On our turf

Experts say the threat of domestic terrorism is growing. But are officials ready to call it what it is? | Lynn Vincent

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

While the rest of us were working, cooking, paying the bills, and carpooling our kids, some in our own midst, many of them fellow citizens, were plotting to kill us.

Since May of this year, federal agents have knocked down five elaborate terror plots to kill Americans on American soil:

May 2009: FBI agents arrested four men—three U.S.-born, one Haitian-born, all Muslim converts—after they planted bombs in cars outside the Riverdale Temple and the Riverdale Jewish Center in the Bronx. The conspirators (James Cromitie, 44, David Williams, 28, Onta Williams, 32, and Laguerre Payen, 27) had also obtained from an FBI confidential informant what they thought was a fully operational surface-to-air missile that they planned to fire at an Air National Guard aircraft on the same day.