Don't say you weren't warned

Here is the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. If you look carefully, you will notice some differences from the standard picture postcard view.

According to the Daily Mail, "This is the apocalyptic scene terrorists hope to create if they ever get their hands on a nuclear bomb. The computer-generated image below was posted on an Islamic extremists' website yesterday."

There are of course reasons not to take it seriously, if you don't want to.

It's journalistic sensationalism, intended to stoke readership. True. It would be very hard to transport, assemble, and detonate a nuke that could do this. True again. It's a madman's fantasy. Yes, the Muslim jihadist's version of a skin-magazine centerfold. And so on.

The FBI was quick to point out that it had not issued any warning and that the video was not an official Al Qaeda release through its media arm, Al Sahab, but simply an ' amateur' collection of old footage spliced together and posted on the Internet. U.S. analysts said a lot of effort had been put into the video - entitled Nuclear Jihad, The Ultimate Terror - with graphics, music, and clips of different leaders and groups.

The same expertise seems to have gone into creating this image of a devastated Washington.

Al Sahab puts out more than 80 'officially sanctioned' videos a year to keep up the propaganda on the West. And the Internet shows how easy it is to stir up militancy. One message with the Washington picture said: 'The next strike's in the heart of America. When? When? When? And How?'

Despite the relative ease of computer graphics, someone spent considerable time and effort to create this imaginary scene of a devastated Washington. (To see the picture in all its loving detail, click to enlarge it on the Daily Mail site.) Without a doubt, there are people (very likely in the United States) who relish the idea. And who would love to make it happen.

So what's the point? We've known this for seven years, come September.

The point is this. I've made it before, but I think it bears repeating.

The United States government says, "Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in the United States today. According to one recent survey, there are 1,209 mosques in America, well over half founded in the last 20 years." The New York Times reports, "In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent U.S. residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades. More than 40,000 of them were admitted last year, the highest annual number since the terrorist attacks, according to data on 22 countries provided by the Department of Homeland Security."

Right, so we're bringing in 100,000 Muslims a year, in round figures. The great majority of them would have nothing to do with nuking Washington or anything similar. They are perfectly willing to wait 30 or 40 years for their high birth rate and demographics to bring the Caliphate and shari'a law in peacefully. Let's be generous and say that no more than 1 percent of Muslims admitted permanently to the United States are violent jihadists. Only 1,000 a year, ready to use all their ingenuity and fanaticism to produce something like the scene pictured above.

So we have basically two choices. We can trust to luck — yes, luck — and hope that those 1,000 a year all get frustrated and give up, or are all detected in time and prevented from carrying out their mission, or fail at it.

The other option is to allow no Muslim immigration. Zero. Not even allow Muslims to visit the United States except for a handful who have been vetted six ways from Sunday.

That's unfair to the other 99 percent of Muslim would-be immigrants? Yes, if you don't mind the country eventually being under shari'a law, like Britain in a few more years. Yes, if you believe that anyone on earth has a "right" to colonize the United States.

If that is what you believe, then damn you, and I hope you are standing at Ground Zero if the kind of people who created the vision of a skeletal Washington pull it off.

UPDATE 5/31

According to another report, the image of a blasted Washington was taken from a computer game (which strikes me as a rather sick production). If true, you can strike from the above posting the picture of a jihadweasel toiling away in a dark room to paint with pixels his dream of the Great Satan humbled. The Daily Mail has not changed its story about the webcasting of the image on a militant Muslim site.

EU commissioner: Stop Web searches about ____, ____, and ____

Franco Frattini, the EU commissaire for justice and security, whom we have encountered before, wants to find a technological means to prohibit Web searches for "dangerous" words. (Tip of the hat: The Croydonian.)

As quoted in Le Monde, Commissar — excuse me, Commissaire Fratini said (my translation):

I have the firm intention to undertake a study with the private sector … on the technological means to prevent people from using [the Web] and searching for dangerous words like "bomb," "kill," "genocide," or "terrorism."

He is quick to reassure us that he does not intend to block discussions or opinions, only to knock one prop out from terrorist networks who use the Internet to diffuse specific information such as how to build bombs.

This proposal may or may not be the thin end of the wedge that would eventually culminate in EU censorship of the Web. I'd probably take his assurance at face value, had we not seen too many initiatives in the direction of suppressing free speech in Europe, most recently the prohibition of the anti-Islamization demo in Brussels.

In any case, the idea of a computerized watchdog over Web searches is naive on several levels.

