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Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor at Reason magazine. It's a tough call whether Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the Jordanian militant who is reportedly responsible for the videotaped butchery of Nicholas Berg — is more stupid than he is brutal, or whether he is a bigger monster than he is a fool. Zarqawi's own nauseating videotape makes the case for his indescribable brutality and may have inadvertently delivered his enemy from its own demoralization. Americans were feeling so shamed, dishonored and demoralized by the repulsive images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that even many prominent war supporters were...

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) - Al-Qaida plotted bombings and poison gas attacks against the U.S. Embassy and other targets in Jordan, two conspirators said in a confession aired Monday on Jordanian state television. Azmi al-Jayousi, identified as the head of the Jordanian cell of al-Qaida, appeared Monday in a 20-minute taped program and described meeting Jordanian militant Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi in neighboring Iraq to plan the foiled plot. A commentator said the plotters wanted to kill "80,000" Jordanians and had targeted the prime minister's office, intelligence headquarters and the U.S. Embassy. Another Jordanian suspect, car mechanic Hussein Sharif Hussein, was shown saying...

Saturday, Apr. 17, 2004 11:23 AM EDT Foiled Al Qaeda Attackers Caught Red-Handed with WMDs Two members of an al Qaeda cell connected to top terror master Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have been caught in Jordan with chemical weapons and poisonous gas for a planned attack that Jordanian officials say would have killed up to 20,000 people. The officials told the London-based newspaper al-Hayat on Friday that the al Qaeda plotters planned to launch a WMD attack against a Jordanian Military Intelligence installation, the US embassy in Amman and a government building in the country. According to the Israeli newspaper Maariv,...

Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al Qaeda bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks. Abdullah said that trucks containing 17.5 tons of explosives...

Scores of masked gunmen went on an audacious daylight rampage through the flashpoint Iraqi town of Fallujah yesterday morning, launching twin attacks on a police station and civil defence compound that left at least 23 people dead and 35 wounded. At least 14 of the dead were lightly-armed police officers, recently recruited to the force, who could offer little resistance to the heavily-armed gunmen, suspected of being foreign fighters. About 70 raiders shouting "God is great" fired rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machineguns at policemen, throwing grenades as they cleared the police station room by room and released at least 20...

AL QAEDA 'PLANS NEW WAR' Al Qaeda wants to provoke a religious war in Iraq to further destabilise the country, according to a seized document. The leaders of the terror group plan to drag the Shi'ite majority into a conflict with the minority Sunnis, to radicalise the Sunni clan. Once pushed towards the extremists, the Sunnis - the religion affiliated with Saddam Hussein - could be persuaded to take up arms against occupying US and British troops. The 17-page document urging "sectarian war" is believed to have been written by al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian. In it,...