What Khalid Sheik Mohammad's statement tells us

The Wall Street Journal looks at KSM's confession and hopes that it will remind those of us who have started to forget the threat we face.

One lesson of his testimony is the scope of his terror success, and his even larger ambition. Among the 31 actual events: The February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, chiefly carried out by his nephew Ramzi Yousef; the October 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, in which 202 were killed and another 200 injured; the killing of two U.S. GIs in Kuwait the same month; the November 2002 hotel bombings in Kenya, in which 13 Israelis and Kenyans died; and the November 2003 attacks in Istanbul against Jewish and British targets, which killed 57 and wounded 700. That's roughly 3,280 murders.





But even this pales next to what might have happened had the U.S. not arisen from pre-9/11 complacency and gone on offense. By his own admission, KSM also planned attacks on targets in South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Israel, the Straits of Hormuz and Gibraltar, the Panama Canal, Brussels and London. He made extensive plans to assassinate Pope John Paul II during the pope's visit to Manila in 1995. He attempted to destroy an American oil company in Indonesia "owned," as he put it, "by the Jewish former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger."
Among other U.S. targets, there was "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid's failed attempt against American Airlines Flight 63 in December 2001, schemes to assassinate Presidents Clinton and Carter, and a "new wave" of attacks after 9/11 targeting skyscrapers in L.A., Chicago and Seattle, New York's suspension bridges and stock exchange, and nuclear power plants in "several U.S. states."

Perhaps most ominously, KSM also admitted to being "directly in charge" of "managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American Soil."

Perhaps he's just padding his resume but his ambitions should remind us that it is truly a war that we are in.

As KSM makes clear, bin Laden and his acolytes declared "war" on the U.S. in his fatwa of 1998, a fact the U.S. only figured out on September 11. He professes to regret the death of women and children, but calls such indiscriminate killing "the language of any war" and justified by his religious motivation.

"For sure, I'm American enemies," said KSM in his broken English. For sure, too, he is a reminder of the evil that still confronts us in this conflict with radical Islam, and one that we underestimate at our existential peril.

I fear that we have become complacent having gone through over five years with no attack on American soil. This is not a war we've chosen, but one that has been declared on us and that we'll be fighting for a long, long time.