From reading Christopher Dickey’s Securing the City, Dwight Garners learned the comical and scary degree to which terrorists (and would-be terrorists) have been in thrall to American action movies:
The scenes of Godzilla stomping across New York City, crushing everything in its path, were mesmerizing and inspiring. One captured terrorist later warned of an attack against “the bridge in the Godzilla movie.” Interrogators had to go rent Mr. Emmerich’s film to find out what he meant: the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber, used the pseudonym Van Damme, after the B-grade martial arts star Jean-Claude Van Damme. Another terrorist was obsessed with “Air Force One,” the Harrison Ford president-in-peril film.Weirdest of all, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the pudgy 9/11 plotter who will be forever remembered for his disheveled mug shot — was supposedly an amusing guy when he attended an agricultural state university in North Carolina. His nickname? “B’lushi.”