This may be down to my ignorance of advanced information technology, but I find it hard to see how any purely automated program can determine the intention of a Web site. If you block phrases like "bomb making," you will eliminate many innocent, and possibly important, discussions of — for example — the feasibility of terrorists creating "suitcase nukes." Just making the verboten search terms more complex, such as "instructions for disguising a 40-megaton nuclear device as a cocktail swizzle stick," is bound to leave out other possibilities, such as "instructions for making an atomic bomb look like an American flag lapel pin."

Beyond that, any such technology would be completely useless in the face of simple codes. Any reasonably bright terrorist could easily devise substitute words that would be known to cell members and others with explosive tempers. Military forces have done this since battles were fought with swords. The daring but failed World War II operation at Arnhem in the Netherlands (the famous "bridge too far") was called Operation Market Garden. If there had been an Internet at the time, would a German computer program have pounced on "market garden"?

But the most naive assumption of all is that stopping the spread of accursed information on the Internet can substitute for preventing the people who would use it from entering the country. A terrorist — a violent jihadist, let us say — wants to blow up himself and infidel commuters from Twickenham on the London Underground. It would put him to considerable inconvenience if he was back home in Wahabistan without a petition to Allah of getting into the U.K.

But of course the EU elite have hypnotized themselves into believing that immigration is the lifeblood of modern society, and that keeping those of a certain religio-political ideology from slapping down a moth-eaten passport at Heathrow and proceeding to swan around Britain would be … wait for it! … discriminatory. Gasp. Quick, bring the smelling salts.

I don't think Commissaire Frattini is too stupid to know this. Depend on it, he even realizes that no technology can stop the sharing of pernicious knowledge. But he is a politician, and master of the art of seeming to tackle a problem without committing himself to any plan that could blow back on him. And in today's Europe, that is any plan that would offend the Muslim constituency whose numbers are ever growing, ever growing.

"We are going to get hit again"

That's the headline of an interview in Newsweek with Vice Admiral (ret.) John Scott Redd, who heads the government’s National Counterterrorism Center. I must admit I can't keep straight all the various security agencies this country relies on to help us stay in the land of the living, but I presume the top banana at an organization with this title must be in the loop. Admiral Redd says:

We’ve got this intelligence threat; we’re pretty certain we know what’s going on. We don’t have all the tactical details about it, [but] in some ways it’s not unlike the U.K. aviation threat last year. So we know there is a threat out there. The question is, what do we do about it?

He then answers his question:

And the response was, we stood up an interagency task force under NCTC leadership. So you have all the players you would expect: FBI, CIA, DHS, DIA, DoD, the operators—the military side comes into that—participating in an integrated plan, but integrated in a much more granular and tactical way than we’ve ever done before.

I don't know what a granular plan is, but I know a task force when I see one. That all these alphabet agencies are trying to play from the same score is good, but is it really the most effective way to protect the country?

The interview suggests the assumptions behind the government's counterterror activities. The main assumption is that the terrorist threat comes from one gang, Al-Qaeda, and that nothing can be done to stop them coming into the United States unless there is proof that will stand up in a law court.

I will give you good odds that when we are "hit again," as Admiral Redd is convinced will happen, the participants in the plot will turn out to have no evident connection with Al-Qaeda. They will be "regular guys" like the perpetrators of 7/7 in London. They'll have baseball teams they root for, good driving records, no criminal background.

It's worth noting that the last two intended terrorist plots that were prevented (Fort Dix, JFK) were stopped because of a snitch and a tip-off, respectively. Fine. We need all the help we can get, and the police and security agencies involved are entitled to take a bow for exemplary action using the sources they had.

The fact remains that there is no way to guarantee public safety against terrorists — all you can do is improve the odds. And the odds would be significantly improved if the terrorists never got into the United States at all.

There's no way to guarantee that, either, but there's something that would be a giant step forward. I'm sure you see where this is leading. We should stop Muslim immigration. Period. And check out very thoroughly any visitor from a Muslim country or a country with a large Muslim population, or who has an Arabic name, or who for any other reason arouses suspicion. That is feasible. Infiltrating every sleeper cell isn't.

Of course, it's drastic. Of course, it will inconvenience many innocent people. But nobody has a right to immigrate here, so would-be Muslim immigrants have no legitimate complaint. And if someone doesn't want to put up with questioning about why they are visiting, for how long, where they're going, and whatever else we want to ask them, they don't have to come here.

Naturally the ACLU and its acolytes will go off their heads. Discriminatory! Well, yes. That's the point. We're not up against a gang called Al-Qaeda, as though they were the Mafia or drug smugglers. We are, as the admiral admits, in a war. One with, as he puts it delicately, "a strong ideological content." Which is as close as he can come to saying out loud that Islam is a totalitarian system with a top layer of religion, and it's coming to get us.

