Take them ALL seriously, even the empty threats. Just don't bother quaking in fear every time another threat is made. It isn't worth it. It makes them stronger and those who quake in fear weaker, when we have seen with our own eyes on TV that the terorists quake in fear of the United States' reaction to their attacks on our soil.
President Bush won't challenge them to some stupid duell when they say they're allegedly, possibly coming. He'll do everything in his administration's power to stop them and if failing that, will order them carpet bombed into oblivion. Or nuked, depending on the severity of their attack.
It's not even a threat. It's apparently just a fairly desperate al Qaeda recruitment effort. They have to fluff themselves up like housecats to make themselves appear bigger than they actually are in order to attract young unemployed male malcontents to their cause. I am sure they noticed the huge dip in their recruitment levels.
What testosterone-pumped anti-American boy would be attracted to an organization that didn't at least sound tough? None, of course, particularly when word is getting around that testosterone-pumped anti-American radicals are getting killed and captured in droves, and this is reinforced each time Khalid or Abdul comes back from a trip into Iraq with wet pants and a healthy desire to stay out of any American's and Brit's way. Or didn't come back at all.
Hence, al Qaeda's need to launch attacks where there is media to see. They need extensive hysterical media coverage of their very small 'successes' to appear bigger than they are, all to attract interest from the humiliated extremist Muslim or even the not-so-religious malcontented radical, be they Arab or Asian or even western.
Without the media's witting or unwitting support, and its hysterical descriptions of each terrorist attack, al Qaeda cannot survive. Their recruitment would dwindle to nothing, and most importantly, there wouldn't even be money coming in to support them. Without the relative ease of getting news coverage simply by choosing small targets near press stations and journalists' hangouts, people would notice that the now homeless al Qaeda's capabilities are apparently much smaller than before. Were the media still covering Gitmo and arrests with as much enthusiasm as they cover each coalition casualty, al Qaeda would be hurting just from that. Who wants to join al Qaeda if the only known benefits of the job are going to be ankle bracelets, orange jumpsuits and an extended vacation in sunny Cuba with some unpleasant attendants?
They have been reduced from spectacular economy-shattering hits on glitzy and prestigious targets on American embassies or inside America itself to rather pathetic rocket launches and bomb incidents well away from our shores. If they can make the stock markets jittery by exaggerating their ambitions, then so be it, but so far they sound like they are all fur and no alleycat.
This latest rant just sounds much more desperate- they used to keep their mouth shut until AFTER they had succeeded in an attack.