Chilling terror threat in NYC

Newsday: There are people in New York City who want to frighten, attack, maim and kill. If our concerns about that are often vague, they were given names and faces Thursday.

Two Queens women — both U.S. citizens — were charged with planning to build a bomb they hoped to detonate at an event big enough to make headlines around the world.

Reportedly calling themselves “citizens of the Islamic State,” they allegedly plotted about the best places to unleash their homemade hell — rejecting Herald Square as filled with just “normal people” and instead debating the relative merits of a high-profile event like Boston’s marathon versus the packed funeral of an NYPD officer slain in the line of duty.

Investigations into possible terrorist plots in NYC — even arrests — now happen fairly often. Those who have been charged seem to range from deadly serious and on the verge of acting on their plans to some who are utterly incompetent and vague about goals. But these women seem to fall in the middle of that spectrum, as “aspirational” but “closer to operational,” a law enforcement source said. This plot is unusually unsettling. These are young women, former roommates living in NYC’s most diverse borough, who were free to enjoy the goodness this nation offers. Yet, they were obsessed with killing its people.