Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical journal, was in 2007 the only publication in France to print the Danish Mohammed cartoons. As a result, Charlie Hebdo was then charged with slandering a group on the basis of religion, but was finally acquitted after a two day trial.

Charlie Hebdo today intended to commemorate the Islamic victory in the elections in Tunisia by temporarily renaming itself “Sharia Hebdo” and appointing the Prophet Mohammed “guest editor” and putting his portrait again on the cover.

The “Sharia Hebdo” edition had not even appeared yet, when last night the paper’s Paris offices were fire-bombed and its web-site attacked and taken down.

The bravery and readiness to defend the principle of free speech of the American urban elites was promptly demonstrated by Time Magazine’s Bureau chief, the aptly named Bruce Crumley.

Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that “they” aren’t going to tell “us” what can and can’t be done in free societies? Because not only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?

The difficulty in answering that question is also what’s making it hard to have much sympathy for the French satirical newspaper firebombed this morning, after it published another stupid and totally unnecessary edition mocking Islam. ..

[Y]eah, the violence inflicted upon Charlie Hebdo was outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable, and illegal. But apart from the “illegal” bit, Charlie Hebdo’s current edition is all of the above, too.

All of which leads inevitably to the reflection that objectionable as the bigoted barbarian fanatics who firebombed Charlie Hebdo are, lickspittle cowards, appeasers, and traitors to their own culture and civilization like the invertebrate Mr. Crumbley are even more of a blight on the face of the planet.

Bugger Islam, and bugger bed-wetting liberalism twice.

The New York Times provides some details on the Norway mass murderer.

When Anders Behring Breivik was not plotting mass murder and fine-tuning the bomb he detonated here last week, he was busy playing video games and blogging, listening to Euro pop and watching episodes of “True Blood” — except on Sunday nights, when he usually dined with his mother. ...

For years, Mr. Breivik, who is 32, participated in debates in Internet forums on the dangers of Islam and immigration. It is not clear at what point he decided that violence was the solution to the ills he believed were tearing European civilization asunder. Before the attacks that he has admitted mounting on government buildings and a children’s summer camp on Friday, he was careful never to telegraph his intentions.

“He didn’t say anything you could remember,” said Stig Fjellskaalnes, who knew Mr. Breivik when he was a member of Norway’s conservative Progress Party in the early 2000s. “He’s one of the crowd, if you know what I mean. You forget him.” ...

With the 1,500-page manifesto, which he said took three years to complete, Mr. Breivik endeavored to find common cause with xenophobic right-wing groups around the world, particularly in the United States. He quoted extensively from the anti-Islam writings of American bloggers, and cut and pasted a whole section of the manifesto written by Theodore J. Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, into his own, replacing “leftism” with “multiculturalism” as the object of aspersion. ...

He attended the elite high school where the country’s current king, Harald V, and his son once studied. Former classmates remembered him as quiet but intelligent, with a small rebellious streak: he was a prolific graffiti artist. ...

To earn money for the attacks, he wrote that he had started a company that earned him millions. Neighbors cast doubt on this claim, however, saying that they thought he had inherited some money from relatives.

As he went about gathering six tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and turning aspirin powder into pure acetylsalicylic acid for his bomb, he led an active life online, railing against Muslims and Marxists in debate forums.

He once approached Hans Rustad, the editor of a popular conservative Website called Document.no, with a proposal to create a pan-European movement modeled on Tea Party groups in the United States.

When not surfing conservative blogs, Mr. Breivik was fighting virtual demons, ogres and other fantastical creatures in online role-playing games. He was a regular in talk forums for players of “World of Warcraft,” using a busty female as his avatar and the handle Conservatism.

Mark Steyn was annoyed to find himself quoted in Breivik’s manifesto and points out some of the illogic of the commentariat’s reaction.

It is unclear how seriously this “manifesto” should be taken. Parts of it simply cut and paste chunks of the last big killer “manifesto” by Ted Kaczynski, with the occasional [insert-your-cause-here] word substitute replacing the Unabomber’s obsessions with Breivik’s. This would seem an odd technique to use for a sincerely meant political statement. The entire document is strangely anglocentric – in among the citations of NR and The Washington Times, there’s not a lot about Norway.

Nevertheless, Breivik’s manifesto seems to be determining the narrative in the anglophone media. The opening sentence from USA Today:

Islamophobia has reached a mass murder level in Norway as the confessed killer claims he sought to combat encroachment by Muslims into his country and Europe.

So, if a blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavian kills dozens of other blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavians, that’s now an “Islamophobic” mass murder? As far as we know, not a single Muslim was among the victims. Islamophobia seems an eccentric perspective to apply to this atrocity, and comes close to making the actual dead mere bit players in their own murder. Yet the Associated Press is on board:

Security Beefed Up At UK Mosques After Norway Massacre.

But again: No mosque was targeted in Norway. A member of the country’s second political party gunned down members of its first. But, in the merest evolution of post-9/11 syndrome, Muslims are now the preferred victims even in a story in which they are entirely absent.

Rand Simberg adds:

It took almost a day for some on the left to start blaming Sarah Palin for what happened in Norway. It probably took a while for them to get over their cynical shock that it actually was a white guy this time.

I will note, though, as an aside, that like school shootings in “gun-free zones,” this was another catastrophic failure of gun control. Just a few rifles in the hands of the older kids on that island, with training, would have ended this pretty quickly. Instead, they were fish in a barrel for him.

Infowars:

In response to a Department of Homeland Security warning to airlines that it believes terrorists want to bypass full body scanners and blow up commercial airliners by planting bombs inside humans, the TSA has indicated it will intensify security procedures across the nation’s airports.

“The Department of Homeland Security has identified a potential threat from terrorists who may be considering surgically implanting explosives or explosive components in humans to conduct terrorist attacks,” an advisory to foreign counterparts notes, according to an unnamed U.S. security official.

The advisory says that the DHS believes terrorists could inject a detonating chemical into themselves to trigger the so called “belly bombs”.

The memo also reportedly states “Our Government has information indicating doctors have offered to help extremists surgically implant explosive devices in humans and animals for terrorist attacks.”

Officials claim that full body scanners currently being used in airports would not penetrate deep enough to detect such devices.

The anonymous official stated that there is no intelligence pointing to a specific plot or that any attack was imminent.

Daily Mail:

‘Maybe he was looking for the bathroom’: Family defends Yemeni passenger who stormed cockpit, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as plane came in to land at San Francisco.

Right.

This much we know: Al Qaida has a long-standing interest in WMD. Their capabilities in that area have improved modestly in those areas in recent years, despite severe damage inflicted on their leadership and fund-raising operations—essential elements in any WMD/WME attacks. We also know there was a major WMD operation in the Atlanta area late last year, with the feds stopping all trucks on I-20 during rush hour, and running them through a radiation scanner. Sources told WSB-TV the activity was “real world” and not a drill, though various spokesmen later tried to “walk back” that remark. Sounds like the same p.r. tactic recently attempted in San Diego.

One more point. It’s probably unrelated (at least, that’s what government officials would have you believe), but this recent item also caught our eye: early last month, the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to test Presidential Alerts in the near future. ...

To someone who spent years in radio (before having the good sense to join the military) this announcement was stunning. Broadcasters have worked with the FCC for years on the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and its predecessor, the Emergency Broadcast System or EBS. There was always some provision for the president (or the national command authority) to provide information through the system in the event of a cataclysmic event. But for more than 50 years, no one saw a need to test the presidential capabilities, despite nuclear dangers during the Cold War, and real-world events like 9-11.

And what sort of event might warrant activation of the Presidential EAS? How about a domestic terror attack, using weapons of mass destruction or a weapon of mass effect?

He could be right.

San Diego assistant port director Al Hallor, also a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer, told local ABC affiliate Channel 10 News that authorities have uncovered “weapons of mass effect” in an interview that aired Feb. 11.

Hallor did not say where WMD had been located. He only denied that they had not been found at the port of San Diego. Hallor also did not identify the type of WMD he was referring to, but that reply strongly suggested that he was aware of the apprehension on US soil of at least one nuclear device or the components for a dirty bomb.

“At the airport, seaport, at our port of entry we have not this past fiscal year, but our partner agencies have found those things,” he said.

