The  global financial crisis has become a topic of feverish debate for al Qaeda sympathisers on militant Internet forums.

According to  the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors  al Qaeda-linked propaganda on the Web and translates it for the benefit of security analysts and counter-terrorism officials, the militant chat rooms have been buzzing for weeks with excited comment.

“Now Sheikh Osama bin Laden has an historic opportunity to crash America completely. Al Qaeda, which has caused America to be ruined economically in Iraq and Afghanistan, has an opportunity to deliver the fatal blow,” wrote a member of a Turkish militant forum recently.  “Al Qaeda could bury America into the landfill of history with an operation similar to or greater than September 11.”

In a discussion on al-Hesbah, a password-protected forum linked to al Qaeda,  one participant gloated that the U.S. economy is “on the precipice”, SITE reported.

He continued: ”Now is a golden opportunity and a gift from Allah that we should not lose. If America is hit now, by Allah, it will never survive, until Allah permits it … I can see that victory is closer than expected.”

Such ”chatter” has attracted the attention of Western intelligence officials. Ernst Uhrlau (pictured), head of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency, told Reuters in an interview this week that the financial crisis had emboldened some Islamist militants but it was too early to say if it would help them attract new recruits.

“We’re hearing some first voices on this. Some see the fact that the United States has been so shattered by the financial crisis, and that its dominant role in the world is shaken, as confirmation the West can be beaten,” Uhrlau said.

Al Qaeda has always placed high value on economic targets. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, razed in the Sept. 11 attacks, were chosen both as an iconic New York landmark and a symbol of U.S. capitalism. It’s a fair bet that the next statement from Osama bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri — perhaps in the  less than two weeks remaining until the U.S. election — will make great play on the current crisis and boast of how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drained the U.S. economy.

But it’s doubtful whether all of this translates into a heightened security threat to America. The official threat level has remained unchanged for more than two years, and the fact is that al Qaeda has failed to land a blow on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.  In the Reuters interview, Uhrlau questioned whether it was capable of staging more attacks on the scale of 9/11. 

For the time being, its sympathisers can only wait, hope — and put forward their own ideas. In another discussion monitored by SITE, one participant suggested a plan for an attack aimed at bankrupting a U.S. bank. Some contributors praised the idea, but one was more sceptical.  “Why bother, their economy is collapsing by itself,” he wrote.

NEW YORK -  When her eight years in the Bush administration end on Jan. 20, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to write a book about U.S. foreign policy.

Asked in a Reuters interview on Friday if it would be a tell-all memoir and reveal secret meetings in the build-up to the Iraq war, Rice replied: “Tell-all? What’s a tell-all?”

The former Stanford University academic said it would look at America post-Sept. 11, 2001, and how those attacks shaped security issues worldwide.

Rice plans to sprint to the finish in her last months as secretary of state, tackling North Korea and Iran’s nuclear programs and trying to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

“There are still quite a few accounts out there that deserve my attention and need my attention and I have to go worry about a couple of them now,” she said, ending the interview.

Posted by Randall Mikkelsen

ORLANDO, Fla - Decades of passing lie detector tests and the most stringent background checks count little when it comes to the U.S. no-fly terrorist watch list, the Pentagon’s former spy chief recalled on Monday.

Retired Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, once the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a top Homeland Security Department intelligence official, said after he entered the private sector in 2005 he was denied boarding on a flight because his name was on the no-fly list.  It has taken him ever since to clear up the confusion.

“It happened three years ago, I just got off the list –  Yay!,” Hughes said at a conference of intelligence analysts.

Security screenings were nothing new to Hughes — he said had passed them going back to the 1960s — but he was stopped short when the watch list flagged an Irish Republican Army member with the same name.

“It’s all about the name. I don’t see anything really subversive about Patrick …. Hughes, but it appears there’s an IRA guy out there who has the same name. Probably equally handsome,” he said.

Hughes’s was one of about 50,000 names on the no-fly list, which has mushroomed since the Sept. 11 attacks, when it contained just 16 people considered threats to aviation.
Also snagged by similar name mix-ups have been Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and 1960s civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis. Such problems show the watchlist is poorly managed, critics say, but authorities call it a useful tool and say they have tightened procedures against such problems.