Powerline has a post quoting the AP report on the two al-Qa'ida terrorists just arrested in Germany. The really interesting part is that the two were also planning to commit insurance fraud, taking out a million-dollar policy on one of the men, who would later fake his death. The money would have been transferred to higher-ups in the al-Qa'ida network.
This would be very good news; it means that the terrorists are getting desperate. Insurance payments have a very well-defined paper trail, and are very risky to scam. The terrorists must be running out of options, and this will make it much easier to detect them in the future.
We may draw a few tenative conclusions:
1. The funding networks are getting closed down, especially the Saudi charities.
2. Al-Qa'ida is becoming much less popular in Saudi Arabia now that they are attacking Saudis, and not just Americans. In fact, there hasn't been an al-Qa'ida attack against the US for a long time now, and the attacks on the Saudi royal family are fresher in the mind of the Arab world. Certainly few Saudis like the royal family, but I think that nobody wants to see Usama bin-Laden as an actual head of state.
3. Al-Qa'ida is running out of reserves, or else they have been frozen or confiscated, which amounts to the same thing.
4. The Taliban is no longer cooperating with them, or else they would be getting a cut out of the opium trade in Afghanistan.
5. Hizbullah is not cooperating with them, or else they would be getting money from Hizbullah's hashish business, or else from Hizbullah's friends in the Latin-American cocaine business.
If my speculations are anywhere close, it means that al-Qa'ida is becoming increasingly isolated even in the terrorist world. Of course, we still need to worry about Hizbullah and all the other terror groups; but it's a start.
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