Henry Crumpton, the State Department’s anti-terrorism guy, tells CFR (correctly) that Al Qaeda is pretty much crippled: “Because of out collective operational success, Al Qaeda is crippled and certainly not the organization it was.” And he properly refuses to put the blame on Al Qaeda for the would-be terrorists nabbed in London. He mostly makes sense, until the end of the CFR interview, when he darkly tries to scare us with the idea that unnamed terrorists are trying to get their grubby hands on WMD. Here is the exchange:

Do you have evidence that terror groups are still trying actively to acquire various forms of WMD?

Absolutely.

Any anecdotes that could shed some light on that?

All I could offer you are some historical public record references. One of the most chilling is the al-Qaeda operative who's currently in Malaysian detention—[Yazid] Sufaat. He was tasked to develop and deploy a biological weapon in Southeast Asia and obviously I can't talk about some of the ongoing intelligence operations and investigations but yes, multiple terrorist groups are searching for weapons of mass destruction.

In other words: Yes, they're out there, building nukes in garages and bioweapons in their bathtubs. But I'm not gonna tell ya where.