Most Muslims aren't terrorists, but terrorists can easily pass for "moderate" Muslims. The next "hit" is being planned at this moment, and the planners will be trying for a grand slam. It's a point of honor for these blokes to raise the score each time.

Admiral Redd says, "We have come a long way. But these guys are smart. They are determined. They are patient. So over time we are going to lose a battle or two. We are going to get hit again, you know, but you’ve got to have the stick-to-itiveness or persistence to outlast it." Sorry, sir, but that's not good enough. I don't want to outlast an enemy that would like to take the lives of thousands or tens of thousands of us. I want to make it as close to impossible for them to succeed as we can. And it will be a lot harder for them to succeed if they're not here.

Lucky this time

U.S. counterterrorist forces have done themselves proud again in rolling up the Muslim plotters who intended to blow up a fuel pipeline servicing JFK airport in New York, which if successful would have caused almost inconceivable harm. From the information released, it sounds like a beautifully run sting operation by the authorities, who deserve credit and our gratitude. Maybe this country is finally getting its heretofore abysmal counterterrorist act together.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but while justly celebrating this success, we are to keep a few important points in mind.

The plot was infiltrated by an informant. The details are a little unclear, but apparently the convicted drug dealer either went to the police or FBI in exchange for a deal, or was already involved, caught, and "turned." The AP story said:

Tom Corrigan, a former member of the FBI-New York Police Department Joint Terrorism Task Force, said the Kennedy airport case and the recent plot to attack Fort Dix illustrated the need for inside information. Six men were arrested in a plot to attack soldiers at the New Jersey military base after an FBI informant infiltrated that group. "These have been two significant cases back-to-back where informants were used," Corrigan said. "These terrorists are in our own backyard. They may have to reach out to people they don't necessarily trust, but they need - for guns, explosives, whatever."

Without informants, Corrigan said, investigators are often left with little more than educated guesswork. "In most cases, you can't get from A to B without an informant," said the ex-NYPD detective.

No doubt true — and the trouble is, there's not always going to be an informant. A lot of these jihadists don't seem to be among God's brighter children, but that won't always be the case, either. Especially now that the authorities have twice (in this and the Fort Dix plot arrests) revealed their modus operandi. You can figure that the sleeper cells or freelance terrorists already working on the next plan are going to be twice as suspicious and on the lookout for double agents.

In my view, the U.S. counterterrorism agencies should keep absolute radio silence on their tactics. They should be revealed only in court in closed sessions. In this life-and-death game, you don't send memos to your opponents about your methodology. That is, you shouldn't. A few years ago, in a lead front page story in USA Today, a whole batch of politically appointed birdbrains in airport security positions explained exactly what behavioral clues they were looking for among passengers.

Once again, the plotters this time were militant Muslims (including one who had resided in this country for 30 years). The USA, the world's no. 1 sucker, not only accepts but encourages immigration by Muslims. The Multi-Culti Establishment thinks the country would be nothing if not constantly nourished by immigrants from anywhere and everywhere, as long as they're Third World countries.

So we wave them in with nary a passing thought, and some turn to plans for carnage, and those plans may issue in action. Thus our counterterrism agencies, whatever their skills and resources, must particpate in a perpetual game of hide-and-seek.

No more Muslims should be admitted to the United States except for the briefest of visits (with their exits monitored and enforced) until their religio-political system learns to work and play well with others.

Severe? Yup. Want to think about more severe still? Try to imagine the JFK plot succeeding.

Because one of these days something like it will. The cell leader will be real smart. All the participants will be checked out six ways from Sunday and any double agent will be executed. And there won't be any slip-ups that time. As the IRA said to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after they nearly killed her with a bomb at a party conference: "You were lucky this time. But you need to be lucky every time. We only need to be lucky once."

We were lucky this time.

Whistling Dix

The arrest of six people accused of planning a bloodbath at Fort Dix has been presented in the media in a most curious way. There is an aura of celebration about it that is unlike anything I can recall before in similar circumstances. It's being treated as though our team won the World Series. Even buttoned-down CNBC pundit Larry Kudlow could hardly contain his cheerleading.

Let's enjoy our five minutes of self-congratulation, but there's a lot more here to make us uneasy than confident. FOX reports:

A federal law enforcement source confirmed to FOX News that the three — Dritan "Anthony" or "Tony" Duka, 28; Shain Duka, 26; and Eljvir "Elvis" Duka, 23 — also accumulated 19 traffic citations, but because they operated in "sanctuary cites," where law enforcement does not routinely report illegal immigrants to homeland security, none of the tickets raised red flags.

The brothers entered the United States near Brownsville, Texas, in 1984, the source said, which would put their ages at 1 to 6 when they crossed the border.

