There's a reason the terrorists are snorom
Recently I've had a few laughs at the expense of terrorists--Hamas' unbreakable cryptography, or the doofus in San Jose who allegedly put his return address on weapons shipments to his jihadist brother in the Philippines.
Mark Goldblatt has noticed the same thing--that the guys we're busting over here and in England are not exactly junior Sun Tzus:
Far more frequent are the foiled plots, the parade of jihadist clown posses who self-destruct before they can do damage. The would-be assault on soldiers at Fort Dix, for example, fell apart earlier this year when the nitwits planning it brought videotape of themselves firing rifles in the woods and shouting "Allahu akbar!" to a Circuit City to convert into a DVD.Goldblatt says we keep getting lucky because the terrorists' A-team isn't over here anymore--they're stuck in the flypaper, fighting us in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maybe, but jihadists of extreme intellectual insignificance are nothing new. The pattern extends to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when one of the bombers named Mohammed Salameh decided to get back the deposit for the bomb truck he had used. And then there was Zacarias Moussaoui, who told flight instructors that he only needed to know how to fly the plane sideways--not to take off or land.
So Goldblatt's not quite right--terrorists have been dullards since before the flypaper strategy was in operation. This piece at Stratfor has a better look at terrorist moronism, and the causes for it. It actually doesn't disagree with Goldblatt too much--it just says that terrorists in America or London have trained for an entirely different war than the ones in Iraq.