Someone in Al Qaeda did not attach the coversheet to his TPS report:
“I was very upset by what you did…I obtained 75,000 rupees for you and your family’s trip to Egypt. I learned that you did not submit the voucher to the accountant, and that you made reservations for 40,000 rupees and kept the remainder claiming you have a right to do so. . . . Also with respect to the air-conditioning unit, . . . furniture used by brothers in Al Qaeda is not considered private property. . . . I would like to remind you and myself of the punishment for any violation.”
The LAT says that the Al Qaeda memos “depict an organization obsessed with paperwork and penny-pinching and afflicted with a damaging propensity for feuds,” which I suppose should just make us glad that the typical journalistic enterprise is not armed with stolen U.S. weapons.
Intelligence experts say that Al Qaeda’s penchant for bureaucracy reveals an important weakness in what they had thought was cell-based, decentralized and efficient organization. It turns out, however, that “committees and titles proliferated.” All that mismanagement and yet they still, by their terms, succeed. In some parallel universe, they’ve started a consulting business to train executives in the same kind of counterintuitive process; it took 1500 years for someone to come out with “Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun,” what’s the time line for “Who Moved My Jihad?” The only flaw would be first chapter, which would have to be something along the lines of, “Step One: Have your corporate rival start a stupid, costly, and unnecessary war.” Step two, of course, would be “Hope they start another one.”