Reporter: Do you ever find things that are dangerous like a chemical agent or a weaponised device?

Mr Hallor: At the airport, seaport, at our port of entry we have not this past fiscal year, but our partner agencies have found those things.

Reporter: So, specifically, you’re looking for the dirty bomb? You’re looking for the nuclear device?

Mr Hallor: Correct. Weapons of mass effect.

Reporter: You ever found one?

Mr Hallor: Not at this location.

Reporter: But they have found them?

Mr Hallor: Yes.

Reporter: You never found one in San Diego though?

Mr Hallor: I would say at at the port of San Diego we have not.

Al-Qaeda is attempting to procure nuclear material and recruit rogue scientists in order to build a radioactive “dirty bomb,” leaked documents published in Wednesday’s Telegraph newspaper revealed.

The cables, released by the WikiLeaks website, showed that security chiefs told a Nato meeting in January 2009 that Al-Qaeda was planning a programme of “dirty radioactive improvised explosive devices (IEDs).”

The makeshift nuclear bombs, which could be used against soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, would contaminate the surrounding area for years to come.

The leaked documents also revealed that Al-Qaeda papers found in 2007 convinced security officials that “greater advances” had been made in bio-terrorism than was previously feared.

US security personnel were warned in 2008 that terrorists had “the technical competence to manufacture an explosive device beyond a mere dirty bomb.”

The Vancouver Sun mentions a few more details.

A leading atomic regulator has privately warned the world stands on the brink of a “nuclear 9/11.”

Security briefings suggest jihadi groups are also close to producing “workable and efficient” biological and chemical weapons that could kill thousands if unleashed in attacks on the West.

Thousands of classified American cables obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to the Daily Telegraph detail the international struggle to stop the spread of weapons-grade nuclear, chemical and biological material around the globe.

At a NATO meeting in 2009, security chiefs briefed member states that al-Qaida was plotting a program of “dirty radioactive IEDs”, makeshift nuclear roadside bombs that could be used against western troops in Afghanistan.

As well as causing a large explosion, a “dirty bomb” attack would contaminate the area for many years.

The briefings also state that al-Qaida documents found in Afghanistan in 2007 revealed that “greater advances” had been made in bioterrorism than was previously realized. An Indian national security adviser told American security personnel in June 2008 that terrorists had made a “manifest attempt to get fissile material” and “have the technical competence to manufacture an explosive device beyond a mere dirty bomb”.

Alerts about the smuggling of nuclear material, sent to Washington from foreign U.S. embassies, document how criminal and terrorist gangs were trafficking large amounts of highly radioactive material across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

————————————————————-

And the Telegraph published today the details of a series of nuclear trafficking incidents occurring in recent years.

Radiation alarms installed on the border crossing between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan sounded in November 2007 as a freight train travelling from Kyrgyzstan to Iran passed through Nazarbek rail station. Customs officials halted the train to perform an examination and found that a single carriage ostensibly packed with “scrap metal” was perilously radioactive. So high were the radiation levels that officials were instructed not to pass within five metres of the carriage, making it impossible to come close enough to open it. At the time of the last dispatch to Washington, sent in January 2008, the rail car was still unopened and remained in quarantine.

In November 2007, the US embassy in London received a telephone call from a British deep-sea salvage merchant based in Sheffield, who claimed that his business associates in the Philippines had found six uranium “bricks” at the site of an underwater wreck. The uranium had formerly belonged the US. The merchant provided nine photographs of the bricks, which he said his associates wanted to sell for a profit. It is not clear whether diplomats agreed to the purchase.

Officials in the US embassy in Uganda were approached in February 2008 by a source who claimed that a Congolese acquaintance had asked him to help find a buyer for some highly enriched pure uranium liquid. The source, a Ugandan gold merchant, said a potential sale to a Pakistani buyer in Kenya had fallen through due to the ongoing civil unrest in the east African county. A nuclear smuggling alert sent back to Washington states that the highly radioactive material may be transported across the Congolese border in Uganda in the next few days by train, bus or taxi.

In September 2009, two employees working at the Rossing Uranium Mine in Namibia smuggled almost half a ton of the uranium concentrate powder – known as “yellowcake” – out of the compound in plastic carrier bags. The theft was initiated by Namibian police officers who offered the two employees “exorbitant amounts of money” in a bungled sting designed to determine how easily uranium could be stolen. The two employees removed the yellowcake from a broken drum and scooped it into carrier bags which they placed into a skip and smuggled out of the compound on the back of a haulage truck. The police caught the thieves when they attempted to sell 24 bags containing 170kg (370lb) of the stolen yellowcake. The remaining 250kg was not intercepted and are likely to have been sold on to smugglers.

A car carrying three Armenian men set off a radiation detector on the Georgian-Armenian border in August 2009. The driver was waved through by guards after he claimed to have been injected with radioactive isotopes during surgery. When the alarm sounded again as the car returned from Armenia, the guards decided to carry out a search. They found that the car was contaminated with radiation throughout, but no nuclear material was discovered. Whatever radioactive cargo the car may previously have been carrying had already been delivered.

A Portuguese man walked into the US embassy in Lisbon in July 2008 offering to sell six uranium plates that had been stolen from Chernobyl – the site of the 1986 nuclear catastrophe in the USSR. The plates were in the possession of an ex-Russian general who was allegedly using a Portuguese judge to broker sales, he said. Officials reported that the source was a well-known “small-time hustler,” known as “The Giraffe” who was involved in “many scams”. The case was referred to the Portuguese police.

The Security Service of Ukraine arrested two private entrepreneurs and a prominent local politician in April 2009 as they attempted to sell a container of weapons-grade plutonium for $10 million (£6.3 million) in the western province of Ternopil Oblast. A security official told the embassy that the radioactive material could be “used by terrorists for making a dirty bomb”.

During the summer of 2009, Russian customs officers reported three incidents in which cobalt-60, a highly radioactive substance, was detected in passenger trains travelling from Kazakhstan to Russia. A large number of passengers were exposed to the radiation. The authorities seized 500g of the substance.

Also, in the Telegraph:

Airport security staff are being urged to examine “children’s articles” after US intelligence concluded that terrorists were plotting to fill them with explosive chemicals.

Terrorists are attempting to manufacture nitrocellulose, a chemical which can become highly explosive if tightly packed. Details of how to prepare the chemical, which cannot be detected by airport X-ray machines, have been found in al-Qaeda training manuals.

Terrorists could, of course, conceal a radio-transmitting detonator in more or less any object. But, why worry about cavity bombs when al Qaeda is being reported to be making plans for surgically-implanted infernal devices.

New York Daily News:

Jihadis bent on concocting a “new kind of terrorism” are brainstorming how to surgically implant explosives to make undetectable Frankenbombers.

“What is your opinion about surgeries through which I can implant the bomb …inside the operative’s body?” an apparent mad surgeon recently asked an online forum used by Al Qaeda affiliates.

He called on bombmakers and doctors to cook up the perfect solution to murder “larger numbers of unbelievers and apostates.”

“I am waiting for the interaction of the experienced brothers to connect the two sciences together and produce a new kind of terrorism, Allah willing,” he wrote, according to a translation by terror experts at the SITE Intelligence Group.

The scheming comes amid controversy over body scanners and pat-downs in airports that some Americans complain are too invasive. The ideas for a “surgically booby-trapped martyrdom seeker” were chillingly concise for the doctor of death monitored by SITE.

Stitching a bomb into the abdominal cavity made of plastic or liquid explosives – such as semtex or PETN - was judged the best method.

“It must be planted near the surface of the body, because the human body absorbs shocks,” advised one terrorist.

Al Qaeda has already used a remotely detonated cavity bomb in an assassination attempt on the Saudi head of counter-terrorism.

The answer is: not well. The Embassy Bomber who killed 224 people in the simultaneous truck bomb attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 was acquitted in a Manhattan Federal District Court of all but one count of a 285 count indictment.

Jennifer Rubin, in Commentary, explains what went wrong.

