THE INTERCONTINENTAL PUKE FUNNEL?

This story, from Britain's Mirror, leads Drudge right now and is being accepted as gospel by the entire right-wing blogosphere, but I'm not buying it:

The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist "sleeper cell" linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers.

Police believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were specially trained to carry out the devastating attack.

More than 1,000 FBI operatives were last night working to track down the cell and arrested a man and two women 60 miles from Boston in the hours before Dzhokhar's dramatic capture after a bloody shootout on Friday.

A source close to the investigation said: "We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.

"They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come."

So what's the theory here? As I read it, the theory is that they had a twelve-person sleeper cell -- or possibly fourteen, i.e., a dozen plus the Tsarnaevs -- and they had multiple pressure-cooker bombs made, but when they decided to target the Boston Marathon they used only two of the bombs and, seemingly, just two of the cell members planting the bombs. They had bombs left over, but the two guys were schlepping them around after the marathon attack and tossing them during the post-attack shooting with the cops, presumably because no one in this massive sleeper cell was available to plant them in the crowd at the Marathon. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Oh, and that shootout with the cops happened after a carjacking. We're suppoed to believe that the Tsarnaevs had to steal a car even though they have all these alleged accomplices. None of them had cars? (We know the three people in New Bedford have a car because we were told about its "Terrorista #1" license plate, which is obviously a joke. We were also told that, in fact, they weren't arrested, merely questioned, and that they were two men and one woman, not one man and two women. Details, details.)

And sleeper cells? Do they even exist? Back in 2005, ABC's Brian Ross quoted from an FBI report that cast doubt on the whole notion:

The 32-page assessment says flatly, "To date, we have not identified any true 'sleeper' agents in the US" ...

... "US Government efforts to date also have not revealed evidence of concealed cells or networks acting in the homeland as sleepers."

Where were the sleeper cells in the cases of the Fort Hood shooter and the would-be Times Square bomber and Najibullah Zazi, who wanted to attack the New York City subway?

Yes, there have been group plots -- but even the best known, the so-called Lackawanna Six, weren't actually plotting any activity at the time of their arrest.

A cell could certainly exist. But you're going to need to show me a lot more than this before I believe this incident was the product of one. If it was, the other cell members were awfully uninvolved this past week.

And this is very separate from the question of whether one or both brothers were radicalized or trained. I think it's quite possible Tamerlan, in particular, got encouragement and training. But we don't know yet.

*****

This is a great story for an Obama-hating source to whisper to a reporter. Now, even if there are accomplices and even if arrests are made, there probably won't be arrests of enough accomplices, so the notion will always linger that we didn't get them all because the Obama administration Mirandized Dzhokar Tsarnaev or tried him as a civilian or didn't throw him in Gitmo or didn't torture him. And if no accomplices are ever found, then we'll "know" for sure that Obama really hates America. So if this is (as I suspect) a complete crock and (as I also suspect) disinformation from a grudge-holding wingnut in law enforcement, then it's really toxic. And this story, which may be utterly specious, may never die.