As terrorist plots against the United States have piled up in recent months, politicians and the news media have sounded the alarm with a riveting message for Americans: Be afraid. Al-Qaida is on the march again, targeting the country from within and without, and your hapless government cannot protect you. But the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the jihadist enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill. Their weapons were old-fashioned guns and explosives -- in several cases, duds supplied by FBI informants -- with no trace of the biological or radiological poisons, let alone the nuclear bombs, that have long been the ultimate fear. And though 2009 brought more domestic plots, and more serious plots, than any recent year, their lethality was relatively modest. Exactly 14 of the approximately 14,000 murders in the United States last year resulted from allegedly jihadist attacks. Such statistics would be no comfort, of course, if an attack with mass casualties succeeded some day. Nor do they excuse the acknowledged missteps at the nation's bulked-up security agencies that permitted a Nigerian to carry an explosive onto a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas. But even that near miss, said Mark Lowenthal, assistant director of the CIA for analysis from 2002 to 2005, may offer indirect evidence of the enemy's diminished strength, compared with the coordinated attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 'Sending one guy on one plane is a huge step down,' Lowenthal said. 'They're less capable, even if they're still lethal. They're not able to carry out the intense planning they once did.' Lowenthal and others who urge a calmer, more strategic assessment of the recent rash of violent schemes insist that America is far safer than it was in 2001. They also argue that since the goal of terrorism is to spread terror, hyperbole about threats only does the extremists' work for them. The term 'al-Qaida,' used as a catchall in many of the plots, blurs important distinctions. Few if any of the 2009 cases appear to be directly tied to 'al-Qaida central,' as experts refer to the Pakistan-based group led by Osama bin Laden. Audrey Kurth Cronin of the National War College said Qaida affiliates borrow the name to enhance their appeal but are usually more interested in local goals than in the global jihad proclaimed by bin Laden. 