The acquittal of Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani yesterday on all but one of 285 counts in connection with the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania has once again demonstrated that the leftist lawyers’ experiment in applying civilian trial rules to terrorists is gravely misguided and downright dangerous. The soon-to-be House chairman on homeland security, Peter King, issued a statement blasting the trial outcome and the nonchalant response from the Justice Department:

“I am disgusted at the total miscarriage of justice today in Manhattan’s federal civilian court. In a case where Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was facing 285 criminal counts, including hundreds of murder charges, and where Attorney General Eric Holder assured us that ‘failure is not an option,’ the jury found him guilty on only one count and acquitted him of all other counts including every murder charge. This tragic verdict demonstrates the absolute insanity of the Obama Administration’s decision to try al-Qaeda terrorists in civilian courts”

Congress can start by ending federal-court jurisdiction over detainees. Then they should demand Eric Holder’s resignation — preferably before his serially wrong advice causes any more damage to our national security.

As the New York Times explains:

[P]rosecutors built a circumstantial case to try to establish that Mr. Ghailani had played a key logistical role in the preparations for the Tanzania attack.

They said the evidence showed that he helped to buy the Nissan Atlas truck that was used to carry the bomb, and gas tanks that were placed inside the truck to intensify the blast. He also stored an explosive detonator in an armoire he used, and his cellphone became the “operational phone” for the plotters in the weeks leading up to the attacks, prosecutors contended.

The attacks, orchestrated by Al Qaeda, killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded thousands of others.

But the case was ill-suited to civilian courts, and a key witness was excluded from testifying:

But because of the unusual circumstances of Mr. Ghailani’s case — after he was captured in Pakistan in 2004, he was held for nearly five years in a so-called black site run by the Central Intelligence Agency and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the prosecution faced significant legal hurdles getting his case to trial. And last month, the government lost a key ruling on the eve of trial that may have seriously damaged their chances of winning convictions.

In the ruling, the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, barred them from using an important witness against Mr. Ghailani because the government had learned about the man through Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation while he was in C.I.A. custody, where his lawyers say he was tortured.

The witness, Hussein Abebe, would have testified that he had sold Mr. Ghailani the large quantities of TNT used to blow up the embassy in Dar es Salaam, prosecutors told the judge, calling him “a giant witness for the government.”

The judge called it correctly, and explicitly warned the government of “the potential damage of excluding the witness when he said in his ruling that Mr. Ghailani’s status of ‘enemy combatant’ probably would permit his detention as something akin ‘to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end, even if he were found not guilty.’”

In other words, what in the world was the bomber doing in an Article III courtroom? He was, quite bluntly, part of a stunt by the Obama administration, which had vilified Bush administration lawyers for failing to accord terrorists the full panoply of constitutional rights available to American citizens who are arrested by police officers and held pursuant to constitutional requirements.

Once again, the Obama team has revealed itself to be entirely incompetent and has proved, maybe even to themselves, the obvious: the Bush administration had it right.

The world is awash in intelligence about terrorism. Most of it is meaningless speculation, a conversation intercepted between two Arabs about how they’d love to blow up London Bridge. The problem, of course, is how to distinguish between idle chatter and actual attack planning. There is no science involved in this, but there are obvious guidelines. Are the people known to be associated with radical Islamists? Do they have the intent and capability to conduct such an attack? Were any specific details mentioned in the conversation that can be vetted? Is there other intelligence to support the plot discussed in the conversation?

The problem is that what appears quite obvious in the telling is much more ambiguous in reality. At any given point, the government could reasonably raise the alert level if it wished. That it doesn’t raise it more frequently is tied to three things. First, the intelligence is frequently too ambiguous to act on. Second, raising the alert level warns people without really giving them any sense of what to do about it. Third, it can compromise the sources of its intelligence.

The current warning is a perfect example of the problem. We do not know what intelligence the U.S. government received that prompted the warning, and I suspect that the public descriptions of the intelligence do not reveal everything that the government knows. We do know that a German citizen was arrested in Afghanistan in July and has allegedly provided information regarding this threat, but there are likely other sources contributing to the warning, since the U.S. government considered the intelligence sufficient to cause concern. The Obama administration leaked on Saturday that it might issue the warning, and indeed it did.

The government did not recommend that Americans not travel to Europe. That would have affected the economy and infuriated Europeans. Leaving tourism aside, since tourism season is largely over, a lot of business is transacted by Americans in Europe. The government simply suggested vigilance. Short of barring travel, there was nothing effective the government could do. So it shifted the burden to travelers. If no attack occurs, nothing is lost. If an attack occurs, the government can point to the warning and the advice. Those hurt or killed would not have been vigilant.

I do not mean to belittle the U.S. government on this. Having picked up the intelligence it can warn the public or not. The public has a right to know, and the government is bound by law and executive order to provide threat information. But the reason that its advice is so vague is that there is no better advice to give. The government is not so much washing its hands of the situation as acknowledging that there is not much that anyone can do aside from the security measures travelers should already be practicing.

The alert serves another purpose beyond alerting the public. It communicates to the attackers that their attack has been detected if not penetrated, and that the risks of the attack have pyramided. Since these are most likely suicide attackers not expecting to live through the attack, the danger is not in death. It is that the Americans or the Europeans might have sufficient intelligence available to thwart the attack. From the terrorist point of view, losing attackers to death or capture while failing to inflict damage is the worst of all possible scenarios. Trained operatives are scarce, and like any strategic weapon they must be husbanded and, when used, cause maximum damage. When the attackers do not know what Western intelligence knows, their risk of failure is increased along with the incentive to cancel the attack. A government warning, therefore, can prevent an attack. ...

the warning might well have served a purpose, but the purpose was not necessarily to empower citizens to protect themselves from terrorists. Indeed, there might have been two purposes. One might have been to disrupt the attack and the attackers. The other might have been to cover the government if an attack came.

In either case, it has to be recognized that this sort of warning breeds cynicism among the public. If the warning is intended to empower citizens, it engenders a sense of helplessness, and if no attack occurs, it can also lead to alert fatigue. What the government is saying to its citizenry is that, in the end, it cannot guarantee that there won’t be an attack and therefore its citizens are on their own. The problem with that statement is not that the government isn’t doing its job but that the job cannot be done. The government can reduce the threat of terrorism. It cannot eliminate it.

This brings us to the strategic point. The defeat of jihadist terror cells cannot be accomplished defensively. Homeland security can mitigate the threat, but it can never eliminate it. The only way to eliminate it is to destroy all jihadist cells and prevent the formation of new cells by other movements or by individuals forming new movements, and this requires not just destroying existing organizations but also the radical ideology that underlies them. To achieve this, the United States and its allies would have to completely penetrate a population of about 1.3 billion people and detect every meeting of four or five people planning to create a terrorist cell. And this impossible task would not even address the problem of lone-wolf terrorists. It is simply impossible to completely dominate and police the entire world, and any effort to do so would undoubtedly induce even more people to turn to terrorism in opposition to the global police state.

Will Rogers was asked what he might do to deal with the German U-boat threat in World War I. He said he would boil away the Atlantic, revealing the location of the U-boats that could then be destroyed. Asked how he would do this, he answered that that was a technical question and he was a policymaker.

Read the whole thing.

George Friedman is clever and cynical as always, but I think he’s wrong about the United States and her Western allies being unable to boil the Islamic sea.

Terrorism is really war by another name, and war is labor intensive and consequently costly. Terrorism exists because funding, weapons, material support, and ultimately safe havens are made available by the only entities capable of providing the necessary scale of support: governments.

We are in denial about the collusion of hostile states like Iran and supposedly friendly states. A major debate occurred some years ago in foreign policy and intelligence circles on the possibility of the existence of non-state actors operating in complete isolation from any state or government. The liberal side of the debate was articulated most prominently by Paul Pilar, chief of analysis at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and expressed most completely in his book Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Pilar’s position, that unicorns exist and spontaneously generate, has become the Intelligence Community’s orthodoxy and it is nonsense. The Taliban have been able to pay their fighters more than than the Afghan government pays members of its security forces. The Taliban have an estimated 20,000-30,000 fighters. $300 a month times 20,000-30,000 men is $6,000,000-$9,000,000 or $72,000,000-$108,000,000 in minimum base salaries alone per annum before adding in higher compensation for officers and ncos, arms and ammunition, clothing, rations, and medical supplies.

