ABSTRACT
In Jordan as elsewhere, the larger community of Islamic fundamentalists includes both very large social and political groups that do not themselves engage in any form of terrorism while defending and funding it, and violent Islamists that do nothing else. Jordan's Islamists have acted—if at all—against local and Israeli targets with no previous attacks against American ones. The implication was that a "general contractor" somewhere outside Jordan, Osama Bin Laden or his equivalent, was seeking to enlist Jordanian activists to serve as his sub-contractors, so to speak. The threat to American targets was already assessed as very serious, but it was still believed that this did not mean targets in the United States itself, and the State Department warning that went out in fact focused on the threat to Americans abroad.