The source said there is no record of them entering by way of a regular border crossing, so they are investigating whether they were smuggled into the country.

So what have we learned? Three brothers among the suspects have been living in the United States for 23 years after crossing the border illegally. No one suspected anything -- they were some of the famous "moderate" Muslims. Thanks to the useful idiots who created "sanctuary cities," they were apparently never investigated before, even though they had 19 traffic tickets.

Obviously, we can be grateful that the plot was smoked out and stopped. But many more like it are probably currently under way, and it wasn't primarily shrewd counterterrorism that saved the day, just luck. According to the reports, the case was investigated because of a tip-off. No doubt the authorities handled it well after that, but you can't count on tip-offs to safeguard national security.

To get back to the light-headed joyousness with which the media have delivered the story, at least part of the reason is that it fits comfortably with the mythology of the Liberal Establishment. In that view, the plotters were a handful of Muslim "extremists" (although, as always in these situations, they were "moderate" law abiding citizens until caught); the long arm of the law was sufficient to take them down. We're back in a September 10 world -- terrorism is a law enforcement issue. Militant Islam isn't the problem, just a few criminals, and as this case proves, we've got them clocked. The only thing to worry about is a "backlash" against domestic Muslims by the drooling morons of the American public that the ACLU stands guard against.

I have not read or heard one suggestion in the mainstream press that we ought to reconsider our policy of admitting Muslims to settle in the United States and then playing catch-'em-if-you-can to sort out the violent jihadists. Seems to me it would be a lot safer and less expensive to keep them out in the first place than to invite them in and then try to track them down. But in the Age of Political Correctness, that would be "discrimination," one of the deadly sins. I can't fathom why a sovereign nation shouldn't be able to use discrimination in choosing who it allows to move in, but we'd rather risk a horrendous terror act than offend the members of any group, thanks to liberal ideology.

Well, to hell with liberal ideology. It's no time to stop at plugging leaks. If we know what's good for us, which most Americans except those handicapped by working in Washington or living in "sanctuary cities" do, we need to start patching the holes.

Are they sleeping, or are we?

And I guess I just don't know.
Lou Reed, from The Velvet Underground and Nico

A sleeper cell, in intelligence jargon, is a subversive group that hangs around for a long time (years perhaps), its members behaving completely normally as far as anyone outside the group can see. But they are gathering resources and waiting till the order is given, or the opportunity arises, to strike.

Dave Gaubatz, a former "U.S. Federal agent" (a little vague there) who was assigned to Iraq for missions during the run-up to the invasion and is now a freelance counterterrorism specialist, says in an article on the American Thinker site that "there is every reason to suspect that we will endure suicide missions by Islamist sleeper cells. They are already in place. They are waiting for the right time. I know this from experience."

They may be "sleeping" for the moment, but so are we, he says.

Upon returning from Iraq I left Federal Service to pursue a career educating U.S. law enforcement in the U.S. … I began conducting research and talking with experts from various fields and determined three significant facts that I corroborated by further research:

1. The terrorists groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al-Qaeda each had different leaders and to some degree operated in different ways, but they each had the same two goals (destroy Israel and destroy America and any country that supported either).

2. Our nuclear research centers were very vulnerable to an attack and the potential for a suicide bomber using a dirty radiological bomb from these facilities was and is a high probability. Note: Vic Walter and Brian Ross of ABC News did an excellent report on the lack of security at these facilities. I received an enormous amount of information from individuals associated with Russian nuclear programs that there is nuclear material being sold on the black market and nuclear material is in the hands of Islamic Extremists.

3. Terrorist sleeper cells are located primarily in North Carolina, Michigan, and Canada. The "sleepers" are prepared to conduct terrorist attacks within the U.S., and nuclear material is available to them. "Prepared" in this instance indicates they have the necessary tools to carry our their attacks and are prepared to die.

I assure you, I have no inside information of any kind. My guess is that in the five years since 9/11, numerous sleeper cells have been operating quietly, taking advantage of our wide-open borders, our unwillingness to impose any limits on Muslim immigration, and a deep yearning by the American people to forget all this security stuff get back to our national business of selling and buying (we no longer make anything, of course, plenty of $2-a-day wretches in the world's backward countries — excuse me, I mean developing nations — to do that for us).

When the balloon goes up, the next target(s) probably won't be anything spectacular like nuclear power plants or airliners. Why go to the trouble when there are so many soft targets — shopping malls, schools, bridges, office buildings?