We have a multi-hundred million dollar per year enterprise underway in the Afghan mountains and other insurgencies operating in Iraq, in the Arabian Peninsula, in Africa, and to some extent in Europe and the United States. A certain amount of all this activity is self-funded by kidnapping, robbery, and extortion, but it must be obvious that enormous amounts of monetary and material support are coming from somewhere.

It is also obvious that what makes the expenditure on NGO terrorism possible for governments, groups, and wealthy citizens of the Islamic world is the vast transfer of wealth from the civilized and developed world exchanged for oil at artificially high prices created by the manipulation of prices and supplies by the OPEC oil cartel.

To boil the sea that terrorism swims in, the US government merely needs to destroy OPEC, return petroleum to prices to the mercies of the real world market, and thereby reduce the economic surplus that flatters Islamic egos and enables Islamic extravagances.

The first step, of course, would be to defeat the liberal security orthodoxy that protects state supporters of terrorist surrogates and immunizes them by enabling deniability.

Multiple terrorist teams have arrived and are in position in Europe and are believed to have received go-ahead commands to carry out “Mumbai-style” attacks in Germany, France or other locations. Pre-security areas in airports are thought to be likely targets.

ABC NEWS:

Mounting ‘Chatter’ by Jihadi Extremists Has Law Enforcement Nervous

Among the possible targets in the suspected European terror plot are pre-security areas in at least five major European airports, a law enforcement official told ABC News. Authorities believe terror teams are preparing to mount a commando like attack featuring small units and small firearms modeled after the Mumbai attack two years ago.

The State Department issued a highly unusual “Travel Alert” Sunday for “potential terrorist attacks in Europe,” saying U.S. citizens are “reminded of the potential for terrorists to attack public transportation systems and other tourist infrastructure.”

One scenario authorities fear is a repeat of the 1985 attack on the Rome and Vienna airports, when Palestinian extremists threw grenades and opened fire on travelers waiting at ticket counters injuring 140 and killing 19, including a small child. ...

Authorities have detected a dramatic increase in online chatter among jihadist websites the last week, in what experts believe could be other terrorists banning together in anticipation of terror attack plans in Europe and hoping to engage themselves in prospective plots.

The escalating discussions in the virtual meeting rooms for al Qaeda supporters have praised terror attacks plan and suggested targets, communicating with fellow believers just as the terrorist teams at the center of the current suspected plots likely did, experts said.

George Smiley 9/29:

Connect the Dots

...Al Qaida was/is reportedly planning a Mumbai-style attack against cities in Western Europe. ...

...The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, is refusing comment. That’s often a sign that the information is credible, and the spy masters are upset that someone blabbed before all the suspects could be rounded up, or the plot was completely foiled.

...Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal says a recent surge in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan is part of an effort to disrupt possible attacks in Europe.

...And the U.S. is also a potential target, according to ABC News and Britain Sky News.

But before you say this is nothing out of the ordinary, consider this unusual twist that might related. On Tuesday, federal, state and local law enforcement agents were stopping—and inspecting—all west-bound tractor-trailers traveling on I-20 out of Atlanta. At the height of the evening rush hour, no less.

A spokesman for the TSA told WSB-TV that the search was part of a “training exercise.” But the station’s investigative reporter, Mark Winne, learned from other sources that the inspections are part of a counter-terrorism operation.

Obviously, there’s a big difference between an “operation” and an “exercise.” Additionally, we’ve never heard of this type of drill being conducted on a major interstate highway, during rush hour, with participation by all levels of law enforcement. So, it sounds like something beyond training prompted that traffic jam on I-20 Tuesday afternoon.

But, before we connect that final dot, it is worth noting that the European plot apparently didn’t involve large trucks or radioactive devices. The trucks being searched on I-20 west of Atlanta were screened with a radiation detector (and other devices), according to WSB.

For the second time in three days, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies have conducted a major counter-terrorism operation along I-20 in Atlanta. For several hours, beginning this morning and continuing into the afternoon, officials searched scores of tractor-trailer rigs traveling along the highway.

A spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, Jon Allen, told WSB-TV that the operation was aimed at prevent any type of activity that anybody may have to disrupt transportation systems.”

Mr. Allen described the search effort as a form of “highway homeland security.” But at that point, his comments took a turn for the odd. Interviewed by WSB’s Mark Winne—one of the first journalists to learn that Tuesday’s search was an operation and not an exercise—Mr. Allen said the federal air marshal service was the lead agency for the roadway inspections in Atlanta. ...

Admittedly, this has not been a very good week for TSA’s regional public affairs department. As Tuesday’s search got underway west of Atlanta (and traffic slowed to a crawl on I-20), a TSA spokesman insisted the activity was a training exercise. That explanation lasted until Mr. Winne contacted other law enforcement officials, who revealed it was a counter-terrorism operation.

———————————
Dave Lindorff, at leftist CounterPunch, Weekend October 1-3 edition:

Now the Government is X-Raying You While You Drive

Americans in Atlanta got a taste of this latest government intrusion into their lives when Homeland Security last Tuesday ran what it called a “counterterrorism operation” not prompted by any specific threat. They set up one of their ZBV vans on I-20 and snarled traffic for hours while all trailer trucks stopped and scanned by Homeland Security personnel.

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CBS Atlanta 10/1:

Emergency Repairs On I-20 This Weekend

Drivers should expect delays on I-20 eastbound around Six Flags this weekend as an emergency project continues to replace failing bridge joints. ...

Tuesday morning traffic was backed-up for miles on the eastbound side. Failing joints created a hole in the bridge over Six Flags Parkway. The debris lead to a four-car accident.

The hole was temporarily patched, the but the problem was not solved.

This weekend an emergency project will continue to replace those bad bridge joints. The $5.1 million project will close two right lanes on the eastbound side at Six Flags. No major delays are expected, although drivers should give themselves a few extra minutes. ...

The lane closures are scheduled to last from 9 p.m. Friday until 5 a.m. Monday.

Some news agency reports.

German authorities say they have closed a Hamburg mosque used by the Sept. 11 attackers as a meeting place before they moved to the United States.

A statement by Hamburg officials says the Taiba mosque was shut down and its cultural association was banned on Monday.

The prayer house, formerly known as al-Quds mosque, used to be a meeting and recruiting point for some of the Sept. 11 attackers.

Weekly news magazine Focus cites a report by a local intelligence agency branch in saying the mosque has again become the city’s “main center of attraction for the jihad scene.

And it is easy to foresee, several more years down the road, the news agency report of police closure of Corboda House, Park51, or whatever they wind up calling the ground zero mosque, built on the basis of empty liberal optimism, like Fareed Zakaria’s (“If there is going to be a reformist movement in Islam, it is going to emerge from places like the proposed institute.”)

But there is no reformist movement in Islam. There is only taqiyya and kitman, the concealment of real beliefs and intentions in order to mislead, and ultimately to defeat and subjugate, the unbelieving adversary.

The imaginary moderate, reformist Muslim plays the same role in the liberal’s vision of the world that the unicorn does in the bedroom decor of certain particularly air-headed high school girls, as a fantasy symbol representing a whole collection of comforting, emotionally self indulgent illusions with no connection to reality whatsoever.

Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah

A leak by US Intelligence Officials to Some News Agency reveals that in 2008 three of the subway bomb plotters traveled to Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal areas where one of them, possibly all three, met with Adnan el Shukrijumah, the prominent al Qaeda figure known to have been the leader of the failed “Second Wave” attack following 9/11 involving the detonation of a dirty bomb in a major US city, whose target is generally believed to have been Los Angeles.

Shukrijumah was long suspected to have been operating from somewhere in Latin America, but this evidence places him in Waziristan in 2008.

U.S. counterterrorism officials have linked one of the nation’s most wanted terrorists to last year’s thwarted plot to bomb the New York City subway system, authorities said Wednesday.

Current and former counterterrorism officials said top al-Qaida operative Adnan Shukrijumah met with one of the would-be suicide bombers in a plot that Attorney General Eric Holder called one of the most dangerous since the 9/11 terror attacks.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have named Shukrijumah in a draft terrorism indictment but on Wednesday the Justice Department was still discussing whether to cite his role. Some officials feared that the extra attention might hinder efforts to capture him. ...

