Someone Tell Fleming

I stumbled across an interesting thread over on FreeRepublic today, a long and rambling post looking at the possibility of a large-scale Al-Qaeda attack in the near term. The actual content is very disjointed and poorly presented, not being organised in a chronological way, nor grouped particularly clearly. But it is information rich, containing a lot of further details from stories the major American media usually filter before they present it to us.

Then it hit me: someone needs to make sure Mike Fleming (Memphis talk radio host, for the out-of-towners reading this) sees this! He's already on a paranoid tear about the Constitution being thrown out for martial law in the soon-come "100,000 dead" Al-Qaeda super-strike. [Scroll down to "Mike Fleming Really Is An Idiot" if the link is bloggered.] Ol' Flemmy would have a week-long theme with this stuff!

I'm not sure how trustworthy the FreeRepublic stuff is, since I've not heard of the source before, but if reliable, it's a trove of background stuff we usually don't hear. And it makes for worrying reading, to a point. The number of near-misses and almost-worked plans it documents is pretty scary.

I'm of the opinion that an Al-Qaeda strike will be in one of three forms:
A) A bio/chem attack that maybe kills a couple of hundred. (I apologise for the emotionless tone of this.) It'll be in a major city, one of international significance, but in a public place like a train or subway station. Maybe a government office.
B) A dirty bomb (i.e. conventional explosives wrapped in radioactive material) in a major city. No guesses on the number of dead, though the effects of something like this will linger for years and slowly reveal themselves.
C) A car bomb near a government office or military facility. Maybe a few or a few dozen dead, but a real media scare as they liken us to London and the IRA and most especially to Israel and the Palestinians. Minimal real damage, but major media fear-mongering. The major media will go beserk, regardless of the severity of the first attack, likening America to Israel immediately. No matter how normal Americans handle it, which I suspect won't be as bad as we might fear today, the rest of the world will see ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/NYT/WaPo hysteria and take that for our response.

No way to predict, but I suspect option C, as it's the most simple to co-ordinate and relatively easy to carry out. It also will likely have an effect far out of proportion to the actual damages. And it can be repeated many, many times all across the country.

Again, please forgive me for the bloodlessness of this discussion and the seeming callousness. I can, for the purpose of this discussion, separate my real fear and anger from the need to look at things reasonably. I've always considered us lucky, in a way, for our enemies this time. When they attack us, it's not with striking fear into our hearts as their primary motive, but impressing the audience back home and around the world. Yes, they do want to destroy us, but more important, I think, is showing the folks they most want to dominate that they are a force to fear and submit to. No blasphemy intended, but in a way they want to be seen as Allahs-on-Earth: submit or die. If these attacks get rid of us good; if they get fundamentalist Islamic states, even better.

Remember, right after September 11, as the Christmas season approached and there were all kinds of rumors about attacks in shopping malls? That would have been a devastating thing to do to America. Malls would have deserted overnight and the economy would have been wrecked for months and years to come. But that isn't how the terrorists seem to think, based on what they've been doing around the world so far.

Imagine a car bomb, heaven forbid, on a Friday or Saturday night along Beale Street, here in Memphis. Major casualties and a fast end to outdoor gatherings. That might happen, but it seems more likely the bomb would be placed near a government office, as a statement. We're talking Al-Qaeda, not Palestinians. There's always a political and thematic point to the attack, not just simple fear.

One thing that occurred to me, when discussions of biological attacks came up in early 2002, was football games. Some games attract up to 80,000 people. Imagine, again heaven forbid, someone releasing an agent into or over that crowd, especially one that takes a few hours to take effect, ensuring a greater spread into the populace. The casualties there would be astronomical and the effects on the city involved might be terminal. I remember ABC's Nightline doing a program where they simulated the release of a biological agent in Atlanta. The scenario played out with tens of thousands of dead, and the government and emergency infrastructure was completely incapable of handling it.

Again, see, that's American thinking. We know what would cause major fear and disruption. But the terrorists are more (or at least as much) interested in playing to the folks back home. It doesn't occur to them to think like this. Their plans come from their cultural biases and assumptions. And thank God for that. They planned to hit the World Trade Centers because back home the towers represent American dominance and globalism. Smash the towers and you smash American hegemony. But they hit them early in the day, when there were fewer folks there, thereby saving tens of thousands of lives. Why? Because they wanted lightly-filled planes which their past experience showed were easier to control. Instead of 100,000 dead, which might have been a possibility, we only (only!) suffered less than 3000.

Sorry for the turn in the post there. I started out razzing Mike Fleming and ended up discussing apocalyptic scenarios. But we need to consider these things rationally. New Al-Qaeda strikes in America are a certainty, of that I'm sure. We should be ready. If that's possible.