By David Malone

I.          Introduction

II.        Al Qaeda’s New Campaign of Small-Scale Attacks Inside America

III.      The October Surprise of 2010

IV.       A 2012 October Surprise 

V.        Other Attacks

VI.       Conclusion

__________

I.  INTRODUCTION

The informational campaign at BLPlan.org equips the United States with both offensive and defensive miracle weapons to combat Al Qaeda.  In concert with a silver-bullet strategy to destroy Al Qaeda ideologically, a formula explaining Osama bin Laden’s strategic logic empowers America to detect reliably the syndicate’s major attacks in advance.  Anticipating the times and locations of strikes orchestrated by the juggernaut of international terrorism, our well-proven trends analysis reveals actionable intelligence to deter those future plots against America that are authorized by the high command of the Bin Laden syndicate.  Extrapolating from Al Qaeda’s past attacks and current situation, this examination of terrorism patterns discerns the way the leadership will proceed towards its central objective, that of an apocalyptic cult’s Armageddon.  Representing the latest and most influential example of Islamic Messiah pretension, the 9/11 War is designed to mirror millennialist prophecy on the Apocalypse War between the “Great Satan” empire and the awaited Muslim Messiah.  Projecting from the likely continuation of this strategy and Al Qaeda’s high command, our multi-faceted war analysis can prove as reliable as some meteorological forecasts.

U.S. intelligence can employ our predictive formula to provide a defensive shield for the United States that enhances the security derived from existing counterterrorism measures.  By helping to concentrate America's limited resources on less than a dozen potential targets during narrow time frames, this innovative counterterrorism tool can help to deploy cost-feasible security measures that block or otherwise defuse most major Al Qaeda operations targeting the United States.  In addition to utilizing the trends analysis from Binladensplan.com, enhancements to U.S. intelligence should:

1. Loosen its restrictions,
   
   
2. Sharpen its accountability,
   
   
3. Cultivate new human sources generated by the proposal at Binladensplan.com to discredit Al Qaeda’s high command as a villainous apocalyptic cult, and
   
   
4. Institutionalize a short-term willingness to accept inevitable failures without launching overly aggressive reprisals that fulfill Al Qaeda’s desire to vilify and bankrupt America. 

More than any other improvement in U.S. intelligence, however, foreknowledge about the timing and location of Al Qaeda’s large-scale attacks on America can best bolster the nation’s defensive capabilities.  In July of 2008, campaign director David Malone demonstrated on national headline news the validity of our trends analysis during a press conference.  Claiming to have predicted the 9/11 attack, Malone then revealed actionable intelligence about Al Qaeda’s plot for the most spectacular terrorist catastrophes since the fateful year of 2001.  Malone’s warning was precisely validated in the following months by the execution of “Pakistan’s 9/11” and “India’s 9/11”, two conspiracies to target Americans in top cities of the Muslim world that were both originally scheduled to occur during the weeks before the 2008 U.S. presidential election.  As the American homeland now faces the first serious prospect of the next 9/11 in 2012, the terrorism-patterns model from Binladensplan.com can deliver to U.S. intelligence agencies the critical information necessary to foil the plot.

Our analysis anticipates that Al Qaeda will continue trying to launch the most provocative post-9/11 attacks on America in order to (1) coincide with key time frames identified by ancient apocalyptic literature, and (2) sway U.S. national elections in favor of war hawks.  Through these plots Al Qaeda will pursue the correlated objectives of vivifying apocalyptic mythology and provoking an intensification of U.S. military aggression within the Muslim world, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Iran.  Opening a preliminary front for this terrorist campaign in late 2009, the syndicate deceptively unleashed its first post-9/11 attacks inside America with a whimper of small-scale strikes.  Having maneuvered American intelligence into a defensive misfooting, Al Qaeda will aim to culminate this treacherous new campaign by abandoning the minor acts of terrorism in favor of a 9/11-scale catastrophe targeting New York on December 21, 2012.

II.  AL QAEDA’S NEW CAMPAIGN OF SMALL-SCALE ATTACKS INSIDE AMERICA

A.  THE ATTACKS TO DATE

The first clear signs of an impending 9/11 sequel inside the United States appeared in the days following the attack’s anniversary on September 11, 2009.  In a highly publicized yet thwarted back-pack bombing targeting New York City subways, an Al Qaeda operative was arrested on his way to execute the first known substantive plot by the syndicate’s leadership to strike the U.S. homeland since 9/11 [1]. 

Intelligence analysts had long warned though that Al Qaeda intended to continue to attack the US on its own soil. "The surprising thing is Zazi (the accused plotter) is the first," the official said, calling Zazi's contacts with core Al Qaeda leaders "at most one step removed." [2]

Intelligence officials characterized the scheme as “the most serious threat inside the United States” since 9/11 [3].  Mirroring Al Qaeda’s “Millennium Bomb Plots” that preceded the 9/11 attack (originally scheduled for October 2000 [4]), the defused bombing in 2009 appeared to signal the inception of one of Al Qaeda’s trademark “preamble” campaigns.  Characterized by small-scale attacks against an individual country, such a series of relatively minor terrorist incidents often augers a catastrophic strike by Al Qaeda targeting that nation’s homeland approximately one year later. 

In November of 2009, this small-scale campaign against America seems to have continued with the concurrent timing of:

A)    A Message:  A rare Bin Laden message, only weeks after another Bin Laden communique (coinciding with the New York bombing attempt) in which he warned America that President Obama was continuing the Bush Administration’s military aggression in the Muslim world [5],

B)     An Anniversary:  The expiration of one-year’s grace period of international good will towards the United States for having formally rejected the Bush doctrine in the 2008 election, and

C)    An Attack:  A solo commando raid by an Al Qaeda enthusiast that killed thirteen people on America’s largest military base. 

The attack on Fort Hood in Texas was executed by an officer in the U.S. army who was recruited by the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Anwar al-Awlaki.  This key figure was in turn linked to the earlier New York subway bombing scheme and the syndicate’s Christmas-airliner bomb plot that occurred one month later, as well as the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center [6].  With Al-Awlaki’s encouragement, the Texas-base shooter appears to have followed the footsteps of Al Qaeda’s most famous double agent, Ali Mohammed, as another Al Qaeda mole inside the U.S. army.  Representing the only terrorist to have executed a successful attack during the syndicate’s new campaign in the U.S. homeland, the Fort Hood mole provided significant support for the high command’s strategy.  Although Al Qaeda has yet to claim formal responsibility (not uncharacteristically), the Fort Hood massacre appears to have marked the first successful post-9/11 strike by the high command. 

Less than two months later during the 2009 holiday season, a thwarted plot actually succeeded in heightening American fears of terrorism more than these two preceding schemes due to its:

1. Nearly successful slaughter of over two hundred civilians,
   
   
2. High-value target, a commercial airliner inside the United States on Christmas Day, and
   
   
3. More explicit links to Al Qaeda. 
   

Employing an established Al Qaeda operative with ties to the syndicate’s latest “superstar” affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP, based in Yemen), the attempted detonation of explosives adjacent to a jet fuel tank occurred days after the same group had issued a threat about an imminent bomb attack inside America [7].  In the days and weeks following the botched bombing, AQAP and Osama bin Laden formally claimed responsibility for the plot [8]. 

Careful consideration of the Christmas bomb plot reveals that the orchestrators may not have actually intended to destroy the airplane or kill any passengers.  Rather than using novel tactics that would maximize the chance of operational success for Al Qaeda's first overt strike inside America since 9/11, this plot involved tactics virtually identical to the only other attempted post-9/11 homeland attack by an Al Qaeda-linked individual [9].  Just like the infamous shoe-bomber Richard Reid, the 2009 plot involved:

• a known Al Qaeda associate
• who had been radicalized in Britain and
• was flying during the Christmas holidays
• on a one-way ticket
• from Europe
• for which he had paid cash and
• checked no luggage. 

Furthermore, the bombing "attempt":

• employed the same type of explosive chemical and
• ostensibly pursued the same goal of blowing up a commercial airliner in flight
• with a bomb located on the terrorist’s body. 