If Gaubatz is to be believed (read his article), law enforcement officials aren't very interested in evidence of sleeper cells. Of course, you can't take his word as gospel. He is in the lecture and training business, and predicting terrorist-induced disaster is one way to gain attention (like this posting). And maybe the law enforcement agencies he said ignored the information did no such thing, and just didn't feel like sharing the details of their counterterrorist activities with Gaubatz, who is now a private citizen. If they have agents inside these cells, they're not going to broadcast the information. They'd want the cell members to believe that the FBI is just a clutch of paper-shuffling, form-filling mopes.

Personally, I think American counterterrorism forces are smarter and more activist than they seem. I hope, anyway. And I guess I just don't know.

Thinking about insurgency

Some critics of the mass media get riled about their use of the word "insurgency" rather than terrorism, enemy action, or similar strong terms. They see the word as an attempt to be value-free and refusing to take sides. But we need a word to describe a war format that has been developed to a high degree in recent years, and which conventional military terminology doesn't fit. Insurgency is an overall strategy that can include terrorism among its tactics, but much else besides.

Insurgency can take the form of recruitment through ostensibly legitimate institutions like schools and mosques; threats to demoralize a country's population and government; propaganda to de-legitimize an established political system or regime; acquisition of resources through smuggling, narcotics dealing, and other crimes; raising money using front organizations; and, of course, sabotage and violence. Most of these activities are small-scale and clandestine, not the kind of warfare that large organizations, particularly government organizations, are equipped by background and training to counter.

Such are ways an insurgency avoids a direct full-scale confrontation with a larger and better equipped force, which the insurgency couldn't hope to win, and restricts the terms of engagement to situations where it has advantages such as surprise, lack of visibility, and fanaticism — even suicidal fanaticism — among its followers. Hence the expression "asymmetric warfare."

There's been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere about whether our armed forces are hogs on ice when trying to defeat insurgents. The negative argument runs something like this: our military establishment is terrific at straight-ahead campaigns of the World War II type, against identifiable state enemies. We can turn them to powder before they've had their morning coffee. But when the rules change drastically, and we face opponents playing to their strengths rather than ours, we're as vulnerable as armies behind castle walls were when faced with newly invented artillery, or World War I infantry armed with rifles and bayonets leaping out of the trenches to be shredded by machine guns.

Insurgents, this reasoning goes, use our massive strength — designed to be used on a large scale with all the implied time required to get it in place and the relative inflexibility of top-down, bureaucratic organizations — against us. Exhibit A for the prosecution: Iraq, after the waltz in.

I'm too optimistic to believe that, partly because the few active-duty (or recently so) U.S. military people I've run into in recent years weren't anything like the stereotype of the unquestioning, unimaginative drone. One of them showed me a couple of studies — unclassified, of course — that impressed me with one department of the services' ability to question its own routines and inertia. Besides — our fighting men and women are Americans, and Americans generally put a high value on improvising and pragmatism. They're still learning, but they can learn just as well, if not better, than insurgents hobbled by a certain religio-political system that has all the answers and discourages individual thinking.

Jonathan Winer at Counterterrorism Blog has posted an excerpt from an Army document that suggests our side is carefully considering what needs to be done to answer insurgencies. It says, "Because insurgents attempt to prevent the military battlespace from becoming decisive and concentrate in the political and psychological, operational design must be different than for conventional combat." And the authors go on to suggest what that design needs to include:

• Fracturing the insurgent movement through military, psychological, and political means, to include direct strikes, dividing one part against another, offering amnesties, draining the pool of alienated, disillusioned, angry young males by providing alternatives, and so forth. Relationships within insurgent movements are not necessarily harmonious. Cabals within the insurgency often vie for leadership or dominance. Identifying these rifts and exploiting them may prove to be a coup for the counterinsurgency strategy;
• Delegitimizing the insurgent movement in the eyes of the local population and any international constituency it might have;
• Demoralizing the insurgent movement by creating and sustaining the perception that long-term trends are adverse and by making the lives of insurgents unpleasant and dangerous through military pressure and psychological operations;
• Delinking the insurgent movement from its internal and external support by understanding and destroying the political, logistics, and financial connections; and,
• Deresourcing the insurgent movement both by curtailing funding streams and causing it to waste existing resources.

We can only hope that everyone, military or civilian, charged with defending us against the very real advantages that decentralized, non-uniformed insurgent forces count on is thinking equally creatively about fighting a kind of conflict that is mostly new to us.

For those who are interested in following the action on these strange, ill-defined, geographically diffuse front lines, Counterterrorism Blog is a fine source, with contributors who seem to know what they're talking about. Some of the blog postings are hard to understand without a certain amount of specialized knowledge, and some are disturbing, but as a whole they dig far deeper than 98 percent of what you learn from reporters and pundits in the mainstream media about the so-called "War on Terror."

