So we should all be happy about this today -- although I suspect some on the Left aren't.

A senior al-Qaeda commander was killed this week in Pakistan, according to Western officials and an Islamic radical Web site, marking a rare success in the flagging U.S. and Pakistani campaign to hunt down members of the network.

Abu Laith al-Libi, the nom de guerre of a Libyan fighter who had served alongside al-Qaeda and the Taliban since the late 1980s, had become an influential field commander in recent years, overseeing many operations against U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, officials said. The U.S. military blamed him for organizing a suicide attack that killed 23 people outside Bagram air base during a visit by Vice President Cheney in February last year.

The Western officials declined to give details of how Libi died. But there is evidence he was targeted in a missile strike that killed 12 people early Tuesday in a remote village in northwestern Pakistan.

Yeah, that's right. This is the guy who tried to get to Dick Cheney last year. Folks at Kos, DU, HuffPo and other "progressive" sites were upset that the assassination attempt was thwarted. So ask your favorite liberal how they feel about this success in the Crusade Against Islamist Terrorism, mentioning the attempt to kill the Vice president. You'll quickly find out if that if they are with us or with the terrorists.

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According to terrorism experts, authorities need to be on the lookout for cases of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" among home-grown terror cells.

Sympathy for al Qaeda has produced "sudden jihad syndrome" in domestic terror cells unaffiliated with foreign terrorists and people seeking to carry out attacks in the U.S., a law-enforcement intelligence analysis says.

The Dec. 6 report by the Texas Public Safety Department's Bureau of Information Analysis warns officials not to dismiss individual or homegrown terror cells as "wannabes," saying they pose a credible threat to homeland security.

"Oftentimes, these attackers are dismissed as suffering from mental health issues, but their own words and writings reveal an affiliation with Islamic supremacy or an affinity for Islamic extremism," said the report, which was distributed to federal, state and local law enforcement in Texas. "As a result, law enforcement should not be too quick to judge their attacks as having no nexus to terrorism."

It said they might act with the intention of eventually joining al Qaeda or the jihad movement overseas.

In other words, the writings of Islamists may be sufficient to push some susceptible individuals to act upon the ideology of Islamic radicalism expressed by terrorist groups. Having pulled an ideological justification from extremist sources, their actions should not be seen as isolated, but are instead a part of the global jihad being waged by the likes of bin Laden. In other words, look for more cases of homegrown terrorism linked by ideology, not direct command-an-control, to radical groups abroad.

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