The Brits were lucky those guys were lamers

[Bill]

It's kind of hard to imagine a more bumbling bunch of bombers.

Then all three of them get into a car and crash into a security checkpoint?

What, it didn't occur to them that it would cause more damage to get into three different cars?

Then they don't even manage to kill themselves. No virgins for two out of the three.

"Those who witnessed the flaming Jeep Cherokee smash into the airport Saturday said one of the passengers was shouting "Allah" as he fought with police and a second man set himself on fire.

"We tried to subdue the guy, but he's a bad boy, he's not for being subdued," said airport worker John Smitten, who ran to help police in the aftermath of the crash.

"He was shouting something. 'Allah,' something, 'Allah.' Every time he threw a punch, he was saying 'Allah.' "

Smitten said the second man who was severely burned and "covered head-to-toe in flames" also tried to fight policemen after a taxi driver used a water hose to put out the fire.

Two men were immediately arrested at the airport. "

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/07/01/london.alert/index.html

[Bill]

Discovering that these guys were doctors makes their lameness all the more spectacular.

I would have said a doctor _couldn't_ be so stupid as to think that bombs like that would be any use.

I stand corrected. Doctors, too, can be dumb as a sack of hammers.

[Moby]

The people that they catch seem to be pretty clueless. We caught a bunch of dolts in Florida that couldn't afford boots until the FBI gave them money, then they catch some more idiots around an airport and now this.

It seems strange that all the terrorists we catch since we removed the troops from Saudi seem to have IQs below 80 and are whacked to the point of not being able to function.

I think these doctors did a lot of meds and were given the bombs by someone that knew they wouldn't cause much damage. What would a doctor know about bombs?

[Bill]

What would a doctor know about bombs?

Bombs are not complicated, they are among the simplest of devices.

Any educated person could design a bomb that would be much more effective than those, after a few hours of reading.

I suspect those guys were just in a real rush to collect their virgins - that this was a symbolic suicide, like a monk setting himself on fire.

It's possible the press is leaving out details, but it just sounds like some total idiots idea of a cheap car bomb. Thats what a few experts I've seen commenting on this have been saying too.

[Bill]

"Petrol, writes Mr P. G. Urben, of Kenilworth, Warwickshire, “is not explosive and propane is not explosive: what is explosive is a mixture of these with air, within narrow composition limits (2-9 per cent by volume for propane, rather less for petrol vapour). Large volumes (the car ‘bombs’ specified hundreds of cubic metres) will not form spontaneously under any normal ventilation conditions.” "

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article2039719.ece

"Yet for all that, something is changing in the public mood, and I think it’s this: terrorism is beginning to look a bit stupid. Those pictures of that idiotic and slightly overweight fellow with his clothes burnt off looked pathetic, undignified. It has occurred to even the meanest of intellects that concrete doesn’t burn.

And it isn’t just the technical competence of alleged British terrorists that people are beginning to doubt: it’s the whole jihadist idea. What world are they aiming for? Most British Muslims, just like most British everyone-else, think it’s all pie in the sky: all rather silly.

Yes, silly. Not “evil” as the red tops would have it. Take care, neocon editors, prime-ministerial speechwriters and opposition spokesmen, with that word “evil”. Evil is cool. Evil is wicked. Evil sells DVDs and airport thrillers. Evil is a gang you might want to be in if you were a clever boy in a cultural mess with a chip on your shoulder. We’re not talking anything as clever as Evil here: we’re talking Weird, we’re talking Crackpot, we’re talking Sad. The idea of using a Jeep to make a terminal explode was, in the latest lingo, a bit gay. We’re talking Failure.

Two thoughts, very widely thought, have completely escaped Britain’s headline writers. The first thought is that Islamist plotters, though hugely dangerous as any fool can be dangerous, don’t seem to be anything like as clever as the media keep telling us. The second is that although a lot of opinion formers keep telling them to be, a majority of the British people are not anyway on George W. Bush’s side. Both these thoughts are hurting – not helping – the terrorist cause.

At the heart of the jihadists’ most insistent recruiting pitch lies Iraq. The flaw in this pitch is that a substantial majority in Britain and America don’t support the occupation of Iraq. That realisation has grown this year, and is growing still. Your Muslim newsagent knows that most of his white customers agree with him about the war. He is not part of a marginalised community in an alien land: he is part of a democracy that made a mistake in Iraq, and knows it, and will in due course repent of it publicly as well as privately. Democracy is working for him."