Mack Sennett jihad

You know, I appreciate getting these morons off the street, but let's tone down the rhetoric here since, like Padilla and the guys who wanted to buy al Qaeda "uniforms" before they blew up the Sears Tower were, you know, not so much.

“Today we dodged a bullet,” J. P. Weiss, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Philadelphia office, said at the news conference. “In fact, when you look at the type of weapons that this group was trying to purchase, we may have dodged a lot of bullets.”

Mr. Weiss added: “We had a group that was forming a platoon to take on an army. They identified their target, they did their reconnaissance. They had maps. And they were in the process of buying weapons. Luckily, we were able to stop that.”

Wow, we sure are lucky.

The authorities first caught up with the men in January 2006, when personnel at a video store alerted the authorities after the suspects requested that he transfer onto a DVD a videotape of the group shouting about jihad as they fired assault weapons at a range in the Pocono Mountains.

Best part of the story:

It is the latest in a series of plots, targeting sites in the United States, that authorities said they have foiled. These included one last June in which seven arrests were made in Miami after the authorities described suspects talking about blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the F.B.I.’s Miami headquarters. In June 2003, the authorities said they thwarted a plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, and in 2002, six Yemeni-Americans from Lackawanna, N.Y., near Buffalo, were arrested and linked with Qaeda interests.

Look, it's great we're "foiling" all of these plots and putting these nutjobs behind bars*. But the list above is hardly a compendium of the best and the brightest. After all, the plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge involved, if my memory serves, a blowtorch.

* Or in straighjackets?