Bill Bratton Warns of October Surprise? (and not in a good way)

I had pretty much dismissed this Washington Post story about Al-Qaeda supposedly supporting John McCain as somewhere in between questionable journalism and pretty silly (although the McCain campaign got even sillier when they called a conference call with reporters in order to insist that al Queda really, really meant was that it hoped John McCain won (wink, wink), when really the terrorists want Obama to win. The McCain thing was just reverse psychology. (Okay, if you say so.)

But then this OpEd by LAPD Chief Bill Bratton came out yesterday, in the New York Daily news, saying that we should expect a October surprise in the form of Al-Qaeda attack, because Bin Laden and company would love to influence the US elections, and that they want McCain to win. (Yes, I know. The logic’s hard to follow.)

Bratton wrote the thing with a guy named R. P. Eddy, who is something of a terrorism expert, as the senior fellow for counterterrorism at the Manhattan Institute, and the former director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

Anyway, here’s a clip. Make of it what you will.

Will Osama Bin Laden have anything to say about the U.S. presidential race? Does our economic implosion make us an even more tempting target?

Al-Qaeda has a history of trying to influence elections, most notably with the 2004 train attacks in Madrid. Just three days before Spain’s prime ministerial elections, 10 bombs left 191 dead- and Al-Qaeda affiliates swung the election away from the incumbent, who supported the coalition wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toward the challenger, a vociferous critic of U.S. foreign policy.

Seven months later, Bin Laden attempted to disrupt the presidential race between George W. Bush and John Kerry. His videotaped statement, released just days before the elections, seemed to support Kerry – driving some voters toward Bush. According to 2006 reporting by Ron Suskind, CIA analysts concluded that Bin Laden knew that voters would react in this way and his message was “clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.”

If Bin Laden wants to engineer a late-October surprise in 2008, an attack on a significant American economic target may be one of the most tempting opportunities he has had in recent years. One of his goals on 9/11 was to undermine our markets; he has bragged of what he calls the “success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan.” Given our current financial turmoil, Bin Laden may believe that a strike against the U.S.could push our economy over the edge.

(sigh.) You can read the rest here.