What happens when a writer is given a few days to let the imagination run.
So I'm thinking about the Times Square car bomber, and what it means that he's in custody, apparently talking his head off with intel.
Simplest explanation: He's a guy who went crazy, traveled back and forth to Pakistan a few times to scratch his itch, didn't satisfy, and then made a failed bomb. His incompetence at bomb-making and incompetence at escape* are simply signs that he was acting alone. Now he's spinning yarns for Homeland Security because it feeds his delusions.
Plot a writer would devise: He is working for a terrorist organization in Pakistan, but he deliberately muffed the bomb in order to leave enough evidence so he would get caught. Now he's feeding Homeland Security all kinds of false intel as part of a larger plot to misdirect US efforts in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan.
*One might question whether actually getting as far as being on an airplane in line to take off counts as incompetence on his part.