Amateur Spy Unearths Amateur Terrorist

Were I not drunk right now, and trying to sober up at Ben's Cafe over a cappuccino, I wouldn't be bottom-feeding on the story of Ryan Anderson AKA Amir Abdul Rashid, national guardsman, tank loader, convert to Islam, convicted of carrying dangerous weapons near a school (boy, the Guard will take anybody these days, not just Lynddie England), and now to be tried for treason. What did he do? He passed information about U.S. tank vulnerabilities, much if not all of it available on the Web, to undercover agents posing as Al Qaeda.

It's worth bearing in mind that George W. Bush has just told us that the War on Terror is essentially unwinnable for reasons that should have some of us yelling "Whoa! Whoa! Nuance! Nuance! That's a French word, ain't it Bubba?" Are we reduced to tail-chasing? Are we reduced to nailing our own utterly ineffectual wingnuts of no particular relevance or risk, because we can't catch the real thing?

The amateur spy has her cheerleaders: Daniel Pipes, for one, lauds Shannon Rossmiller as an "American Hero." Um, that would be "heroine", would it not? Or does that have too much of an opiate echo these days, not to mention being slightly sexist? Well, whatever: she had nothing better to do with her time except bait a wingnut or two into the open, and not even in Arabic. I mean, it would take serious time to learn Arabic, right? Go for the low-hanging fruit - or nut, as the case may be. Rossmiller's a city judge and a mother of three in a town of about 2,700 people, and was recovering from having broken her pelvis. Can you say "bored"? Can you say "I went to law school for a trillion years, and all I got was this lousy backwater job?" I knew you could.

Now, am I out of my tree to think that a guy who posts openly, in English, confessing jihadi sympathies - nay, enthusiasms - has got to be too much of a nutter to be a threat? If you were an Al Qaeda operative, wouldn't you keep a very great distance from such a loudmouth, figuring that he was either an operative or was having his strings pulled unwittingly by operatives? Especially when it's so easy to just pop "M-1 tank" into Google?

I hereby propose some Compassionate Conservatism: find some poor schizoid on the street, get him enrolled in the National Guard (sounds like their standards are way low these days, and probably dropping daily, what with imperial overstretch), post a bunch of Jihadi rhetoric on Islamic nutter websites so that it can be traced back to this poor guy, and let the likes of Shannon Rossmiller, American Hero, pick him up on her insomniac radar. Pretty soon, he'll have have a warm place to sleep and four squares a day without the burden of having to maintain anything like military discipline; he'll have state-appointed counsel for his insanity defense; and, upon being sentenced, will be set up for life: housed, well-fed, medical care, all the reasonable entitlements that much of the civilized world outside America figures is the birthright of even sane citizens. If you're on the streets anyway, why not? I think this proposition would interest quite a few of the gibbering wretches who spare-change you on the way to the office, and maybe even some sane nine-to-fivers earning minimum wage.

OK, I'm way past my italics quota for the day. I'm also feeling sober enough to face my wife. Time to head home. Ta ta.