Only after this “Richard-Reid duplicate” miraculously passed through security undetected and successfully ignited the explosive did the plot fail because the bomb was faulty.  The only significant difference between the “Shoe Bomber” and the ”Underpants Bomber” seems to be that the recent one was authorized by Al Qaeda’s leadership.  The improbability of success in this convoluted scheme suggests that the “Underpants Bomber” may not have been intended to constitute Al Qaeda’s long-awaited premier of post-9/11 terrorism within the U.S. homeland.  More likely, this Christmas plot constituted another attempt to heighten American fears about Al Qaeda with terrorism rumors. 

Along with these homeland schemes, Bin Laden’s syndicate concurrently launched major operations around the world that impacted the mindset of U.S. voters. Collectively constituting one of Al Qaeda’s greatest surges, at this time the terrorist network actually attacked all of the homelands of its foremost enemies, America, Israel, Russia and India [10].  These strikes included Al Qaeda’s first open attack on Israel, a twin Moscow subway bombing that marked Russia's worst terrorist incident in six years, and the first major terrorist strike inside India since the Mumbai Massacre [11].  As a critical adjunct to this campaign, the syndicate’s leadership perpetrated one additional assault on the U.S. military command in Afghanistan.  Unlike terrorist attacks, most insurgent attacks within the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq typically do not heighten fears of terrorism within the United States.  However, the bombing of a CIA headquarters on December 30th magnified the contemporaneous Al Qaeda terrorist operations, raising American concerns about Al Qaeda’s global resurgence.  Hailed as the terrorist network’s greatest insurgent attack of the 9/11 War, a suicide bombing by an Al Qaeda double agent killed a group of the CIA’s most experienced counterterrorism analysts [12].  While undoubtedly benefiting the Al Qaeda-Taliban military campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan, this insurgent strike also frightened Americans about the syndicate’s mounting ability to strike critical U.S. targets at will. 

Targeting New York City commuters, the largest American military base, a U.S. airliner, America’s top allies, and a group of the CIA’s prized intelligence analysts, multiple Al Qaeda-linked conspiracies inside the United States and abroad during late 2009 represented the forerunners of “October Surprise” plots scheduled for the weeks before the 2010 and 2012 U.S. national elections.

             B.  AL QAEDA’S STRATEGY

The renewal of Al Qaeda attacks inside the United States in late 2009 provided new insight into the high command’s strategy.  The use of small-scale strikes in this campaign seems to refute an often regurgitated theory that the high command had chosen to refrain from any minor acts of terrorism within the homeland in order to outshine 9/11 spectacularly with its latest feat.  Similarly, this incipient campaign disproves the theory that Al Qaeda has been thwarted by vaunted U.S. security measures, which actually have not appreciably changed since the Obama Administration took power (as revealed by the official investigation into the Christmas bombing plot) [13].  Additionally, these terrorist operations rebut any contention that the Al Qaeda syndicate was too weak to attack inside America, especially considering that Osama bin Laden’s network:

• Had launched an unprecedented global terrorist campaign from 2002 through 2012, and
  
• Was classified “as strong as ever” by the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate six years after 9/11. 

Al Qaeda’s willful cessation of post-9/11 attacks inside America during the Bush presidency was verified by the syndicate’s operational commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who secretly canceled a planned chemical weapons attack on New York City subways soon after the Iraq invasion in 2003 [14].  By all accounts, Zawahiri had once again wielded the power to kill hundreds or even thousands of people inside New York at a time when anti-American sentiment was peaking, and yet he ordered the U.S.-based cell to abort the operation.  When the world’s most popular American president assumed office six years later, however, the Al Qaeda high command ordered a lone operative to execute a relatively minor bombing plot against the same New York City subways.  Despite the deficiencies of U.S. homeland security throughout the eight years since 9/11, the powerful Al Qaeda syndicate waited until the ascendancy of President Obama before hitting this notoriously vulnerable country with small-scale strikes. 

Al Qaeda’s renewal of attacks against the homeland in 2009 appears to confirm the theory that the high command had issued a standing order for its operatives and affiliates to refrain from attacking America during the Bush Administration.  Although Bin Laden and his lieutenants have publicly encouraged unaffiliated individuals to launch attacks on American interests since 1996, the high command avoided directing post-9/11 strikes on the U.S. homeland until the Obama administration assumed power.  By recruiting terrorist groups to join its umbrella network before attacking the homeland and then refusing to authorize any such proposals, the syndicate’s leadership limited post-9/11 terrorist operations inside America to a trickle of small-scale plots by unaffiliated individuals (such as the 2002 murder sprees involving the “DC Sniper” and the “LAX Shooter”).  Employing standard insurgency doctrine that emphasizes the battle for hearts and minds, Bin Laden’s inner circle seems to have refrained from its most provocative terrorist attacks on the superpower in order to

1. Facilitate the transfer of guilt to America for the war's escalation

2. Solidify Al Qaeda's image as a defensive insurgency
   
   
3. Deceive American voters about the efficacy of the Bush Administration’s militant response to 9/11

Bin Laden’s strategic decision to ignore the most influential venue for terrorist offenses has proven particularly effective in light of the Bush Administration’s globally despised belligerency.  Graced with the unwitting support of an American war hawk, Al Qaeda’s duplicitous restraint has helped recast America and not Al Qaeda as the reckless world-war provocateur behind the 9/11 War.

The new phase of Al Qaeda’s war begun in 2009 marks a concerted effort to recapture the ideological momentum that the syndicate enjoyed during the Bush presidency.  In pursuit of this overarching goal, these latest plots aim to discredit the Obama Administration’s national defense record, create security fatigue over small-scale attacks, and instill complacency about Al Qaeda’s current putative inability to execute a 9/11-style cataclysm.  Aspiring to pave the way towards election-rigging October Surprises in 2010 and 2012, these operations also served as a standard Al Qaeda preamble to a catastrophic strike.  Similar introductory terrorist campaigns launched by Al Qaeda in the past include its bombings

• Of U.S. targets in the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, along with the “Millennium Bomb Plots”, that preceded the 9/11 attack
  
• Of Spanish targets (in Casablanca) and British targets (in Turkey) during 2003 that preceded the opening of the syndicate’s European front with its first large-scale strikes on the capitals of the two European powers. 

In much the same way, Al Qaeda’s prelude campaign in 2009-2010 helped to portray the syndicate as a righteous defensive insurgency by providing requisite “due warning” to Americans of an imminent terrorist catastrophe in the homeland.  Through less provocative strikes or highly publicized thwarted plots, Al Qaeda appears to offer America the opportunity to repent for its “criminal” foreign policy before Bin Laden delivers “righteous” justice.  Furthermore, these widely circulated Al Qaeda warnings about an imminent offensive will convincingly bestow credit upon the syndicate for the planned terrorist catastrophe, helping to cement its image as the leading opposition to America.  In the context of President Obama’s refocusing of the U.S. military on the Al Qaeda leadership, including the increase in targeted assassinations by Predator drone aircraft inside Pakistan [15], the syndicate’s mounting campaign inside the homeland will appear to many as a justifiable retaliation by the superpower’s greatest nemesis.  By employing such ruses, Al Qaeda paved the way to sabotage president Obama’s reelection bid in 2012 while also obscuring the syndicate’s drive to provoke an expansion of the U.S. war in the Muslim world.

Beyond simply duping America into playing the role of "the Great Satan empire" who battles the Mahdi, Bin Laden's nefarious strategy requires that he also dupe the world into perceiving his war effort as a righteous action designed to protect the Muslim world from the "real" aggressor. Although large-scale U.S. military aggression throughout the Muslim world advances this vision, Al Qaeda's attacks must appear to be just as defensive as America appears offensive.  Accordingly, the syndicate's leadership has designed virtually all of the its major terrorist strikes to demonstrate a pattern of gradually increasing provocation characteristic of a defensive insurgency.  By starting Bin Laden's war with attacks against the "infidel occupiers" inside Islamist war zones, and only later attacking the "infidel" homes after U.S. military aggression expanded further, this purposefully designed war narrative has portrayed  the United States coalition as the "Great Satan" provocateur of the war that spreads worldwide, and Al Qaeda as the just defender of Muslims from unyielding "infidel" aggression. This model for a time-scaled provocation represents a crucial part of Bin Laden's strategy to mask the apocalyptic cult that is Al Qaeda's leadership as a righteous defensive insurgency in order to dupe a mass movement into facilitating its agenda.

