Propaganda Warfare

The State Department was out yesterday with its annual report on terrorism, and it makes for some interesting and important reading. Al Qaeda's "current approach," the report says, "focuses on propaganda warfare — using a combination of terrorist attacks, insurgency, media broadcasts, Internet-based propaganda, and subversion to undermine confidence and unity in Western populations."

The report also charges Iran with harboring Al Qaeda terrorists. "Iran remained unwilling to bring to justice senior AQ members it detained in 2003, and it has refused to publicly identify these senior members in its custody," the report says. "Iran has repeatedly resisted numerous calls to transfer custody of its AQ detainees to their countries of origin or third countries for interrogation or trial. Iran also continued to fail to control the activities of some al-Qaida members who fled to Iran following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan."

Had the terrorists not succeeded in undermining "confidence and unity" in America, the news about Iran alone would be reason enough for American military strikes on Al Qaeda targets in Iran. Leave the Iranian nuclear program aside — it's bad enough that the Iranians are harboring "senior members" of the terrorist group that attacked America on September 11, 2001.

The State Department is a center of establishment respectability, not known as a hotbed of neoconservatives with political agendas. Dissent and disagreement and even some division are part of any healthy democracy, ours included. But the fact that even the State Department realizes that Al Qaeda aims to use the press to undermine American confidence and unity is something for all Americans to ponder in wartime.