THE US: At the end of a trying week, which went off without a repetition of last year's catastrophes, US law enforcement officials deserved a moment of triumphalism. It came at the weekend: "Al-Qaeda cell busted in NY", one headline declared.
Five men - US citizens of Yemeni descent - are in jail, having appeared shackled in a courtroom charged with "providing material support and resources to foreign terrorist organisations". The five, all friends and neighbours, had been to an al-Qaeda training camp in Kandahar and been lectured on the mechanics of terrorism by Osama bin Laden himself, federal officials said.
"We have the key players in western New York," said Mr Peter Ahearn, the FBI agent in charge.
"They worked together, they socialised together, they lived within blocks of each other. It's a group of individuals that were trained in Afghanistan. It's an al-Qaeda-trained cell."
Background briefers told the media that the cell's activities had prompted the government to raise the country's terror alert status last week to "code orange", the second highest. They said the group's activities on the Internet had become more intensive just before last week's anniversary.
They hinted that the men had been fingered by John Lindh, "the American Taliban", who has reportedly agreed to tell the authorities what he knows in return for a sentence of no more than 20 years. Lindh's lawyers declined to deny the allegation.
However, the officials also said that they had found no weapons of any kind. The sheriff of Erie County, Patrick Gallivan, who helped co-ordinate the work of almost 20 different agencies to produce the breakthrough, admitted yesterday: "We have no evidence that anybody or anything within the US was ever in danger \ these individuals."
The geography itself can be confusing. By western New York, Mr Ahearn was referring to New York State: the five live in Lackawanna, just outside the industrial city of Buffalo, 640 km from Manhattan. And it soon became clear that this was not a sudden discovery on the part of the authorities.
The men have been under surveillance, with their calls and Internet activity monitored, since last year - according to the local US attorney, Mr Michael Battle, since well before the September 11th attacks. None of the officials explained why the arrests were delayed until the weekend, three days after the anniversary.
Friends and relatives in Lackawanna insisted to the local newspaper, the Buffalo News, that the men had never been to Afghanistan, and that their journeys to the region simply involved trips to Pakistan to study Islam.
Even discounting these ritual protestations of innocence, the paper said descriptions of the men "hardly match the demographic profile of anyone who would train to become a terrorist". It said that four were married; at least three have children and one was voted the friendliest member of his high school class. Mr Yahya Goba's brother-in-law pointed out that this suspect weighed 18 stone. "He complains all the time that it hurts to walk," he said. "Forget about him training."
These arrests follow another high-profile scare, which dominated the cable news channels last Friday. Three Muslim medical students were arrested after a customer in a Georgia diner overheard them making "alarming" comments about terrorism.
They were released, without charge, after 17 hours. - (Guardian Service)