Daniel Pipes: "Stupid Terrorists"

This reminds me that I haven't seen Darwin Awards material for ages.

Mohammed Salameh, the terrorist who returned to the rental agency in 1993 to retrieve the $400 deposit he had paid on a truck subsequently used to blow up the World Trade Center. His penny-pinching lead to his own capture and that of several other bombers.

Zacarias Moussaoui, thought to have been the would-be 20th hijacker of the September 11, 2001, attacks, was sitting in jail on that date because his disheveled and impoverished appearance at a flight instruction school was so discordant ("there's really something wrong with this guy") that two of its staff phoned the FBI. In April 2005, Moussaoui pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

Michael Wagner, an African-American convert to Islam associated with Al-Qaeda, did not wear a seat belt and that got him stopped by the police in July 2004 near Council Bluffs, Iowa. His car contained "flight training manuals and a simulator, documents in Arabic, bulletproof vests and night-vision goggles, a night-vision scope for a rifle, a telescope, a 9mm semiautomatic pistol and hundreds of rounds of ammunition."