A Year of Terror Plots

As terrorist plots against the United States have piled up in recent months, politicians and the news media have sounded the alarm with a riveting message for Americans: Be afraid. Al Qaeda is on the march again, targeting the country from within and without, and your hapless government cannot protect you.
It used to be the commies that we needed to fear, because they were getting closer to our shores every time a domino was predicted to fall.


But the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill.

China and the Soviet Union and Viet Nam and all the other commies were lumped into the world-wide Communist conspiracy.

Analysts urge a calmer, more strategic assessment of the recent rash of violent schemes insist that the country is far safer than it was in 2001. They also argue that since the goal of terrorism is to spread terror, hyperbole about threats only does the extremists’ work for them.

 As did talk of the Red terror.


Charles E. Allen, a 40-year C.I.A. veteran served as the top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security from 2007 to early last year. Exaggerated news coverage and commentary, he said, “creates an atmosphere of tension and fear, and to me that’s exactly the wrong way to go.” Mr. Allen said the United States needed “resilience” in the face of the terrorist threat. He noted with admiration that public transportation barely paused in London in 2005 when 52 people were killed by four suicide bombers attacking the subway and a bus. “I believe in heightened attention to security; I just don’t believe hysteria is useful,” Mr. Allen said.

Unless used by a politician to score points.


The term “Al Qaeda,” used as a catchall in many of the plots, blurs important distinctions. By most accounts, apart from possibly the Zazi case, none of the 2009 cases appears to be directly tied to “Al Qaeda central,” as experts refer to the Pakistan-based group led by Mr. bin Laden. Others involved ersatz “Qaeda” agents who actually worked for the F.B.I. Still others, including the Christmas Day attempt, had links to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a loosely linked affiliate of Mr. bin Laden’s group in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Blurring  distinctions is important for the right wing crowd.


In 2008, in his book “Leaderless Jihad,” Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. officer who has long studied terrorism networks, wrote that Al Qaeda was in decline, to be replaced by dispersed terrorists for whom it provided mostly inspiration. The new generation of extremists, he believed, would be less skilled and would likely pose less of a threat than the network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Dr. Sageman said he saw no reason to revise that judgment today. The plots of the last year should be carefully analyzed and the findings used to improve counterterrorism, not turned into fuel for thoughtless anti-Muslim panic and discrimination, he said. “If we overreact and upset 1.5 billion Muslims,” Dr. Sageman said, referring to the global total, “then we’ll have a lot bigger problem on our hands.”



A memorial for the 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November. It was the deadliest domestic terrorism attack of the year

the Point's Combating Terrorism Center

A news story about a drone strike in Pakistan quotes an analyst; his title, and his name, caught my eye.

A U.S. drone strike this week killed a senior al Qaeda operator in a Pakistani tribal area near the Afghan border, U.S. and Pakistani officials said Friday. U.S. officials said Saleh al-Somali, who was responsible for al Qaeda's operations outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan, was killed in the strike Tuesday. He was on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of the top 20 al Qaeda targets, according to an official familiar with the list.

On Friday, officials in Pakistan said intelligence officers on the ground had identified the dead militant as Abu Yahya al-Libi, a senior al Qaeda figure higher on the CIA's list of terrorist targets. Mr. Somali was likely involved in planning attacks against the U.S. and Europe, and maintained links to Pakistan-based militants plotting attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said.

"He's a big fish when it comes to [al Qaeda's] efforts to strike in the West," said Vahid Brown, a research fellow at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center.

Vahid Brown. And West Point's Combating Terrorism Center. The URL has cta, the Center; usma for the Military Academy, and an extension of .edu (for educational institution). Not .mil for military

46 Die in Taliban Attack on Pakistani Troops

This is a really worrying situation.

The New York Times About 600 Taliban assaulted a base in the Mohmand Agency.

Hundreds of Taliban militants poured into northwestern Pakistan in a large frontal attack on a paramilitary base late Saturday and Sunday that left at least 40 militants and 6 Pakistani soldiers dead, according to Pakistani security officials.

Hundreds in a frontal attack. Last night I saw an interview with Admiral Mullen, in which he mentioned that the US had been surprised by the sophistication of the tactics of Qaeda militants. This is such.

Rudd attacks Howard

Yesterday David Schuster, on his show 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, mentioned that one reason why the Obamas were not given Blair House to live was that John Howard, the former PM of Australia was staying there while visiting W. Bush (who in turn will give the former PM a Medal of Freedom).

Now that the Obamas have been ensconced at the Hay-Adams Hotel in time for their daughters to start school, the White House has revealed why Blair House was not available early.

It turns out that John Howard, former prime minister of Australia and a longtime ally of President Bush, is spending the night there on Jan. 12, according to Sally McDonough, a spokeswoman for Laura Bush.

The next day, Mr. Howard is receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Several receptions are also scheduled at Blair House over the next week.

Shuster remarked that Howard had attacked Obama in 2006 as the favoured candidate of Al Qaeda, a remark that his opponent, the leader of the Australian Labour Party, Kevin Rudd lambasted. "YouTube it," Shuster said (using the noun as a verb, as has become popular). I did. It makes for good watching.


For politicians, that is powerful. Well done.

Australians may find some irony in the news that their former prime minister bumped Mr. Obama from the coveted Blair House locale. Bruce Wolpe, an American publishing executive in Sydney who is about to join the staff of Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat, said in an e-mail message that the news is “rocking Australia this morning.’’

That’s because Mr. Obama and Mr. Howard have a history; when Mr. Obama announced his bid for the presidency in February 2007, Mr. Howard – a staunch ally of President Bush’s on the war in Iraq – attacked Mr. Obama’s plan to withdraw troops by March 2008.

“If I were running Al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats,’’ Mr. Howard said then. Mr. Obama fired back, saying Mr. Howard was engaging in “empty rhetoric.”

Mission accomplished?

Really? That well?

Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Less than a year ago it looked dire; now it looks great. Quick turnaround, indeed.

While cautioning that al-Qaeda remains a serious threat, Hayden said Osama bin Laden is losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world and has largely forfeited his ability to exploit the Iraq war to recruit adherents. Two years ago, a CIA study concluded that the U.S.-led war had become a propaganda and marketing bonanza for al-Qaeda, generating cash donations and legions of volunteers.

Rather nuanced assessment.

The sense of shifting tides in the terrorism fight is shared by a number of terrorism experts, though some caution that it is too early to tell whether the gains are permanent. Some credit Hayden and other U.S. intelligence leaders for going on the offensive against al-Qaeda in the area along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where the tempo of Predator strikes has dramatically increased from previous years. But analysts say the United States has caught some breaks in the past year, benefiting from improved conditions in Iraq, as well as strategic blunders by al-Qaeda that have cut into its support base.

How are shifting tides measured?

Others warned that al-Qaeda remains capable of catastrophic attacks and may be even more determined to stage a major strike to prove its relevance. "Al-Qaeda's obituary has been written far too often in the past few years for anyone to declare victory," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. "I agree that there has been progress. But we're indisputably up against a very resilient and implacable enemy."

Caution is prudent.

... terrorism experts note the lack of success in the U.S. effort to capture bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Intelligence officials say they think both are living in the Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal area in locations known only to a few top aides. Hayden said capturing or killing the pair remains a top priority, though he noted the difficulties in finding them in a rugged, remote region where the U.S. military is officially forbidden to operate.

Quite nuanced.