The blogosphere lit up last week with stories about how the New York Times, and the Bush Administration, had information in the summer of 2001 that specifically foretold of an impending, spectacular attack by al Qaeda "perhaps to be visited on the continental United States" – information which both august institutions declined to share with the public. The stories have rightly drawn much attention for the new light it throws on the years-long decline of the Times – and on the surpassingly curious inaction on the part of the Bush Administration during that fateful summer, despite an intelligence system "blinking red" with warnings of an impending attack. No doubt all of this will be chewed over, to good effect, by many analysts in the days to come.
But there is another very important part of the story that seems in danger of being overlooked. In an interview with Alternet, former NYT reporter (and Bush Regime misinformation conduit) Judith Miller tells how an intelligence source told her, during the 2001 July Fourth holiday weekend, about an intercept of a conversation of two al Qaeda members. As Miller recounts it: "And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the Cole. And one Al Qaeda operative was overheard saying to the other, 'Don't worry; we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'"
What is the key fact here? Not really that al Qaeda operatives were planning a big operation against the United States; they'd been trying to do that for years, including one thwarted spectacular involving the mass hijacking of airplanes. No, what is truly significant, I think, is this passage: "They had been….supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what happened to the [USS] Cole," a destroyer hit by a deadly suicide bomb attack in a Yemen harbor the previous October.
Al Qaeda's entire strategy was aimed at drawing the United States into a worldwide "war on terror," a massive campaign of retaliation that would doubtless see the American military charging into Muslim lands, killing civilians, wreaking havoc. The benefits of this to al Qaeda would be two-fold. First, it would fuel anti-American sentiment throughout the Islamic world, radicalizing many Muslims who would see the retaliation as proof of bin Laden's charges of a "Crusader-Zionist" war on Islam. It would be, in other words, the greatest recruiting tool al Qaeda could ever have, bringing more recruits, arms and money to their cause.
So Bush managed not only to confirm bin Laden as a Prophet (a Christian nation will invade a Muslim nation for oil, pre-9-11 prediction), he is the best recruiter al Qaeda has ever had.
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