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| Britain |
| Moderate Muzzy Thingy: Bombers count on a web of support |
| 2005-07-31 |
| The ability of London's bombing suspects to elude police, slip through borders and fade into ethnic communities suggests a broad network of support. When the bomb he tried to detonate aboard a London Tube train failed to explode, police say Osman Hussain jumped out a carriage window, ran along the track, then hopped through backyards before melting into the city's bustle. After going underground for five days, Hussain boarded a train at Waterloo station -- possibly walking past his picture and those of three other suspected July 21 attackers on posters that blanketed the city. Then he slipped away, traveling from London through France to Rome. His ability to escape a massive British dragnet, coupled with the arrest of another suspect in Zambia with al Qaeda ties, raised fears about the global reach of today's terrorists and the depth of their networks. "The way people fanned out after the bombings, it's brought it home to people . . . that it is part of a kind of a network, interconnected -- all the fingerprints are there," said Michael Cox, a professor at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs specializing in the post-Sept. 11 terrorism threat. "They'd have to have a much wider support base than just those who are active suicide bombers." Hussain, an Ethiopian-born Briton, was captured Friday at his brother Remzi Isaac's house in Rome, where police traced him through his use of a relative's cellphone. Italian newspapers said investigators suspected Hussain's real name was Hamdi Isaac. Hussain admitted Saturday to a role in the attack but said it was only intended to be an attention-grabbing strike, not a deadly one, according to a legal expert familiar with the probe. Grilled by a pair of Italy's top anti-terrorism prosecutors, Hussain said that months ago in London, his chief -- who he identified as "Muktar" -- taught him how to assemble explosives using fertilizers and stuff explosives and timers into backpacks, the Rome daily La Repubblica said. Hussain was referring to Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27, one of the other bombing suspects captured Friday in a London raid, the newspaper said. Ibrahim is suspected of planting explosives on a London bus on July 21. "Muktar urged us to be careful," La Repubblica quoted Hussain as telling his interrogators. "We didn't want to kill, just sow terror." The arrest sparked more than a dozen follow-up raids across the country, as Italian authorities tried to determine if any attacks on Italy were being plotted. In addition to Hussain, at least two of the other July 21 suspects were of East African origin, and Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the country was watching the area closely. "We are following the evolution of the overall situation in the Horn of Africa where, in stateless lands, al Qaeda has arrived, has settled, and from where it tends, in various ways, to dispatch its followers into Europe and the rest of the world," Pisanu said. Though officials have not yet said they found links between the deadly July 7 attacks and the failed attacks exactly two weeks later -- both of which targeted three subway trains and a bus -- police chief Sir Ian Blair said there was a "resonance" between the two. If it turns out there was a single mastermind for both events and a common bomb maker, experience shows they probably would have fled Britain before the attacks, said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest. A likely hiding place would be in western Europe, where they could flee without having to undergo tough border security checks. "They'll go to ground in areas that they will not be conspicuous," Standish said. "Most European Union countries have a significant Muslim population where these guys can just sit there and fade into the background." Britain was seeking Hussain's extradition and said it was seeking the return of one of its citizens detained in Zambia. Though the Foreign Office has not released the person's name, it is widely reported to be Haroon Rashid Aswat, whom Zambian officials have said was being questioned about 20 phone calls he allegedly made to some of the men involved in the July 7 attacks, which killed 56 people, including four suicide bombers. Aswat is implicated in a 1999 plot to establish a terrorist training camp in the United States and has told Zambian investigators he once was a bodyguard for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Zambian officials said. Before he was detained in Zambia, Aswat had been hiding in Johannesburg, South Africa, and was followed after entering the country from Botswana, the Zambian officials said. "Every single terrorist event we've had, and the failed ones we've had, there usually are foreign connections, even though the cannon fodder may be home grown," said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. British authorities were fortunate to have good quality closed-circuit television pictures of the July 21 suspects. That could have spooked them into a "panic" response counter to known terrorist training methods, with three failing to immediately flee the country and Hussain using a cellular phone that could be traced easily, Ranstorp said. |
