Hello Agitatees. Pleasure to be here. I’m actually one of Radley’s “blogchildren,” having started mine in 2002 a couple of months after this site got going.

To kick things off, yesterday’s big story about the Jersey jihadi arrests contains an interesting detail. It seems that the plot “was foiled when the men asked a store clerk to copy a video of them firing assault weapons and screaming about jihad.”

Hmmm.

Now, I know, I know: we face a dedicated, determined threat that’s so deadly, (so “existential,” man) that dangerous distractions like the Constitution and critical thinking must be suspended for the duration while we duct tape ourselves to our recliners and dutifully watch Fox News. But I can’t help thinking the Fort Dix plot is part of a pattern: that a good many of the players on Team Jihad just don’t seem all that bright.

I’m sure you remember Iyman Faris, the truck driver who planned to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. Next to that, launching an attack on an Army base looks like a stroke of tactical genius.

But there are more examples. Like this, from the Padilla indictment:

…efforts to conceal the nature of the subjects discussed were seemingly clumsy. In one conversation, for instance, Adham Amin Hassoun talks with another defendant, Mohamed Hesham Youssef, about soccer equipment. The indictment says that Mr. Hassoun later told investigators he had indeed been referring to sports equipment, but that he was unable to explain why he had then asked Mr. Youssef if he had enough “soccer equipment” to “launch an attack on the enemy.”

Padilla himself once went to jail for punching a cop in a fistfight over a donut. And according to one account, Padilla “believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.”

Another that comes to mind is Mohamed Odeh, an AQ operative who helped with the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania. As Peter Bergen recounts in his book Holy War, Inc., upon Odeh’s arrival in Karachi’s airport shortly after the bombing, Pakistani immigration officials took him aside because his passport showed a man with a beard, but he had subsequently shaved his off so as to appear less religious. They asked Odeh, “are you a terrorist?” Instead of denying it, he stayed silent. When they pressed him about the bombing, he tried to persuade the immigration officials that it was “the right thing to do for Islam.”

Doubtless there is some number of highly competent, intelligent terrorists who mean to do us harm. And we haven’t done ourselves any favors since 2002, when we adopted a crackbrained anti-terror strategy that’s been increasing their recruiting pool.

But it’s also worth exploring the idea that maybe we’re not all going to die if we’re old-fashioned enough to maintain constitutional checks on executive power. Maybe, just maybe the most powerful nation in the history of man shouldn’t tremble in fear over the likes of Padilla, Faris, et al. It’s just a little undignified.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 1:09 pm by Gene Healy and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.