Since starting the 9/11 War, Al Qaeda's terrorist campaign against America has followed this "scaled-catastrophe" strategy without deviation. 

1. The first phase (2001-2002) of this new war began with major terrorist strikes least likely to incite America, involving operations smaller than 9/11 that marked targets of minor value to Americans.  These plots targeted allies already fighting Islamist insurgencies, including Russia (in Chechnya), Australia (in Indonesia) and France (in Algeria) and Israel. Most importantly, these plots did not target American civilians. 
   
   
2. Once this opening phase of the 9/11 War ended with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bin Laden's syndicate began the next phase (2003-2005) distinguished by attacks more apt to arouse American military reprisals.  Beginning in the month after the Iraq invasion, a full eighteen months following 9/11, Al Qaeda resumed major terrorist attacks against U.S. targets.  These operations hit U.S. civilian targets inside the Muslim world, in Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Jordan.  In addition, this new phase of the war included attacks against U.S. allies like Spain and Britain that had only entered the Western wars against Radical Islam after 9/11.  The expansion of Bin Laden's terrorism to Western Europe in 2004 and 2005 represented his greatest provocation of the U.S. coalition since beginning the war. 
   
   
3. Only after Americans endorsed the Iraq invasion by reelecting George Bush did Al Qaeda initiate the third phase (2006-2008) of its war, the era of 9/11's on U.S. targets abroad.  After failing in a plot to down U.S.-bound airliners in 2006, Al Qaeda returned during the weeks before the next U.S. national election to launch its greatest ever surge of terrorism against the United States abroad, targeting American civilians in Turkey, Yemen, Pakistan and India. 
   
   
4. The escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by President Obama has coincided with the onset of the the fourth phase (2009-2012) in Al Qaeda's strategy for gradually escalating campaign against America, the resumption of homeland operations. 

By proceeding with small attacks inside the U.S. homeland in prelude to a 9/11 sequel, Al Qaeda's high command aspires to climax its nine-year, four phase terrorist war against America.

2001-2002: No attacks on U.S. targets

2003-2005: Limited attacks on U.S. targets in the Muslim world

2006-2008: 9/11-scale operations targeting America abroad

2009-2012: Strikes targeting the U.S. homeland

The scaled provocation evident in Bin Laden's post-9/11 strategy echoes his pre-9/11 strategy for attacks against America, which proceeded from U.S. military targets in Saudi Arabia to U.S. diplomatic outposts in the greater Muslim world to small-scale Millennium Bomb Plots inside America to 9/11.  Similarly, Al Qaeda replicated this pattern against U.S. allies, targeting Israel (2002-2008), Spain (2003 Casablanca), Britain (2003 Istanbul) inside the Muslim world before moving to attack the homelands of Israel (2009-), Spain (2004) and Britain (2005). 

The pattern of gradually escalating terrorism displayed by Al Qaeda since declaring war on America in 1996 explains three of the most vexing questions of the 9/11 War:

1. Does the Al Qaeda syndicate exist, or is it a loose network with no strategic guidance?
   
   
2. Why did Al Qaeda not attack the vulnerable American homeland for eight years after 9/11?
   
   
3. Why did Al Qaeda promptly resume attacking the U.S. homeland when the war hawk George Bush was replaced by the peace dove Barack Obama?

The trend of scaled provocation in Al Qaeda attacks suggests that (1) its high command has remained in tact directing this overarching strategy, ignoring small attacks and the details of day-to-day operations by affiliates while requiring command approval for large-scale terrorist strikes, particularly those against US targets. Furthermore, this trend supports the contention that (2) Al Qaeda chose not to attack the vulnerable U.S. homeland for the eight years following 9/11 in order to shift war blame to the Bush Administration, and (3) Al Qaeda resumed attacking the U.S. homeland after President Obama took office in order to empower war hawks in American foreign policy to expand the 9/11 War.  In this devious manner, Al Qaeda endeavors to convince the world that America is in fact to blame for the 9/11 War.

Through these machinations, Al Qaeda can proceed under the guise of an anti-imperialist insurgency to pursue its true goal, the incitement of a nuclear war designed to fulfill biblical prophecies from the Book of Revelation about the Apocalypse War predicted to kill two-thirds of the human population.  By engineering this conflict while concealing its own monstrous motives from the Muslim world, Bin Laden’s apocalyptic cult seeks ultimately to usurp the superpower's global authority and achieve world domination through nuclear terrorism.  This villainous strategy depends on two of Al Qaeda's most valuable assets, Bin Laden's growing reputation as the awaited Muslim Messiah of the Apocalypse, as well as his stateless army's invulnerability to nuclear counterattack.  Additionally, Bin Laden’s megalomaniacal plan requires that America respond to his attacks by creating wars in the locations for the battlefields of the mythological Apocalypse War during time frames consistent with these ancient prophecies.  By goading the superpower into depicting itself as the Muslim Messiah’s enemy, the Great Satan, Al Qaeda can best dupe Muslims into supporting Bin Laden’s bid to ignite a global nuclear conflict. 

Of course, centralized direction is the linchpin of an effective insurgency strategy, particularly one as diverse and potentially divisive as Bin Laden’s anti-American movement.  The actions of Al Qaeda's leadership have persuaded many leading counterterrorism officials that it has retained command and control capability over the branches of its syndicate [16].  Undeniably, Bin Laden’s inner circle has demonstrated that it can communicate with the entire global community at will.  Given this capability, the shadow network’s top leaders probably instruct its affiliates, either via internet or the constant flow of operatives throughout the Muslim world.  Al Qaeda agents captured in transit with strategic instructions for affiliates, such as a February 2010 case involving orders intended for the Yemeni branch [17], have demonstrated that Al Qaeda Prime continues to direct the syndicate from its base in Northwestern Pakistan.  Certainly, strategic guidance would be a vital necessity for a group preoccupied with maintaining its ideological appeal and launching major terrorist attacks in a location, time and manner most conducive to this pursuit of hearts and minds.  It would be a disaster for the Al Qaeda high command if a misguided branch launched

• A radiological or contagious biological strike that created a regional calamity in the Muslim world
  
• A major bombing of a Saudi oil facility that wiped out the wealth of crucial Al Qaeda supporters
  
• A poorly timed attack that disrupted the leadership’s plans to manipulate a population’s psyche on the eve of an election.

Nevertheless, some counterterrorism officials claim that the high command has lost command and control over major terrorist operations.  Correctly observing that certain aspects of the syndicate, like funding and recruitment, have become decentralized since 9/11, these officials tenuously extrapolate that Al Qaeda has lost strategic cohesion either due to communication difficulties or because loyal affiliates disregard critical guidance from the leadership.  This contention is not supported by the group's known communications and investigations into each of its major terrorist attacks since 9/11, all of which appear to conform to a unified strategy that foreshadows future offensives.  It is more likely than not a few officials are waging a wartime propaganda offensive through such spurious arguments in a bid to diminish the public stature of Al Qaeda by claiming its leadership is marginalized.  Unfortunately, the spread of this misinformation has dimmed the public's awareness of the Al Qaeda threat and helped instill a complacency about the possibility of the next 9/11.  Such public ignorance serves Al Qaeda's purposes by diminishing the commitment of the American people to the war effort and obscuring from them the futility of a hawkish military response to the danger posed by Bin Laden’s syndicate.  On the other hand, as recognized by national leaders such as former CIA Director Michael Hayden, public acknowledgement of Al Qaeda’s command and control capability serves the national interest in fostering understanding of the terrorist syndicate, anticipating its next move and counteracting Bin Laden’s war plan.

