UTTERLY CHILLING – AT 8:37 A.M. ET:  We were worried over the Christmas-day airline bomber.  Let's not forget that an attack like that is small-time stuff compared to what Al Qaeda apparently has in mind.  The Washington Post, in a solid piece of journalism, reports:

When al-Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off a planned chemical attack on New York's subway system in 2003, he offered a chilling explanation: The plot to unleash poison gas on New Yorkers was being dropped for "something better," Zawahiri said in a message intercepted by U.S. eavesdroppers.

The meaning of Zawahiri's cryptic threat remains unclear more than six years later, but a new report warns that al-Qaeda has not abandoned its goal of attacking the United States with a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon.

Why would it abandon that goal?  That's what Al Qaeda is about.

The report, by a former senior CIA official who led the agency's hunt for weapons of mass destruction, portrays al-Qaeda's leaders as determined and patient, willing to wait for years to acquire the kind of weapons that could inflict widespread casualties.

The former official, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, notes:

"If Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants had been interested in . . . small-scale attacks, there is little doubt they could have done so now," Mowatt-Larssen writes in a report released Monday by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Not everyone affiliated with Harvard is a cookie-cutter leftist, although the cutter seems to have made many, many cookies.

The report comes as a federal panel is about to release an assessment of our preparedness for a WMD attack:

The review by the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism is particularly critical of the Obama administration's actions so far in hardening the country's defenses against bioterrorism, according to two former government officials who have seen drafts of the report.

Is any reader out there surprised by that conclusion?  Maybe the Obamans think that hardening our defenses would be offensive to certain cultures that are equal in every way to ours, and also have nice music and costumes.

Mowatt-Larssen, a 23-year CIA veteran, led the agency's internal task force on al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and later was named director of intelligence and counterintelligence for the Energy Department. His report warns that bin Laden's threat to attack the West with weapons of mass destruction is not "empty rhetoric" but a top strategic goal for an organization that seeks the economic ruin of the United States and its allies to hasten the overthrow of pro-Western governments in the Islamic world.

He cites patterns in al-Qaeda's 15-year pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that reflect a deliberateness and sophistication in assembling the needed expertise and equipment.

COMMENT:  Another serious warning, coming at a time when Iran is working vigorously toward nuclear weapons.  It would be comparatively easy for Iran to pass some knowledge on to favored terrorist groups.

And yet, we treat captured terrorists like shoplifters, reading them their Miranda rights. 

There's an old saying that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.  Apparently, many members of the Obama administration didn't get the memo.

January 26, 2010