Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[marketmaven]

OT- SIGNS of coming attack on the U.S. Seen

http://junkyardblog.transfinitum.net/
I tend to think of Imperial Hubris author and former CIA terrorist specialist Michael Scheuer as a bit of a flake. On TV he comes across as slightly bizarre, and in his writing he comes across as a bit anti-Semitic and Osama-worshipping at the same time. And if his writing is any guide, he's a fairly mediocre left-of-center thinker when it comes to strategy, which means he isn't overly impressive.

Having thrown so many insults at Scheuer, let us now condemn him with faint praise: He may be right this one time. The old saying about broken clocks being right twice a day may apply to Scheuer's latest analysis (no link; I received it in email today from a listserv), which he draws from bin Laden's pre-election tape as it relates to the last couple of years of al Qaeda's public statements. Scheuer believes al Qaeda is set to strike the US, and soon.

After 9/11, bin Laden received sharp criticisms from Islamist scholars that dealt with the al-Qaeda chief's failure to satisfy several religious requirements pertinent to waging war. The critique focused on three items: (1) insufficient warning; (2) failure to offer Americans a chance to convert to Islam; and (3) inadequate religious authorization to kill so many people. Bin Laden accepted these criticisms and in mid-2002 began a series of speeches and actions to remedy the shortcomings and satisfy his Islamist critics before again attacking in the United States.
Scheuer believes the October 2004 tape, the one that showed up just prior to the election, completed the last step bin Laden believed he needed before being able to strike at the US in a mass casualty attack with a clear caliphascist conscience.

Thus, when bin Laden spoke to Americans in October 2004, he was tying up loose ends leftover from 9/11 and telling Americans again that changing the "policy of the White House ... [is] the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan...." (Al-Jazeera 30 Oct 04) By then he had repeatedly warned Americans that al-Qaeda would attack unless U.S. policies were changed. Strange and even comic sounding to American and Western ears, bin Laden's warnings and invitation to conversion are meant to satisfy Islamic scholars, and Muslims generally, that al-Qaeda has abided by the Prophet Muhammad's instructions of offering a warning to the enemy before launching an attack. Likewise, Shaykh al-Fahd's treatise [expressly allowing a nuclear attack against Americans] attempts to overcome the lack of religious grounding for mass casualties for which Islamic scholars criticized the 9/11 attack, and will be used by bin Laden as such after his next attack against the United States.
And...

Since November 2004, Zawahiri and bin Laden each have made two statements. They focused on Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the continuing threat of "The Crusaders"; none warned Americans or even specifically addressed the United States. These recent statements mirror the non-specific statements that were issued by bin Laden and Zawahiri before earlier attacks -such as 9/11 (2001), The USS Cole (2000), and the East Africa Embassy bombings (1998)- and suggest that bin Laden believes he has satisfied his post-9/11 critics. If Zawahiri's November 28 speech did conclude al-Qaeda's warning cycle, it probably means the group is ready to attack in the United States, a situation that makes DCI Goss's statement that Soviet nuclear materials may be held by al-Qaeda all the more troubling.
The Goss statement Scheuer refers to was part of the new DCI's Feb 16 Congressional testimony regarding the current state of the terrorist threat. It's not pleasant to think that the Russians and other USSR successor states cannot account for all of their old nuclear weapons and material stocks.