Al-Qaeda has responded to the U.S. intelligence focus on young Arab men as potential risks, he says, by recruiting "jihadists with different backgrounds. I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to."--The Washington Post, Saturday April 28, 2007.
The excerpt above is from a Washington Post story on former CIA director, George J. Tenet who is once again in the news because of his book, At the Center of the Storm, slated for release Monday, April 30 by HarperCollins. One of Mr. Tenet’s preoccupations in his book as well as all the promotional interviews—including the one he gave to CBS’s 60 Minutes, which will air tomorrow evening—is the imminence of future acts of terror here in the US by al-Qaeda.
That, in itself is not scary. Al-Qaeda founder, Osama Bin Laden who is presumed to still be alive hasn’t for even once indicated in any of the video and other messages that he has released on the World Wide Web or through Al Jazeera television that his terror organization was going to back down on their terror campaign. The scare in Mr. Tenet’s assertion is encapsulated in the fact that the US intelligence establishment has rendered itself incapable of countering the menace that al-Qaeda represents. It has done that by allowing the typical American bias for cultures and things unfamiliar to color its perceptions and judgments.
Listen to Mr. Tenet again: “I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to”! When you see that this rock-solid conviction is based solely on al-Qaeda’s shift to recruit “jihadists with different backgrounds” in response to US intelligence “focus on young Arab men as potential risks” one cannot but marvel. If this man, Mr. Tenet is incapable of realizing that al-Qaeda’s recruitment of jihadists hasn’t been restricted to Arabs, Asians, and Africans, there is indeed serious cause for worry.
Ever since the September 11, 2001 attacks on America, and the declaration of the war on terrorism the same year by the Bush White House, people of all races have been implicated in al-Qaeda’s or related cause. These include American citizens who were born and raised here on American soil. Recall John Walker Lindh who was captured in Afghanistan fighting in the ranks of the Taliban? Another, Ryan Anderson, a member of the National Guard in Washington State was caught in a sting in 2004. There’s yet another! He’s name is Adam Gadahn, born in the state of Oregon, 28 years ago and he converted to Islam when he was seventeen years old. Known in al-Qaeda as Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the American), this person who holds membership in al-Qaeda’s media committee is a senior cadre. He is said to be hiding with Bin Laden and others in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. He has been implicated in five different videos addressed specifically to the US—see The New Yorker magazine, January 22, 2007.
Do you now see the scare in Mr. Tenet, the man who is reputed as one of the actors who made US president George W. Bush affirm his determination to invade Iraq with his “slam dunk” statement? The Washington Post said that in his book, Mr. Tenet confessed that “he and others sometimes failed to give Bush the information he needed”. His take in the excerpt above indicates that the inability to deal with integrity is not the only lapse he has. He’s obviously a xenophobe. If people like him remain in America’s intelligence and policy making establishments, then Asians and Africans will be unduly profiled in the endless war on terror. But the sad thing about that is that it will leave American still vulnerable if terrorists acquire Caucasian physique.
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