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Article from USA Today July 11:

FBI: al-Qaeda detainee spoke of fire plot

PHOENIX (AP) — The FBI alerted law enforcement agencies last month that an al-Qaeda terrorist now in detention had talked of masterminding a plot to set a series of devastating forest fires around the western United States.

Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, told The Associated Press that officials there took note of the warning but didn't see a need to act further on it.

The contents of the June 25 memo from the FBI's Denver office were reported Friday by The Arizona Republic. Davis declined to share a copy of the memo and an FBI spokeswoman in Denver didn't immediately return a telephone call.

The Republic reported that the detainee, who was not identified, said the plan involved three or four people setting wildfires using timed devices in Colorado, Montana, Utah and Wyoming that would detonate in forests and grasslands after the operatives had left the country.

The memo noted that investigators couldn't determine whether the detainee was telling the truth. The newspaper said many forest law enforcement officers it contacted had no idea the warning had been issued.

Big fires in Spain earlier this year. Funny how that would happen to an ally.

Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, told The Associated Press that officials there took note of the warning but didn't see a need to act further on it.

It's not that these officials didn't see a need to act on this threat. The reality is that preventing someone from starting a forest fire is more difficult than catching a fart in the wind.

The Republic reported that the detainee, who was not identified, said the plan involved three or four people setting wildfires using timed devices in Colorado, Montana, Utah and Wyoming that would detonate in forests and grasslands after the operatives had left the country.

That strikes me as a pretty lame terrorist plot.

Even if they successfully started some large fires that destroyed a lot of property, it's going to be written off as natural disasters and fail to add to their "fear the terrorists" goals.

And even if they take credit -- something they apparently did *not* want to do with their other attacks, for some reason -- a forest fire just doesn't have the "threat at any place, at any time, without warning" quality that an effective terrorist event has. Just how many people live somewhere that a forest fire can cause trouble? And there's *days* of warning when a fire is headed your way.

The FBI alerted law enforcement agencies last month that an al-Qaeda terrorist now in detention had talked of masterminding a plot to set a series of devastating forest fires around the western United States.

The contents of the June 25 memo from the FBI's Denver office were reported Friday by The Arizona Republic. Davis declined to share a copy of the memo and an FBI spokeswoman in Denver didn't immediately return a telephone call.

This has also been in the FBI's custody since February 2003. They told the finder, the brother of US Representative Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) that the contents were innocuous. The diary (this photograph is two pages of a full diary) was found in an abandoned backpack on a well-used smuggler's trail on the U.S. Mexico border and contained telephone numbers in Canada and Afghanistan.