Al Qaeda has access to drug smuggling submarines bound for the US. From Reuters:
Colombian guerrillas have entered into “an unholy alliance” with Islamic extremists who are helping the Marxist rebels smuggle cocaine through Africa on its way to European consumers, a U.S. official told Reuters.
Interdiction efforts have made it more difficult to send cocaine straight from Colombia and other Andean producer nations to the United States and Europe.
So criminal organizations including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are going through Africa to access the European market. And they are doing it with the help of al Qaeda and other groups branded terrorists by Washington, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
…..
To reach the U.S. market, Colombian smugglers are meanwhile being driven to use disposable, fiberglass submarines. The homemade craft are constructed in the mangroves of Colombia’s Pacific coast, used to carry drugs to Mexico for transshipment to the United States, then sunk.
Sure these submarines are used to transport drugs, but does anyone doubt that Al Qaeda hasn’t thought about using them to smuggle operatives into the US? Armed with Anthrax/PETN/You Name It??
Think this is far fetched? Consider this recent post by Walid Phares, and then reconsider:
In 2002, one would-be shoe bomber forced millions of travelers to take off their shoes. In 1996, terrorists planned to bring down aircraft on transatlantic flights by smuggling liquid explosives onto plane. They were thwarted but they succeeded in preventing passengers from bringing liquids into airline terminals.
Lesson number one: In this terror war, the jihadists have the upper hand. THEY are in charge. THEY are the ones who choose to use a new weapon and they are also the ones who – by using simple logic — have refrained from using the same terror weapons more than once. In fact, since September 2001, Al Qaeda’s henchmen have avoided rushing into the cockpit of an airliner with box cutters. Does this mean we were successful in deterring the terrorists? Of course: as long as we can prevent them from using the 9/11 methods, they won’t be naïve enough or foolish enough to repeat the same strategy. So are we winning the fight with Al Qaeda by using these measures? No, we are simply protecting our population until we win the war. But winning is not measured by surviving potential copycat attacks.