Current and former counterterrorism officials discussed the case on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.

Shukrijumah, 34, has eluded the FBI for years. The Saudi-born terrorist studied at a community college in Florida, but when the FBI showed up to arrest him as a material witness to a terrorism case in 2003, he already had left the country. The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.

Intelligence officials began unraveling the subway plot last year, when U.S. intelligence intercepted an e-mail from an account that al-Qaida had used in a recent terrorist plot, officials said. The e-mail discussed bomb-making techniques and was sent to an address in Denver, setting off alarms within the CIA and FBI from Islamabad to the U.S.

Najibullah Zazi and two friends were arrested in September 2009 before, prosecutors said, they could carry out a trio of suicide bombings in Manhattan. Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay have pleaded guilty and admitted planning to detonate homemade bombs on the subway during rush hour. A third man, Adis Medunjanin, awaits trial.

A fourth suspect, a midlevel al-Qaida operative known as Ahmed, traded the e-mails with Zazi, who was frantically trying to perfect his bomb making recipe, officials said. The U.S. wants to bring the Pakistani man to the U.S. for trial on charges that are not yet public.

Pakistani officials also have arrested a fifth person, known as Afridi, who worked with Ahmed, officials said.

Falconing is a favorite sport in the Islamic world, and the most prized game of Middle Eastern falconers is the Houbara Bustard, Chlamydotis undulata, a large type of landfowl of the bustard family, which confusingly shares features with gallinacious birds (pheasants, partridges, chickens, turkeys), wading birds (plovers), and struthious birds (cassowaries and ostriches). The Houbara has a special claim to the affection of Arab hunters because its meat is believed to have aphrodisaical properties.

Houbara Hawking in connection with Islamic terrorist plots was the central theme of Charles McCarry’s sensational 2004 spy thriller (presumably wrapping up his Paul Christopher series) Old Boys.

A 2010 documentary, Feathered Cocaine, by Icelandic directors: Thorkell Hardarson and Örn Marino Arnarson recently opened at the Tribeca Film Festival and other venues in New York.

New York Times Artsbeat coverage

Feathered Cocaine website
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The documentary prompted this story by Fox News:

[Osama bin Ladin] wakes each morning in a comfortable bed inside a guarded compound north of Tehran. He is surrounded by his wife and a few children. He keeps a low profile, is allowed limited travel and, in exchange for silence, is given a comfortable life under the protection of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

The idea that Bin Laden is in Iran got a strong boost recently with the premiere of a documentary called “Feathered Cocaine.” In it, Alan Parrot, the film’s subject and one of the world’s foremost falconers, makes a case that Bin Laden, an avid falcon hunter, has been living comfortably in Iran since at least 2003 and continues to pursue the sport relatively freely. He is relaxed, healthy and, according to the film, very comfortable.

To make his case, Parrot, president of the Union for the Conservation of Raptors, took two Icelandic filmmakers, Om Marino Arnarson and Thorkell S. Hardarson, into the secretive world of falconers. It’s a world in which some birds can sell for over $1 million, and in which the elite of the Middle East conduct business in luxurious desert camps where money, politics and terror intermingle.

Parrot, who was once the chief falconer for the Shah of Iran and who has worked for the royal families of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, still has extensive contacts in Iran and the falcon world. One of those contacts, described as a warlord from the north of Iran and disguised in a balaclava, reveals in the film that he has met Bin Laden six times on hunting trips inside Iran since March 2003. He says the Al Qaeda leader is relaxed and healthy and so comfortable that “he travels with only four bodyguards.”

Their last confirmed meeting was in 2008, Parrot says. “There may have been more since then, but I haven’t talked to my source since we left Iran,” he said.

Parrot told FOX news.com that the extraordinary disclosure by the warlord, who supplies the falcon camps Bin Laden visits on hunting forays, was not done out of altruism. “One of my men saved his life and this was the repayment,” he said. “He was asked to talk. He wasn’t happy about it.”

To prove his case, Parrot said he managed to get the telemetry setting for the falcons Bin Laden was flying, and he provided them to the U.S. Government. “They could locate him to a one-square-mile area using those unique signals”’ he said. He says the government never contacted him to follow up.

Maj. Sean Turner, a Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. Military would not comment on the whereabouts of Bin Laden.

Parrot’s story is supported in the documentary by former CIA agent Robert Baer, an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East and of how the CIA is managed. Baer, the onetime Middle East operative on whom the movie Syriana is based, explains that while he was in the CIA, he used satellites to watch the camps and they proved to be one of the key ways Al Qaeda was funded. He underscored how important falconry is to the vastly wealthy, and how Parrot’s position gave him a unique lens on that world.

Parrot’s disclosures add another piece to a jigsaw puzzle that for years has fed suspicion that Bin Laden is living in Iran. Among the other clues are:

Iran accepted 35 Al Qaeda leaders after the fall of the Taliban, despite the schism between Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots and the Shiite regime in Iran.

In February 2009 the U.S. Treasury placed sanctions on several high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives working out of Iran and helping run the terror network.

In 2004 author Richard Miniter, in his book “Shadow War,” wrote that two former Iranian Intelligence agents told him they had seen Bin Laden in Iran in 2003.

In June 2003 the respected Italian newspaper Corre de la Sierra,quoting intelligence reports, reported that Bin Laden was in Iran and preparing new terror attacks.

Some analysts believe the reason Bin Laden switched from video to audiocassettes for his announcements was that he couldn’t find a place in Iran that matched the terrain of northern Pakistan.

In December 2009 it was widely reported that one of Bin Laden’s wives, six of his children and 11 grandchildren were living in a compound in Tehran. The living situation was made public after one of the daughters escaped the compound and sought asylum in the Saudi Embassy. It is in this compound, Parrot says, that Bin Laden has found sanctuary.

Parrot said Bin Laden was renowned as an avid falconer who captured most of the falcons around Kandahar to raise funds to support his terror efforts. Each spring wealthy Arabs from the Gulf would fill military cargo planes full of specially equipped Toyota Land Cruisers and other equipment and fly to the falcon camps in Afghanistan. “Usama would arrive and presented the falcons as gifts,” Parrot said. “In return, the wealthy princes would leave the cars and equipment with him when they left, giving Al Qaeda a considerable material advantage over others, including the Taliban.”

Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism expert at the White House through two administrations, has admitted in interviews and before the 9/11 Commission that on one of the three occasions the United States was able to place Bin Laden, he was in a falcon camp set up by falcon hunters from Dubai. The CIA requested a cruise missile strike against Bin Laden. Clarke said he stopped the government from firing at the camp because “it didn’t look like an Al Qaeda camp.”

2:08 video of Gyrfalcon on Houbara Bustard

A special federal court that oversees domestic surveillance has raised concerns about the National Security Agency’s collection of certain types of electronic data, prompting the agency to suspend collecting it, U.S. officials said.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which grants orders to U.S. spy agencies to monitor U.S. citizens and residents in terrorism and espionage cases, recently “got a little bit more of an understanding” about the NSA’s collection of the data, said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because such matters are classified.

The data under discussion are records associated with various kinds of communication, but not their content. Examples of this “metadata” include the origin, destination and path of an e-mail; the phone numbers called from a particular telephone; and the Internet address of someone making an Internet phone call. It was not clear what kind of data had provoked the court’s concern.

Some House Republicans have argued that the suspension of collection creates an intelligence gap that undermines the government’s ability to track and identify terrorist networks, according to officials familiar with the matter. Frustrated about waiting for a remedy, these Republicans say the gap can be closed with a technical fix to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the officials said.

“This is a basic tool we used to have, and it’s now gone,” said one intelligence official familiar with the impasse. “Every day, every week that goes by, there’s just one more week of information that we’re not collecting. You sit there and say, ‘This is unbelievable that we have this gap.’ ”

The data could be used to help analysts learn whom a suspect was working and communicating with, and to “detect and anticipate” a plot, the official said. “It’s not a concern over what was being collected,” he said. “It’s just a question about whether the law was written in a way that allowed the information to be collected in a way that they were collecting it.” ...

The NSA voluntarily stopped gathering the data in December or January rather than wait to be told to do so, the officials said. The agency had been collecting it with court permission for several years, officials said.