In early 2010, top U.S. intelligence officials announced that Al Qaeda would definitely attempt more small-scale attacks inside America during the next six months [18].  This terrorism alert represented one of the most serious warnings about Al Qaeda’s threat to the homeland issued by administration leaders since 9/11.  The trends analysis from BLPlan.org precisely corroborates this warning and elaborates on its rationale.  Operating from its base in Northwestern Pakistan, Al Qaeda’s leadership will continue to authorize relatively minor terrorist strikes along with seemingly serious plots to attack the American homeland.  In February of 2010, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula advanced this agenda with public warnings of a planned sequel to its Christmas Day bombing attempt inside the United States [19].  Despite the menacing appearance of these schemes, our terrorism-patterns model projected that Al Qaeda would not launch a major surge against America until the October Surprise time frame. 

Unlike the eventual 9/11 sequel, the small-scale preliminaries pose a more difficult challenge for the U.S. counterterrorism community because their timing and locations are less certain.  However, two characteristics of this introductory terrorist campaign in the U.S. homeland feature prominently. 

1. Military and Economic Targets: 
   
   The series of known foiled terrorist plots in 2009 have predominantly focused on military and economic targets [20], and the only actual attack of the campaign to date (Fort Hood) occurred on America’s largest army base.

2. Image Insecurity: 
   
   The emphasis on military and economic targets conforms to the obsessive commitment that Bin Laden’s syndicate has demonstrated to framing its slaughter of American civilians as “legitimate” by attacking symbols of U.S. belligerence and financial domination[21].

Based on these two patterns, the genuine attacks inside America launched by Al Qaeda focused on the most “legitimate” targets, military or economic symbols.  By assaulting the home bases that fuel U.S. armed aggression in the Muslim world, this campaign has aimed to validate Al Qaeda’s war as a defensive action and refute well-founded contentions that it is a genocidal apocalyptic cult.  Rather than broadly striking the range of civilian targets inside America, the high command confined its most important battle front to less provocative acts of terrorism that facilitate Bin Laden’s claim to a righteous war. 

Many of the operatives used throughout the one-year period of this October Surprise campaign had established memberships in the syndicate’s leading affiliates within the countries where Al Qaeda is trying to goad America into invading, Pakistan, Yemen and Iran.  Outside of the United States, the high command coupled these strikes on the homeland with mounting attacks on U.S. targets in the Muslim world, similar to its greatest post-9/11 surge against America launched during the weeks before the 2008 election.  Without effective counterterrorism measures, these relatively unprovocative terrorist incidents in 2010 will continue to escalate to an the election-eve cataclysm.

The ongoing terrorist campaign inside America represents a continuation of a coherent Al Qaeda strategy that can be understood and counteracted.  In addition to his detailed warnings issued on the website BLPlan.org in 2009, David Malone publicized three elements of his trends analysis that anticipated the present campaign of small-scale attacks inside America via his 2005 book Bin Laden’s Plan (Trafford Publishing, available as a free e-book). 

• In Chapters 4, 5, 10 and 11, Malone identified October Surprises designed to rig U.S. national elections as the central tactic in Al Qaeda’s “crusader-baiting” strategy for inciting American belligerency in the Muslim world. 
  
  
• In Chapter 8, Malone proposed that after 9/11 Al Qaeda ceased attacking the U.S. homeland during the Bush years in order to transfer war guilt to America and deceive U.S. voters about the efficacy of the hawkish Bush Doctrine. 
  
  
• In Chapter 9, Malone examined Al Qaeda’s habit of launching preliminary campaigns of less provocative terrorist attacks prior to its 9/11-scale attacks as part of an effort to portray the syndicate as the leader of a righteous defensive insurgency against Western imperialism.  Depicting itself as a just instrument of divine punishment, Al Qaeda had carefully provided due warning to individual countries about impending retribution for their transgressions well in advance of the most horrific terrorist strikes. 
  

Beginning in late 2009, the new Al Qaeda operations inside America validated these three observations by Malone, including the syndicate’s two prized tactics of October Surprises and “preamble” attacks, as well as its intentional cessation of post-9/11 strikes in the homeland during the Bush presidency.  When the international euphoria over President Barack Obama’s election faded amidst a tsunami of seemingly insurmountable political challenges, the opportunity opened for Al Qaeda to capitalize on rising anti-American sentiment by commencing the next stage of its war against America.  Through a campaign of mounting attacks inside the homeland designed to discredit the Obama administration’s Al Qaeda policy, Bin Laden’s syndicate  conspired to rig the national elections of 2010 and 2012 in favor of war hawks who would complete the transfer of war guilt to America begun unwittingly by the Bush Administration. 

III.  THE OCTOBER SURPRISE OF 2010

A.  AN OVERRIDING TREND

As examined in Malone’s book Bin Laden’s Plan (Trafford, 2005, available as a free e-book), the strategy governing Al Qaeda’s war against America revolves around the tactic of biennial October Surprises.  In the pivotal weeks before every U.S. national election since 2000, Al Qaeda has reliably launched a surge of terrorist operations designed (with varying degrees of success) to rig the outcomes in favor of U.S. war hawks by placing the issues of terrorism and national security foremost on the minds of voters. 

• October 2000:  During the final weeks before one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, Al Qaeda’s high command attempted to launch the 9/11 attack.  When the unprepared plotters balked, Al Qaeda launched the USS COLE bombing off the Yemeni coast of the Arabian Peninsula and nearly sunk the naval destroyer, the largest escalation of Bin Laden’s war on America to date.

• October 2002:  While the American people continued to experience the shock of the 9/11 attack one year later, the Al Qaeda syndicate rekindled these fears by launching the first catastrophic terrorist attacks of the post-9/11 age.  Targeting some of the most powerful U.S. allies in the war against Al Qaeda, the syndicate executed multiple major operations against Australia, Russia and France during the pivotal weeks in October before America’s mid-term elections.  These incidents included the Bali bombing, the Moscow theatre siege and the partially thwarted bombing of a French oil tanker off the Yemeni coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

• September-October 2004:  As America entered the final decisive weeks before the presidential election preoccupied by the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq, Al Qaeda refocused voters’ attention on the syndicate’s ongoing threat to the United States by launching the largest and most horrifying post-9/11 terrorist attack to date.  The Beslan school massacre in Russia slaughtered hundreds of children in a heavily armed assault that targeted America’s most powerful (albeit uneasy) ally in the war against Bin Laden’s network.  During the following weeks, Al Qaeda disseminated intelligence that prompted a national terrorism alert in the U.S. homeland for another group of the syndicate’s Chechen terrorists who had purportedly infiltrated America to launch more attacks targeting children at schools.  Soon after, Al Qaeda executed a major terrorist attack (only its third targeting America abroad since 9/11) against a U.S. hotel in Egypt popular with Israeli tourists, targeting America along with its top two allies in the Middle East.  This bombing had followed another Al Qaeda attack on America and Israel in July of 2004, a twin bombing of their embassies in Uzbekistan.  Within a four-month time frame, Al Qaeda had launched two of its three post-9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. targets to date.  Following this surge in Al Qaeda terrorism, the leadership issued a shocking Bin Laden video less than four days before the 2004 presidential election.  In his first known recording since 2001, Bin Laden:

o        Finally claimed credit for ordering the 9/11 attack,

o        Harshly criticized the sitting wartime president George Bush, and

o        Promised more 9/11’s if voters did not change U.S. foreign policy. 

Through his most influential video ever, America’s nemesis implicitly endorsed Bush’s Democratic challenger in the country’s first post-9/11 presidential election, a psychological operation that provided Bush with what CIA analysts unanimously characterized as intentional support swinging the close vote in favor of the incumbent wartime president.

• September 2006:  When America’s attention had once again wandered back to Iraq and the brewing civil war there, Al Qaeda again intervened with a high-publicity plot for a 9/11 sequel that attempted to reframe the imminent mid-term election as another referendum on the Al Qaeda threat to America.  Scheduled for the 9/11 anniversary, this operation was aborted before the British-Pakistani operatives could execute their attempt to destroy seven U.S. airliners over the Atlantic Ocean with liquid explosives.

