More (Sort Of) on that Iranian Plot (Sort Of)

I'm not following this story closely, meaning that I am spending no time at all trying to figure out who said what to whom when or the various degrees of plausibility of the various claims. But I am following some people who are doing that, and I have drawn the conclusion that there is a boatload of stupid in this case, possibly shared by all sides.

That is not to say that I don't believe that the Iranian government would do something so stupid as to engage a struggling used-car dealer to contact the Mexican Zeta gang or that I don't believe that the FBI would get taken by a probably-not-reformed-at-all drug runner. That's where the boatload of stupid comes in. Or boatloads. Recall the plot to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars.

In any case, someone tweeted last night to the effect that presumably the government is smart enough to see how improbable the plot is and therefore checked things out fully. The tweet was actually pithier than that.

So here are a couple more commentaries from Juan Cole and Jeffrey Toobin, without any more comment from me than the above.

Update: Lots of linkies here.

And we have to award at least two points for stupid to the government:

Steven Walt says something I've been thinking in connection with that tweet I reported above:

So my advice to Holder & Co. is this: you better show us what you've got, and it had better be good.

If they recognized how absurd this plot sounds and they have really solid evidence, they should have made more of it public in their first announcement.

And, um, FBI, no kidding?

When residents looked for available Wi-Fi networks, names like “FBI Van 1” would pop up.