AL QAEDA MAY BE PLANNING MORE HIJACKINGS

According to a Transportation Safety Administration memo sent to airports July 26th, al Qaeda may be sending out five-man teams to attempt to hijack planes on the East Coast or in Europe or Australia. Knowing that they won't be able to smuggle any kind of blade onto an aircraft, the hijackers will instead try to use everyday items that have been modified into weapons. They're apparently getting very James Bondish on us, outfitting cameras and the like with secret weapon components.

This story is profoundly good news. It indicates that al Qaeda is undergoing a dual collapse--its money and brainpower have been drained away.

First, the money. The memo indicates that the hijackers need not have been trained to actually fly the planes they take over. It took sizable funds to get the 9-11 hijackers into the country and then house and feed them for the duration of their expensive training. The tactic worked quite well, as we all now know. The fact that al Qaeda is now designing attacks that include hijackings but not flight training indicates that they simply don't have access to the funding necessary to make it possible. Their funds have to some extent been effectively cut off, or the network they once used to move funds around has been choked off. Stories that potential bombers have been arrested in bank robberies, which they are apparently using as al Qaeda fund raisers, reinforces the point that we're winning the financial component of the "new kind of war" we're in.

On the subject of the brain drain, it seems apparent that in returning to hijackings al Qaeda is trying to go back to a tactic that once worked spectacularly for it. This reveals that at its top levels there isn't much in the way of current creative thinking going on. Al Qaeda's past attacks showed creativity with each new murderous stunt--a truck bomb in the WTC basement in 1993, planned multiple airline bombings in Operation Bojinka (which was foiled), multiple car bombs outside American embassies in Africa, a boat bomb used against the USS Cole, and then the 9-11 hijackings. Since that attack, al Qaeda has made noise about hitting us in new and more destructive ways that would devastate us and collapse our economy. Hijackings won't do that. They'll just make us even madder, and we'll be that much more determined to stop terrorism by killing the terrorists. For every one of us they kill, we will become more angry and determined to rip them up root and branch.

We're winning. That's the bottom line of the TSA's warning memo. Al Qaeda can't fund the large scale attacks that it desires and can't afford to buy bigger weapons to use against us. It's leadership isn't as lethally creative today as it once was. Our leadership is as creative as ever, and learns new ways to smash the enemy with each battle. We're winning, and al Qaeda is only trying to recapture its old and rapidly fading glory days.