Despite the very costly “War on Terror” — which, we are repeatedly assured, is making the world safer than ever before — attacks by al Qaeda have skyrocketed. This supposedly “decimated” network of terrorists has been busier, and more deadly, than ever after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The famously neutral, thorough Congressional Research Service — whose reports are almost never made available to the general public — looked at the number of al Qaeda attacks perpetrated in the two and a half years after 9/11, balanced against the number of attacks during that amount of time before 9/11.
While some experts believe that there's no such thing as “al Qaeda,” that the term was created by the CIA to refer to groups, cells, and individuals that have little, if anything, to do with each other, the CRS looked at incidents that the government credits to al Qaeda. Thus, under the establishment's own rules of the game, al Qaeda's attacks went from one in the 30 months before 9/11, to ten during the 30 months after 9/11.
The discrepancy is even worse when you look at the number of fatalities. Before 9/11: 17 deaths. After 9/11: 510 deaths.
When comparing injuries, the difference becomes 64-fold. In the 30 months before 9/11, al Qaeda injured 39 people. In the 30 months after, it injured 2,526.
The differences can be considered even more lopsided because the one pre-9/11 attack was the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The report explains that “some experts do not include this attack as a ‘terrorist incident,’ because it was directed against a military, not civilian, target, although the Cole was not engaged in combat during that period.” One of the post-9/11 attacks was against military personnel in Kuwait. So if we take out the two military attacks, the scorecard is zero to nine.
Even if we lengthen the time period to look at all al Qaeda attacks prior to 9/11, the news is still bad. Al Qaeda's first attack took place in December 1992. During the almost nine years until 9/11, there were four attacks, two of which were against military targets: the Cole and US servicemen in Somalia.
So, the final tally:
Two attacks against civilian targets and two against military targets in the nine years prior to 9/11.
Nine attacks against civilian targets and one against a military target in the two and a half years after 9/11. 