Posted on 06/23/2002 1:44:58 PM PDT by glorygirl
By common consent, the "dirty'' bomb story bombed. Two weeks ago, John Ashcroft announced that authorities had apprehended an American citizen, Abdullah al-Muhajir, formerly Jose Padilla, for plotting to explode a ''dirty'' bomb, which, as 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."
As my colleague Robert Novak noted, 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 hundred, and turn a bunch of the stampeding pantywaists into panty-radioactive-waists, but that's no reason to get in a big panic. If you're, say, a 5-foot-2-inch gran'ma who happens to be in the right-hand seat of a mid-size sedan in the vicinity of Times Square when the dirty bomb goes off, you're more likely to be killed when a Chevy Tahoe fleeing the scene rear-ends you, causing your lethal passenger-side airbag to go off.
But 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 precisely the opposite effect, and Bush aides wasted no time in slapping down the over-excited attorney general. A dirty bomb, they hastened to reassure, 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 the day after Ashcroft's announcement, Bush repeated the same applause line: ''We've rounded up and detained over 2,400 terrorists,'' he said. ''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 with an unusually large sum of cash. Cynics say the administration's grandstanding, and Jose Padilla's too dumb to pull off a dirty bomb attack. You can understand the first: If Ashcroft was shouting fire in a crowded theater the other day, many feds spent the year before Sept. 11 declining to call the Fire Department even as the flames were licking the end of their desk.
As for the second, it's becoming clear that the salient characteristic of al-Qaida'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 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 detonated the plane over the Atlantic. Instead, he's destined to be the most pitiful footnote in terrorist history: a man who couldn't even blow his legs off when his loafers were packed with explosives.
It shouldn't surprise us that al-Qaida finds it hard to recruit top-quality psychopaths willing to kill themselves to protest the fall of Andalusia in 1492 or whatever other ancient grievance is itching Osama's yak-wool scanties. Nonetheless, certain distinctions in the organization's operational moron structure can now be discerned. Mohamed 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 foot soldier morons sitting around the Muslim immigrant quarters of Western cities living off European and Canadian welfare and doing a lot of the boring legwork: In the last couple of weeks, for example, there have been two very interesting break-ins in immigration offices in Tacoma, Washington, and Ottawa, both netting the perpetrators some useful supplies of visas, stamps, passports, official badges and the like.
And below these foot soldiers 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 respectable types like Her Majesty the Queen. The toxic Saudi-funded madrassahs are doing a grand job radicalizing hitherto moderate Muslims in Chechnya, the Balkans, Pakistan and South Asia, and it's reasonable to assume they've had some modest success with the smaller pool of disaffected losers in Virginia and Florida, too. But while the Wahabi hotshots are happy to give the likes of Senor Padilla some chump change to make a little trouble, they're far too racist to trust some punk-ass Chicago homey with anything that matters. So Prisoner No. 2,401 is either a bit-player . . . or something huge.
Which is why conspiracy theorists are having a field day. Abdullah 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. This was after Bill Clinton decided to save his presidency by making Tim McVeigh the poster boy for home-grown angry right-wing gun nuts, thereby leaving no place for mysterious Middle Eastern connections in the official narrative. McVeigh, though, told people that it was the ''Iraqi suffering'' he'd witnessed during the Gulf War that made him think the government for which he soldiered was a global bully. Far from the stereotypical white supremacist, he 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 afterward was so stupid?
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see certain patterns at work. Whoever's behind al-Qaida seems to be very adroit at scheduling distractions--first, this spring's flare-up on the West Bank; then, a nuclear showdown over Kashmir. After all, most terrorist networks boil down to a handful of masterminds manipulating whatever gullible local twerps 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. Padilla is almost certainly of no importance, just some despised infidel-convert terrorist wannabe a top-dog Islamist like Abu Zubaydah had reasons to sell out.
Unless, of course, Prisoner 2,401 really is ''John Doe No. 2''--which is about the only scenario under which all that fevered Ashcroft/Bush hype makes any sense.
"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 with an unusually large sum of cash..."
"Abdullah 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. This was after Bill Clinton decided to save his presidency by making Tim McVeigh the poster boy for home-grown angry right-wing gun nuts, thereby leaving no place for mysterious Middle Eastern connections in the official narrative. McVeigh, though, told people that it was the ''Iraqi suffering'' he'd witnessed during the Gulf War that made him think the government for which he soldiered was a global bully..."
"Padilla is almost certainly of no importance, just some despised infidel-convert terrorist wannabe a top-dog Islamist like Abu Zubaydah had reasons to sell out.
Unless, of course, Prisoner 2,401 really is ''John Doe No. 2''--which is about the only scenario under which all that fevered Ashcroft/Bush hype makes any sense."
The Chicago cops called Padilla "nothing more than a street punk." What would the feds have called McVeigh, prior to 911, or Mohammed Atta, prior to 9/11?
Makes you wonder what Ashcroft knows, doesn't it?
In other words, "Nothing to see here, move on..."
With all due respect, the Dow drops 80 points in response to just about everything nowdays. If we used the question "will the market go down if we release this info" as a guage to determine whether to release or discuss news, well, you can shut down the news beaureus now, until the market recover is under way. For the record, I expect that to be quite some time from now.
In my opinion, John Doe 2 is Hussain Hashem Alhussaini. After reading the above statement in a major media outlet, I believe it is possible that Jose Padilla will be Todd Bunting No.2, not John Doe 2. That would also explain the Ashcroft/Bush hype.
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