Surely it's not at all surprising that someone who calls himself "Father of Holy War" wanted to be involved in jihad?

Hasn't he already plead guilty by changing his name?

American enlisted men aren't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, if you get my drift. A rather large proportion are people who couldn't get a job anywhere else and would be on what our transatlantic chums call "welfare" or working in MacBurger Kong. The average British able seaman is an intellectual giant compared to his colonial counterpart, in my experience (Signalman, serving for several years on a Type-12, numerous NATO exercises where I got the opportunity to observe the relative degrees of professionalism between the Royal Navy and our Yankee chums.)

I will say however that their officers are very good indeed and generally as good as if not better than ours, who are often still Hooray-Henries drawn from the "elite" public schools.

Paris Hilton icon because she knows a lot about... ships... something liek that.

"American enlisted men aren't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer"

Hmm, let's see. Alan Kay, developer of Smalltalk, force behind the Alto, sometime airman in the USAF. Just think where he (and computing would be) had he had the privilege of serving in the Her Majesty's forces with those giants....

You Silly Billy. Don't you understand the concept of generalisation? Stating that "american enlisted men aren't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer" does not mean that every single one to a man are low in IQ levels. It means that generally if you took a random sample the majority would be low IQ, the rest average, with not many of high IQ.

So Alan Kay was enlisted and he was inteliigent, but that doesn't mean that every other enlisted person was of the same IQ levels. As Tawakalna states, the lower ranks in the US forces are mainly those that can't get a job elsewhere. And why might that be? Because they haven't had much education.

Of course I freaking well understand the concept of generalization. I can click over to El Reg and watch a lot of Brit techies generalize all day about a country of which they clearly know very little.

"As Tawakalna states, the lower ranks in the US forces are mainly those that can't get a job elsewhere..."

Wrong on many levels.

1. Recruiting standards have slipped since Iraq showed signs of going on forever, but if you look at the statistics, they measure up pretty well.

2. Education & intelligence are correlated only so well, however much the meritocrats among us might like to think otherwise.

I don't see anyone pinning a badge on themselves announcing they are Brit techies. So i assume you are generalising all comments as being from Brits?

Having played a small part in the British armed forces and also having had a fair number of friends in the USAAF based in the UK in times gone by I would say that US military personnel tend to be be either gun fodder or pretty bright. The strange thing is that there seems to be no in between, it was beer and bowling or interested in everything around them. I have to say that the beer and bowling boys out numbered the bright guys by about five to one. Also as another commenter says above the officers were often very good unlike one or two British subbies and a couple of officers in the `intelligence corps´ that have come to my attention, definitely more dangerous than the enemy in a combat zone. No matter what their IQ levels were they were generally OK guys though, most of the US military personnel I have met are decent people regardless of how smart they were. Just a shame about their current president.

As for Mr Abu Jihaad I think he is probably desperately trying to live up to the unwarranted attention he has received from the FBI and from the evidence still failing , I don't think he is much different to some of the yank home grown W.A.S.P. conspiricists that I have met in my travels in the States, Discontent and looking for any explanation for what is wrong or missing in their lives so long as it doesn't involve their own shortcomings.

Actually, Abu-Jihaad is accused of passing secret material relating to the movement of his ship's whole battle group and the best ways to attack them, not just the Benfold alone. This despite his being in the Navy at the time of the Cole attack, and his reported praising of the attack and passing the secrets whilst still enlisted and serving on the USS Benfold. If I wasn't allowed to try him as a traitor and spy, my way of prosecuting this would be to total up the number of sailors on all the ships in the group he betrayed, then try Abu-Jihaad for the same number of conspiracies to commit murder. That should keep the little twit safely locked up until he rots, and serve as a strong message to any other wannabe jihadis.

So- Abu-Jihaad is a traitorous fool of questionable intelligence. Surely instead of having to rely on the fickle court system- court martial the ignoramous and lock him up and throw away the key. I think all armed services have perhaps more than their fair share of idiots who like the idea of a uniform and a gun- along with those who truely care about safeguarding the security of their countries and have the intelligence and cop-on to properly recognise events going on around them.

Also- fyi- we're not all British over here, this side of the water- some us might actually be insulted by the insinuation.