Actually, Karen, I think that there is a tremendous amount of misinformation going on fostered by AQ and its cohorts, particularly after the UN resolution, designed to increase tensions but with no spectacular threat on the horizon.
The objective facts are that there have been very few attacks of any substance after 9/11, with the Bali bombing being the most significant. Though there were a lot of innocent lives lost in Bali, the attack was insignificant in terms of scale. The bombing of the French tanker was similarly insignificant in scale as were the other attacks. Had the shoe bomber succeeded, it would have been a disaster but not a catastrophic calamity on the scale of 9/11.
The bottom line is that AQ, for all its threats, has not been able to successfully mount the kind of large scale terrorism that would cause significant damage to the US economy, which I presume is its ultimate goal.
Radio and communications "chatter" might be consciously increased in order to keep us on our toes, create apprehension, etc., and test our counter-terrorism resources. I suspect the article which you linked yesterday that got me so bent out of shape is part of this process.
This is not to diminish the threat we face. It is serious and will exist for a long time. However, the fact that no operations with calamitous results have been launched gives me a lot of hope that perhaps the threat is not as huge as once thought and/or our counter-terror measures have been effective. |
