Joe Katzman at Winds of Change (who I’ve finally gotten around to adding to my link list) has some interesting thoughts on what the “Abdullah Al Muhajir” aka “Jose Padilla” case implies about Al Qaeda’s abilities and preparedness. He believes that it indicates that they are even less competent and sophisticated than has been previously evidenced by their behavior, and that this represents, if not an actual intelligence coup, one that can throw enough fear and panic into the terrorist network that it will help us turn many more. In short, he thinks it was their Midway.

He may be right, and it’s a good time to review much of the mythology about this organization. Right after September 11, much of the press were praising bin Laden as an “evil genius,” his tactics being lauded as “brilliant.” Unfortunately, even as recently as a couple of weeks ago, even the redoubtable Condi Rice was feeding into this myth–“no one could have foreseen anyone driving hijacked airliners into skyscrapers,” when in fact, many had foreseen it, including Tom Clancy, and as recently as a few weeks before the events, members of the sci.space.policy newsgroup (though the latter were discussing hijacking space freighters, rather than airliners, but the principle was the same). It was easily foreseeable, as long as one wasn’t a high-level bureaucrat at the FBI or CIA.

But any realistic current appraisal, looking back over the past few months, should conclude that if there are intelligent people running this organization, they are few and far between. Most of the ones to which we’ve been exposed seem fanatical and not particularly bright.

The leadership (like much Arab leadership–remember Saddam and the Gulf War–the “Mother of all Battles”?) relies more on bluster and fiery rhetoric than competence. Mullah Omar continued to make his loony predictions of the death of America, even as he was being chased around southwestern Afghanistan, living out of his car.

And as for the foot soldiers, Richard Reid aka Maxwell Stupid is not an exception–he’s probably quite typical. As is Johnny “Jihad” Walker, who walked around Yemen being more Islamacist than the Islamacists, to the point at which he became a joke among the locals.

Even one of the successful hijackers, the misogynistic extremist Mohammad Atta, was so blatant in telegraphing his intentions that it was only the politically-correct tolerance that was so prevalent prior to September that prevented him from being turned in by the government loan officer, for threat to commit bodily injury, if nothing else. Based on descriptions of the behavior of all the hijackers on the airplanes, none of them would have succeeded in their missions on September 12–they would have been far too obvious. And as Joe points out, there’s nothing to indicate that they’ve learned any lessons from any of this.

We have been fortunate, and will probably continue to be, because there are two sets of people here–one is the set of people competent, intelligent and knowledgable to carry off things like this, without tipping their hands beforehand. I belong to that set.

The other set is people who are insane and angry enough to do it (to which, of course, I do not).

The people that we have to worry about is the intersection of those two sets (to go back to Jay Manifold’s Venn Diagram tutorial). That set of people is, fortunately, miniscule.

Unfortunately, it’s not zero, and we will have to remain vigilant.

But not panicked.