Austin Bay has posted a must-read piece on some translated Al Qaeda documents that shed more light on the Somalia debacle. Black Hawk Down makes President Clinton’s administration look pretty foolish, but these Al Qaeda letters put the final nail in his legacy’s coffin. It’s a shame we continued sleeping until 9/11, and even now some of us can’t come to grips with the fact that we have a serious enemy, and that they want to kill us all.

Meanwhile, Paul Boutin has an inside look at how easy it could be for a terrorist in this country to unleash a biological weapon: “advances in DNA-hacking technology have reached the point where an evil lab assistant with the right resources could do the job… an advanced grad student could do it.”

Which makes our local terrorist case all the more chilling. The Commerical Appeal published an update yesterday on the trial of terror suspect Mahmoud Maawad:

A University of Memphis student arrested last September with a pilot’s uniform and other flight-training materials in his apartment was preparing for a terrorist attack on the United States, new documents in the case allege.

Mahmoud Maawad was charged with wire fraud and using a false Social Security number, but authorities now say he was visiting online chatrooms and Web sites supporting radical Sunni Muslim organizations and Al Queda leaders in Iraq.

They said an examination of his computer also showed Maawad had searched the Internet for how guns and bombs could be smuggled through airport magnetometers and had used key words such as “car bomb” in other searches.

…

Newly disclosed evidence in the case includes printouts of chatroom discussions on a Web site with an opening message that thanks Allah “for all your Jihad” and says Iraq is “standing alone in the face of the Zionist crusader aggression.” An entry posted by Mahmoud Maawad reads, “i union with you and i completely agree.”

You can sese pictures of the items found in Maawad’s campus apartment right here.

His fields of study, by the way?

Science and economics.