How many of us put any credence into this stuff, let alone pay attention? “Federal authorities announced Tuesday that they had foiled a terrorist plot to attack Fort Dix. Six men were charged with planning to kill as many soldiers as they could,” the Associated Press would have us believe. “One of the suspects, Serdar Tatar, had delivered pizza on the base and said he knew it like the back of his hand,” according to the government, never mind the “post has had especially tight security since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

According to the FBI, the United States “dodged a bullet”—or maybe extra cheese and Italian sausage—thanks to paid informants who apparently had little trouble penetrating the group and videotaping them. “What we witnessed here was a brand new form of terrorism,” that is to say terrorist plots cooked up in pizza delivery joints by delusional patsies who apparently believed it was possible to attack a military installation with weapons to be provided by “a confidential government witness.”

“The charging documents, filed in federal court in Camden yesterday and unsealed today, portray an ambitious and cold-blooded—but somewhat bungling—cadre who hoped to kill at least 100 soldiers, but also dropped training videos off at a local store to be copied, and spoke openly to a Philadelphia police sergeant about obtaining maps of Fort Dix,” the Washington Post, reports.

Naturally, the key word here is “bungling,” although it appears these hapless patsies are, more than anything, delusional in the true psychiatric sense of the word, i.e., the would-be (with the promise of “confidential government witness” assistance) perps entertained an erroneous belief it was possible to attack a military base with “three AK-47 automatic assault rifles and four semi-automatic M-16 rifles,” going up against hundreds of trained soldiers, and actually “kill as many soldiers as possible.”

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department database has served as the key source of statistics on the status of terrorism investigations in the United States and has been cited frequently in official speeches and testimony to Congress,” the Washington Post reported in June, 2005. Out of 361 cases, the Washington Post “identified 180 cases in which no connection to al Qaeda or another terrorist group could be found in court records, official statements, the 9/11 commission report or news accounts. Even some of the terrorism-related cases featured early allegations of terrorist connections that were later dropped.”

Of the 142 individuals on the list linked to terrorist groups, 39 were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. More than a dozen defendants were acquitted or had their charges dismissed, including three Moroccan men in Detroit whose convictions were tossed out in September after the Justice Department admitted prosecutorial misconduct.

Not surprisingly, these minor crimes produced modest punishments. The median sentence for all cases adjudicated, whether or not they were terrorism-related, was 11 months. About three dozen other defendants were given probation or were deported. The most common convictions were on charges of fraud, making false statements, passport violations and conspiracy.

[…]

“What we’re seeing over time is the equivalent of mission creep: Cases that would not be terrorism cases before Sept. 11 are swept onto the terrorism docket,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former Clinton administration Justice official who heads the national security program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “The problem is that it’s not good to cook the numbers. . . . We have no accurate assessment of whether the war on terrorism is actually working.”

In other words, the government is not particularly interested in detecting, arresting, and prosecuting supposed “homegrown” terrorists, but rather making a big headline splash with initial arrests and hyperbolic allegations, as the WOT is all about propaganda, not actual threats.

It seems to hardly matter if the alleged plots are completely ludicrous.

Would you like crazy crust with that?