ALL ABOUT BIN LADEN (5 OF 6): OH NO! NOW THEY'RE GOING TO REALLY GET US!

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Al-Qaida vows revenge for Osama bin Laden's death

Al-Qaida vowed to keep fighting the United States and avenge the death of Osama bin Laden, which it acknowledged for the first time Friday in an Internet statement apparently designed to convince followers that it will remain vigorous and intact even after its founder's demise.

Al-Qaida's plots are usually large-scale and involve planning over months or even years. But Western intelligence officials say they are seeing increased chatter about cheap, small-scale attacks — perhaps by individuals or small extremist groups inspired to take revenge for the killing.

"USA, you will pay!" chanted more than 100 participants in a pro-bin Laden protest outside the U.S. Embassy in London on Friday.

A Western intelligence official said no concrete threat has emerged so far that authorities considered credible. "There have been mentions of shootings, bombings and random violence, though it is not surprising, given bin Laden's death," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Authorities in the U.S. and Europe chose not to elevate threat levels.

More here.

And from Los Angeles Times via the Albany Times Union:

Bombings to avenge bin Laden's death may hurt relations with Pakistan

Twin suicide bomb blasts that killed at least 80 paramilitary force recruits in northwest Pakistan on Friday -- an attack that Taliban militants said was meant to avenge the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. commandos -- could trigger new doubts among Pakistanis about the value of Islamabad's already rocky relationship with Washington.

The bombers targeted scores of Frontier Constabulary paramilitary recruits who had just completed six months of training and were boarding vans outside the center's main gate before going on a 10-day leave, police and survivors said. The base is located in Shabqadar, a town near the edge of Mohmand, a tribal area where Pakistani troops have struggled for years to rein in Pakistani Taliban militants.

The attack was Pakistan's deadliest this year, and the first major terror strike in the country since bin Laden's killing.

More here.

The whole "Al Qaeda's really gonna get us now" meme is probably the stupidest of all ideas arising from OBL's death. I mean, if they hated us enough ten years ago to fly planes into the World Trade Center, which was the most spectacular and deadliest terrorist attack in the history of humanity, there's probably not much more we could do to make them angrier. What are they going to do this time? Hijack six planes? Use a shoe bomb? Set off a "dirty bomb"? We're already on watch for all that stuff. We could probably do more to secure chemical plants and refineries and whatnot, but the point is that Al Qaeda got lucky, by and large, with 9/11: the Bush administration just wasn't concerned with their predecessors' mounting concerns about OBL, and fell asleep at the switch, which included the derisive dismissal of the now famous presidential daily briefing from the CIA entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the United States" a month before the attacks.

So of course, I credit President Obama with the kill, but I will give Bush a little credit; after 9/11 he started taking the terrorist threat seriously--I mean, he was totally inefficient, and more concerned with amassing power and invading Iraq, but he did get the ball rolling again, after he had stopped it, in terms of anti-terrorism efforts. Since the 9/11 attacks, there has been no successful Al Qaeda operation on American soil. And I think Obama has been way more grownup about terrorism than Bush was, so any other sort of Al Qaeda operation on the scale of 9/11 is highly unlikely. And that's really what we're talking about when we discuss retaliation for the bin Laden assassination, another attack comparable in destruction to the Pentagon and WTC attacks.

I feel pretty sure that's not going to happen again. Of course, I could be wrong about that because anything could happen, but I, for one, am not at all afraid of being blown up because Obama took out bin Laden. I stand a better chance of dying from a piano dropping on my head.

And this recent attack in the tribal areas of Northern Pakistan, which may or may not be about avenging OBL's death, wasn't even Al Qaeda. It was a Pakistani Taliban group, which means it was very probably local, and very probably tribal in nature--after all such tribal violence happens often in these semi-lawless Pakistani tribal areas, so no surprise here. I'd bet ten bucks that this is business as usual stuff, and the revenge label was stuck onto it for sexiness and good press.

It's nice to know that saner people are deciding what the terrorist threat levels are these days--if Bush was still in office, this would be a great excuse to ramp it up to red alert and give us all full body cavity searches.

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