Liberal Talk Radio

Reading this article on the life and times of Al Qaeda “architect” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar is scary, no doubt. But it’s also reassuring, in its own way. The reason this guy got as far as he did was basically because no government cared enough to track him:

Although Nasar attracted the notice of Spanish police, investigators did not classify him as a serious threat. According to Spanish court papers, detectives had Nasar under surveillance in 1995. But when he moved to London that year, they stopped paying attention.

In London, Nasar led an above-ground life as a writer and voice of Islamic extremism. He did publicity work for al-Qaeda, helping to arrange interviews with bin Laden in Afghanistan for CNN and the BBC.

Hard to believe that just 10 years ago the Taliban was this kooky band of religious fundamentalists that we helped defeat the Soviets but otherwise didn’t care too much about.

Given that we’re now seriously on the lookout for these guys, and now that we have them under heavy surveilance (I hope), you’ve got to think it’s going to be much harder for them to do anything. Even without warantless wiretaps and other Patriot Act-era questionable spying methods, simply caring enough to keep an eye on these guys is going to put a serious damper on their busy schedules.

Two big caveats, of course: one, they’re going to be a lot more careful now that they know we’re watching, so the cat-and-mouse game has to escalate, and two, as Nasar makes clear, al Qaeda is morphing from a top-down organization to a decentralized web (sometimes referred to as “Qaeda 2.0″) which will be much harder to stamp out.

Nonetheless, when I learn, for example, that the 1993 WTC bomber was the nephew of the guy who plotted the 9/11 attacks, I remember that it’s a relatively small group of identifiable nutjobs behind all this stuff.