Shorter Davig Ignatius:

We should seriously consider the prospect of Al Qaeda having a nuclear bomb.

Hey, anything is possible. And nothing is certain. Ignatius:

Many intelligence analysts have concluded that al-Qaeda doesn't have nuclear capability today. [the Energy Department's director of intelligence] argues that a more honest answer is: We don't know.

So what to do about this spectral danger? The first requirement, says [ the Energy Department's director of intelligence], is to try to visualize it. What would it take for al-Qaeda to build a bomb? How would it assemble the pieces? How would the United States and its allies deploy their intelligence assets so that they could detect a plot before it was carried out? How would we reinvent intelligence itself to avert this ultimate catastrophe?

Ignatius has no qualms when the Energy Department's director of intelligence says we "don't know" if Al Qaeda has nuclear capability today.

Remember, in Ignatius' world, anything is possible. Anything. President Bush could be a robot controlled by Martians. Elvis is alive and well and guiding Chinese economic policy. A monkey could walk into MIT and write on a chalkboard the answer to the Reimann Hypothesis.


posted by Quiddity at 10/17/2007 11:45:00 PM