a) The Islamic terrorism threat is diminishing;
b) The only remaining Islamic terrorism threat is from Osama bin Ladin;
c) Osama bin Ladin is capable of attacking the USA; therefore
d) The USA should concentrate on Osama bin Ladin specifically, rather than Islamic terrorism generally.

So yeah, he got it right, section9.

I inferred that Jeff G. was referring to something like that, and I don’t deny it could be true, but a link would have been nice. Righties generally have less credibility than the CIA, even.

In the rest of your comment you display some pretty flabby thinking. Yes, the CIA and intelligence agencies generally were not exactly models of efficiency before 9/11. However, the fact remains that throughout 2001, from before the January inauguration and until 9/11 itself, a number of intelligence officials went out of their way to warn the Bushies to pay attention to the threat of Islamic terrorism, and the Bushies brushed them off. This happened multiple times. The U.S. intelligence community knew SOMETHING big was in the works, but they couldn’t get the White House to take these warnings seriously until 9/11. The Bush national security “experts” — Condi Rice looms large in this saga, but so does Dick Cheney — didn’t take al Qaeda seriously because it was not a “state sponsored” organization.

So when you refer to “those same folks who believed 911 would never happen,” in reality that would be the George W. Bush Administration.

And actually, few conservatives bother to respect the CIA anymore. Capable of leaking information to the New York Times, but not so much for killing bin Laden. Yah, “hair on fire” about terrorism and all that. Manifest, fatuous, bullshit. The CIA was responsible for tracking and shutting down Al Qaeda. In reality, the CIA was and remains and organization that couldn’t put the hearse in the right place in a two car funeral and produces buck-passers like George Tenet. And of course, CIA Superspy Larry Johnson.

Ask yourself why and how AQ Khan successfully traded in nuclear components and uranium hexafloride for up to a decade right under the notion of the good folks over at the Non-Proliferation division (that would be Val’s Division, Our Heroine).

For its part, Al Qaeda was a faster, better, and far more compartmentalized organization than the late 20th Century model CIA ever thought of being. It’s franchise model was more than capable of counteracting anything thrown at it by the blundering, post-cold war model thrown together at the end of the Second World War. I mean, these jackalopes screwed up the Bay of Pigs.

Oh. Yeah. Right.

They “forgot” to finish the job.

Honestly, though, the fact that there are terrorists training to attack the West with suicide squads isn’t really new, despite Brian Ross getting juicy video. It does, however, remind us of how very pathetic the administration has been, and how deranged its supporters remain.

It’s a sad day when I find myself reassured more by Brian Ross’ history of occasional sensationalism than by my government’s competence in protecting me.

1) If’n'when a suicide bomb goes off in the US, “fighting them over there so they don’t come here” will be as utterly forgotten as the warning to Bush entitled “Bin Laden Planning to Attack US Using HiJacked Airliners”.

2) The more mayhem and bloodshed that goes on overseas, whether by our hand or by the hands of others, the more likely there will be suicide bombings here in the US, what the CIA calls “blowback”. I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened yet. And - most importantly - the more this will galvanize righties into their particular form of self-righteous hyper-patriotism. You think they screech now? You ain’t seen nuthin yet.

In a sense the righties’ obsession with global jihad is a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that saner heads must somehow interdict before they become completely unreasonable, which is what will happen if’n'when suicide bombers become successful in unleashing their terror on US soil.