More on the Killer Clowns of Al Qaeda

Gene Healy with some details from the trial regarding the 2007 plot to blow up JFK Airport:

Last week, federal jurors in Brooklyn heard tapes from an undercover informant in what one prosecutor called one of "the most chilling plots imaginable," a 2007 Islamist plan to detonate underground fuel tanks at JFK International Airport.

On the tapes, defendant Russell Defreitas promised "high-tech," "ninja-style" tactics that included releasing rats in the main terminal to distract security. "We got to come up with supernatural things," he told the informant.

Despite his bluster, Defreitas seemed unaware of the technical difficulties involved in igniting hardened underground pipelines, and he never secured explosives.

The JFK plotters' trial follows May's attempted Times Square bombing, in which Faisal Shahzad—trained in explosives at an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan—failed to set off a bomb made of gas cans, propane tanks, fireworks and nonflammable fertilizer.

You ever get the feeling that some of these guys aren't the sharpest scimitars in the shed?

One imagines Count Floyd intoning about "the most chilling plots imaginable." Healy is following up on observations from Daniel Byman and Christine Fair in The Atlantic, which Jesse Walker blogged about last month.