 WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, a White House hopeful, said Thursday that the al-Qaida terrorist network clearly wants to strike the United States again, perhaps with an attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.
``I believe they're planning something as large and complex as 9/11,'' Biden told an audience at the National Press Club four days before the fifth anniversary of the attacks. ``If you look at their modus operandi, that's how they have proceeded. That's how they have worked. And, I believe that's what they're doing,'' said Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
| That's real profound. Thanks Joe. |
``We have a lot of their leadership on the run, some of which we've captured,'' Biden said.
However, ``they're patient,'' he said, and it could be years before they go after the United States again." ``These folks are in it for the long haul,'' he said.
Biden made the remarks during a question-and-answer session after delivering a speech in which he criticized the Bush administration's foreign policy and national security strategy as ``a dangerous combination of ideology and some incompetence.'' He also offered a plan for making the country safer.
| Again, the Dhimmis can't think of anything other than playing defense. |
The six-term Delaware senator is one of several prominent Democrats offering policy proposals. Biden has indicated that he's interested in seeking his party's nomination a second time. He ran in 1988 but dropped out of the race after it was revealed that he had lifted portions of a speech from a British politician without attribution.
| Which were the better parts of his speeches. |
Among Biden's proposals:
-Implementing the security-strengthening recommendations from the bipartisan commission that studied the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
| Make the Shipping Container Inspection Authority as competent as the TSA. |
-Working to prevent potential threats to the country's security rather than relying on a strategy of ``military pre-emption.''
| Because military action is ucky. |
-Building effective alliances with like-minded countries and with international organizations to pool resources, information, ideas and power.
| Which means we're supposed to become 'like-minded' with the French and Spanish, because Joe would never ask them to think like us. |
-Developing ``institutions of democracy'' - political parties as well as an independent media and judicial system - in the Middle East and beyond.
| Shades of 'nation-building', which the Dhimmis castigate in Iraq. |
Tracey Schmitt, a Republican National Committee spokeswoman, said Biden and other Democrats offer ``a dangerous combination of both seriously flawed policies that ignore the threat facing America and an eagerness to play politics with a difficult war during campaign season.'' |