STEVE DOOCY: Yesterday it was announced that charges have been filed against six guys living in the Philly area in a terror plot foiled. Unlike 9/11, some of the alleged plotters don't fit the mold for Islamic terrorists. Four are from Eastern Europe - former Yugoslavia, not the Middle East, although one is from Jordan and one is from turkey. Is Eastern Europe the new training ground for terrorists?
GRETCHEN CARLSON: Steve Emerson, the director if the Investigative Project and author of Jihad, Inc., he joins us now in studio. There is this recruiting that's going on in Eastern Europe, and you say that part of the reason that it is easy to do this is because these people are poor and so they come in and they say hey, we're going to feed you and clothe you, and by the way here is our message that we want you to take in.
STEVE EMERSON: And the "they" is Saudi Arabia. I just got an e-mail fortuitously about three weeks ago from someone who just returned from Kosovo and Albania and said they were building new mosques, that is the Saudis, under the Wahhabist doctrine there were pouring in billions of dollars and luring in Muslims into the Wahhabist, radical doctrine. This is becoming a radical fundamentalist country. Contrary to what it was 15 years ago. It was inevitable and it was going to produce these types of young men who believed in jihad. It was being exported, so it did not just stay in Kosovo and Albania , but it was being exported overseas.
DOOCY: Well, we're lucky that the guy at Kinko's - who was asked by the bad guys to transfer from video tape to DVD - had the wherewithal to call the cops and then they started a surveillance program that lasted something like 16 months. Had we not heard from the Kinko's goes guy, this could actually have happened.
EMERSON: You are absolutely right. I mean these are these fortuitous events that basically provide a break for the FBI to put somebody on the inside. It happened in the second plot in 1993 when Imad Salem, the informant, was able to insert himself back into the Blind Sheikh plot and stop the second series of plots to bomb bridges and tunnels. In this case, fortuitously, he was able to get the FBI the tape, they saw it and said we have to get somebody in. They ended up getting two confidential informants. The only reason they stopped the plot was at the point of actually selling them the weapons. And the FBI would have wrapped this up earlier, but I think the American public was getting sort of sensitized by all of the American media criticism of the earlier plots which didn't unfold enough to show the level of sophistication of the plotters.
DOOCY: And in fact these guys were arrested just as they tried to buy an AK-47.
BRIAN KILMEADE: Steve, they're familiar statements – "I didn't care if I got locked up," "I do not care if I die," "It's all in the name of Allah." We know that. But what's the theory behind going after hardened targets like Fort Dix and the Army-Navy game. I mean, if you are a terrorist, if you want a big hit, why do you go to the teeth of a lion?
EMERSON: Listen, we do not have all the recordings. One thing we know for sure is that there are thousands of hours of recording. We will find out soon enough why they selected Fort Dix . My belief is that Fort Dix was an icon, and so were the Army and Navy ports that they selected. And the Army or the Navy was an icon because they represented the U.S. Government overseas. This also shows, by the way, that it was not the Arab-Israeli dispute, it was not Iraq . It was the United States government, and they represented the heart of the U.S. Government.
DOOCY: And the other thing about it, one of those six faces right there, a former pizza delivery guy whose dad's company had access to the base. Maybe that is why he was in on it as well. Steve Emerson, thank you for joining us live today.