Analyst: Attack threat should be taken seriously

By WND Staff

An analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies says a new threat from a Pakistani branch of the Taliban to attack Washington, D.C., needs to be taken seriously.

“Keep in mind that al-Qaida, the Taliban, many of these other organizations … they would like to kill Americans every day of the week,” said Clifford May, president of the foundation.

He was interviewed by Greg Corombos of Radio America/WND, and the audio of the exchange is embedded here:



The new warning comes from Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who previously claimed responsibility for a siege at that nation’s police academy.

In a telephone conversation with the Associated Press, Mehsud said, “Soon we will launch an attack on Washington that will amaze everyone in the world.”

May said it probably is Mehsud’s group that orchestrated the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Authorities in the U.S. are offering a $5 million reward if he’s caught.

According to Fox News, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talked about Afghanistan and Pakistan this week at a conference of world leaders. Clinton supported a plan to let former Taliban and al-Qaida members be given “an honorable form of reconciliation and reintegration into a peaceful society, if they are willing to abandon violence.”

The U.S. State Department previously has described Mehsud as the leader of a group that “has conducted cross-border attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and poses a clear threat to American persons and interests in the region.”

May said the fact such terrorists haven’t managed to kill Americans on American soil over the past seven years is not “because they’ve been napping … it’s because they haven’t been able to put it together.”

That, he suggested, should “give us pause to decide which policies are preventing them from doing that.”

“You do know if you want to stop it there really is only one way: They must feel themselves to be hunted. Otherwise they will be hunters,” May said. “You have to make sure they know that at any time they can be picked up off the street and be spirited away.”