TERROR CONVICTIONS IN LOS ANGELES:

Two members of a prison-based Islamic terrorist cell that authorities say was poised to attack military sites, synagogues and other targets across Southern California pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to conspiring to wage war against the United States.

The plot, which police stumbled upon during a routine investigation into a gas station holdup, represented one of the most realistic terrorism threats on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, experts said. The case also raised concerns about whether the country’s prisons could serve as recruiting centers for Islamic extremists.

“Could”? Seems like we know the answer already. More here:

It was not the most spectacular domestic terrorism plot since the Sept. 11 attacks, and certainly not the best-known.

But no other case posed such a real and immediate threat as the audacious scheme to attack more than a dozen military centers, synagogues and other sites in Southern California, experts said Thursday. . . .

The case illustrated how quickly authorities must be prepared to move in the event of an actual terrorist threat, they said. In a matter of weeks, the FBI, Los Angeles and Torrance police departments and two dozen other agencies conducted 19 searches, seized two dozen computer hard drives and examined about 53,000 documents, all without the normal luxury of moving at their own pace with undercover informants, surveillance and wiretaps.

The plotters “were flying dangerously below the radar,” said the FBI’s John Miller, who was the LAPD’s counter-terrorism head at the time the case broke. He added that the defendants had robbed gas stations for the money to buy rifles, had picked their targets and had set a date.

“The clock was ticking. All they needed to do was to start killing,” he said.

The prison-hatched scheme raised another fear in U.S. counter-terrorism circles, particularly within California, which has the nation’s largest inmate population: Were there other members of the conspiracy, spawned in cellblocks and prison libraries, preparing to carry on the plan?

It’s a bad idea to keep so many people in prison, and it’s a worse idea to do so and then have them exposed to radical “clerics.”