Author and FOX News Channel political analyst Dick Morris has adjusted his rationale for his oft-repeated conviction that terrorists support Senator John Kerry's campaign for president.

In an August 18 article on right-wing news site WorldNetDaily.com, Morris predicted that terrorists would attempt to influence the presidential election by carrying out an attack on American soil: "[E]vidence that he [bin Laden] may be planning a terror strike to disrupt the elections here indicates he is planning to become more aggressive as Election Day nears." Morris offered: “My bet is it will help” President George W. Bush politically.

Apparently, Morris now considers such an attack to be less likely and has developed a new theory for how he believes the terrorists are going to influence the election in Kerry's favor. On the October 25 edition of the nationally syndicated The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly, Morris told host Bill O'Reilly that “Al Qaeda is voting with its silence for John Kerry”:

MORRIS: My sense is that the real question here is, how scared are we about terrorism? And I think that Al Qaeda is voting with its silence. Al Qaeda attacked us in Spain before the election. Al Qaeda attacked Australia before the election. Hamas and Hezbollah attack Israel before every election, and there has been no Al Qaeda attack anywhere in the world in months. No bin Laden tape, no threats coming out of it, and I think that Al Qaeda is voting with its silence for John Kerry.

And on the October 23 edition of ABC Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show, Morris reflected similar adjustments to his conviction that terrorists prefer Kerry:

MORRIS: You know, Al Qaeda is voting in this election with their silence. ... Do you hear a peep out of them? Do you hear a bin Laden tape? Do you hear a threatening gesture? Do you hear any kind of statement that any of them is making? And they know that if they attack, uh, the United States or in some major terrorist target that that's gonna raise the fear level and that it will help Bush. ... But Putin, who is opposed to it, said that a victory for Kerry would -- would not help the war on terror.

HANNITY: Yeah. ... I think your analysis is 100 percent right, and I think they know politically that an attack would help George W. Bush. I think they are that savvy and that aware of our political system.

As MMFA has noted, while there is a conspicuous lack of evidence to support the theory that terrorists prefer Kerry, there is some evidence suggesting that terrorists would prefer four more years of the Bush administration. As Reuters news agency reported in an October 15, 2003, article, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank that focuses on political-military conflict, stated in the 2003-2004 edition of its report The Military Balance that the “war in Iraq has probably inflamed radical passions among Muslims and thus increased Al Qaeda's recruiting power and morale and, at least marginally, its operating capability.” Further, there is strong evidence that America's invasion of Iraq has served as a powerful recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.