Eric O'Neill

Well, it's a pretty amazing story.

You have a group that calls themselves the Turtle Island

Liberation Front, which comes from this idea that if you flip the map of the United States, it looks like a turtle.

It looks like an island that looks like a turtle.

And so the original indigenous name was Turtle Island, which has no bearing in historical fact.

And so that capitalism is bad and all of this ideology.

It's crazy.

The whole thing is crazy.

The plot is the thing that's scary.

This idea that capitalism is bad and the United States is bad and we stole it from indigenous people and so that we need to blow up buildings in Los Angeles in order to

to restore it.

I don't know what their goal was other than absolute chaos.

And that's what you see in many of these terrorist cells.

But it shows that the investigation, which was a class act by law enforcement and the FBI, shows that there was coordination, there was planning, and that they might have been able to pull this off if the FBI hadn't learned about the plot and surveilled and infiltrated and then caught them before they could build these pipe bombs.

Yeah, we don't know, but it's typically one or two ways.

Either someone in the group has a little bit of a conscience and rats them out.

That happens a lot in counter-terror.

When I was operating, you would see somebody in the cell who didn't feel comfortable or got angry at their fellow terrorists and provided an anonymous tip.

The other way that the FBI could have learned about them is digital surveillance, looking for people in chat rooms, in different areas of the internet, talking about these things.

And what we're learning from the investigation is they were doing a lot of talking.