corrente

The ISS makes AQ sound like a thriving, well-managed small business with a sound business model and a resilient organizational structure. Quite unlike the bunglers in the WhiteWash House, I might add.

Al Qaeda has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s network, a leading London think-tank said on Tuesday.

And this was doubtless written before Bush's Abu Ghraib fiasco.

Al Qaeda's finances were in good order, its "middle managers" provided expertise to Islamic militants around the globe and bin Laden's drawing power was as strong as ever, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said.

It warned in its annual Strategic Survey that al Qaeda would keep trying to develop plans for attacks in North America and Europe and that the network ideally wanted to use weapons of mass destruction.

"Meanwhile, soft targets encompassing Americans, Europeans and Israelis, and aiding the insurgency in Iraq, will do," the institute said.

"Galvanized by Iraq if compromised by Afghanistan, al Qaeda remains a viable and effective network of networks," it said.

The IISS said al Qaeda lost its base after the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001 but had since adapted to become more decentralized, "virtual" and invisible in more than 60 countries.

"The Afghanistan intervention offensively hobbled but defensively benefited al Qaeda," it said.

The institute said 2,000 al Qaeda members and more than half of the group's 30 leaders had been killed or captured.

So all the Special Access Program has managed to do is kill off the stupid ones.

The IISS said the 1,000 al Qaeda militants estimated to be in Iraq were a minute fraction of its potential strength.

It said al Qaeda was reported to be exporting extremism on a global scale with "middle managers" providing planning, logistical advice, material and financing to smaller groups in Saudi Arabia and Morocco and probably Indonesia and Kenya.

The IISS said http://www.agonist.org/archives/015949.html#015949the Madrid train bombings in March suggested al Qaeda had now fully reconstituted and had set its sights firmly on the United States and its closest allies in Europe.
(via Reuters from the essential Agonist)

A network of networks, eh? You and I, readers, we know this is how AQ is structured. We've known it since they surfaced. Clarke's known it for years.

Question: How then, does it make any sense at all to claim that Iraq is the "central front in the war on terror [sic]", as Bush does?

Answer: It doesn't. A network of network has no front! The inanity of the neocon thinking has never been so clear.

Idiots!