War on Terror: Miscellany

1. Wednesday's OpinionJournal displays a studied ignorance about what John Ashcroft could possibly have meant about al Qaeda trying to affect the election result in November:

The [terrorism news article about threats to US over coming months] doesn't say which candidate or party al Qaeda hopes to benefit, and so far as we know the terror group has not issued a formal endorsement. Such information would be most useful for voters in November.

Well on this point they are just wrong. One terrorist group apparently affiliated with al Qaeda has issued their position paper on the November election; we have searched the web and can find no sign that their statement, issued as part of a claim of responsibility for 11-M, was discredited. disowned by al Qaeda. Here is the International Herald Tribune account [IHT link is busted, this one has the gist of it]:

In its statement, Abu Hafs al-Masri..tells Americans that [it] supports the re-election of President George W. Bush.

"We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections," it said.

Addressing Bush, it said: "We know that a heavyweight operation would destroy your government, and this is what we don't want. We are not going to find a bigger idiot than you." The statement said Abu Hafs al-Masri needs what it called Bush's "idiocy and religious fanaticism" because they would "wake up" the Islamic world. Comparing Bush with his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, the statement tells the president, "Actually, there is no difference between you and Kerry, but Kerry will kill our community, while it is unaware, because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish infidelity and present it to the Arab and Islamic community as civilization."

We now find ourselves in complete agreement with OpinionJournal in the hope that the voters find this information useful.

2. John Yoo, the Berkeley law professor who advised the White House on how to dodge the Geneva conventions, writes in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal:

It is important to recognize the differences between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism.

Enough said.

UPDATE: Regarding our item 1 above, it turns out that there's no accounting for the stupidity of John Ashcroft. As we noted, the only explicit political endorsement offered in the name of al Qaeda has been for Duyba, via the Abu Hafs al-Masri brigade. Intelligence experts don't take this group too seriously ("it may be no more than one man with a fax machine," says one, although it does appear to be a part of the broad al Qaeda propaganda machine) -- but this group was also the source of Ashcroft's terrorism warning. So here's Ashcroft's choice now: either he says the warning was based on a reliable source, in which case their endorsement of Dubya is also genuine, or he admits that his brilliant department's terrorism intelligence involves some chump sitting in an office and surfing the web.