Updated June 2, 2011 at 5:50 p.m. EDT with new information at the end of the story.

Memo to all al-Qaida personnel: You might want to start doing a little more research about whom precisely you’re exacting retribution from.

Mumbai attack plotter David Coleman Headley told a federal court in Chicago this week that al-Qaida commander Ilyas Kashmiri directed him to dig up info on the CEO of Lockheed Martin for an assassination plot. 

On the stand, he said Kashmiri singled out Lockheed because drone strikes were getting frustrating and Kashmiri wanted to take it out on the manufacturer. Headley was testifying again his erstwhile pal Tahawwur Rana, who also stands accused of aiding the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

“My research is more in-depth than Googling someone a couple of times,” Headley told the court of his methodology in the Lockheed assassination plot.

Al-Qaida may want to offer some remedial Googling tips or hold a Wikipedia intro class at its training camps. Headley’s research and Kashmiri’s plan had a small but fundamental flaw: Lockheed Martin doesn’t actually make the killer drones that zap terrorists in Pakistan. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems does.

Jihadis have long been pissed at the persistent drone strikes against them in Pakistan. In the summer of 2009, al-Qaida rising star Abu Yahya al-Libi published a book in PDF format: The Ruling Concerning Muslim Spies. In it, he weighs in against the spies that help American drones target the “murderous and destructive missiles whose wrath is inflicted on the Mujahedeen and the weak.” 

More recently, Ustadh Ahmad Farooq, a leading al-Qaida propagandist in Pakistan, bemoaned the fact that drones are helping to shrink the group’s territory there, saying “There were many areas where we once had freedom, but now they have been lost.”

Faisal Shahzad, the
would-be Times Square bomber, was also a drone hater and the Pakistani Taliban claimed his failed attack as revenge for the aerial strikes.

But apparently al-Qaida’s hatred for American drones hasn’t translated into an especially informed curiosity about them. Given the personnel involved in this plot, you might expect a little more terrorist competence. Headley helped Lashkar-e-Taiba in the horrifically effective Mumbai attacks of 2008 and Kashmiri was involved in a number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan and India.

All of which yields a useful lesson about laughing too much at bouts of jihadi stupidity: It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

Update: Headley said Lockheed’s CEO was targeted “because he was making drones,” although as commenter Ben Grocholsky points out, al-Qaida’s wrath wasn’t completely out of left field. Lockheed makes the Hellfire missiles used by U.S. drones.

Photo: DVIDSHUB
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