The second paragraph is revealing.

But question is, does the story make any sense on its face?

Ask yourself — what could Terrists actually Do to disrupt an entire election? How many polling places are there? How many counties in all the 50 states?

Our election is so decentralized that such a plot would have only a minimal effect, if any at all. A Terrist organization would do far better to attack the noozemeeja — and they’d probably get some cooperation from the Wingnut set at that.

There’s nothing realistic here. At best, it’s a Wish List from al Qaeda.

Posted by: Don at August 8, 2004 09:20 PM

“Disrupt” is perhaps not the right word. “Influence” is probably closer to what is intended/hoped for. Their model is repeating what happened in Spain, getting what looks like by all accounts to be a very tight election to swing one way or another.

I don’t think it’s productive to debate again whether the Spain attacks did or didn’t influence Spain’s election. What is clear, from the limited intel we have, is that certain elements of al Qaeda believe they did influence the election, and that’s enough to make believeable the possibility that they want to repeat their Spain performance in the U.S.

What’s unclear is which way al Qaeda would want the election to go if it were up to them. Given the direct strikes Bush has made on them, one would think they’d want GWB out and Kerry in. However, if the article on al Qaeda by Alan Cullison in this month’s Atlantic Monthly is correct, the Islamists may want Bush to stay in office in the hopes that his direct approach to fighting them will galvanize the rest of the Muslim world to their cause (and thence to global jihad against the West), moreso than Kerry’s intention to return to the ’90s policy of combating terrorism through law enforcement.

Seems counterintuitive to want the guy who’s attacking you directly over the guy who may leave you alone, but given al Qaeda’s apocalyptic worldview, it may make sense to them.

Posted by: tagryn at August 9, 2004 01:40 AM

Disrupt or Influence of whatever.

What could al Qaeda actually do to make a difference on either?

Nothing, really.

Yuhsee, there’s a Truly Strange Thing going on here, and it’s apparently missing many, maybe even most folks. The list of Potential Targets is huge. It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising that al Qaeda considered a raft of potential targets and/or methods of conducting its own version of asymmetric war against CONUSl In fact, that’s precisely how any such campaign Must work, if it’s to sort out targets that offer some sense of success.

Just today, we have this breathless discussion about how “al Qaeda” has just perhaps looked at tourist helicopters as a potential means of attacking a site in New Yawk. Well, OK - that makes Perfect Sense to me, certainly. Along with car bombs, truck bombs, suitcase bombs, a/c attacks — just the whole panoply of Potential Targets.

In the process of evaluating such methods, it is not surprising that they just Might keep some records from the reconnaissance efforts. The folks on the ground in the field would obviously report back to the folks in the Head Office the substance of what they’d seen and looked at, yes?

Most of such Potential Targets will be discarded as being utterly impractical or offering little potential for success. We have some information that ObL has vetted such lists previously for precisely that reason.

But here, we report each and every one of the New findings as though there were a specific threat against each of them. Inevitably, someone tries to deploy some sort of force, the end result of which is we attempt to protect Every potential target at a cost of much hue and cry, great inconvenience, large amounts of money, to no particular purpose. That’s because we react to potentials — and seldom to Actual Threats.

The anti-Terrist Weenies, for what really are a grab bag of reasons, refocus their mailing tubes through which they view their world on each of these alleged “threats” seriatim, and while focused start to rant about how we Must protect this or that or something else to the best of our capacity. As a rationale, they state (a) that if we didn’t, folks might get upset if a Terrist Attack actually were to happen, and usually (b) that it’s all Clinton’s Fault anyway — one way or another.

This is just nonsense. It appears for all the world that al Qaeda has figured out how to pull our chain, cause us to react and overreact, spend a ton of money, interfere with our own lives and commerce, enact procedures and laws that restrict the sorts of Freedoms we claim they resent, and just generally turn this nation, by bits and pieces, into an armed camp. At this point, they don’t actually have to attack Anything. Just drop a hint, here and there, that they might have thought about it, and predictably Tom Ridge will be on CNN and Faux News with yet another press conference, an attempt to stage manage American Jitters once again, and the obligatory claim that all of this is being done because of the Great Leader’s benificent influence and leadership in Time Of War.

Ever noticed how each and every one of these recent Terrist Alerts has also included a smallish paragraph down toward the bottom of the press release that the increased alert does Not imply that we have any Actual Information about an Operational Plan to hit any specific target within any specific time frame? Yet we act as though we actually Do have such information, and folks come to believe that those nice guys wandering around with FAW’s and wearing the black suits and body armor are somehow dealing with a CAPD out there.

It’s not true. They aren’t. And in fact, if stories that come to me from friends (now retired) with acquaintances serving on the NYPD are any indication, they know that they are mostly there For Show, putting up a nice photo op for the cameras in public.

Were I ObL et al, I’d be doing precisely what’s happening. I’d be dropping careful hints about a Terrist Attack Potential just all over the place. So long as we predictably react in a panic, and the noozemeeja take each and every such claim seriously, we’re doing ObL’s work for him just fine.

There’s some truth to the observation that Terrist Attack potential is going to be with us for a while, just as it has been for the past five decades in the rest of the world, engendered by those who have long since figured out that asymmetric warfare does indeed provide a certain set of advantages to a decentralized, non-national means of warfare. We were fortunate to have gotten away without having to deal with it for 4-5 decades, but once TmcV demonstrated the ease by which it might be accomplished, anyone else in the world picked up quickly on the lesson.

Fact of the matter is, the nation is Not more safe from such attacks. It is also probably not Less Safe either. Our security measures have certainly inconvenienced potential Terrists, but as has been pointed out time and time again, there remain sufficient potential means by which to carry out such an attack that the main problem is to decide which one is worth attacking.

Yes, we have some security around National centers. No one has been able to get near NORAD HQ for decades, and the air defences around DeeCee have been in place for about twenty years at least, differing now only in degree but not in kind. We will not have another hijacked passenger plane to be flown into a ground target — 911 and Flt 93 have permanently put an end to that potential. The previous paradigm for how to handle an in-flight hijacking has ended, and isn’t about to be repeated. Train bombings in this country could still happen, but it’d be difficult to see how the results could or would influence anything much. Even if it happened in the ayem on the LIRR commuter line, the rest of the nation would shrug it off, and after three or four days on the national news, the impact of it would fade away. You could kill 3-4 times the number killed in Spain, and the US would barely react at all.

The danger of over-dramatizing each and every potential threat out there is obvious. The inappropriateness of over-reacting to each and every one in predictable ways ought to be equally obvious.

The headlines are surely predictable, the photo ops dramatic, and the ongoing effect on the populace trackable. Satellite trucks will be deployed to the sites of each and every Potential Target.

One wonders whether or not it would be worth the effort to construct a satellite teeveenooze truck with a bomb in it.

Now there’s a potential threat!

SAFSN

Posted by: Don at August 9, 2004 12:31 PM