Bin Laden’s Fiendish Chemical Warfare

So is this what all those politicians mean when they tell you Al Qaeda is out to destroy America’s way of life? Or is it just a sign of just how gormless some news organizations can be? The New York Post on Tuesday devoted its front page to a story suggesting Osama bin Laden had sought to poison America’s cocaine supply. The rest of the News Corporation empire duly followed suit. It was a perfect moment of synergy for the paper’s headline writers who like to use such Dickensian pejoratives as “fiend” to describe Bin Laden at the best of times — “Bin Laden Coke Fiend!” they screamed in towering letters.

The story suggests US drug enforcement authorities report a plot to kill “thousands of Americans” by poisoning cocaine supplies to be sold on the streets, which was foiled only because bin Laden’s ostensible Colombian kingpin suppliers baled out when they realized they would be killing their own clientele.

Of course believing this hogwash requires that we simply forget about how terrorism works — if it’s not on TV, it’s not particularly effective. And the idea of a poisoned cocaine epidemic slowly eliminating various Wall Street bankers, club kids, uh, Washington politicians and ghetto bad-boys isn’t exactly going to create that sort of iconic image that 9/11 did. But you can understand the concern. After all, anyone who could take at face value their source’s claim that Bin Laden met, in person, with Colombian drug kingpins at an undisclosed location in 2002, has got to be smoking something pretty nasty.