Warning of an "American Hiroshima"

An interview with Abu Dawood, described as "the newly appointed commander of the al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan," is published in Canada Free Press. Whatever weight to give it is for you to decide. A few highlights:

Final preparations have been made for the American Hiroshima, a major attack on the U. S. Muslims living in the United States should leave the country without further warning. The attack will be commandeered by Adnan el Shukrijumah ("Jaffer Tayyer" or "Jafer the Pilot"), a naturalized American citizen, who was raised in Brooklyn and educated in southern Florida.

The al Qaeda operatives who will launch this attack are awaiting final orders. They remain in place in cities throughout the country. Many are masquerading as Christians and have adopted Christian names.

The interviewer asks Dawood:

Q: What do you mean by another attack in America?

A: Yes a bigger attack than September 11^th 2001. Brother Adnan [el Shukrijumah] will lead that attack, Inshallah.

Q:Who is Adnan?

A: He is our old friend. ... He is very well known in Al Qaeda. He is an American and a friend of Muhammad Atta, who led 9/11 attacks five years ago. We call him "Jaffer al Tayyar" ["Jafer the Pilot"]; he is very brave and intelligent. Bush is aware that brother Adnan has smuggled deadly materials inside America from the Mexican border. Bush is silent about him, because he doesn't want to panic his people.

If this is true, there's another reason: Bush is silent because any evidence that weapons and terrorist operators are being smuggled across the Mexican border would drive a spike through his open borders strategy.

Sheikh Osama bin Laden has completed his cycle of warnings. You know, he is man of his words, he is not a politician; he always does what he says. If he said it many times that Americans will see new attacks, they will definitely see new attacks. He is a real Mujahid. Americans will not win this war, which they have started against Muslims. ...
Q: But if you attack inside America again, then Muslims living in America will face lot of problems, why would you like to create new problems for your brothers and sisters?

A: Muslims should leave America. We cannot stop our attack just because of the American Muslims; they must realize that American forces are killing innocent Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq; we have the right to respond back, in the same manner, in the enemy's homeland. The American Muslims are like a human shield for our enemy; they must leave New York and Washington.

Q: But your fighters are also using the American Muslims as their shield, if there are no Muslims in America, then there would be no Al Qaeda, may be the Americans would feel safer?

A: No, not at all. We have a different plan for the next attack. You will see. Americans will hardly find out any Muslim names, after the next attack. Most of our brothers are living in Western countries, with Jewish and Christian names, with passports of Western countries. This time, someone with the name of Muhammad Atta will not attack inside America, it would be some David, Richard or Peter.

So, like so many previous warnings, we can't ignore this, but we've got to decide how seriously to take it.

The specifics of Dawood's claims are probably moonshine. To take the most obvious point first, if this plan was really on, why would the leader of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan spill the beans about it, knowing that it would be picked up in the media or at least analyzed by U.S. intelligence services? To warn Muslims to get out of the way? But if they did, that would be even more of a tip-off. As I've often said, Muslimopaths may be insane but they are not stupid, which is what describing their modus operandi in advance would be.

The business about the attackers operating under cover of Western names also sounds like classic disinformation. If our security agencies gave it any credence, the result would be less scrutiny and surveillance of acknowledged Muslims and maybe increased distrust of David, Richard, or Peter -- which would make the enemy's job easier.

Finally, on a purely psychological note, this is the kind of bragging that weak bullies fall into. Being head of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan doesn't come with a lot of job security; extravagantly boasting about clocking the infidels makes Dawood, the Man with the Golden Gums, sound like a big guy to his Qur'anic mob.

Yet, as an expression of the state of mind of Al Qaeda and other Muslim fanatics, we have to take Dawood at his word. This kind of big bang in America is what he and his gang would like to do, and will if they can. It's one more indication, out of many, that we are playing Russian roulette by not sealing off our borders (Canadian as well as Mexican). When he claims to be fighting a war on terrorism but leaves all the doors and windows wide open, George W. Bush is as much of a blowhard as Abu Dawood.

Okay, calm down, everybody. How about "The War on Nuisance"?

On the same day that President Bush said, "Bin laden and his terrorists' allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them," the chief of strategic planning on the Pentagon's Joint Staff, Colonel Gary Cheek, said that what is needed is to recast terrorists as criminals, UPI reported.

"If we can change the name ... and find the right sequence of events that allows us to do that, that changes the dynamic of the conflict," said Cheek at the Defense Forum Washington, sponsored by the Marine Corps Association and the U.S. Naval Institute.