Cobalt-60 is a radioactive isotope of Cobalt with a half life of 5.27 years. Cobalt-60 is not found in nature, and is artificially produced by bombarding Californium-59 with slow neutrons or by placing Cobalt rods in a nuclear reactor.

Cobalt-60 in very small quantities is used to sterilize medical equipment, to irradiate food, and for medical and industrial radiography.

It can also be used to create a dirty bomb.

One week ago (April 8), in the West Dehli industrial area of Mayapuri, two local scrap dealers, Deepak Jain, Bablu, and five others fell ill as the result of exposure to “very powerful” radiation.

Indian Express (April 9)

Economic Times (April 9):

Indian Times (April 14)

Hindustan Times (April 9):

Sources at Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (BARC) told HT the radioactive waste recovered was commercial in nature and may have been used at biochemistry or a haematology laboratory.

Police said the waste in the form of “entangled wires and pellets” could have been brought from outside the country and was handed over to Deepak Jain, the scrap dealer, through an agent.

Jain is battling for his life at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals after sustaining prolonged exposure to the substance.

The officials of Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) collected eight bags of the substance from two of Jain’s godowns located 300 metres away from each other.

Two more sources found (April 14).

The Cobalt-60 is assumed to have originated outside India, because no legitimate production of the isotope takes place inside the country.

Hat tip to Debkafile and Thorvald Maada.

The Department of Justice publicly released the indictment of a Pennsylvania woman arrested last October, who had apparently been part of a conspiracy planning to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks.

David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, and Michael L. Levy, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, together with Janice K. Fedarcyk, Special Agent-in-Charge of the FBI in Philadelphia, today announced the unsealing of an indictment charging Colleen R. LaRose, aka “Fatima LaRose,” aka “Jihad Jane,” with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements to a government official and attempted identity theft.

The indictment charges that LaRose (an American citizen born in 1963 who resides in Montgomery County, Pa.) and five unindicted co-conspirators (located in South Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the United States) recruited men on the Internet to wage violent jihad in South Asia and Europe, and recruited women on the Internet who had passports and the ability to travel to and around Europe in support of violent jihad.

The indictment further charges that LaRose and her unindicted co-conspirators used the Internet to establish relationships with one another and to communicate regarding their plans, which included martyring themselves, soliciting funds for terrorists, soliciting passports and avoiding travel restrictions (through the collection of passports and through marriage) in order to wage violent jihad. The indictment further charges that LaRose stole another individual’s U.S. passport and transferred or attempted to transfer it in an effort to facilitate an act of international terrorism.

In addition, according to the indictment, LaRose received a direct order to kill a citizen and resident of Sweden, and to do so in a way that would frighten “the whole Kufar [non-believer] world.” The indictment further charges that LaRose agreed to carry out her murder assignment, and that she and her co-conspirators discussed that her appearance and American citizenship would help her blend in while carrying out her plans. According to the indictment, LaRose traveled to Europe and tracked the intended target online in an effort to complete her task.

Jawa Reports has photos and gossipy details on the defendant.

Seven of her associates were arrested in Ireland.

Vilks was targeted for the terrible affront to Islam of drawing the prophet in the form of a rondellhund, a whimsical Swedish street art fad resembling the cows that ornamented the streets of Chicago a few years ago.

An American woman with a mullet who converted to Islam and then conspired to murder a Swedish cartoonist? Sounds like the plot of a new Coen Brothers movie.

I think the first time I grappled with this question was in an undergraduate philosophy course. The professor was a Yaley (sic), very very smart, and loved to provoke us. His job, after all. So one day, when a famous person had died, he said in his flippant way, “obviously this man was much more important than Joe Schmoe down the block, and the society should value him more, and try harder to protect him and tend to him if he’s sick, etc etc.”

And so we debated, in the way of young students. Who is to say that one man’s life is worth more than another’s? Maybe Mr Schmoe was a better husband/father than Einstein, where does that go in the balance scales of life? Yes, we will long remember Einstein, and no one remembers Schmoe except maybe his dear ones, but still…

In a way, there’s nothing to debate, because Einstein had a far greater effect on far more people than Schmoe did. But one of the great achievements of Western civilization is our conviction that every human life is precious, and that belief underlies the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise. So, while Einstein will live forever, as they say, Schmoe was endowed with the same fundamental rights, and in that sense Schmoe was as important as Einstein. ...

Back in that southern California classroom, plenty of us developed a real affection for Schmoe, and resented Einstein’s importance. It somehow felt wrong to say that, if you could only save one of them, it had to be the great genius. What’s wrong with rooting for the underdog? And so terrorists get a sympathy vote, just like Schmoe.

A lot of ideology rests on the love of Schmoe, even if he turns out to be a very nasty piece of work and wants us dead. At about the same time we were debating in our philosophy class, Norman Mailer was extolling the virtues of criminals, which had long been a staple of anti-bourgeois literature, especially in France, where the Marquis de Sade somehow became a culture hero. The nihilists couldn’t care less about Einstein; they wanted to blow up the entire society that made him possible. The Communists wanted Schmoe to become part of a new proletarian dictatorship, where Einstein could work, to be sure, but his work wouldn’t be any more important than Schmoe’s. The Nazis wanted Einstein dead because he was a filthy Jew, while if Schmoe had a few generations of Aryans to his record he’d be hailed as a member of the Master Race. In many corners of the Islamic world today, Schmoe’s in good shape if he’s a Muslim, while Einstein gets blown up or beheaded.

You see where I’m going, don’t you? After all these years, it seems more and more that my prof was right, most evidently in those cases when Schmoe, as he does so often, is trying to destroy a society that’s clearly better than his own. Do the lives of Daniel Pearl and his executioner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have the same value? I don’t think so.

Yet it’s notable how often Schmoe wins popular sympathy. All those “anti-war” people, for example, end up supporting killer Schmoes against our best, indeed the world’s best: the men and women of the American military. And while the anti-warriors are usually careful to tell us how much they “respect the troops” (which they don’t), it’s pretty clear that they consider a terrorist to be worth at least the same as a U.S. Marine.

Which is nuts.

In the “great debate” over Iran, you hardly ever hear any great concern over the fact that Iranian killers and their proxies are murdering and maiming American soldiers most every day. As if nobody really cared about our guys, who are defending a superior society and a superior culture against the depredations of terrorists from a tyrannical and fanatical regime that glorifies misogyny, stones adultresses to death, kills its critics, and rapes its prisoners as a matter of course.

Nuts again.

A lot of the talk about the “Arab street” (which does not even exist), for example, is a reprise of the glorification of the weak, downtrodden working class (which does not exist either, although perhaps it did, once upon a time). They shouldn’t be glorified. They should be freed.

Al Qaeda is much less of a top-down organization than it once was, when it called the shots and funded terrorist operations from Afghanistan. Then, it told operatives to focus on assignments and not to worry about how to subsidize them. Today it’s a much looser organization of affiliates—more of a McDonald’s, if you will, than a General Motors. Its decentralized partners and cells around the world pick their own targets, concoct their own strategies and raise their own funds. They may draw inspiration from al Qaeda headquarters somewhere in the Chitral region of northwest Pakistan, even kick back money to the leadership. But, like franchisees, they are largely on their own.

The change, U.S. officials like Cohen say, is a direct result of the pressures the U.S. government has placed on terrorist money men. That has forced al Qaeda to go underground. While it still relies on individual donations from the Persian Gulf region, these contributions now move outside the formal financial system, through cash couriers and informal money transfer shops known as hawalas. In addition, the network seems to be turning to organized crimes like kidnapping and drug running. The shipment of cocaine from Latin America to Europe is a source of funding.

Fundraising efforts have also embraced new technologies—like the bit of telemarketing by Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, who solicited donations through cell phone recordings that were distributed in 2008. Last June Abu al Yazid, a former al Qaeda money man who now runs its Afghan operations, made his pitch on a Web site controlled by al Qaeda leaders: “If a holy fighter does not have the money to get weapons, food, drink and the materials for jihad, he cannot fight jihad.” The Internet, of course, is a terrorist’s best friend when it comes to recruiting. Not that they’ve given up on old-school methods like extortion. “A broader trend that shows their financial troubles is they are shaking down recruits for money,” says Michael Jacobson, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who specializes in terror financing. A handful of people, arrested in 2008 by French and Belgian authorities, had traveled to Pakistan for al Qaeda training—and were forced to cough up euros for courses, a room and weapons.

