Al Qaeda still wants to kill you. That message comes directly from the lips of a “former senior CIA official” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen(as mediated by the Washington Post’s Joby Warrick), who apparently has perfect recall of classified files to which once he had access, to your ears:
The former official, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, draws on his knowledge of classified case files to argue that al-Qaeda has been far more sophisticated in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction than is commonly believed, pursuing parallel paths to acquiring weapons and forging alliances with groups that can offer resources and expertise.
“If Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants had been interested in . . . small-scale attacks, there is little doubt they could have done so now,” Mowatt-Larssen writes in a report released Monday by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
So, a former Bush appointee issues a “report” that says Al Qaeda wants to kill us all (or at least a whole lot of us) with Weapons of Mass Destruction. He even prsents a timeline to show all the efforts Al Qaeda has made to acquire WMD’s, from nukes to anthrax, since 1988 up until August 2003, roughly 6 and a half years ago. Tell me something I didn’t already know.
Furthermore, why more recent information isn’t available no one can say (Mr. Mowatt-Larssen certainly doesn’t), but you have to think that Al Qaeda is either incredibly weak, incredibly underfunded, incredibly small, incredibly inept or all of the above if in all this time (21 years) the best they’ve been able to do is fly three airplanes into buildings and attack an American ship and our embassies in Africa with conventional explosives.
I mean, if Al Qaeda is really run by Islamic Jihadi Super Villains, why haven’t they acquired nukes from their friends in Pakistan’s infamous security service, the ISI, by now. Or unleashed giant clouds of weaponized white powdery anthrax over our major cities? Or sabotaged our water supplies by infiltrating our water treatment facilities and pumping dangerous nerve toxins poisons in our water supply?
Heck, if fictional bad guys, Scarecrow and Raz al Ghul, in the Hollywood film Batman Begins can do it, why haven’t these real “Super Villains” who started the War on Terror pulled off that same feat by now? It’s not like we have the greatest security at these facilities thanks to underfunding by the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress (probably so they could to pay KBR more money to electrocute and provide undrinkable water to our troops in Iraq). Heck, Congress didn’t get around to passing legislation to provide better security for waste water treatment plants until a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress both assumed power.
Nonetheless, this report by a man who hasn’t worked for the US Government since 2004 is no doubt good news for Republicans, and more evidence that Obama’s radical Socialist touchy-feely foreign policy and blase attitude toward the “Terrorist Menace” will bring doom and destruction on the United States of America unless Tea Party candidates and the same old Neoconservatives who had us attack Iraq for no good reason are elected to the Halls of Congress this Fall.
If you expect this to be spun any other way in our media you are far more optimistic than I about the reasons this “report” came out in an election year.
Ps. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Especially when it’s time for you to vote.
