By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer
With the election coming to a close, it's clear there won't be any "October Surprise" as many pundits had predicted.
The political term gained currency most recently in 2004, when Osama Bin Laden popped up in a videotape four days before the Bush-Kerry presidential election. "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaida," Bin Laden warned in late October 2004, in his first videotaped address in three years. "Your security is in your own hands." Sen. John Kerry has said that the 11th-hour videotape heightened Americans' fear, and persuaded many undecided voters to stay with President Bush.
Radio Silence
But this election season, there's been almost complete radio silence from al-Qaida and its terror affiliates. There have been no threatening tapes from Bin Laden, and no election-related messages from his verbose deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, or from Adam Gadahn, the bellicose American-born spokesman for al-Qaida.
(There was a brief reference to the current election buried in a tape last month from Abu Yahya al-Libi, a top Taliban propagandist, asking that God "humiliate Bush and his party." But the videotape was not promoted by al-Qaida, and some intelligence experts question whether "party" meant political party or just Bush's political allies. There also have been dozens of threatening messages posted by individual bloggers active on jihadist websites, as the SITE Intelligence Group recently found, but still no official statements from al-Qaida.)
The terror group's relative silence comes as a surprise to many in the U.S. intelligence community. Just a month ago, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to U.S. law-enforcement officials predicting more messages from al-Qaida in the weeks leading up to the election. "We expect al-Qaida to release additional messages before the election" for U.S. president," said the FBI/DHS notice obtained by NBC News. "They certainly want to be a topic of the election campaign," a senior U.S. intelligence official predicted at the time.
A word from the experts
So today we asked several NBC News terrorism experts why they think al-Qaida shied away from the presidential race, and what it means.
Michael Sheehan is the former New York City Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism and the former State Department Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism. He said that, 2004 aside, al-Qaida is not concerned with the details of U.S. elections. "They do not see the big difference between American politicians; they all are representatives of the great Satan," Sheehan said. And he dismissed the notion that al-Qaida would try to time an attack to coincide with popular events in the U.S.
"Terrorist operatives have their own timetable," Sheehan said. "It normally takes a few years to organize a serious attack, and the timing is usually based on their own issues, not electoral timetables. Even in Spain, there is disagreement among the experts and investigators as to whether the March 2004 attacks had anything to do with the elections."
Evan Kohlmann studies jihadists on the Internet, and has appeared as an expert witness for the U.S. government in nearly a dozen high-profile terrorism cases in federal courts and at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He says it may be too dangerous a time for senior al Qaida leaders to come forward. "Either Osama Bin Laden and Zawahiri are deep in hiding right now, or they didn't have a clear card in this election," Kohlmann said. "If I were them, especially after the recent barrage of missile strikes [in Pakistan], I would be very careful about popping up for a media interview precisely at a predictable time. That seems to be taking a pretty big risk."
Bill Harlow is the former Director of Public Affairs for the Central Intelligence Agency and a top aide to former CIA Director George Tenet. He also speculates that recent U.S. military activity in the tribal regions of Pakistan may be forcing al-Qaida to lay low. "Al-Qaida is keeping a low profile at the moment because, whenever someone sticks their head up, Hellfire missiles [from Predator drones] keep falling out of the sky," Harlow said.
Also, he said, "they probably figure that anything they said before the election would benefit the party of President Bush." He said it's possible the al-Qaida leaders will issue a statement after today saying that President Bush "and his evil doers" have been repudiated. "This doesn't mean that they find Team Obama is necessarily good for them," Harlow said, "just that they can leverage the message by a Republican loss."
Roger Cressey is the former Director for Transnational Threats on the National Security Council staff, where he was responsible for coordination of U.S. counterterrorism policy. He said he was surprised that al-Qaida didn't weigh in. "I have to believe that an effort was made to prepare a statement but there may have been logistical problems, similar to what happen with the Zawahiri tape around 9/11."
Cressey said that, had Bin Laden surfaced in a video, "I don't think a Bin Laden tape would have had the same impact as it did four years ago." He said "what was striking about the campaign is how little terrorism really factored into the debate."
--with reporting by Robert Windrem