• September-October 2008:  In the final weeks before the historic 2008 presidential election, the American electorate was preoccupied with unprecedented blunders in the Bush Administration’s foreign and economic policies.  While George Bush’s Republican successor faced damning criticism over the prospect of continuing these Bush policies, Al Qaeda predictably attempted to intervene and rig the election in favor of the beleaguered John McCain.  Launching its greatest surge of terrorist attacks against America since 9/11 during the deciding weeks of the election campaign, the Al Qaeda syndicate executed major strikes on the U.S. embassy in Yemen (its most spectacular attack ever in the Arabian Peninsula) and the premier American hotel in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad (popularly described as “Pakistan’s 9/11”).  At the very start of October, Al Qaeda attempted to climax this campaign with an operation to target American congregations inside India’s New York City, demolish the city’s two premier hotel towers and kill five thousand people.  Representing a plot for the largest terrorist attack in world history, the Mumbai Massacre by Al Qaeda’s leading Pakistani affiliate was thankfully postponed when the scheme was uncovered by the CIA and Indian investigators.  In the weeks after the U.S. election when security at the targets was downgraded, the plotters finally launched the attack.  Targeting Americans celebrating Thanksgiving, the Al Qaeda syndicate killed 166 civilians in the most spectacular terrorist strike since 9/11 (popularly described as “India’s 9/11”).  Persuasive evidence indicating the involvement of Bin Laden’s inner circle in this plot was confirmed with the March 2010 indictment of David Headley, an American Al Qaeda operative who served as a scout for the Mumbai operation [22].  Through a scheme that involved Pakistan’s 9/11, India’s 9/11 and its most stunning attack on a U.S. embassy, Al Qaeda implemented a concerted effort to sabotage Barack Obama’s election.

Since the start of the 9/11 War, Al Qaeda seems to have only gradually focused on American targets in its terrorist operations, which now regularly feature U.S. victims.  Nevertheless, America’s archenemy has consistently demonstrated a penchant for launching election-rigging October Surprises characterized by surges of terrorism in the weeks before U.S. national elections.  After failing to help elect George Bush’s hawkish Republican successor in 2008 and then witnessing the partial restoration of international goodwill towards America during the relatively dovish Obama presidency, Bin Laden’s syndicate committed itself to successful October Surprise operations in 2010 and 2012.  The 2009 inception of a preamble terrorist campaign within the United States pointed ominously towards the timing, location and nature of the syndicate’s latest scheme to rig a U.S. national election.

            B.  PROJECTION

During the seven weeks before the 2010 U.S. national elections, Al Qaeda  attempted to launch its greatest post-9/11 terrorist surge to date -- the failed U.S. air cargo plot to blow up two aircraft over New York City.  Based on its election-rigging strategy, Al Qaeda had to abide by this strict time frame, since an attack either too late or too early in the U.S. election cycle would not have the same psychological impact on voters in the voting booth as such an attack would if it shocked America during the final decisive weeks before the vote.  Harkening to 9/11, this operation targeted the clearest examples of America’s “imperial” leadership, the national symbols of American finance in New York City.  Furthermore, by trying to attack this city that was already established as a “war zone” in the 9/11 conflict, Al Qaeda appeared to have provided the due warning to the victims of the strike that is essential for its fighters’ portrayal as honorable “holy warriors”.  Echoing its 2008 plot, the targets abroad for the 2012 election-eve campaign were confined to premier U.S. symbols inside the capital cities of the top geopolitical hotspots in the Muslim world, including Yemen, Egypt and Libya.   

In designing Al Qaeda’s preeminent terrorist plot for the end of 2012, the masterminds will focus on both sites and methods that best define Bin Laden’s syndicate as a righteous defensive insurgency and not a nihilistic group of mass murderers.  However, Al Qaeda’s overarching drive to provoke another U.S. invasion of a sovereign Muslim nation also requires that the terrorist strike be violent enough to incite America to expand the 9/11 war.  At this point in the war, Al Qaeda’s desire to kill enough without killing too many will lead the leadership to authorize a 9/11-scale attack that does not involve nuclear weapons.  Given the Bush Administration’s use of radiological depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “defensive” precedent does exist for radiological attacks on leadership targets in America that force large-scale evacuations of civilian populations.  Such terrorism could employ  a “dirty” nuclear bomb detonated over New York City. 

In March of 2010, indications of this looming plot emerged with the violent arrest of a former New Jersey nuclear plant employee who has established ties to the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [23].  Also at this time, the British government reported compelling signs that Al Qaeda was actively engaged in a dirty bomb plot, which revealed the intent, recruitment capabilities, access to radiological material and bomb-making expertise necessary to succeed [24].  Along with well-documented attempts by Bin Laden’s syndicate to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, persuasive evidence of this intent emerged in 2007 when Al Qaeda used chemical weapons inside Iraq in a campaign of chlorine-bomb attacks.  As far back as 1993, Al Qaeda displayed its willingness to attack the U.S. homeland with chemical weapons when Al Qaeda agent Ramzi Yousef detonated a failed cyanide bomb as part of the syndicate’s first attempt to destroy the Twin Towers [25].  

Much like 9/11, this momentous attack in 2012 will be designed both to provoke an expansion of the U.S. wars in the Muslim world and to portray Al Qaeda as the leading opposition to these wars.  As a prelude to this operation, the syndicate’s October Surprise of 2010 aimed to manipulate U.S. voters into:

1. Empowering the war hawks in Congress by increasing their numbers and supporters,
   
   
2. Depriving Obama of congressional support for dovish foreign policies that would diminish hostility towards America, and
   
   
3. Propelling a political shift back towards the neo-conservatives that helps to sabotage President Obama’s chances of reelection in 2012. 

Attempting to replicate the success of its most effective election-eve intervention in October of 2004, Al Qaeda again stoked terrorism fears during 2010 in order to provide Republican war hawks with their most potent political “trump card”, national security [26].  In the context of rising anti-Obama sentiment stemming from the continued economic impact of the September 2008 U.S. financial meltdown, this Al Qaeda attack had a multiplier effect on the election’s outcome that energized the American conservative movement. 

In addition to the timing, locations and methods of the next 9/11, the individuals involved in the operation can be discerned from Al Qaeda’s crusader-baiting strategy.  Examined in Malone’s book Bin Laden’s Plan, this nefarious scheme aims to provoke American belligerency by helping elect U.S. war hawks.  The syndicate’s overarching bid to discredit the dovish Obama presidency, particularly its purported leniency towards Guantanamo Bay inmates [27], prompted the terrorist leadership to use former detainees from this infamous prison in the October-Surprise operations of 2010 and 2012.  Previously, Al Qaeda employed former Guantanamo prisoners released to Yemen in its 2009 Christmas-airliner plot [28].  Most importantly, the syndicate’s leadership aimed to utilize future October Surprises to continue provoking U.S. invasions of key Muslim countries.  Accordingly, the plots were ostensibly connected to Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and/or Yemen, echoing

• The 2006 airliners plots and the above mentioned 2009 plots
  
• The syndicate’s latest major attacks on Americans abroad conducted in 2008, including the Mumbai Massacre (the most spectacular terrorist attack since 9/11) and the commando raid on the U.S. embassy in Yemen (the first large-scale attack on a U.S. embassy since the 1998 twin bombings in Africa)
  
• A thwarted operation in late 2009 to bomb Saudi Arabia’s major oil installations orchestrated by a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who currently helps lead Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) [29]
  
• The ongoing threats of 9/11-style kamikaze attacks on Western cities using Indian flights hijacked by the Pakistani affiliate Lashkar-e-Taiba (executioners of the Mumbai Massacre) [30]. 

Similarly, Al Qaeda’s desire to prompt a U.S.-backed invasion of Iran might persuade the leadership to include established Al Qaeda agents residing in Iran as part of upcoming plots.  Such false implication of Iranian complicity would resemble the syndicate’s use of Iranian-based operatives in the syndicate’s first post-9/11 terrorist attack on America, the bombing of an American defense contractor's building in Saudi Arabia in the month after Al Qaeda had successfully provoked Bush to invade Iraq.  As Al Qaeda prepares to incite the next U.S. invasion in the Muslim world, operatives from Pakistan, Yemen and Iran will likely figure prominently in the campaign.

