ABC News reports this morning on a Homeland Security document that describes at least three plans to attack America and its allies via commercial aviation. The DHS analysis notes the "ingenuity" of al-Qaeda planners even though US security efforts stopped all of the plots:

Al Qaeda terrorists were planning to use cameras to disguise bombs and flash attachments as stun guns in a disrupted hijack plot that targeted the U.S. east coast, Britain, Italy and Australia, U.S. officials say.

The plot was one of three previously unknown al Qaeda hijack plots disrupted before they could be carried out, according to a Department of Homeland Security report obtained by ABC News.

The report, a strategic assessment on U.S. aviation, says despite security improvements, "DHS continues to receive information on terrorist threats to the U.S. aviation industry and to the Western aviation industry worldwide."

The previously secret plots include one in which "Al-Qa'ida planned to hijack flights departing London's Heathrow Airport and crash them into the airport and a skyscraper in the Canary Wharf financial district of London."

The third plot involved taking over a plane of unknown origin, filling it with explosives, and crashing it into the US Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan. This plan would certainly have killed a number of Americans had it succeeded, but it also would have killed many more Muslims in Pakistan. The same dynamic occurred in the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, and it appears that al-Qaeda really doesn't care. One of the criticisms that Ayman al-Zawahiri had for Zarqawi before Americans rendered thermal equilibrium unto the leader of AQ-Iraq was that he indiscriminately killed Muslim citizens, especially his slaughter of Jordanians attending a wedding. This appears to either have been overblown or an example of AQ hypocrisy.

The document comes along at the same time as Ron Suskind's One Percent Solution, which detailed other AQ plots against the United States. It seems as though the government wants to remind us how dangerous Islamofascits terrorism still remains to America after almost five years without a terrorist attack. Some had theorized that AQ wanted to narrow its focus on Saudi Arabia, including Suskind himself. That may well be the case now, although it hardly seems probable that Osama bin Laden or Zawahiri would pass up a chance to hit the US if they could. We see now that the run of safety has not resulted from the mercy of terrorists or through blind luck, but instead through improving operational intelligence.

The war is far from over, and we fight it on many fronts. This may remind some that one of those fronts is here in the US, and our tenacity on any front (or lack thereof) carries consequences for the others.

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» The War Continues from Flopping Aces
But I thought there was no "War On Terror"? Al Qaeda terrorists were planning to use cameras to disguise bombs and flash attachments as stun guns in a disrupted hijack plot that targeted the U.S. east coast, Britain, Italy and Australia, U.S.... [Read More]

Tracked on June 21, 2006 11:58 AM

» Whatever Happened To Pragmatism? from Hard Starboard
But remember the three foiled Islamikaze attacks revealed yesterday? Or the 2003 al Qaeda plot to release sarin nerve gas in the New York subway system? According to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS), it was NSA "domestic eave... [Read More]

Tracked on June 22, 2006 8:58 PM