Foiled again

Pay no mind to the usual suspects who claim NYPD intelligence officers should cease what they call spying, the terror threat against New York City supposedly being overblown. The police and FBI agents just nabbed a man they say wanted to detonate grenades in Times Square, and they did it thanks to aggressive, sometimes surreptitious intelligence collection. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Ashiqul Alam, of Jackson Heights, had been under surveillance by the Joint Terrorism Task Force for a while. Then, prosecutors say, he tried to buy two 9mm pistols with the serial numbers removed; that triggered his arrest.

Before it came to that, in conversations with an undercover agent, he had praised the

9/11 attacks as “a complete success,” and said he wanted to see the “flag of Islam on the Twin Towers or the Empire State Building.”

He had said he wanted to get ahold of a suicide vest because: “When it blows up, those balls explode and the metal goes everywhere. The more better the explosives the more farther the shrapnel could go” and sick).

In January, he went to a shooting range with the undercover to practice hitting targets. Twice, he scoped out Times Square as a possible target.

Want to minimize it all by saying Alam had yet to draw up attack plans? Go ahead.

We say thank God we pay people to take this threat seriously while others complain about overreach under the shield of safety they provide.