Great symbolic significance underlies the inclusion of these three Islamic countries on Al Qaeda’s “crusader-baiting” hit-list.  Perhaps most centrally, Northwestern Pakistan, the Arabian Peninsula and Eastern Iran, along with Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel, represent the key battlefields of the mythological Apocalypse War that Bin Laden’s apocalyptic cult is trying to recreate.  Furthermore, each of the three targeted Muslim nations holds powerful geopolitical significance.  As heartlands of international Islamic terrorism and one of the world’s most precipitous nuclear standoffs, both the sole Muslim nuclear power and the rising nuclear power of Iran exist on fault lines for potential earthshaking cataclysms that have haunted humanity throughout the past decade.  Across the Muslim world in Yemen, this impoverished underbelly of the Arabian Peninsula serves as a pivotal Al Qaeda stronghold, representing

• Bin Laden’s deeply tribal ancestral homeland
  
• The location of his first independent “jihad”
  
• The site of both Al Qaeda’s first terrorist attack (a hotel-room bombing targeting Americans in 1992) and two of its most devastating strikes on America in the Peninsula (a crippling attack on a U.S. naval destroyer in 2000 and a major commando raid on a U.S. embassy in 2008). 

Currently functioning as the base for Al Qaeda’s insurgency against the Saudi monarchy, the Yemen battlefield poses a major threat to the world’s most lucrative oil supply, and by extension to America.  Additionally, the potential of a U.S. war on the Arabian Peninsula, Islam’s holiest land, positions Yemen as a looming flashpoint that could ignite broadly based Muslim support for Al Qaeda’s war against America’s alleged imperialism.  The syndicate’s belief in the political, economic and religious importance of future American wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Iran suggests that the next 9/11 will involve known operatives from Al Qaeda’s strongest affiliates in these targeted nations.

Al Qaeda has clearly demonstrated the value it places on the Arabian Peninsula as a battlefield for its war by overtly connecting its affiliate there with each of the syndicate’s publicized plots for attacks inside America during the Obama administration.  Furthermore, U.S. intelligence officials have identified over a dozen individuals tied to the affiliate’s leader Al-Awlaki who are actively planning more attacks within the United States [31].  After having begun its war against America as an insurgency against the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, which has since been withdrawn, Al Qaeda today renews its focus on the Peninsula by attempting to provoke a U.S. invasion and even claiming that America is already engaged in a war inside Yemen [32].  Perhaps more than any other location, the heartland of the Islamic world figures as the centerpiece of Al Qaeda’s future plots against America.   

Despite these indications of Al Qaeda’s intent, some analysts do not believe that Bin Laden’s syndicate possesses the capability of succeeding in another 9/11-scale plot that could expand the 9/11 War.  Along with the small-scale operations inside America during 2009 launched by AQAP, the failure of a single 9/11-scale scheme orchestrated by Pakistani operatives that targeted U.S. aircraft abroad in 2006 has helped persuade a number of prominent observers that Al Qaeda lacks the capability to launch another 9/11 within the homeland.  Although the core organization has suffered attrition from America’s post-9/11 campaign, this popular opinion on Al Qaeda’s impotence overlooks one of the most lamented facts about America’s war effort.  Many of the dozens of affiliates that make up the syndicate have remained virtually untouched, or even swelled in ranks, since 9/11.  These groups do possess the ability to launch 9/11-scale operations, as evinced by

• The Moscow theatre siege and the Bali bombings in October 2002
  
• The Madrid train bombings and the Beslan school massacre in 2004
  
• The London commuter bombings and the Jordan hotel bombings in 2005
  
  
• “Pakistan’s 9/11” and “India’s 9/11” in late 2008. 

After having launched two of the world's most devastating terrorist attacks since 9/11, including “India’s 9/11” in Mumbai, Lashkar-e-Taiba continues to thrive in Pakistan with a membership of approximately 150,000 [33].  Furthermore, America’s failure to diminish Al Qaeda’s ideological appeal has allowed the leadership to cement its ties to the various organizations that constitute Bin Laden’s “Global Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders”.  Despite the depletion of Al Qaeda Prime members in the 9/11 War, the core leadership remains intact to provide its numerous animated affiliates with strategic instructions and training, as evidenced by its regular internet-based messages to the world.  Armed with this guidance and having evaded America’s military campaign, the strongest of the Al Qaeda branches are well positioned to attempt a 9/11 sequel.  Because of the geopolitical importance and operational capabilities of the syndicate’s loyal franchises in Pakistan and Yemen, the U.S. intelligence community would be wise to anticipate that Al Qaeda Prime will use known operatives from these groups in the next 9/11 targeting America.

Just as apocalyptic prophecy figures centrally in Al Qaeda’s choices about which Muslim countries it tries to provoke America into invading, these ancient predictions also have influenced the timing of Al Qaeda’s most important operations.  Certainly, the decision by Bin Laden’s apocalyptic cult to begin its global “religious” war at the turn of the millennium did not unintentionally coincide with the precise time frame when apocalypticists around the world were anticipating such a war to start.  Considering the dated prophecies that lead up to the infamous end date for the mythological Apocalypse War in December 2012, Bin Laden’s death cult will likely attempt to stage a major attack at this time.  An assault on Israel may serve to demonstrate Al Qaeda’s mounting ability during Obama’s presidency to devastate America’s closest Middle Eastern ally and violently oppose its purported oppression of Palestinians in the expected flashpoint for the Battle of Armageddon.  Furthermore, the provocation of a U.S.-backed Israeli war with the Jewish state’s neighbors, particularly Iran and Lebanon, would ideally suit Al Qaeda’s plans for crusader baiting and igniting the Apocalypse War.

The most crucial feature of Al Qaeda’s apocalyptic agenda, a nuclear conflict, may also figure into the plot as a threat posed by brinkmanship in the world’s most precarious nuclear standoff.  Echoing the syndicate’s most nefarious plan for its 2008 October Surprise, the original Mumbai Massacre plot, Al Qaeda might again attempt to stoke fears of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan.  Like the terrorist network’s “Indian Mujahedeen” campaign (November 2007 - November 2008) and “Pakistan’s 9/11”, which helped elevate Indo-Pakistani tensions up through the climax in Mumbai, the plot could involve a precursor campaign of major attacks targeting foreigners, key cities or civilian transportation facilities inside India and Pakistan preceding a 9/11-scale strike on New Delhi or Mumbai.  Already in 2009, the Al Qaeda syndicate launched brazen commando raids on Pakistan's military headquarters in October and its local mosque in December, marking two of the more spectacular terrorist strikes in the history of the military-dominated country [35].  These twin attacks coincided with a highly publicized plot by the Indian Mujahedeen’s commanders to launch a more catastrophic sequel to the Mumbai Massacre as part of a new campaign inside India to be executed  by the same group, Lashkar-e-Taiba.  This cabal continues to enjoy sponsorship by the Pakistani government [36].  Al Qaeda appears to have initiated this campaign with a bombing targeting foreigners in February 2010, the first major terrorist attack within India since the Mumbai Massacre [37].  In the same month, this latest surge in Al Qaeda’s terrorism against India was coupled with synchronized bombings of Indian targets in the Afghan capital of Kabul, a marked increase in violence towards Indians in this war zone [38].  As a precursor to a Mumbai Massacre sequel, these new strikes echo the escalation of Al Qaeda’s campaign against India in July of 2008, which included devastating twin attacks on two major Indian cities and the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.  Once again, Al Qaeda terrorism has begun to cultivate American fears over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and Indo-Pakistani relations.  Along with devastating attacks on the United States and Israel, another “Indian Mujahedeen” campaign could incite widespread panic about terrorism and nuclear war.