"It makes sense for us to find another name for the GWOT," said Cheek. "It merits rethinking. I know our European allies are more comfortable articulating issues of terrorism as criminal threats, rather than war ... It ought to be our goal to partner better with the European allies so we can migrate this from a war to something other than a war."

Why, Colonel Cheek, that's not far short of brilliant. The ... er ... criminals may have tens of thousands of volunteers for worldwide jihad, but we have the power of re-branding!

The "war" moniker elevates al-Qaida and other transnational terrorists, giving them legitimacy as an opposition force to the United States. It also tends to alienate Muslim populations in other countries, who see the war as a war on Islam, and feel they need to support al-Qaida as a matter of defending their faith.

On no account must we alienate anyone! In fact, if you'll forgive me for raising this point, Colonel, sir ... don't you think "criminal" is a bit, well, strong? After all, we're only up against a few misguided members of the Religion of Peace. Using the word "criminal" could tend to defame all Muslims, even when the offense is a mere misdemeanor, hardly worth the time it costs the district attorney's office to work out a plea bargain. As the UPI "analyst" who quoted you writes, "If the United States can recast it in the global public eye as what the Pentagon views it as now -- a struggle for the imposition of law and order and the establishment of a democracy -- al-Qaida can be drained of some of its power."

Provided we can disabuse our minds of emotion-laden words like "terrorist" and "attack," we can pass local ordinances against disturbing the establishment of democracy, which, when proven in a court of law, will subject the offender to fines and points against pilot licenses.

I'll feel safer tonight, Colonel, knowing that strategic thinkers like you are migrating this war into something other than a war, which has so upset our allies the Muslims, and that the Pentagon views it the same way now.

Fashion news from the Transportation Security Administration

WASHINGTON -- Air marshals were told Thursday they will be allowed to dress the way they want and choose their own hotels in order to protect their anonymity while on missions.

Federal Air Marshal Service chief Dana Brown, who has been in the job for five months, said he was changing the rules, starting Sept. 1, after listening to air marshals' concerns. In a memo to the air marshals, Brown said the dress code was changed to "allow you to blend in and not direct attention to yourself, as well as be sufficiently functional to enable you to conduct your law enforcement responsibilities."

Washington Post, Aug. 24, 2006

From the Desk of Lance Frisk
Federal Air Marshal Service Underchief

Good morning, marshals.

Well, you've all read the news from Chief Brown, I hope. Nobody is more glad than me that the dress code is changing. The rule requiring you to wear white button-down shirts, heavy suits and wing-tip shoes has forced me to listen to a lot of griping. Especially from you women.

But the idea behind the old rule is still the same: Don't be mistaken for an air marshal. Based on the records of a lot of you, that shouldn't be difficult.

Now, you may have noticed that I've undergone a make-over. That's because I believe in leading by example.

You think you can fool anybody by wearing jeans and a T-shirt that says "Hard Rock Cafe Galapagos Islands"? Listen, my fine feathered friends, that's exactly what the hijackers are going to be looking for, now they've read the story in the Post! You imagine we're dealing with a batch of misfits? These guys may be crazier than Michael Jackson sniffing glue but they're not dumb. They're going to expect you to look like everybody else, see, so you've got to be sure not to look like everybody else, know what I'm saying?

So how do you not look like everybody else? You look like Grade-A passenger-walkout material, that's how! I'm glad to say that my two deputy underchiefs got the idea the minute I came up with it. Complimented me on my imagination, even. Here, let me call on Deputy Underchief Ross Flagstaff to tell you a little about how it can work. Ross?

"Allahu Akbar!"

Good man, Ross.

Now let me turn to my other deputy underchief, Bill Climber. Bill, can you fill our marshals in on a little more of the deep-cover technique?

"Allahu Akbar!"

Way to go, Bill. See what I mean, marshals? Follow their lead and, before you know it, you won't have to look for terrorists — they'll come to you and ask for your help! Now I agree, that could be a little bit of a problem, because you don't speak the lingo.

Best way to handle it is by saying something like, "Brother, my instructions from my cell are to keep a low profile, speak only English, not talk on phone, not wave bottle of contact lens fluid around. I do not know your cell or your mission, but our mission is of inestimable importance in overcoming the Crusaders and Zionists! Our cell leader informed us that we might bump in to other brothers on this flight, and said that to divert suspicion from ourselves we should pretend to handcuff and arrest you. I am sure you will see the wisdom in this."

Pretty clever, don't you think? I'm told that a certain highly placed — very highly placed, you know what I'm saying? — person in Washington was told of my theory of disguise and grinned widely and said, "That'll teach those folks, who represent a threat to our country with their weapons of mass destruction, to keep their pea-picking hands off our airliners and passengers, especially those passengers whose family values don't stop at the border, no sir, who are flying off to do jobs that Americans won't do."

