Today ABC News and Good Morning America aired a portion of a new video from California teenager turned Al Qaeda trained Islamist, Western mouthpiece of Sauron, and prized jumping monkey Adam Gadahn of Orange County, CA. Along with the video, chilling in its English presentation, ABC also released an "edited transcript" that appears to be that of the entire 11 minute video. I have no way of knowing what was edited out. The video makes explicit threats to LA and to Melbourne, Australia.
I have not yet dug for any analysis of this tape, and the ABC story is very dry and factual in its presentation; however, I can take a couple of not too giant leaps as to what intelligent and informed folks may say about it. Al Qaeda have now released the third video in two months, and the second in ten days' time, to both claim responsibility for recent attacks, and more urgently, I think, to warn the West that our time is up. It seems very important to their leadership that they not only score propaganda points with these videos, but that they also fill a religious obligation to warn the Infidel (that's us) to either convert, withdraw, or face the consequences of inaction on either of these fronts. It is a religious duty for Muslims to first warn the Infidel of their crimes and offer them a chance to repent and change their actions and apparently Al Qaeda took some grief from some quarters over the severity of the 9/11 attacks only because there was not sufficient warning before taking so many civilian lives. We have now received three (3) such explicit warnings in a very short amount of time.
What is most alarming to me is that this latest video by Gadahn appears to fulfill this obligation in such a way that it is undeniable that we could not now know Al Qaeda's intentions and the rationale behind their actions. And after an attack, even if our leadership is disingenuous enough to claim either ignorance or arrogant denial, the rest of the world now knows better. As that notorious hothead Mike Scheuer always says, never has America faced an enemy that was so direct in stating their desires, goals and intentions. Now to have them delivered on a platter in our own language, and by one of our own, there can be no doubt from either side that Al Qaeda has been heard and understood.
God help us, but when some WMD fires off in one or more American cities, no one will be able to say that "nobody imagined this" or that it came out of the blue. Though they will try, nor should anyone in power be able to pawn off the idea that " they hate our freedoms" here in the US. No, they hate our policies in the Middle East and South Asia, the governments we help prop up both directly and indirectly, and the perceived suffering of their fellow Muslims at the hands of the Israelis.
Say what you want about US and Western policies in each of these areas, debate them all until the harvest moon rises, but nobody should be able to say that we have no idea when or why these "Stone Age madmen" keep attacking us. They have told us why. They have told us it will be soon. And they have told us it will be big. By their accounts, they reckon they can take 3 million of ours for the estimated 3 million of theirs we have cost.
As we have seen from past attacks, "soon" is a relative term to the incredibly patient Al Qaeda leadership. Their long view appears almost geologic when compared to our short, sometimes almost nonexistent, Western time horizon. And if I were a thinking Jihadi with satellite internet access and a plan on the back burner, what better time to fire it off than when 30% of our National Guard are in Iraq now on extended deployment, 50% of the rest are down on the Gulf Coast along with a host of regular military, and we've increased our presence in Afghanistan to fight off the Taliban insurgency there in front of the September 18 parliamentary and provincial elections? Well, I can't think of many, really. And after three explicit warnings, I'm going to guess that they've warned enough and that we're due for something soon.
I'll go further out on a limb and predict that it won't be what we expect. I don't know what it will be, but something this long in the planning, and following a slew of warnings of increased pain for the next attack, well, it could get uglier around here than most folks have considered possible. And our ability to respond on a federal and state level is now severely compromised.
Our government had left us with what appeared to be the slimmest of margins to deal with any such emergency, and now Katrina seems to have destroyed even that wafer thin safety net, pulling it from under us like a birthday party magician removing the cheap, red table cloth from beneath an Italian dinner setting for two. I guess it is now debatable whether we ever even actually had a margin, but to mix the metaphor into a protein shake from Hell, THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES. We are hemorrhaging money. Our responders are stretched beyond breaking in some cases and/or are absent in others. We are half-fighting two wars overseas and thus losing both. By all accounts, outside that of the Whitehouse, the disbursed Al Qaeda is more dangerous now than prior to October 2001. Iraq fulfills Rumsfeld's worry that our actions are creating jihadis faster than we can kill them. One recipe for further and even greater disaster. Nothing up my sleeve....PRESTO!
Keith Olbermann hit the nail on the head last week with his Bloggerman entry about the mess in New Orleans. In that entry, he attributes a quotation to Winston Churchill that I can find nowhere else. I'll trust Olbermann on this one, but even if inaccurate, it gets to the heart of the matter with the current administration and I think speaks much more to the wider Bush Whitehouse paradigm for dealing with the world than just their inability to deal with Katrina and the Gulf Coast. If, as Churchill says, the prima facia responsibility of government is the public safety, the failure of Bush and Co. to provide for it is both laughable (considering that was the whole of their 2004 campaign platform) but also criminal. The current administration's failure is so far advanced that whether it is by idiotic negligence or willful malfeasance matters not. Whatever the cause, the end result is the same. I think and fear that many more chickens of failure are right now returning home to roost.
