Forget the small fry: the big guys are still out there

opinion.telegraph.co.uk ^ | 6/17/02 | Mark Steyn

[MountainPete]

Forget the small fry: the big guys are still out there By Mark Steyn (Filed: 16/06/2002)

By common consent, the "dirty bomb" story bombed. At the beginning of last week, John Ashcroft, the US Attorney-General, announced that the authorities had apprehended an American citizen, Abdullah al-Muhajir, formerly Jose Padilla, for plotting to explode a "dirty bomb", which, as Mr Ashcroft helpfully explained, "is highly toxic to humans and can cause mass death and injury". He was being detained "for the safety of all Americans".

The Dow Jones immediately dropped 80 points on the announcement, while the rest of America gave a massive shrug. That's because the Dow was at the mercy of a highly sophisticated, educated, well-informed elite, while the rest of America was tuned to talk-radio stations whose redneck hosts have been telling us for weeks that a dirty bomb is a l'il ol' pissant firecracker that real men scoff at. "Mass death"? Dream on, jihadi losers. It might kill a few dozen folks, maybe a couple of hundred, turn a handful of the stampeding sissy pantywaists into panty-radioactive-waists, but that's no reason to get in a big panic.

The White House was horrified. The idea with the Scare Of The Week press release is that the public gets spooked but the stock market doesn't. The Ashcroft announcement had had precisely the opposite effect, and Bush aides wasted no time in slapping down the over-excited Attorney-General. A dirty bomb, they reassured us, doesn't mean mushroom clouds over Manhattan, and anyway there wasn't really a "plot" as such but just some "fairly loose talk". But in that case why had the President himself made such a ballyhoo over it? Everywhere he went last Tuesday, Mr Bush repeated the same applause line: "We've rounded up and detained over 2,400 terrorists. You probably read in the newspaper, the number's now 2,401."

So what's the big deal about Prisoner 2,401? In the revised post-Ashcroft version of events, he's no more or less than some Latino street punk from Chicago arrested at O'Hare Airport with an unusually large sum of cash. Cynics say that the administration's grandstanding and Jose Padilla's too dumb to pull off a dirty bomb attack. Maybe. But the salient characteristic of al-Qaeda's operatives is how dumb they are.

As the number of incompetent Palestinian suicide bombers suggests, in this field it's hard, by definition, to get people with experience. If the British shoebomber, Richard Reid, had invested a handful of euros in a lighter instead of relying on a damp, bent book of matches from the airport EconoLodge, he'd have blown American Airlines Flight 63 to pieces. Even Mohammed Atta, the Islamonutter-in-chief on September 11, spent a year and a half blundering around America with a big "TERRORIST" sign flashing in neon off the top of his head. If Ashcroft was shouting fire in a crowded theatre this week, many Feds spent the year before September 11 declining to call the Fire Department even as the flames were licking the end of their desk.

Not surprisingly, al-Qaeda finds it hard to recruit top-quality psychopaths willing to kill themselves to protest the fall of Andalucia in 1492 or whatever other ancient grievance is itching Osama's yak-wool undies. Nonetheless, certain distinctions in the organisation's operational moron structure can now be discerned. Mohammed Atta and the other bigshot, wealthy, middle-class Saudi morons get the fun of ploughing the jets into the skyscrapers.

Below them are a network of footsoldier morons sitting around the Muslim immigrant quartiers of western cities, living off European and Canadian welfare and doing a lot of the boring legwork: in the past eight days, for example, there have been two interesting break-ins in immigration offices in Tacoma, Washington, and Ottawa, both netting the perpetrators useful supplies of visas, stamps, passports, official badges and the like.

Below these footsoldiers are a miscellaneous rabble of social-misfit morons from Chicago, California, Britain, Australia and elsewhere. These fellows are useful if only because they're not obviously Middle Eastern and they travel on documents issued in the name of Her Britannic Majesty. The toxic Saudi-funded madrassahs are doing a grand job radicalising Muslims in Chechnya, the Balkans, Pakistan and South Asia, and it's reasonable to assume that they've had some modest success in Virginia and Florida. The Wahabbi hotshots are happy to give the likes of Mr Padilla some change to make a little trouble, but they are far too racist to trust some punk-ass Chicago homey with anything that matters. Prisoner No 2,401 is a bit-player.

That said, conspiracy theorists are having a field day. Mr Padilla is the absolute spitting image of the FBI artist's impression of "John Doe No 2", a swarthy guy wanted as a supposed "co-conspirator" in the Oklahoma City bombing but conveniently forgotten along the way, after Bill Clinton decided to save his presidency by making Tim McVeigh the pin-up for angry Right-wing gun nuts: there was no place for mysterious Middle Eastern connections in this script. As I wrote in The Sunday Telegraph a year ago, that wasn't quite the whole story on McVeigh: the Gulf War "had broadened his mind: the 'Iraqi suffering' that he'd witnessed made him think the government for which he soldiered was a global bully". Far from the stereotypical white supremacist, McVeigh seems to have been the biggest Arabist in the American militia movement. If he was solely responsible, how come everything he did before the explosion was so smart and everything he did afterwards was so stupid?

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see certain patterns at work. Whoever's behind al-Qaeda seems to be very adroit at scheduling distractions - first, this spring's flare-up on the West Bank; then, Kashmir - and, after all, most terrorist networks boil down to a handful of masterminds manipulating whatever gullible losers are to hand. Even poor deceased Osama bin Laden seems likely to prove to have been merely the front-man moron for slyer, more official forces. Abu Zubaydah, the bin Laden sidekick now in US custody, is the man who fingered Padilla, but his previous insider tip-offs have consisted mostly of diabolical plots lifted from the remake of Godzilla. Does al-Qaeda get most of its ideas from Hollywood or is Zubaydah playing the Feds for a bunch of infidel saps?

Unless he really is "John Doe No 2", Mr Padilla is almost certainly of no importance, just some despised taco-breathed terrorist wannabe that Zubaydah had reasons to sell out. President Bush's scoreboard will be a lot higher than 2,401 before he gets to anyone who matters.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002. Terms & Conditions of reading. Commercial information. Privacy Policy.

[MountainPete]

Time constraints here didn't allow for a search...If this has already been posted, I do apologize profusely!