In late 2009, Americans witnessed the inception of a new Al Qaeda offensive against the homeland.  These small-scale plots represented the forerunners of a widely anticipated conspiracy to rig the 2010 and 2012 national elections in order to provoke an expansion of the U.S. wars in the Muslim world.  During the deciding weeks before the vote, Al Qaeda perpetrated its October Surprise gambit employing Yemeni-based operatives, including former Guantanamo Bay detainees.  The syndicate’s leadership coupled the 2012 homeland operation with major attacks on American targets in the Middle East.  Additionally, the October Surprise may involved designs for 9/11-scale strikes targeting the capital of India.  This terrorist campaign to influence the U.S. vote escalated in September-October 2010 and culminated in September-October 2012.  Al Qaeda’s unalterable parameters for its October Surprise tactic and its imitation of apocalyptic prophecies restricted the syndicate’s capabilities in these pivotal operations, confining all of its genuine plots for major surges against American targets to a limited time frame of seven weeks every two years (in addition to the December 21st date) and a limited geographical scope of less than a dozen sites. 

IV.  A 2012 OCTOBER SURPRISE

During the seven weeks before the 2012 U.S. presidential election, Al Qaeda climaxed its “October Surprise” strategy.  If the syndicate fails to launch a successful 9/11 sequel during the 2010 time frame, the 2012 operation will likely represent a repeat attempt.  Alternatively, a failure in 2010 may prompt the terrorist network’s leadership to proceed with the 9/11 sequel inside America during the weeks following the mid-term election, similar to the delayed Mumbai Massacre in 2008.  In any event, the plot will include a concerted bid by Al Qaeda and its allies to overthrow the Pakistani government and demonstrate via a press conference that Bin Laden's inner circle has definitively acquired nuclear weapons.  Like its 2010 prequel, this terrorist campaign in 2012 will aim to sabotage Obama's reelection campaign with national-security disasters that favor a war-hawk challenger. 

In addition to shocking U.S. voters during the deciding weeks, Bin Laden’s syndicate will design these events to goad America into destroying the underground nuclear weapons cache in Pakistan with the first nuclear strike of the 9/11 War.  If Al Qaeda’s crusader-baiting strategy reaps this final victory, late 2012 could mark the inception of the global nuclear war that Al Qaeda has long planned to blame on the “Great Satan of the Apocalypse”.  On this ideological platform, Bin Laden’s apocalyptic cult would enjoy a unique opportunity to achieve its goal of sustainable world domination by nuclear terrorism.  Appearing as the chief opponent of the nuclear war’s provocateur, Al Qaeda would enjoy the widespread public support necessary to subdue humanity nonviolently while it detonated deployed nuclear weapons against America.  Having transformed itself since 9/11 into a stateless global empire that is immune to nuclear retaliation, Bin Laden’s syndicate would not be constrained by the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” that has deterred nation states from nuclear war since the advent of the atomic age.  The convergence of this unparalleled military achievement with an earthshaking ideological victory in 2012 might mark the final stage of Bin Laden’s plan to portray himself as the awaited Muslim Messiah who destroys the Great Satan.

Beyond impacting the election and vilifying America, these operations in 2012 would endeavor to imitate apocalyptic mythology by inflaming Bin Laden’s millennial world war against the “Great Satan” America in the weeks before the widely prophesized date for the climax of the millennial Apocalypse War.  Based on multiple ancient predictions, especially those of the Mayan civilization, apocalypticists worldwide anticipate that this mythological event will occur during the ominous astrological alignment of the Earth and Sun with the black-hole center of the galaxy on the winter solstice of 2012.  Accordingly, in the weeks and months before December 21, 2012, Al Qaeda will likely attempt to spawn the battlefields of apocalyptic mythology that it has yet to create.  Along with escalations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bin Laden’s syndicate might try to incite U.S.-led wars in:

• Pakistan,
• The Arabian Peninsula,
• Iran, and
• Palestine. 

Through these machinations, Al Qaeda will strive to convince the world that the 9/11 War is the long-awaited Apocalypse War. 

Just as the centrality of the United States to Al Qaeda’s strategy facilitates detailed projections about its future attacks, the secondary importance of Bin Laden’s conflict against U.S. allies helps to reveal another accurate, albeit less focused, trends analysis.  Although Al Qaeda’s large-scale attacks targeting non-Americans do demonstrate some of the same limitations on ferocity displayed in its strikes on Americans, the terrorism against U.S. allies orchestrated by Bin Laden’s network exhibits far fewer predictive guidelines.  Unlike the syndicate’s rigid schedule for major terrorist attacks on America, operations against U.S. allies are not constrained by Al Qaeda’s fear of generating sympathy for America.  Nevertheless, both the timing and location of these plots will likely conform to certain strategic criteria.

1. October Surprise:  Operations may be scheduled to escalate gradually until a climax in September-October 2010, in continuation of Al Qaeda’s habitual surge during the deciding weeks before U.S. national elections. 

2. Unfulfilled Threats:  Considering that the focus of Al Qaeda’s war is the superpower, and not any one U.S. ally, the terrorist network will likely seek to prove the global breadth of its Islamic insurgency by first attacking those leading Western powers that it has yet to strike.

Certain countries may be excluded from this pre-election hit list because of their homeland’s operational utility to Al Qaeda, such as Italy’s role in the Afghan-based heroin trade and Germany’s leniency towards political extremists.  Alternatively, other countries like Russia and India that have already suffered from Al Qaeda terrorism may be included as future targets because some of their policies serve as lightning rods for Muslim animosity.  Essentially, Al Qaeda will attempt to portray itself as the undisputed nemesis of America and the leading Western powers, while avoiding attacks on countries that fulfill key logistical requirements for the syndicate.

In the years ahead, the Binladensplan.com trends analysis projects escalating plots by Bin Laden’s network that target major civilian hubs inside the capitals of Israel, Australia, France, Denmark, Russia and India.  This concerted effort will reflect a broader movement by Al Qaeda’s numerous affiliates to amplify their violent campaigns with similar acts of terrorism.  These developments will mark a new stage of Bin Laden’s 9/11 War designed to discredit the dovish American administration, discourage U.S. allies and reinvigorate Al Qaeda’s image as the superpower’s greatest adversary. 

A.  FINANCIAL WARFARE

Al Qaeda has tightly intertwined its crusader-baiting strategy with its financial war to bankrupt America and enrich Al Qaeda.  In fact, the syndicate’s economic warfare has always supported and never counteracted its efforts to provoke the United States into invading the Muslim world.  Already, Al Qaeda has created a military response that cost America between $1 trillion to $2.5 trillion, while amplifying the Middle Eastern oil revenues that fund the syndicate [39].  Continuing this trend, the new global terrorist campaign directed by Bin Laden’s inner circle will also mark a period of rejuvenated financial warfare.  Al Qaeda will probably attempt to replicate past successes at enriching its revenue stream from oil-rich patrons by artificially inflating Middle Eastern oil prices with a “terror dividend”. 

Likely scenarios for these future plots include highly publicized foiled attacks on Saudi oil facilities and major government targets, like those in 2009 [40].  Similar machinations might include assaults on the U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula, an escalation of international terrorism by AQAP, or inflamed internal rebellions in Yemen.  Notably, Al Qaeda’s new campaign to provoke a U.S. invasion of the Arabian Peninsula has coincided with the intensification of two civil wars inside Yemen, one of which even spread into Saudi Arabia in November 2009 [41].  The fortuitous convergence of these hostilities, along with Al Qaeda’s deep ties to Yemeni tribes, suggests the possibility that Bin Laden’s inner circle is already orchestrating all three Yemeni conflicts.  In addition to fomenting an American political movement for armed intervention in Yemen, Al Qaeda’s operations in the world’s oil heartland represent another bid to raise supply concerns in order to raise energy prices.  By inciting unsustainable U.S. military spending and siphoning money from the oil-addicted Western powers into the bank accounts of its own financiers, Al Qaeda pursues an economic front that parallels its ideological movement to bankrupt America.

