It’s hard not to read a story like this and think to causes way beyond pure, random chance, luck or fate (‘good’ or ‘bad’, depending on which team you’re on, though neither term should ever dangle sans a rock-solid reference point.)

At least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics [don'cha just love tabloids?] died horribly after being struck down with the disease that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages… Now al-Qaeda chiefs fear the plague has been passed to other terror cells — or Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. [How the NY Sun knows this last bit is unclear; it's a happy development, nonetheless... unless you're a moral relativist.]

One security source said: “This is the deadliest weapon yet in the war against terror. Most of the terrorists do not have the basic medical supplies needed to treat the disease. It spreads quickly and kills within hours. This will be really worrying al-Qaeda.” [emphases added]

It’s a story that simply begs for Bourne-like conspiracy theories and/or supernatural explanations. You’ll get both here! You can almost hear this ’security source’ grinning, for just an instant, catching himself, then switching to deadpan gov-speak. “Golly,” he or she might have said, completely poker-faced. “I can’t even think of a way this thing might have happened… the plague… who woulda thought? Well, it’s good for us, I guess…”

Meanwhile, vivid images of months and years of plausibly deniable hard work are spinning through this guy’s mind like old newsreels… late-night sessions with expert microbiologists, deep-black-ops field guys, maybe a well-paid military ethicist… the planning, the secrecy, the fingernail-biting wait once it started.

And the reporter can’t escape noticing the subliminal ‘tells’ of relief and delight in his source’s demeanor and posture that make him think, “I can never print this. I probably shouldn’t even suspect it. They’d probably fire me… or take me out in an alley. But still… What if… it would make sense…”

Al Q’aeda… an evil priesthood of violence, isolated from society by design but tightly knit across borders… fire-walled off from contact with innocent civilians except when they blow themselves up. What better weapon could one imagine?

Yeah, I made all that up. Sheer wild imagination. Still… one must ask, if only hypothetically: is such a scenario worse than cluster-bombs and napalm? worse than invasion? worse than superior firepower at close range that leaves too clear a trace of suspicion and only backfires in the court of public opinion and diplomatic nicety? worse than impotence in the face of concerted and sustained threats?

I couldn’t help thinking of a short story I read just last week, (‘The Boy in Zaquitos’, by Bruce McAllister, one of the ‘Best American Short Stories of 2007′, edited by Stephen King). Excerpt:

SOME PEOPLE–maybe one in one hundred thousand–can get infected by an epidemic disease and not get sick and die. They don’t even get the symptoms, but they can carry it and they can give it to others. They’re called “chronic asymptomatic carriers,” or CAC’s. You’ve heard of Typhoid Mary maybe, in health class or history. She was one. Not to the degree that the history books say she was, but she was. She didn’t even know she was one until they told her how many people she’d probably killed; but she was one and it drove her crazy to find out…

I’m sure you’ve heard about some of these things before. In World War II the Japanese tried plague on China and killed a couple of hundred Chinese, but also one of their own companies of soldiers. They were also, later in the war, planning to try it on San Diego, California, but then Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened and they signed the surrender. And all the old Agency stories–the news media coverage, the “black ops,” the assassinations of heads of state, the secret support of coups d’etat–all those covert actions that got the intelligence community in trouble in the 1970s. You’ve heard about those things, I’m sure…

I remember a young woman in–a mid-sized city–let’s call it Santa Livia. That’s not its real name, but I still can’t use the real names. She was an ex-Peace Corps worker and back in the States I’d have asked her out; but when I met her she was in–in Santa Livia working for a civilian aid organization. And that was the city where they wanted me to crack the hollow thing in my tooth to start it. All I needed to do after I cracked it was take the train from Santa Livia to the next two cities on the train route and cough a lot. It was in my bloodstream and that’s all it would take. I’d cough, put my hand over my mouth, cough some more, touch the railings and doors of the train as I left and entered each car along the way. It was easy. You weren’t sick yourself–you didn’t have the symptoms–and the first time you did it you couldn’t believe you were starting an epidemic. How could you be starting an epidemic just by doing that? You didn’t believe it. You were just doing what they wanted you to do.

It’s a great read. Fiction, of course, with more than a bit of paranoid ’60s radical edge to it. Still…

There’s also the divine intervention theory. It can happily coexist, I might add, with random freak occurrence explanations, (e.g., as laid out in books such as the one I’m reading now, ‘The Drunkard’s Walk’ by semi-famous mathematician, Leonard Mlodinow, not to be confused with this 1973 science fiction book by the same name), based on the simple premise that God made those very laws — of ‘randomness’ — and (since He exists outside of time), He has already seen/engineered how the sum of all of those ‘chance’ occurrences turns out in the end: i.e., to His perfectly good purposes.

One needs to tread carefully here though — on the micro scale, i.e., in any particular case — if only because all kinds of folks die from all kinds of diseases all the time for no immediately, human-discernible cause — moral or otherwise. As such, it’s very easy and dangerous to fall into a false gospel wherein God ‘zaps’ the bad guys and in which not being zapped by God offers proof of righteousness. Danger Will Robinson, as the saying used to go. Way too simplistic for an omnipotent God who is mysteriously able to juggle infinite grace with perfect justice.

Still… it would not be much of a stretch, biblically, to suppose that some of the fiercest modern enemies of God’s people (Jews and Christians) are, how to put this… taken out.