Not as dumb as they look

Mark Steyn makes a good point about the Fort Dix Six:

Most terrorists seem like bumbling losers if they're caught before the act: That's certainly true of the Fort Dix jihadists who took their terrorist training DVD to the local audio store to be copied. It was also true of the Islamists arrested in Toronto last year for plotting to behead the prime minister, one of whose cell members had a bride who wanted him to sign a prenup committing him to jihad. The Heathrow plotters arrested while planning to blow up U.S.-bound airliners included a Muslim convert who'd started out as the son of a British Conservative Party official with a P. G. Wodehouse double-barreled name and a sister who was a Victoria's Secret model and ex-wife of tennis champ Yanick Noah.

But then Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 gang would have seemed pretty funny if you'd run into them in that lap-dance club they went to before the big day where the girls remembered them only as very small tippers. Most terrorists are jokes until the bomb goes off.

This is an excellent point. If someone had "connected the dots" and busted the 9/11 hijackers on 9/10 the commentators would have comentated about what a bunch of goobers they were. How seriously could have they taken their Muslim faith when they were in a strip club getting lap dances? How did they expect to gain control of airliners with dozens of other passengers on them with just box cutters? How did they expect to navigate a high-tech wide body jet into the WTC or Pentagon or Capitol when the hijacker pilot was such an idiot that he stood up in class and said that he didn't care about taking off and landing but just wanted to know how to steer the plane in flight?

The instructions left by the leader in which he forbade any women to attend his funeral would have also been a source of mirth and cited as further proof that such cretins could not possibly have pulled off something so serious as the coordinated hijacking and suicide crashing of four jets.

But they did.