Yeah, This is Scary

Sleep tight!

Al-Qaeda terrorists came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps. They were stopped not by any intelligence breakthrough, but by an order from Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. And the U.S. learned of the plot from a CIA mole inside al-Qaeda. These are some of the more startling revelations by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, whose new book The One Percent Doctrine is excerpted in the forthcoming issue of TIME. It will appear on Time.com early Sunday morning.

U.S. intelligence got its first inkling of the plot from the contents of a laptop computer belonging to a Bahraini jihadist captured in Saudi Arabia early in 2003. It contained plans for a gas-dispersal system dubbed “the mubtakkar” (Arabic for inventive). Fearing that al-Qaeda’s engineers had achieved the holy grail of terror R&D — a device to effectively distribute hydrogen-cyanide gas, which is deadly when inhaled — the CIA immediately set about building a prototype based on the captured design, which comprised two separate chambers for sodium cyanide and a stable source of hydrogen, such as hydrochloric acid. A seal between the two could be broken by a remote trigger, producing the gas for dispersal. The prototype confirmed their worst fears: “In the world of terrorist weaponry,” writes Suskind, “this was the equivalent of splitting the atom. Obtain a few widely available chemicals, and you could construct it with a trip to Home Depot – and then kill everyone in the store.”

Okay. Tidbit Number One: al-Qaeda knows how to make rudimentary chemical weapons.

Kind of makes me wonder if they got something a bit more refined from a certain former dictator. Best not to wonder that, I suppose. The answers wouldn’t be the kind that an awful lot of folks would really want to hear, denying as they’ve been for years that said certain dictator actually had anything to give.

Here’s another interesting tidbit.

Conventional wisdom has long held that the U.S. has no human intelligence assets inside al Qaeda. “That is not true,” writes Suskind. Over the previous six months, U.S. agents had been receiving accurate tips from a man the writer identifies simply as “Ali,” a management-level al-Qaeda operative who believed his leaders had erred in attacking the U.S. directly. “The group was now dispersed,” writes Suskind. “A few of its leaders and many foot soldiers were captured or dead. As with any organization, time passed and second-guessing began.”

Three things.

One: Gee, good thing we have a President capable of the sort of action that would “disperse” al-Qaeda and reduce its effectiveness. I’m not quite sure how sitting back and mulling over our own moral failings would have accomplished the same goal.

Two: Is there some pressing reason that Time and Suskind felt they had to burn one of our few sources inside al-Qaeda? I’m sure those guys know the value of such a source and I’m sure they know how difficult it is to replace him. So why, exactly, did they feel the need to staple a giant bull’s-eye on his back?

I can not imagine that any other potential sources is going to be particularly eager to give up useful information given that our MSM seems so darned eager to burn our sources just to make a news story a little bit more spicy. I sincerely hope that wherever “Ali” is now (the article doesn’t say), he’s beyond the ability of al-Qaeda to find him because they sure as heck want to pop a cap in him now.

Thanks, guys, for making our intelligence gathering that little bit more difficult. Any chance you’ll cut us the teensiest amount of slack and let us actually fight and win the war without you blabbing our most secret secrets all over the front page of every major publication we have?

Three: Any chance that we’ll go back and take note of who was squawking so loudly about the city’s decision to search the bags of passengers going onto the subway?

Overall, I think it’s interesting that Zawahiri decided to pull the plug on the attack and more interesting that no actual reason was given. I can’t imagine that the operatives in New York were particularly pleased that their attempt to kill a few thousand infidels and to have their faces in that “Employee of the Month” frame in Al-Qaeda’s Cave HQ were aborted. I also don’t imagine that he would have done so if he had not had a very compelling reason.

I wonder if perhaps President Bush’s aggressive moves against terrorists and terrorist enablers had anything to do with the decision? Jeff Goldstein comes the closest, perhaps, to answering that question:

’ve said before that the US has to make it perfectly clear that any attacks on US citizens using chemical and biological weapons will be met with swift, severe, and lethal retalliation—and that the US will take absolutely no military options off the table in preparing its plan for countermeasures.

Certainly, the international left, various human rights groups, and our own home-grown apologists would do everything in their power to try to weaken US moral authority to strike back with the force and severity US policy dictates—and at times, one suspects al Qaeda even counts on this internal western friction to keep the US from retaliating in a way that matches our official posture.

Still, why Zawahiri called off the attack remains a mystery: was he aware that the US had received word of the attack? Was he worried that an attack using poison gas would cross some invisible line that would almost inevitably cause the US to redouble its offensive efforts against al Qaeda and perhaps regain a good deal of international support? Or was the plan simply a ruse to smoke out a potential mole within al Qaeda?

If the answer to the last question is “yes”, then it certainly worked thanks to Time and Ron Suskind. If the answer to the second question is “yes”, then all of New York owes the President an enormous “Thank You” and a good number of Bush-critics owe him a great apology.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media.