerns of entrapment. Trevor Aaronson’s book The Terror Factory (2013) analysed FBI cases and estimated that, of over 500 prosecutions, around half involved FBI informants or undercover agents, sometimes pushing vulnerable or mentally unstable individuals toward actions they might not have taken on their own.

In the UK, the situation is slightly different: MI5 and the police claim to have disrupted numerous plots, but the use of long-term undercover agents embedded in communities has been less common than in the US. Nevertheless, undercover operatives and informants have played a significant role in many cases, particularly in Northern Ireland (against paramilitaries), and more recently against jihadist or far-right suspects. On the whole, UK police tend to intervene earlier in plots, and sting operations are less visible, so the public debate about entrapment is not as prominent as it is in the US. But whenever we are told that a terrorist plot was foiled at the last minute, or that an attack was hours away from being launched when police miraculously arrived in the nick of time to stop it, this is almost certainly a sting operation.

Courts rarely accept entrapment defences, because the legal bar is high: the defendant must show they were not “predisposed” to commit the crime. But in the court of public opinion, many of these prosecutions are widely recognised as classic cases of entrapment.

Media alarmism and political opportunism

Given the overwhelming evidence of terrorist stupidity, and the likelihood that most “foiled terrorist plots” would never have gotten very far without significant assistance from the security services, it seems that we are left with one conclusion — if these are the terrorists we’re fighting, we’ve got a pretty incompetent enemy!

You couldn’t tell that from the press reports, though. , the plot was a “major attack’” that could have led to an imminent threat to life. that it was among “the biggest counter-terrorism threats seen in recent years”. No one has yet gone so far as to say it had the potential to be another 9/11, but watch this space.

These people are just as deluded as the Fort Dix six or the Glasgow duo. Calling these wannabe numpties, with their movie-plot threats, “terrorists” is an insult to Carlos the Jackal and Ulrike Meinhof. But in this country, while you have to be fairly competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don’t have to be competent to cause terror. All you need to do is start plotting an attack and — regardless of whether or not you have a viable plan, weapons or even the faintest clue about what you’re doing — the media will gladly help you terrorise the entire population.

Government officials and news outlets vastly exaggerate the danger posed by these poorly organised plots in order to justify sweeping security measures, like NSA surveillance or Prevent, even though it is almost always old-fashioned police work — not surveillance — that thwarts real plots. This is rank political opportunism: the public is encouraged to be fearful, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the “terrorists” are incompetent, while cynical politicians use these incidents to push policies that erode our civil liberties.

Mandatory scepticism

Government claims about foiled plots should be treated with liberal doses of scepticism, especially when arrests rely on claims about intent or religious beliefs, sometimes leading to thought-crime–like prosecutions. We need to be doubly sceptical when such claims are used to justify restricting freedoms in the name of security.

Incompetence doesn’t necessarily imply harmlessness: while most plots are bungled, some incompetent actors can still cause harm (e.g., Richard Reid’s shoe bomb), so genuine threats need to be addressed — but without panic or political exploitation. Instead of relying on fear-mongering or sweeping security programs, our best protection against terrorism lies in solid intelligence, dogged investigation, and emergency preparedness — practical security measures that do not ride roughshod over basic human rights.

In the end, the threat we face is not so much a legion of criminal masterminds as a dangerous mix of blundering amateurs, overzealous security agencies, and a media-political machine eager to inflate threats for its own cynical ends. While vigilance against genuine threats is essential, it is vital that we resist the call to surrender our freedoms at every cry of “terror.” A clear-eyed, proportionate response — grounded in solid police work, not fear or opportunism — is the surest way to keep both our safety and our democracy intact.