Bungling idiot?

I forgot about this one from the other day. 'Shoe bomber' Richard Reid's lawyer talked about his meeting with Reid.

"I am not crazy as they suggest, but I knew exactly what I was doing," he said. "Of course I would have been sad to have those people die, but I knew that my cause was just and righteous. It was the will of Allah that I did not succeed."

His motivation for turning to violence, he said, was the foreign policy of the US government, which, he said, had resulted in the murder of thousands of Muslims and oppressed people around the world from Vietnam to southern Africa to Afghanistan and Palestine.

… He also said that racism played a large part in the life he had experienced as a young person. For those wanting to understanding radicalisation, this is important. Reid's journey to violent jihad was not just fuelled by radical Islamist propaganda - he talked about the case of Stephen Lawrence and how that exposed discrimination in society.

… Some have claimed that Reid is educationally impaired, but he did not seem so in his talk with me. He was able to express himself and came across as someone who had passed through the state education system and then supplemented his knowledge with a large amount of self-teaching through reading books.

I know I had thought Reid was almost a figure of ridicule. I figured he was a dumb stooge. Not really true, it seems.