This is a good article on those would-be jihadis arrested in New Jersey:

New Yorkistan?: Initial lessons from the latest homegrown terror plot by Judith Miller

They had ambitious dreams, these guys. They would astonish the world, making it big by killing lots of American soldiers overseas in Somalia or at home in America. Worst case: they would die as holy warriors and become, if not rich, famous.

“My soul cannot rest til I shed blood,” Mohamed Mahmood Alessa, the 20-year-old, American-born son of Palestinian parents, told his putative partner in crime, Eduardo Almonte, 24, according to the criminal complaint filed in federal district court this week. Alessa considered fellow Muslim Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the naturalized U.S. Army psychiatrist who gunned down 13 fellow soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood last November, a nut and an amateur. “I’ll do twice what he did,” Alessa vowed. “I wanna, like, be the world’s known terrorist.”

Fortunately, Alessa was plotting not only with Almonte, but also with an undercover officer from the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division, who was recording every word. As a result, the duo were arrested Saturday night as they tried boarding separate Cairo-bound planes on their way to Somalia, where they intended to join an al-Qaida-affiliated, Somalia-based terrorist group called Al Shabab, or “the guys” in Arabic. On Monday, they were arraigned in federal court in Newark, accused of conspiring to commit murder, kidnapping, maiming, and mayhem in the name of God.