| Posted by:.com |
#22 I also found this statement of Arthur Chrenkoff's over at Roger L. Simon's:
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| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-31 23:15 |
| #21 More to the point, we adopted Nazi combined-arms tactics without adopting the forced-labor death camp. The Maoist guerilla-terrorism hybrid strategy is a combination political/military strategy and death-camp-like political power enforcement system combined. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-31 21:47 |
#20
I didn't mean tactics as in method-of-handling-a-firefight. I was thinking more of the "hold the headman of the village's family hostage" sort of tactics. Which is increacingly a political and ideological system of its own. The practicioners in Iraq don't really care about Islam any more than Mao really cared about the proletariat. | |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-31 21:45 |
| #19 But Bin Laden and Zarqawi and co. aren't following the Madhi's tactics and strategies. They follow Mao's. Tactics are not intellectual background. The US military was willing to adopt the Nazi's combined arms tactics without having politics rooted in Naziism. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-07-31 20:11 |
| #18 Naturalized citizens can and have had their citizenship revoked however. Yes but that course of action is vanishingly rare, among the rarest of all penalties meted out by the government and thus it is highly unlikely that it will become a common punishment for terrorist sympathizers. Far more likely (and far easier to accomplish legally) would be choking off the steady influx of reinforcements by closing our borders to the Islamist horde … of course that’s not going to happen either. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2005-07-31 20:03 |
| #17 But Bin Laden and Zarqawi and co. aren't following the Madhi's tactics and strategies. They follow Mao's. BTW, you might find this interesting: http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007258.php. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-31 19:02 |
| #16 It's easy to find the modern radical moslems in the West because to a large extent it's an offshoot of a western-originated and taught-as-gospel-in-western-universities school of thought, namely leftism of the Marxist/Trotskyist/Maoist/Gramsci school. It just substitutes other rationales and a different elite than the "vanguard of the proletariat." Sorry, but while both Marxism/leftism in general and Islamism make the West the enemy, I don't think one has origins in the other. The Mahdi that Churchill wrote about had likely never heard of Marx, and the conquerors of Constantinople or the Barbary pirates certainly had not. I'll grant they borrow language from one another, though I think that's because they find it useful. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-07-31 18:14 |
| #15 I'll try to make sure it isn't missing from now on, Phil F. I don't like worrying friends needlessly. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-07-31 16:32 |
| #14 OK. I was suffering from missing context. Sorry. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-31 16:18 |
| #13 Phil F., the statement in question did indeed come from me. I'm sorry I was unclear, but it is awfully sweet of you to be concerned -- I'm flattered! I was responding to Capt. America's post, and I intended to give my answer to his question about how to handle those who deliberately shelter suicide bombers and their co-conspirators from capture. I am indeed the child of two naturalized citizens, so I take very seriously those who betray the trust of citizenship that they consciously chose. Oh, and phil b and Robert, thank you, too. I feel very appreciated at the moment -- much more than I deserve. :-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-07-31 16:15 |
| #12 My distinct impression was that they were not. More like a member of the religion of commmunism. There is no way we can deport native citizens without preverting the constutition. If that is done the terrorists have won. Naturalized citizens can and have had their citizenship revoked however. We need to start monitoring all religious instutions better than we have been as a nation. Not interfering with but monitoring. We then can be prepared to act against religiously inspired sedition. The is no legal restraint on monitoring public acts. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet 0’ Doom 2005-07-31 15:57 |
| #11 How suprised would you be to find out that the guy who was trolling here last week (or the week before) from Oxford wasn't Moslem? |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-31 15:24 |
| #10 The statement about a blanket deportation of naturalized citizens seemed out of character. Maybe she meant something else, but she's usually also clearer than that. As long as there are people running around who think that Che Guevara t-shirts are cute there's going to be a serious problem with terrorism. And the answer to that problem isn't deportation, it's the other way around: maybe all the sane people should secede. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-31 15:13 |
