April 16, 2008
During the silly summer of 2006, one moment of comic relief came when the feds did a major bust of an alleged terror cell, which turned out to be a group of guys camping out in a warehouse wearing ninja gear and gathering around a charismatic or schizophrenic leader who, as Paul Kiel put it at the time, they looked to for “religious leadership, karate instruction and contracting work.” As I put it at the time, the FBI rolled up the group “in such preliminary stages of launching their jihad that they hadn’t yet set aside time to become Muslims.