That's about it, except remember to wear your daggers under a fold in your clothing. Oh, and don't let anyone see you being given extra screening, or your cover will be blown for sure.

Now, can we start profiling?

If we can profile Abraham Lincoln (on the penny), why can't we profile airline passengers?

Okay, stupid joke. But not as stupid as our politically correct, nondiscriminatory Transportation Security Administration.

It was a sure thing that, 10 minutes after the plot to blow up airliners by mixing liquids into a potentially explosive blend was revealed, the national security establishment would immediately react — because it never acts with forethought, always reacts — by making all passengers check or throw out whatever liquids they had in their hand luggage. And then, for good measure, making everyone go through security at two different points.

And, in overwhelming part, passengers reacted to the enhanced crowding and delays stoically in the belief that the authorities were "doing what they had to do to make air travel safe." With such encouragement, the new regime of prohibitions and more searches will probably become standard operating procedure. Allow plenty of time: best to arrive at the airport the day before your journey. For international flights, show up for check-in two days early.

React and Inconvenience: that should be the TSA motto, sewn on their uniform patches. Richard Reid tries to set off a bomb in his shoe: got it! Make every passenger take off their shoes and run them through the X-ray. Plotters try to mix explosive liquids: got it! Ban all liquids!

Next time it may be terrorists who figure out how to wire their teeth with explosives. Got it! Recruit dentists to X-ray the teeth of every passenger. Percussive contact lenses: got it! Uniformed ophthlamologists, next stop in security clearance. As the list of attempted sabotage methods lengthens to include every possible possession, prosthesis, and body cavity, the security maze will begin to resemble a teaching hospital: ear, nose, and throat this way ("Have your ears, nose, and throat open and ready for inspection"); musculo-skeletal examination to your left ("Please remove all casts, metal plates from your head, metal pins from arm and leg fracture sites, and artificial limbs and place them in the tray"); urinology to the right ("grab a plastic cup, provide a sample -- keep moving! Keep it moving!").

The TSA, like most government agencies, cannot be reformed. Airline security has become an enervating, time-consuming chore for everyone because the government must adhere to the ludicrous principle that terrorists are randomly distributed throughout the population. To acknowledge anything else would be discrimination, our modern version of the seven deadly sins all packed into one.

Smoke was still rising from Ground Zero when Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, a holdover diversity hack from the Clinton administration, announced that there would be no profiling to determine which passengers posed the greatest risk. He even declared that no more than two people who appeared to be Muslims could be given extra scrutiny on any flight. Fat lot of good that would have done on 9/11.

The Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II), a perfectly reasonable proposed airline profiling and background check system, would have eliminated most of the reactive and mass-produced security madness. It was based on the intelligent idea that airport security should be the last line of defense, not the one and only defense. The best security screening could have taken place in a relatively unhurried and efficent manner, not in the pressured atmosphere of huge numbers of people trying to board flights. I probably don't have to tell you what happened to CAPPS II. It was killed because of protests from the ACLU and other so-called "civil liberties" groups, horrified that members of some groups might have been given more thorough attention than Amish grandmothers.

So, next time you're shuffling forward at 2.7 feet per minute toward the checkpoints for further nondiscriminatory humiliation, be thankful you live in a country where everyone is equal, including jihadists.

Note to terrorists: Subscribe to USA Today

I'm on holiday at the moment and wasn't planning to do any posting, but I just had to say something about this.

This morning's USA Today's front-page lead, headlined "Airport Security Uses Talk as Tactic," describes how airport cops and TSA screeners are being taught to spot possible terrorists by their speech and body language.

A second article on page 3 then describes precisely the sorts of suspicious speech and actions Officer Plod is on the lookout for. Both articles are sourced from airport police, Customs and Border Protection and TSA officials.

Security? Do these dopes have the smallest idea of what their jobs are supposed to be about?

I'm no security expert either, but I know this much: you don't announce your tactics in public. It doesn't surprise me that politically appointed government hacks would be so ignorant, but I would have expected a little more discretion from professional police officers and airport security directors.

The security routine at airports is mostly a farce designed for public relations, to give the appearance of protection without the substance. Any serious airport security would involve extra screening for identifiable Muslims or those whose records show they've traveled in Muslim countries. But that would mean running afoul of the dreaded ACLU (which, needless to say, also opposes using behavioral clues to decide who needs extra attention).

Think about this next time you put your hand luggage and shoes in those trays and raise your arms to be "wanded": the United States government would rather you were blown up in mid-air than offend the politico-religious group that is unquestionably the most likely to try to separate your infidel soul from your body.

(T)error in the skies

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