Several years ago, I was having drinks at an Irish bar with an intelligence official. (Al Qaeda is always best discussed while drinking Guinness.) He had brought with him several pages of publicly available statements made by leaders within Shabaab, a terrorist-insurgency organization that now controls large parts of Somalia. Shabaab’s leaders offered effusive praise for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, he explained, but some of his colleagues refused to believe that Shabaab was closely allied with al Qaeda. “Why shouldn’t we take their own statements seriously?” he asked.

Of course, while caution should always be exercised when evaluating terrorist propaganda (terrorists do lie, after all), his colleagues in the U.S. intelligence community should have taken those statements seriously. In a video released online, Shabaab has, once again, announced its loyalty to al Qaeda. And Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s post-bin Laden emir, has formally accepted Shabaab into al Qaeda’s fold.