Peter Krupa

Today’s elaborately staged announcement that the FBI thwarted Terrorists intent on killing and maiming US servicemen at Fort Dix should send a chill into hearts of all red-blooded Americans.

Or maybe it shouldn’t.

Because looking at what these guys had planned, I feel pretty goddamn safe. First of all, they were going to attack a military base. Bright. We don’t have all the details, but apparently their plan was “to purchase rocket-propelled grenade launchers then use them to fire at Humvees at Fort Dix and ‘light the whole place up,’ Chris Christie, the United States attorney in New Jersey, said today.”

Great idea fellas. I mean, rocket-propelled grenades, you can just pick those up at a hardware store, right?

One of the suspects, a Mr. Mohamad Ibriham Shnewer, was reported to have told a witness “that they could kill ‘at least 100 soldiers’ using rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons, and that the witness was urged to help lead the attack because he had prior experience in the Egyptian military.”

Oh, come on dude, don’t hold back. Tell us how many you can really kill. Wait, never mind, Shnewer had a plan: “They would use a map procured by Mr. Tatar, who used to deliver pizza there, the affidavit said, and the attack would begin with a strike that would cause a power outage.”

Sounds professional. And it was, because they not only watched training videos on the interweb, they “collected weapons including handguns, shotguns and semi-automatic assault weapons, and trained on firearms in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania.”

I’ve trained on those very same firearms in a corn field in Illinois, several times. Such “training” generally involves shooting things. Of course, I didn’t have any connections to international terrorist groups.

Of course, these guys didn’t either, so they couldn’t actually be trapped in the web of illegal wiretaps the Bush administration has set up. Instead, the dastardly scheme was tripped up when these cunning Terrorists took a video tape to a video store to have it dubbed onto DVD, a tape which contained images “that the F.B.I described as firing assault weapons in a ‘militia-like style while calling for jihad and shouting Allah Akbar (God is Great).’”

The video store clerk called the Feds.

All that to say, I’m very happy they caught these losers. But the “Clash of Civilizations” has turned out to be kind of a disappointment.