Clearly the money hasn’t stopped; it is coming in smaller dollops via other channels. ...

With al Qaeda’s home office no longer able to subsidize operations, affiliates and cells have turned more frequently to crime. On what scale? No one knows. Still, law enforcement is taking the issue very seriously. In January the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan merged its narcotics and terrorism units. A few weeks earlier the Drug Enforcement Administration pulled off a sting operation in Ghana, snatching three men—Oumar Issa, Harouna Touré and Idriss Abdelrahman—and shipping them to New York City to face charges of narco-terror conspiracy and providing material support to al Qaeda.

According to the DEA the three men were connected to al Qaeda’s most hardened criminal element, its North African affiliate. Known as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the group appears to be involved in the trafficking of Latin American cocaine through Africa to Spain. The indictment accuses the men of agreeing to transport a series of 1,000-kilogram loads of cocaine for $2,000 a kilogram—a portion of which was to be turned over to Islamic Maghreb in return for protection along the route. The court filings claim that Islamic Maghreb had worked with Touré to move two tons of hashish to Tunisia and also smuggled human beings—undocumented workers, it seems—from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India into Spain.

The criminal filings also indicate that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had recently nabbed Belgian citizens and collected a big ransom. Richard Barrett, who keeps an eye on al Qaeda for the U.N., says kidnapping has been the biggest moneymaker for Islamic Maghreb. “Hostage taking has proved lucrative for them,” he says, adding the group is currently holding seven foreigners and ransomed others for $3 million each. “You can keep going for a long time down there with that kind of money.”

While kidnapping is probably as old as warfare, its latest incarnation owes much to al Qaeda in Iraq, a now largely defanged affiliate. It made piles of cash grabbing foreigners a few years ago and supplemented that income with extortion rackets and black market oil sales. The group became so rich that its leader at one point got a letter from al Qaeda’s number two, Zawahiri, requesting a substantial sum. ...

Officials across the U.S. government insist they have no proof that al Qaeda’s leadership is involved in the drug trade. But Michael Braun, chief of operations at the DEA until 2008, says they are in denial. “There is more clear evidence showing al Qaeda’s growing involvement in the Afghan heroin trade on the Pakistan side of the border—al Qaeda proper,” says Braun, now a managing partner at Spectre Group International, a security firm in Alexandria, Va. “There are growing numbers of investigative leads headed in that direction.”

Al Qaeda’s association with big-time criminal groups is undeniable. Dawood Ibrahim is one of the world’s most infamous gangsters, operating a 5,000-member criminal syndicate that engages in everything from narcotics to contract killing, working mostly in Pakistan, India and the United Arab Emirates. Ibrahim shares smuggling routes with al Qaeda, says the U.S. government, and has collaborated with both al Qaeda and its South Asian affiliate, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which pulled off the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, possibly with Ibrahim’s help.

The $3.4 billion Afghan heroin trade is a critical source for the well-financed Taliban, which has also developed a rich donor network. The Taliban encourages and taxes poppy farmers and collects transit and protection fees related to the drug trade. How does al Qaeda benefit? At the very least the drug trade helps the Taliban create safe havens for al Qaeda fighters.

Some counterterror officials see an opportunity in the convergence of crime and terrorism. They point out that police in most countries are mobilized to tackle the drug trade, making it more likely that a terrorist who also runs narcotics will get caught by the cops. But the flip side is that crime, particularly the rich drug trade, could help sustain terror groups for years. ...

Yemen is an epicenter of what is brewing. The affiliate there, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, claimed responsibility for the botched Christmas Day plane attack. Not particularly well financed, according to a U.S. official, the group is resorting to crime. Some al Qaeda members there reportedly tried their hand at bank robberies and considered going into the kidnapping business. For now its chief source of funds is cash contributions from donors in Yemen and the Arabian Gulf. Couriers are still able to move easily in much of the area—in one example last September agents carrying tens of thousands of dollars for al Qaeda were stopped in Kuwait, says the U.N.’s Barrett.

Yet, to the dismay of the U.S., Kuwait has done little to crack down on such donations, even resisting basic terror finance laws. In 2008 the U.S. highlighted the role the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, a prominent Kuwaiti charity, played in funding al Qaeda’s network. The group has denied any terror ties and continues to operate. Couriers carry as much as $100,000 per trip between Afghanistan and the Gulf, the funds coming from legitimate commerce as well as from heroin trafficking. Hawalas also rely on couriers to settle up paper transactions with fellow money transmitters. It is easy for al Qaeda or Taliban donations to get mixed in. “The difficulty is trying to identify the part of that which is illicit,” says Treasury’s Cohen. ...

Al Qaeda has reaped direct benefits from Lashkar’s ability to raise and move funds. As recently as 2008 Fazeel-A-Tul Ameen al Peshawari, a Lashkar fundraiser and recruiter, was providing financial aid to al Qaeda, says the U.S. government. Arif Qasmani, a chief Lashkar coordinator who has raised funds from crime boss Ibrahim, has been providing al Qaeda with supplies and weapons. In return al Qaeda loaned to Lashkar operatives who helped carry out the 2006 train bombings in Mumbai. Raising funds was so easy for Lashkar that in 2004 its finance chief, Haji Ashraf, traveled to the Middle East to collect donations and manage financial networks in Saudi Arabia.

But Ashraf probably isn’t collecting as many frequent-flier miles these days. The Saudi government finally cracked down on terrorist financiers after it became alarmed by homegrown insurgents and those arising next door in Iraq. In 2007 the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia urged citizens not to finance terrorism and to be mindful of how their charitable contributions were being distributed. A 130-man Saudi financial investigative unit has been set up, and 96 suspected terrorist financiers have been arrested. Getting Saudi officials on board is a big victory. But the kingdom’s charities are another matter. “There continues to exist a pool of donors who are ready, willing and able to contribute to al Qaeda,” says Treasury’s Cohen. “We have at least temporarily disrupted some” of them.

2:50 video

MSNBC:

The Obama administration’s top intelligence officials on Tuesday described it as “certain” that al-Qaeda or its allies will try to attack the United States in the next six months, and they called for new flexibility in how U.S. officials detain and question terrorist suspects.

The officials, testifying before the Senate intelligence committee, also warned of increased risk of cyber-attacks in the coming months, saying that the recent China-based hacking of Google’s computers was both a “wake-up call” and a forerunner to future strikes aimed at businesses or intended to cause economic disruption.

“Al-Qaeda maintains its intent to attack the homeland — preferably with a large-scale operation that would cause mass casualties, harm the U.S. economy or both,” Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told the committee in a hearing convened to assess threats against the country.

Blair and CIA Director Leon Panetta warned of new threats from al-Qaeda’s regional allies, such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Several groups appear increasingly intent on attacking U.S. and other Western targets, even as al-Qaeda’s core leadership struggles to regain its footing after repeated setbacks and eroding popular support in the Muslim world, the officials said.

“They are moving to other safe havens and regional nodes such as Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb and others,” Panetta said. He said al-Qaeda-inspired groups had successfully “deployed individuals to this country,” citing recently disrupted terrorist plots in Colorado and Chicago.

The Daily Mail reports:

Britain is facing a new Al Qaeda terror threat from suicide ‘body bombers’ with explosives surgically inserted inside them.

Until now, terrorists have attacked airlines, Underground trains and buses by secreting bombs in bags, shoes or underwear to avoid detection.

But an operation by MI5 has uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda is planning a new stage in its terror campaign by inserting ‘surgical bombs’ inside people for the first time. ...

A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants.

Experts said the explosive PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate) would be placed in a plastic sachet inside the bomber’s body before the wound was stitched up like a normal operation incision and allowed to heal.
Umar Farouk Abdulutallab

Failed attempt: Abdulmutallab tried to detonate a bomb sewn into his pants

A shaped charge of 8oz of PETN can penetrate five inches of armour and would easily blow a large hole in an airliner.

