Terrorist office politics
You’d never think of terrorism as being rife with office politics.
But documents recently uncovered in Mali found that al-Qaida had more in common with “Dilbert” or “The Office” than any of us might have imagined.
According to the Associated Press, the leaders of al-Qaida’s North African branch at one point sent a nastygram to terrorist Moktar Belmoktar, asking him, more or less, to shape up or ship out. They apparently sent him a letter, which was recently found by the AP in a building in Mali, and it was full of complaints about Belmoktar’s performance on the terrorist stage. They said that Belmoktar didn’t carry out orders, didn’t report for meetings, didn’t answer his phone, aired his gripes about al-Qaida’s inner workings on the Internet and, believe it or not, was not good about turning in his expense reports.
We wonder: Did they also ask for receipts with those expense reports?
They say that a letter Belmoktar sent to his higher-ups “contained some amount of backbiting, name-calling and sneering.”
Belmoktar responded by pulling up his stakes and starting his own competing terrorist organization. Unfortunately, the results of that schism weren’t so funny – he was apparently the mastermind behind the bombings at a uranium mine and a military base in Niger last week, and a hostage-taking at a gas plant operated by BP in Algeria in January. All told, 101 people have died as a result of Belmoktar’s post-al-Qaida handiwork.
It’s a shame that the terrorist wasn’t discouraged by his less-than-stellar performance review and moved to pursue another line of work.