A New York Times report shows that even a law-enforcement model for conducting the fight against terrorism will not satisfy some people. William Rashbaum reports on the testimony of a paid informer who reported conversations and activities at a Brooklyn mosque to New York detectives, which led to the unraveling of a plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station:

The paid police informer who is the central witness at the trial of a Pakistani immigrant charged with plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station testified yesterday that he collected a wide range of information on his visits to two city mosques, from the tenor of the sermons to how many people attended the services.

The informer, Osama Eldawoody, 50, secretly recorded roughly two dozen conversations about the plot with the immigrant, Shahawar Matin Siraj, in the summer of 2004 — many of them incriminating. He was questioned by Mr. Siraj's lawyer about the information he provided to the police on his frequent visits to mosques in Brooklyn and Staten Island. The visits occurred over roughly 13 months in 2003 and 2004, both before and after the informer met Mr. Siraj.

Regardless of the outcome of the trial for Mr. Siraj, 23, who faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, Mr. Eldawoody's testimony is shedding light on what seem to be new police tactics to uncover terrorist plots before they come to fruition. While a federal judge gave the police expanded powers in 2003, critics have nonetheless raised objections to the use of informers in places of worship, political events and other gatherings.

The use of informants for law-enforcement interception of conspiracies has a long and productive record. Informants infiltrate closed societies in order to alert police to violent activities. The FBI (finally) helped break the Klan through this method, and continue to do so with violent white-supremacist organizations, even those who form "churches" to spread their hate. No one seems to mind that application of law enforcement -- and rightly so -- but for some reason they find it objectionable when it gets applied to terrorism.

Like it or not, fair or not, the Islamofascists recruit and organize within mosques, and in order to use a law-enforcement model, the police and FBI have to penetrate them to find out whether any terror planning or support is occurring. They cannot plant bugs without a court order, and that requires some sort of probable cause, which once again requires some inside information. The only way to discover that is to have informers or undercover police at the mosques, talking to people and connecting into the social network.

In this case, it appears to have worked. Siraj wanted to bomb the subway station, or at least take part in the operation. Eldawoody caught him on tape discussing the plan to use backpack bombs to cause economic damage to New York, although Siraj demurred at killing people. This could not have been discovered any other way, leaving only the option of investigation after the attack occurred.

Rashbaum notes that critics oppose these kinds of tactics as an affront to religious freedom, although he doesn't name the specific critics or explicitly give their arguments. This argument shows why even the law-enforcement approach will not get support among those who seem to want America to stop defending itself. The problem isn't that the US wants to curtail religious freedom -- it's that our terrorist enemies use mosques as a cover for their plots. If the mosques want to avoid becoming the target of investigations, they should expel members who espouse violent jihad and report them to the authorities. When terrorists use mosques as their shield, the mosques become fair game for counterterrorism efforts.

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