Three separate and apparently unrelated terrorism plots have been foiled by federal authorities this week. On Thursday, the FBI charged two men, one in Texas and the other in Illinois, with attempting to bomb a federal building and a 60-story office building. In both cases, FBI agents were able to pose as al-Qaeda members, meet with the bomb plotters for months, then slip the plotters a dummy explosive device subsequent to their arrests.

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    A third terror plot, which some investigators are calling the most serious in years, has been uncovered involving an Afghani immigrant named Najibuillah Zazi. Zazi, a shuttle driver in Denver, has been accused of plotting to undertake a terror attack against the United States.

    According to The New York Times, Zazi "bought chemicals needed to build a bomb - hydrogen peroxide, acetone and hydrochloric acid - and in doing so, Mr. Zazi took a critical step made by few other terrorism suspects. If government allegations are to be believed, Mr. Zazi, a legal immigrant from Afghanistan, had carefully prepared for a terrorist attack. He attended a Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, received training in explosives and stored in his laptop computer nine pages of instructions for making bombs from the same kind of chemicals he had bought."

    "Since he was arrested a week ago on a lesser count of lying to terrorist investigators," reported The Associated Press, "investigators have fanned out over New York City, going to beauty shops, home improvement stores and neighborhoods Zazi frequented looking for possible accomplices, while the government issued national terrorism warnings for sports complexes, hotels and transit systems. Prosecutors said they have yet to establish exactly when and where the Zazi attacks were supposed to take place. But Attorney General Eric Holder said in Washington, 'We believe any imminent threat arising from this case has been disrupted.'

    Most terrorism cases brought over the last several years, for a variety of reasons, have fallen apart or failed to pan out. Plotters often lacked the technical or financial means to carry out an attack, or were overly influenced by informants or undercover officers looking to entice them into a plot. According to The New York Times, "As a result, people in and out of government have become dubious about assertions of the grave danger posed by any particular group of defendants."

    The Zazi case, however, appears to be far more serious in nature, and "actually looks like the case the government kept claiming it had but never did," said Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University law school.

    Jarret Brachman, author of "Global Jihadism," said the case was "shaping up to be one of the most serious terrorist bomb plots developed in the United States," calling to mind the London attacks in July 2005. "You don't manufacture homemade TATP explosives unless you want to kill people and destroy infrastructure," Dr. Brachman said. "TATP" is an abbreviation for the chemical combination alleged to be involved in the Zazi case.

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