Home Grown Terrorists

WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA) -- Three of the four men now charged with planning to blow up 2 synagogues in New York City with more than 100 pounds of plastic explosives are U.S. citizens. Police say they also planned to shoot down military planes with surface-to-air guided missiles like this one.

"It's particularly repugnant because these people are supposed to be raised on American values of tolerance and pluralism and not prejudice and not bigotry," says Ron Halber, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council.

Halber says, "certainly if they took a civics course, they know that violence is not the way we produce change in the United States, but rather we have a democratic process to do so."

They may be the latest so-called homegrown terrorists but they are hardly the first US citizens intent on wreaking havoc on U.S. soil. Among the most notorious? Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City bombing and Unabomber Ted Kaczinski. What ties them together?

National Security expert Steve Vladeck, an associate professor at American University Washington College of Law says, "whatever the motive of the individual actors, the real crime is on the effect it has on all of us, more and above the effect it has on the potential victims."

While security has been ramped up at the targeted synagogues in New York, Halber points out, "if we do modify our lifestyles to a great extent or if we stop doing what we doing, if we start closing our institutions or stop serving people who are vulnerable because of terrorists, they will have won. The terrorists are not going to win."

The arrests come after a year-long undercover investigation by the FBI and other agencies. An informant is now shedding more light on a motive. He says one of the suspects said his parents had lived in Afghanistan and he was upset that so many muslims were being killed there by U.S. military forces.