COALITION OF EVIL

The Al Qaeda watchers have a new chant: They tell us that the once-centralized terror organization is now largely decentralized, and that the separate cells have a great deal of autonomy. Osama bin Laden may still provide the ideology, but the locals do their own planning and operations.

Thus, the Washington Post found that the expert consensus on the London attacks was that, yes, these people might be linked to al Qaeda in a broad, political/religious/ideological way, but the operation itself, like many in the recent past (Madrid or London, for example), was a local product.

To be sure, this (more…)

THE AL QAEDA FIZZLE

There is good news and bad news in the attacks Thursday in London. The bad news, of course, is that the attacks took place. The good news is that they were so clumsily executed.

The attacks mirrored those of July 7th. Now as then, three subway trains and a bus were targeted. NBC has reported the Brits have told American authorities that both the backpacks used in Thursday’s attacks and the (homemade) explosives in the backpacks were identical to those of July 7th.

What was different is that this time only the detonators went off. Just one person — apparently (more…)

EVIL WITHIN

That the London killers were native Brits surprised a lot of people, which is testimony to our capacity to forget our own history. The 7/7 terrorists were neither the first British terrorists (take Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” for example), nor the first terrorists born and bred in a Western democracy.

The executioner of Daniel Pearl was a textbook British Establishment sort, having been well raised and educated (he had studied at the prestigious London School of Economics) by a good family. He went to secular schools, he was exceedingly upward-mobile, he did not suffer any deprivations or traumatizing slights (more…)

THE ROVE RED HERRING

Why is special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursuing so zealously the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, since it is all but impossible to prove that the leaker or leakers committed a crime?

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act requires that the leaker have learned the identity of a "covert agent" from authorized sources. And it requires that the leak be deliberate. The law defines a "covert agent" as someone working undercover overseas, or who has done so in the last five years. Plame has been manning a desk at CIA headquarters since 1997.

So why is Fitzgerald acting like Inspector Jauvert (more…)

IRAQIS AS THE NEW JEWS

It was widely noted, most passionately by the Iraqi blogger Hammorabi, that when Tony Blair reminded the House of Commons that many countries had been scourged by the terrorists in recent years, he omitted Iraq from the list. His speechwriters had Iraq in a different part of their database; Iraqis weren’t victims of terrorism in the same way as Brits, Americans, Kenyans, and Indonesians.

One’s instinct is to let it go as an oversight, but there was another country missing from the list, and this case was somewhat less widely noted: Israel. And at this point, one is forced to (more…)