Afghan-American al-Qaeda recruit Najibullah Zazi “was in fact planning to launch what could have been the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States using…seemingly innocuous hair bleach to assemble homemade bombs, a signature of al-Qaeda plots in recent years. …Zazi was spotted in downtown Manhattan on Wall Street on the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks just a few blocks from the gaping hole where the World Trade Center had once stood. By then he was under heavy FBI surveillance and eight days later [September 19, 2009] Zazi was arrested. He later admitted that ‘the plan was to conduct martyrdom operations on subway lines in Manhattan.’ Zazi was the first genuine al-Qaeda recruit to be discovered living in the United States in six years.”
– Peter Bergen, The Longest War, Page 234