Al Qaeda's new magazine: An inside look

The magazine itself has a hefty feature well, reports the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, consistent with what any ambitious editor would want to see in a rollout issue. Osama bin Laden himself offers his thoughts on “How to Save the World”: blow stuff up when people disagree with you about what’s Islamic! His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri shares his insights on what’s going down in Yemen. But the anchor is a message from Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born preacher who’s become al-Qaeda’s biggest draw as an online propagandist. So much so that the Obama administration reserves unto itself the right to kill Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, without due process of law.

And then there are some promising front-of-the-book experiments. “What to Expect in Jihad” is self-explanatory. “The AQ Chef” gives you a step-by-step on “How To Make A Bomb In The Kitchen Of Your Mom.” And that threads the needle for the apparent purpose of launching Inspire: getting frustrated Muslim youth to buy into al-Qaeda’s holistic conspiracy theory that the crises of the modern era are attributable to a nefarious American/Jewish alliance against True Islam, and then giving them the tools to murder people.