Review

The US has begun an internal process of reviewing the overall efforts of the War on Terror and the changing nature of al-Queda and the enemy of terrorism:

The Bush Administration has launched a high-level internal review of its efforts to battle international terrorism, aimed at moving away from a policy that has stressed efforts to capture and kill al-Qaeda leaders since the September 11, 2001, attacks and towards what a senior official called a broader "strategy against violent extremism".

The shift is meant to recognise the transformation of al-Qaeda over the past three years into a far more amorphous, diffuse and difficult-to-target organisation than the group that struck the US in 2001.

But critics say the policy review comes only after months of delay and lost opportunities while the Administration left key counter-terrorism jobs unfilled and argued internally over how best to confront the rapid spread of the pro-al-Qaeda global Islamic jihad.

President George Bush's top adviser on terrorism, Frances Fragos Townsend, said in an interview the review is needed to take into account the "ripple effect" from years of operations targeting al-Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, arrested for planning the 2001 terrorist attacks, and his recently detained deputy, Abu Faraj al-Libbi.

"Naturally, the enemy has adapted," she said. "As you capture a Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an Abu Faraj al-Libbi raises up. Nature abhors a vacuum."

I suppose she means this al-Libbi, the one that was recently detained. That third-in-command al-Libbi who was either a determined brutal major leader of the terrorist organization, or little more than its manipulative, girl-crazy dishboy. When this story broke, The AntiCentenarian's own Long-Eared Ronin chimed in, and, undoubtedly, this story has fallen on many deaf ears and was not put into the MSM in any manner.

Townsend's invokation of the version of al-Libbi that is the devlish third-in-command terrorist mastermind is an outright denial of what al-Libbi might actually be. It is also a propaganda technique- it doesn't matter what Townsend herself knows about al-Libbi, so long as her audience (Americans) only know him as this one thing.

Of course, this is not the larger issue of the WoT, and is a more trifling argument about The Administration's use of evidence (or lack of use) for political methods. The fact that the WoT has shifted comes as little surprise. It has been largely ineffective, as evidenced by the unpublished release of the 2004 terrorism indexes. While it has evidently stymied attacks on Americans on American soil, it has simply displaced the fight to at least 2 theatres in the Middle East.