http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070717/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_terror_threatfrom today's AP.
Sounds to me like the U.S. has to maintain and even expand air travel vigilance, and al Qaeda has to develop counter-intelligence strategies such as concocting fake stories in advance to be given out under torture and/or perfecting suicide options for captured agents. This is a kind of one sided war since, as has often been pointed out, al Qaeda or its clones only have to succeed once. IMHO, they're bound to have ONE lucky day sometime.
IMHO the only thing the U.S. can do is re-evaluate its foreign policy if it wants to avoid an even bigger catastrophe than Sept. 11. WHY are these unsavoury people so focused on killing Americans in America? Sure it would be nice if they all just disappeared from the face of the earth, but realistically that is not going to happen. Realism demands that the U.S. simply stop fucking with them. Stop dictating to them behind the scenes through puppet governments. Stop supporting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Two simple little actions that - - if accompanied with sufficient expressions of regret and reconciliation - - would largely solve the problem of Islamic fundamentalist violence towards "innocent" Americans. (In al Qaeda theory, since America is a democracy, its elected government is chosen by the people, and the people must pay for the crimes committed in their name by their freely chosen representatives. In other words, there are no "innocent" Americans.)
All this bullshit about a "New Caliphate" is just garbage concocted by ambitious self-promoting academics who have used it to vault from a well-deserved obscurity into the public eye as they are grabbed up by unscrupulous politicians and right-wing media crazies to justify what is basically a very old, traditional and now disreputable imperialism based on violence and exploitation. Al Qaeda is responding to some very real injustices and perpetuating the injustice when you can't wipe out its avengers is a very, very, very STUPID policy.
