Mark Steyn' s bewitching tale of Mohammed Atta and his federal loan officer is exquisite. The gist is that Johnelle Bryant, Agriculture Department bureaucrat, had some wierd and threatening visits from Mo and one of his hijacker pals who were trying to get a government loan to buy a REALLY BIG crop duster.

But Ms. Bryant didn't think Mr. Atta was sick. The safe-breaking, the throat-slitting, the fake specs ... why, he was just being charmingly multicultural! "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she says. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could." Unfortunately, his imaginative business plan for a crop-duster capable of crop-dusting Texas was frustrated by the unduly onerous restrictions and bureaucratic torpor of the USDA program. By late summer, Mr. Atta and his chums had concluded the government was never going to buy them their own twin-props and they'd have to make do with the aircraft that were already up there. So they switched their flight training courses from small planes to large jet simulators, and told their instructors to skip all that takeoff and landing stuff.

Ms. Bryant, not the sharpest tool in the drawer, has come forward now to help other people so that

"If they watch this interview and they see the type of questions that Atta asked me," Ms. Bryant told ABC News, "then perhaps they will recognize a terrorist, and make the call that I didn't make."

She apparently didn't think being threatened with having her throat slit and the safe robbed might constitute a reason to drop a dime. Steyn concludes

They weren't in "deep cover," they were barely covered at all. Atta was the brains of the operation, and he did a marginally better job of it than Leslie Nielsen would have. His one great insight into Western culture was his assumption that he could get a government grant to take out the Pentagon. Yet no matter how dumb he was, officialdom was always dumber...

There'll be more of these stories, tales of men virtually screaming their intentions but up against a culture sensitivity-trained into a coma...

The good news is we're up against idiots. The bad news is we're also up against the suppler idiocies of current Western orthodoxy. Thus, the U.S. government's new plans to photograph and fingerprint visitors from countries "believed to harbour terrorists" have already been attacked by Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights honcho who's never met an Arab dictator she didn't like. Islamists want to kill us in the name of Islam. Regrettable, but there it is. If we pretend otherwise, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Islamic Society of Britain might be nice to us. But, speaking personally, I can't say I care. If Islamic lobby groups throughout the Western world really want to hitch their star to a bunch of psychopathic morons, good luck to them. It's a free country. Hey, we'll even give you a government grant to tell us how racist we are.

As I mentioned when this story broke, I'm surprised he didn't get the loan!