What it has come to

Here's how you will know when the terrorists have won: when mainstream news outlets and the millions who still pay attention to them will be thrown into a duck-and-cover tizzy by the online rantings of few clueless nutjobs with as much chance of pulling off a serious act of terrorism as I have of winning a Saudi lottery.

The Raw Story, today:

One former intelligence field officer says, and two other CIA officials confirm, that the alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York City was nothing more than chatter by unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training in an open forum already monitored extensively by the United States Government, RAW STORY has learned.

“The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site,” said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved – “three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere - are indeed extremists," their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.

“They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed," Giraldi added. "Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him.”

In other words, now.

I leave reconciling this triumph of terror with the crowing of the 101st Keyboarders as an exercise for the reader.