Mixed messages

This has been a wild month so far for the War on Terrorism™. It started May 1st with the release of a State Department report saying that new attacks from al-Qaeda were likely, and "there is danger the network of Osama bin Laden and its Taliban backers will re-emerge in Afghanistan", followed 5 days later by the head of the State Department's counter-terrorism office bragging about how "effective" the war on terror had been, saying "This was the big game for them — you put up or shut up and they have failed. It proves that the global war on terrorism has been effective, focused and has got these guys on the run." (Hmmm... do the State Department and their counter-terrorism office talk to each other much?)

Since then there have been two attacks that have all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda operations - one in Saudi Arabia and one in Morocco - that appear to be clearly connected to al-Qaeda killing at least at least 50 between them. Yet in his weekly radio address today, President Bush was back to talking about the US' "success" in the War on Terror™.

"With the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have removed allies of al-Qaeda, cut off sources of terrorist funding, and made certain that no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein's regime," Bush said.

"These two battles were important victories in the larger war on terror. Yet the terrorist attacks this week in Saudi Arabia, which killed innocent civilians from more than half a dozen countries, including our own, provide a stark reminder that the war on terror continues," he said.

[As an aside, this is the 2nd time Bush has mentioned that we've made sure that terrorists won't get weapons of mass destruction from Saddam. While that particular phrasing may be true - since Saddam is out of power, he can't give anyone anything - it is a perfect example of this administrations aversion to truth, since, if Iraq actually had the WMD Bush claimed it did, we have no clue where they now are, who has them, who is giving them to whom or anything else for that matter. So, sure, Saddam can't give them away, but that doesn't mean that if the Iraqi WMD actually exist, terrorists won't end up with them somehow.]

Following the attacks in Saudi Arabia, The Star, a South African paper, published a story with the rather telling title 'US cleaning egg from its face after underrating al-Qaeda':

[...] On more or less the same day that Black was telling The Washington Post of his belief that al-Qaeda was on the run, a self-proclaimed spokesperson for the organisation set up by Osama bin Laden was warning the London-based Arabic weekly al-Majalla magazine that, far from being destroyed, it had actually undergone a thorough restructuring and was planning further spectacular attacks against US targets.

Thabet bin Qais, who said he was al-Qaeda's new spokesperson, claimed that the intelligence on which Black and others were so confidently relying was old and no longer reliable.

"It will take them a long time to understand the new form of al-Qaeda."

With a now chilling prediction that referred to a possible suicide attack, he added: "A strike against America is definitely coming. Martyrdom operations in the jihad will go on."

Peter Bergen, a CNN al-Qaeda analyst and author of Holy War Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden, said yesterday: "I think this action (in Saudi Arabia) speaks for itself. Prince Nayif, the (Saudi) minister of the interior, just last week said al-Qaeda was weak or perhaps nonexistent in Saudi Arabia. Well, this is their answer.

To the best of our knowledge, part of what allowed 9/11 to happen was a tendency to underestimate what al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations might be willing or capable of doing. Why else would so much of the intelligence and other warnings the CIA and FBI received have been ignored? Obviously, in the wake of the Iraqi war, we underestimated them again, with officials declaring them to be "on the run" or otherwise weakened and less effective than they had been. Even the Saudis were claiming they were non-existant in their country. Yet twice in the last week, they've shown us otherwise, and their spokesman has announced that they've restructured in a way that they believe will be harder for us to detect (which, granted, could well be propaganda to try and make us doubt the information we're getting now - though, given our seeming inability to know what it means, may not be such a bad thing). And still Bush claims that the War on Terror™ has been successful so far.

So why don't I feel any safer?

Posted by thorswitch at May 17, 2003 10:33 AM | TrackBack