            B.  ISRAEL

Most crucially in the Middle East, the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu will likely be tested by Al Qaeda attempts to incite this long-time war hawk into invading the Jewish nation’s Muslim neighbors.  After America deprived Al Qaeda of its most powerful recruiting tool, a belligerent U.S. president, the syndicate has been committed to fueling its anti-American insurgency by goading Netanyahu into a military quagmire (in Iran, the Palestinian territories and/or Lebanon) for which America will be blamed by association with Israel.  Additionally, Al Qaeda’s confrontation with the Islamic world’s perennial adversary advances Bin Laden’s bid to portray himself as the Muslim Messiah, the awaited savior of Islam.  Accordingly, it is inevitable that his syndicate would begin attacking the Israeli homeland, the most widely maligned source of aggression against Muslims.  After four years of ruling the Gaza Strip amidst a devastating war and protracted blockade by Israel, HAMAS has been discredited as a force capable of remedying the plight of its fellow Palestinians.  Al Qaeda will certainly try to fill the power vacuum within the epicenter of the “clash of civilizations”. 

Since the election of President Barack Obama and the formal rejection of the Bush doctrine, Bin Laden’s few public communiques have emphasized U.S. support for Israel as the key grievance motivating his war.  The coincidental timing of the Israeli-Palestinian War of 2008-2009 during the weeks after U.S. voters rejected John McCain as the hawkish successor to Bush may even indicate some nexus between Al Qaeda and HAMAS.  Representing a most pivotal election-eve surprise, this war on Israel helped to swing a close election in favor of the national-security hawk Netanyahu.  In any event, the end of the Bush era and the ascendancy of the Obama administration appear to have prompted a shift in Al Qaeda’s strategy in which twin attacks on America and Israel during U.S. election years are no longer focused abroad (like the twin Uzbekistan embassy bombings and Egyptian hotel bombing of 2004, and the Mumbai Massacre of 2008), but are launched inside the two homelands.  In addition to escalating the incitement of a Western “crusade” and bolstering Bin Laden’s reputation, Al Qaeda’s decision to begin targeting the Israeli homeland may, as with its new attacks on the American homeland, reflect a desire to deceive U.S. voters and the powerful Israeli lobby into believing that Israel is safer under the protection of a hawkish U.S. president.  Furthermore, this planned campaign against Israel might seek to goad America into providing more support for its closest Middle Eastern ally that, in turn, strongly implicates the superpower for complicity in Israel’s retaliatory strikes on its neighbors.  In pursuit of these objectives, Al Qaeda attacks on America during 2010 and 2012 will likely have a counterpart operation inside Israel.   

Bin Laden’s syndicate first began its terrorist campaign against Israel with an unprecedented array of attacks on Israeli targets abroad from 2002-2008 (including major strikes in Algeria, Kenya, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Jordan and India).  In 2009, Al Qaeda seems to have zeroed in geographically on the Israeli homeland.  During the anniversary of 9/11 in 2009, the same time frame scheduled for the New York City subway bombing, the syndicate’s newly formed affiliate Al Qaeda in the Levant (AQL, encompassing Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories) appears to have begun its new campaign against America’s top ally in the Middle East with Al Qaeda’s first overt rocket attacks on an Israeli settlement located inside the Palestinian territories [42].  During the weeks after the thwarted Christmas plot to bomb a U.S. airliner, Al Qaeda again coupled its terrorism against America with an attack on Israel when it bombed and nearly killed Israeli ambassadors inside neighboring Jordan.  Notably, the syndicate ostensibly implicated Iran for complicity in this attack [43].  As part of a concurrent bid to rekindle open war between Israel and the Palestinians in early 2010, AQL targeted HAMAS security forces inside the Gaza Strip with the area’s largest terrorist bombing campaign since HAMAS assumed power in 2007 [44].  Finally in March of 2010, AQL claimed responsibility for the syndicate’s first assault on the Israeli homeland, a deadly rocket attack launched from the Gaza Strip [45].  AQL’s leader, a militant well connected with Bin Laden’s inner circle, publicly pledged to execute a series of escalating strikes following this opening salvo in March [46].  Employing a mix of overt and covert attacks on Israel and the Palestinians, Al Qaeda threatens to create a conflict that Bin Laden’s syndicate can then hijack for its own nihilistic purposes. 

            C.  THE MUSLIM WORLD

Ironically, the central target of Al Qaeda’s future terrorist campaign will be a people that the apocalyptic cult ostensibly fights to protect.  In an omen of events to come, unprecedented collateral damage in the Muslim world has long characterized Al Qaeda’s terrorism and the war it provoked.  Most visibly, Bin Laden’s guerrilla war inside the Muslim world has included bloody insurgencies against Western-backed governments, sectarian conflict against Shiite populations, and strikes against Western targets.  Although these actions have served to foment a global Islamic insurgency, much of this violence is so unpopular that Al Qaeda refrains from explicitly claiming responsibility.  Nevertheless, these atrocities have inspired measured animosity towards Al Qaeda in the Islamic world.  Ironically, this ongoing slaughter of Muslims pales in comparison to one of the syndicate’s least acknowledged crimes, crusader baiting.  Already, Bin Laden’s nefarious war plan to portray America as a crusading empire has led Al Qaeda to facilitate the elections of U.S. war hawks and to incite the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  These schemes alone have killed the lion’s share of Muslims in the 9/11 War. 

The victimization of Islam will figure even more prominently as Osama’s apocalyptic cult attempts to stage the climax of a world war that mirrors popular millennialist mythology about the years preceding 2012.  In casting America as the prophesized “Great Satan” empire, Al Qaeda must now redouble its efforts to provoke U.S. military reprisals that reap an unprecedented Muslim death toll, particularly among the civilian populations of Pakistan, Yemen and Iran.  Through these Machiavellian methods, Bin Laden’s design for a global nuclear war centered inside the Islamic world threatens to kill over one billion Muslims.  Beyond implicating the superpower for this unparalleled crime, the instigation of a conflict that murders two-thirds of humanity will precisely match the prophesized death toll in the Christian Book of Revelation, furthering Al Qaeda’s overarching bid to vivify millennialist prophecy.

As the Islamic world debates the validity of Bin Laden’s 9/11 War and its potential to harm the followers of Mohammed’s religion, the most relevant fact is not that Al Qaeda continues to slaughter thousands of Muslim civilians with terrorist attacks, or even that the syndicate continues to rouse U.S. aggression which in turn kills hundreds of thousands of Muslims.  The crux of this deliberation is that Bin Laden’s death cult aims to ignite a global nuclear war designed to murder one billion Muslims and turn much of the planet into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  In this context, there really is no debate.  The true religious obligation facing all Muslims is unyielding opposition to the provocateur of the 9/11 War, particularly his efforts to use the next 9/11 as a launchpad to exterminate billions of people.

VI.  CONCLUSION

A fundamental objective of our campaign at BLPLAN.org is to foster public awareness about Al Qaeda’s future terrorist plots, particularly its psychological operations to rig U.S. presidential elections.  Our efforts involve disseminating actionable intelligence that can deter these major attacks, in part by informing the American electorate of this ongoing attempt at voter manipulation.  Through these actions, we aim to help prevent the next 9/11, secure U.S. elections from Al Qaeda interference, and expose the syndicate’s overarching bids to provoke invasions of the Arabian Peninsula, Pakistan, and Iran. 

Most importantly, our campaign seeks to persuade Muslims that it is in their own interest to abandon all support for Al Qaeda.  In pursuit of this critical war objective, BLPLAN.org provides compelling evidence that Bin Laden’s inner circle actively conspires to incite the murder of nearly one billion Muslims and four billion people worldwide in a nuclear conflict centered in the Islamic world.  As a bloodless substitute for any military campaign against Al Qaeda, our information operation offers a tool to convince Muslims to disavow support for Bin Laden’s movement and provide the human intelligence necessary for dismantling his network.  Victory over Al Qaeda on the war’s main battlefield, the ideological front, can perhaps best be achieved by informing Muslims about Bin Laden’s apocalyptic plot against them.

In concert with our offensive strategy for defeating Al Qaeda ideologically, the defensive “intelligence” shield created by our trends analysis provides America with a wonder-weapon capable of nonviolently ending Bin Laden’s war before it reaches his apocalyptic end game.