| #9 I don't why you would you would suggest TW's comments weren't hers. Terrorism is just the tip of a much larger iceberg of unassimilated minorities with many attendant social problems. This is a problem that is not going away and the numbers say is going to get progressively worse. Some of us have been saying for some time that expulsion is really the only answer. The only issue is how bad things will have to get before its generally recognized. And note that Europe has a long history of doing this. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-07-31 14:58 |
| #8 Phil, Americas Muslims are so moderate the largest mosque on the east coast just selected a jihadi apologist as their imam. They're also more likely to have Al Jazeera available via satellite. It's easy to find the modern radical moslems in the West because to a large extent it's an offshoot of a western-originated and taught-as-gospel-in-western-universities school of thought, namely leftism of the Marxist/Trotskyist/Maoist/Gramsci school. It just substitutes other rationales and a different elite than the "vanguard of the proletariat." |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-31 14:54 |
| #7 Consider this as a naive first approach:
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| Posted by: James 2005-07-31 14:36 |
| #6 British television has provided the USA with many entertaining repackaged shows like Trading Spaces and American Idol. Maybe it's time for a British version of COPS and America's Most Wanted. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2005-07-31 14:27 |
| #5 Phil, Americas Muslims are so moderate the largest mosque on the east coast just selected a jihadi apologist as their imam. And I'm unaware that trailing wife has been involved in supporting or committing acts of terrorism. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-07-31 13:30 |
#4 PlanetDan wrote:
Well, it might look that way if the only countries you look at are Britian and Pakistan (where most of the moslems in the UK come from). OTOH, it appears as if the conflict in Iraq is mainly Al Qaeda trying to fight other moslems. I'd like to suggest that Al Qaeda is doing those attacks for a reason, and that they believe in "too moderate moslems" even if the westerners don't. To some extent, terrorist attacks like the ones in London (and Israel, and even 9-11) are cheap parlour tricks. They let people like OBL, and Saddam Hussein, and the Assad Dynasty, pretend they're in business to "resist" western countries, when by the numbers they're mainly involved in killing Moslems. The Taliban killed many more Afghans than there were New Yorkers killed in the 9/11 attacks, and noone can claim that the Afghans were killed as part of a general resistance against Westerners, or Christians. Saddam Hussein's government killed many times more Kurds (who are Moslems) and Shi'ites than it did "Zionists." But financing blowing up a pizza kitchen in Tel Aviv lets him pretend he's Saladin (who by the way was a Kurd with an army with a substantial number of Turkish soldiers) fighting the Crusaders. To date, it's a cheap parlor trick. We need to keep the governments in question (who are more intolerant than their populations) from getting enough WMD to cement their authority on their own populations; this is probably more important than doing anything wrt the moslems in the west. Trailing wife allegedly wrote:
I was under the impression that your parents were naturalized citizens. Could someone check the IP on that message, make sure it's from the usual location? | ||
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-31 12:36 |
| #3 The thornier issue is how they are to be dealt with? I vote for eviction to their home country of all non-citizens, revocation of citizenship and eviction to their home country of all naturalized citizens, and long jail sentences for American-born citizens for "aiding and abetting." |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-07-31 11:26 |
| #2 I agree. This segment is much larger than the homicide bombers and in some respects more dangerous. The thornier issue is how they are to be dealt with? Pulling of finger and toe nails is a start, but under general sentencing guidelines and liberal judges, they spent little to no punishment. Yet they are the enablers. |
| Posted by: Captain America 2005-07-31 10:32 |
| #1 "Moderate Muzzy Thingy" Well put. The supporters are part of that middle group -- not gonna blow themselves up, not gonna fight for reform in the muslim world. But more than happy to provide a little support here and there to a brother. The fallacy is that the middle group is the moderate group. That's a western wish, driven by western values, not a geopolitical reality. The majority of muslims would, in some way, support terror. There IS no "moderate muslim" faction. If there were, we would have heard from them by now. |
| Posted by: PlanetDan 2005-07-31 08:16 |