A really great article in the Atlantic about how most terrorists who attempt to attack America are less than the unstoppable killing machines that we'd been led to believe- in fact, most of them are idiots.
That was always one of the more unrealistic things about "24"- the terrorists were much smarter, and much more successful, than their real-life counterparts. Then again, the article sort of buries the lede:
If our terrorist enemies have been successful at cultivating a false notion of expertise, they’ve done an equally convincing job of casting themselves as pious warriors of God. The Taliban and al-Qaeda rely on sympathizers who consider them devoted Muslims fighting immoral Western occupiers. But intelligence picked up by Predator drones and other battlefield cameras challenges that idea—sometimes rather graphically. One video, captured recently by the thermal-imagery technology housed in a sniper rifle, shows two Talibs in southern Afghanistan engaged in intimate relations with a donkey. Similar videos abound, including ground-surveillance footage that records a Talib fighter gratifying himself with a cow.Shouldn't the article's headline have been "Terrorists Like to Screw Animals," with the terrorists-are-dumb stuff just as a sidebar? Posted by Stephen Silver at June 14, 2010 10:55 PM
Youtube links or it didn't happen.
Posted by: LilB at June 15, 2010 01:20 PM