Saudi Attack Feared Salient by Revived Al-Qaeda

“People are very, very worried about a wave of attacks,” a U.S. official told the L.A. Times. “These things tend to come in clusters.”

“There is a feeling that this wave might not be over,” a Bush administration official advised the New York Times.

The fresh ration of paranoia has roots in some dramatic intelligence.

According to the Times report, U.S. officials are taking “extremely seriously” recent statements made in the media by two men claiming to be Al Qaeda spokesmen.

In an e-mail message sent to the Saudi magazine Al Majallah, which is published from London, one purported al-Qaeda operative, who used the name Abu Mohamed al-Ablaj, advised that al-Qaeda had “been planning major operations for a long time in the gulf, where it had stocked large amounts of arms and explosives.”

Al-Ablaj, who claimed to be the “coordinator of a Mujahidin training center” run by al-Qaeda, outright claimed responsibility for the bombings in the message. He further advised that al-Qaeda had reorganized its leadership and had been plotting a series of bombings in Saudi Arabia.

“The Americans only have predictions and old intelligence left,” Al Majallah quoted another unnamed operative as saying. “It will take them a long time to understand the new form of Al Qaeda.” This second person warned of a new wave of attacks in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan -- as well as “the heart of America.”

“The list of assassins, the raid teams and the martyr operation squads are ready... and the authorities cannot uncover them,” the latter man said.

The New York Times reported that a senior United States official said that although al-Qaeda did not classically claim responsibility for attacks, intelligence analysts regarded the assertions in the messages as genuine.

This same official also corroborated the operative’s claim that al-Qaeda had reorganized its leadership and was ready to rock and roll, saying that since the September 2001 attacks, al-Qaeda had been aggressively fund-raising and recruiting in Saudi Arabia, the homeland of Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, Monday’s suicide bombings have garnered more than fear.

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a Democratic presidential hopeful, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and longtime critic of the Bush conduct of the War on Terrorism, could not resist an “I told you so.”

In the wake of the attacks, Graham charged that they “could have been avoided if you had actually crushed the basic infrastructure of Al Qaeda.” Instead, maintains Graham, the war in Iraq diverted U.S. military and intelligence resources from fighting against terrorist threats, allowing al-Qaeda the breathing room to pull itself together.

“We’ve been engaged in a manhunt to find their past leadership,” Graham said. “But what we’re also finding is that Al Qaeda has a deep farm team and they’re able to replace those who are killed or detained.”

The Times of London reported that while President Bush was claiming that half of the al-Qaeda leadership had been wiped out, intelligence officials were busily compiling evidence that al-Qaeda was reforming and had prepared to cut loose with further terrorist attacks against Westerners.

The Jerusalem Post’s Barry Rubin offered his analysis: “The ability of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida group to launch a well-organized terrorist assault on Americans in Saudi Arabia shows that his group is still very much alive…

“For U.S. policy, of course, the attack requires some rethinking. While this point should not be exaggerated, there has been a tendency to think that the battle with bin Laden was the old phase in the war against terrorism, replaced by the priorities arising out of the war with Iraq…

“But the message from Riyadh is a clear one: The radical Islamist war against the West continues, and in it the Arab-Israeli conflict is only one of many battles.”

The analyst also opined that with Riyadh, the Arab states’ complicity with terrorism is shown to remain intact, with recent reports indicating that the extent of private Saudi funding of terrorism was even greater than previously thought.