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Osama bin Laden's decision to praise a botched attack by a franchise chapter is his attempt to remain relevant. Most headlines state that bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attack but after reviewing the one minute audio bin Laden simply praises the attack attempt. What is interesting with the short audio is that it comes out 30 days after the attack attempt giving us a window into bin Laden's information flow and hiding posture. Bin Laden links the attack attempt to US support for Israel over Gaza and promises President Obama more attacks should the US continue to support Israel.
Peter Beinart of the New America Foundation previous wrote an article that places al Qaeda's current capabilities into context.
Here's a fact about the underwear attack that you might have missed in the media shoutfest: it failed. It failed, first of all, because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was just one terrorist. Once upon a time, al-Qaeda's modus operandi was to launch multiple, simultaneous attacks. That way, even if one attack failed, the entire operation wouldn't. On 9/11, the network deployed 19 hijackers on four planes; on 12/25, by contrast, it managed only one. Second, the underwear attack failed because Abdulmutallab wasn't particularly well trained. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were personally selected by Osama bin Laden from the tens of thousands of potential killers who went through al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps in the 1990s. The ringleaders got extensive training on the design of airplanes and the behavior of aircraft crews, even before they enrolled in U.S. flight schools. The grunts were made to slit the throats of camels and sheep to overcome their inhibitions about murder. Abdulmutallab, by contrast, reportedly used a syringe to try to detonate a notoriously hard-to-detonate explosive called PETN. "To make this stuff work," says Van Romero, an explosives expert at New Mexico Tech, "you have to know what you're doing." Abdulmutallab, it appears, did not.
You can read the full article here.
Final word goes to Al Jazeera's coverage of the new bin Laden audiotape.
In the latest Osama Bin Laden tape on Sunday, the al-Qaeda leader warned Barack Obama, the US president, that there will be more attacks on the US if it continues to support Israel.
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