Security sources said the explosives would be detonated by the bomber using a hypodermic syringe to inject TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide) through their skin into the explosives sachet.

Western security measures can never be 100% effective against the efforts of suicidal fanatics to destroy innocent lives. The real answers lie in eliminating funding for terrorism, and by applying a principle of reciprocity to discourage attacks on non-combatants. The West needs, first, to destroy the OPEC oil cartel and remove the economic surplus from Islamic hands. Secondly, Western governments should promise that any new successful mass attack on civilian populations in Europe or the United States will result in a retaliatory attack on a target as valuable in the eyes of our barbarous and fanatical adversaries as innocent lives are to us. We should take the advice of Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, and promise that, if another mass attack on the West occurs, we will permanently destroy the Muslim holy site of Mecca.

The crux of the investigative problem is the silicon. None of the scientist suspects or the laboratories they had access to possessed either the specialized equipment or expertise needed to weaponize the Anthrax. Over 8 years later, the case remains open.

The Epstein editorial came to mind this morning, as I was looking through the Memeorandum aggregator page and found a link to this sneering hit piece by Justin Elliott, one of Talking Points Memo’s little leftist elfs.

Elliott is busily trying to marginalize Laurie Mylroie, a Harvard-educated Arabist, who has served on the faculty of Harvard and the Navy War College and as an advisor to Bill Clinton, identifying her as a “crackpot” and conspiracy theorist. I had not been previously familiar with Dr. Mylroie, her books, or opinions, but looking into all this, it is very clear that she has taken a position very much at odds with the prevailing consensus of the foreign policy and intelligence establishments and the media, one attributing a far more significant ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and an active role on the part of the Iraqi regime in both the first WTC bombing and 9/11.

I don’t own her books (I just ordered two of them), so I don’t know if I agree with her, find any of her evidence persuasive or her reasoning credible, but I am interested in seeing what she has to say. Thank you, Mr. Elliott. Whenever I see the left performing one of their little excommunication-on-the-basis-of-thought-crime ceremonies, I always develop the suspicion that the target of such attention may be perfectly correct.

The TPM hit piece notes that the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (an internal Pentagon think tank) was employing Dr. Mylroie as recently as 2007 as a consultant to produce reports on Saddam Hussein’s strategy for dealing with UN inspections and his intelligence service. She had previously written in 2005 a History of Al Qaeda. I plan to read it carefully.

The popularly prevailing theory, completely excluding state support for al Qaeda’s terrorist activities, is very useful if you are interested in asserting Iraqi innocence in order to indict Bush, but it does leave a number of important problems unanswered, like where did those weaponized Anthrax spores come from?

Osama bin Laden’s word choice in the latest audio message attributed to him is seen as a “possible indicator” of an upcoming attack by his Al-Qaeda network, a US monitoring group warned Sunday.

IntelCenter, a US group that monitors Islamist websites, also said that manner of the release and the content of the message showed it was “credible” that it was a new release from the Saudi extremist.

“The Osama bin Laden audio message released to Al-Jazeera on 24 January 2010 contains specific language used by bin Laden in his statements in advance of attacks,” IntelCenter said in a statement.

The group said it considered the language “a possible indicator of an upcoming attack” in the next 12 months.

“This phrase, ‘Peace be upon those who follow guidance,’ appears at the beginning and end of messages released in advance of attacks that are designed to provide warning to Al-Qaeda’s enemies that they need to change their ways or they will be attacked,” the group said.

In a statement carried by Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden praised the Nigerian man who allegedly tried to blow up a US airliner approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.

He warned the United States that, “God willing, our attacks against you will continue as long as you maintain your support to Israel.”

IntelCenter said the audio statement “appears to be exactly what it purports to be, an audio message from bin Laden.”

“The manner of release, content of message and other factors indicate it is a credible and new release from bin Laden,” it said.

The center said similar language attributed to bin Laden was made in a March 19 2008 condemnation of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed which was followed by an attack on the Danish Embassy in Islamabad on June 2, 2008.

The phrase also was used in bin Laden’s April 15, 2004 European truce offer, which was followed by Al-Qaeda attacks in London in July 2005, according to the IntelCenter, which said the 14-month lapse could be explained by the “difficulty” in actually putting an attack into operation.

Audio releases were bin Laden’s normal vehicle for statements, with video statements having been very rare since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States that killed almost 3,000 people, IntelCenter said.

Terrorist spouses had previous appeals for restoration of income support, child benefit and housing assistance rejected in Britain and subsequently appealed to the European Court of Justice, whose decisions are binding on Britain’s Parliament and courts.

Daily Mail:

Ministers have halted benefit payouts made to the families of suspected terrorists to prevent the money falling into the hands of banned groups. ...

Whitehall officials have refused to name the families involved in the test cases – but all three of the husbands are foreign nationals on the United Nations list of international terror suspects.

They have been linked by security officials to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban

The payouts to their wives include income support, child benefit and housing assistance worth ‘several hundred’ pounds a week.

Leon Panetta’s CIA leaps into action to deal with terrorism originating in Yemen (now designated “Al Qaeda Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP). The CIA will be increasing the number of analysts focused on Yemen and Africa. The jihadis are doubtless trembling in their sandals at the thought of fresh teams of coffee sippers hunting them down on computer screens from Tyson’s Corners.

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Erik Eriksen marvels that the environmental left has been so quiet after the Copenhagen conference ended whimpering in a blizzard. He concludes that warmist mouths have been frozen shut.

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How can democrats hope to regain a majority in Virginia? Give hundreds of thousands of convicted felons back the right to vote, quickly, before Governor Kaine leaves office.
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Janet Napolitano announced that is scheduled to deploy 300 additional advanced imaging scanners at U.S. airports in 2010, and may deploy more.

But, as Michael Crowley observes, in New Republic, X-rays machines do not detect PETN, and pat downs are unlikely to be effective, particularly in the case of explosives concealed in body cavities.

In the wake of the Abdulmutallab episode, however, standards will change. Pat downs will become more common—and more intrusive. We may not see the famous vision of the crazed dictator from Woody Allen’s Bananas—“Underwear shall be worn on the outside!”—but those searches by hand are likely to get a little more, shall we say, intimate.

Even a pat-down thorough enough to simulate foreplay, however, won’t protect us completely—not from a threat that sounds even more absurd than an underwear bomb and that is also more alarming: the butt bomb.

The concept is simple. Rather than sew explosives into his underwear, a terrorist might actually plant a bomb, which can weigh as little as a pound, inside his anal cavity. Like drug mules, would-be butt bombers could store the explosives inside a condom.

Sound crazy? Perhaps. Disgusting? Definitely. But security experts initially believed that a terrorist’s derriere nearly killed a top Saudi Arabian counterterrorism official last fall. Back in August, an Al Qaeda-connected militant named Abdullah Assiri offered to turn himself into Saudi authorities and enlist in a state-run terrorist rehabilitation program. Exhibiting a healthy skepticism, the Saudis reportedly subjected Assiri to two airport-style X-ray scans and other security checks. Finding no weapons or explosives on his body, security agents ushered Assiri into the palace of the counterterrorism chief, Prince Muhammad Bin Nayef, who is also the son of a likely heir to the Saudi throne.

Instead of surrendering, however, Assiri exploded. Nayef survived the blast, but the Saudis were bewildered by this incredible breach of their security. At first, they were convinced the explosive had been hidden in Assiri’s anal cavity—a scenario that other security experts didn’t discount. After further investigation, the Saudis concluded that Assiri didn’t have a butt bomb after all, but rather that he stashed the explosive in his underwear much like Abdulmutallab. (The device may have been detonated by a text message sent to Assiri’s cell phone; exactly how the phone triggered the bomb is unclear. Like Abdulmutallab, incidentally, Assiri appears to have gotten his assignment and materials in Yemen.)

Prince Nayaf himself flew to Washington to warn Obama administration officials about this new underwear bomb threat, according to Newsweek—which also recently disclosed a joint report produced by the National Counterterrorism Center, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA, on the threat of both underwear and butt bombs. That report had both good and bad news about the alarming concept of explosive Al Qaeda asses. On the downside, the report found that even full-body-image scanners at airports might not detect anally stashed explosives.