Miami Redux

Remember the infamous "Miami Seven"? The bunch of misfits who dressed up in ninja costumes and had aspirations of "a full ground war against the United States and we knew this because one of them had been to Chicago?

Well, here we are again, with a new bunch of clowns, who again had "aspirations", this time of inflicting massive casualties on American troops....stationed at Fort Dix. Yes, that's FORT Dix. Fort. As in "fortified"? Presumably with weapons? Weapons they hadn't been able to get UNTIL AN FBI GUY OFFERED TO PROVIDE THEM???

Let's look at this sinister bunch of people and the clues, shall we?

OMIGOD, they played PAINTBALL!

Levine recalls seeing some of the brothers shooting paintballs at trees in their front yard, an incident that seemed harmless at the time. Authorities say the group spoke of playing paintball as a training exercise for the attack.

And a video store clerk says that a videotape the men had wanted transferred to DVD showed 10 men shooting at a firing range, calling for jihad and shouting "Allah Akbar!" Do we know that the six arrested today are among the 10? Do we know how old the tape is?

Meanwhile, the loathsome and media whorish Chris Christie, often touted as a Republican challenger to whatever Democrat is up for re-election in any given year, was out in front of the cameras today saying that if six guys with guns had infiltrated a heavily-armed military base, "It could have been a disaster."

If six guys with guns can take over an armed military base, then we are in much bigger trouble than just six Albanians doing some kind of Islamofascist version of imitating what they saw on YouTube.

Shawn Mullen over at The Moderate Voice also notices the similarity of this case to the feckless Miami Seven:

Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be considerably more caution in the blogosphere today over the announcement that the feds have arrested six men who were planning to attack soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, than breathless reports yesterday that an explosion in a Las Vegas parking garage was a terrorist attack.

That is well and good, because the preliminary reports call to mind those feckless Miami-based terrorist wannabes who were going to take a bus to Chicago and blow up the Sears Tower. Or something.

These alleged terrorists had been under surveillance by the FBI for months, practiced by shooting paintball guns and real weapons in a rural area of the Pennsylvania Poconos and allegedly watched jihadist videos in which Osama bin Laden urged them toward martyrdom.

Captain Ed cut to the chase at Captain’s Quarters in noting that these guys do not appear to have the smarts of typical Al Qaeda operatives insofar as they made a videotape of their training sessions and then went to a retail store to get it made into a DVD.

All I know is that once again, we have George W. Bush in very real danger of losing support from his own party for his much-beloved war in Iraq, and we have an Attorney General who's got one foot out the door and the other on a banana peel -- and right on cue, we have a report of would be "terrorists" who had NO WEAPONS IN THEIR POSSESSION when raided, but had been "trying to acquire" them from an FBI agent who set it up to try to sell it to them.

Now, it's entirely possible that these guys had some notion of being Big Bad Jihadists About to Bring Down America, but let's not forget that this is, after all, six guys. And frankly, if six guys with weapons sold to them by an FBI agent can destroy an entire nation, then perhaps the Twenty-Eight Percent Squadron ought to re-evaluate their worship of the Big Daddy in the Codpiece who Said He'd Keep Them Safe.