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Mohammad Sidique Khan Mohammad Sidique Khan al-Qaeda Afghanistan/South Asia 20050721  
  Mohammad Sidique Khan al-Qaeda in Europe Afghanistan/South Asia British-Pakistani Deceased 20050812  
    Leader of the 7/7 boomers

Terror Networks
A Lesson the West Ignored From 7/7
2022-07-10


Long. The set-up:
Seventeen years ago today, four al-Qaeda jacket wallahs attacked the London transport system and in just under an hour that morning murdered fifty-two people from eighteen countries and maimed seven-hundred, one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in British history. An important thread in the story was the role of Pakistain in fostering the ideological and material environment that created the killers, which did not get the attention it deserved at the time, nor in the years since.

THE PAKISTAN DIMENSION OF 7/7
At 8:50 on 7 July 2005, Shehzad Tanweer (aged 22) detonated his boom jacket on a tube train, a minute later another suicide bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan (30), detonated on a second train, and a minute after that another train was blown up by Germaine Lindsay (19). Thirty-nine people were massacred. At 9:47, a fourth suicide-killer, Hasib Hussain (18), went kaboom! on a bus at Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, slaughtering thirteen people.

The Security Service (MI5) confirmed that the killers had not been on their radar before the attacks, but once they were identified it became clear that Khan had been on the periphery of a prior investigation, Operation CREVICE, which in March 2004 had rolled up an al-Qaeda network in and around London that was planning to carry out a terrorist atrocity using a fertiliser bomb. Khan was found to have been in telephone contact with one of the conspirators, Omar Khyam, and both Khan and Tanweer had been briefly surveilled by the security services because of their contacts. After running various checks on Khan and Tanweer, it was determined that neither merited further resources: they seemed to be involved in minor fraud as part of financing the network, rather than having any involvement—and potentially not having any knowledge—of the terrorist planning that CREVICE was interested in.

Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5’s G-Branch dealing with international terrorism during this period and later the MI5 chief, noted later that the plot thwarted by CREVICE, led by Mohammed Qayum Khan, had been directed by al-Qaeda based in Pakistain’s tribal areas and involved "British citizens or British residents of Pak heritage, something which became something of a theme for this period". The 7/7 attack was in-keeping with this: all of its operatives (except Lindsay) were of Pak extraction, it originated in "plans from Pakistain", and indeed the logistics of the plot itself "did not fundamentally differ from all the other plans that failed to come to fruition" during the mid-2000s.

What only became clear after 7/7 was that in February 2004, Khyam had spoken in person to Sidique Khan in a car bugged by MI5, and from snippets of that conversation—and the testimony of a jihadist prisoner—British intelligence was able to work out, in retrospect, once they knew what they were looking for, that Khan and Tanweer had been to al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistain. It was a month after 7/7 when Pakistain handed over the photographs of Khan as he arrived there on 25 July 2003.

Pakistain’s reluctance to proactively assist—and its efforts to appear helpful in the aftermath—are hardly surprising. After tiring of the Mujahideen groups in the early 1990s, Pakistain’s Inter-Services Intelligence
...the Pak military intelligence agency that controls the military -- heads of ISI typically get promoted into the Chief of Army Staff position. It serves as a general command center for favored turban groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, tries to influence the politix of neighboring countries, and carries out a (usually) low-level war against India in Kashmir...
 (ISI) agency had turned to the Taliban
...mindless ferocity in a turban...
 as its instrument to conquer Afghanistan, which was largely completed by 1996, and it was under the ISI’s close watch that the Taliban became entirely intermingled with al-Qaeda and its derivatives like "the Haqqani Network", as it did with the "Kashmiri" groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba
...the Army of the Pure, an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI...
 (LeT). It is analytically quite misleading to treat as autonomous "groups" what is in reality a fluid single network that shares personnel, geography, resources (everything from training camps to ammunition), and ultimately a unified command structure running through the ISI headquarters at Abpara.

Khan’s story testifies to this. Khan had, as it turned out, previously travelled to Pakistain and trained in a jihadist camp in Kashmir
...a disputed territory lying between India and Pakistain. After partition, the Paks grabbed half of it and call it Azad (Free) Kashmir. The remainder they refer to as "Indian Occupied Kashmir". They have fought four wars with India over it, the score currently 4-0 in New Delhi's favor. After 72 years of this nonsense, India cut the Gordian knot in 2019, removing the area's special status, breaking off Ladakh as a separate state, and allowing people from other areas to settle (or in the case of the Pandits, to resettle) there....
 in July 2001, before being taken over the border to a Taliban camp near the frontlines with the final pocket of Afghan resistance, the Northern Alliance. al-Qaeda was woven into the fabric of this ISI-run jihadist infrastructure, designed significantly for an unending ideological war with India, that ran through—and now runs through again—Kashmir and Afghanistan, which simply shifts personnel from front to front as Pakistain desires. As well as the second trip to Pakistain by Khan in 2003, it transpired there had been a third trip, between November 2004 and February 2005, on which Tanweer had accompanied him. Whether Khan and Tanweer went into Afghanistan during this trip is unclear; they certainly made contact with al-Qaeda.

The ISI’s fingerprints had also been visible in the earlier plot that Operation CREVICE has dismantled. In court, Khyam said the ISI was threatening his family in Pakistain because "they are worried I might reveal more about them" and therefore he was "not going to discuss anything related to the ISI any more". It was pointed out to Khyam by the judge that "inferences" would be drawn from this; he understood that, but inferences had less repercussions for him than giving evidence about the role the ISI had played in facilitating a terrorist plot on British soil.

Britannia has a special place in this long-standing, transnational ISI jihadist network:

Masood Azhar
...One of the major players in Pak terrorism. In early 1994, India incarcerated him for his activities. In 1995, foreign tourists were kidnapped in Jammu and Kashmir. The kidnappers included his release among their demands. One of the hostages managed to escape but the rest were eventually killed. In 1999, he was freed by the Indian government in exchange for passengers on hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814 that had been diverted to Kandahar. The hijackers were led by Masood Azhar's brother, Ibrahim Athar. Once he was handed over to the hijackers, they fled to Pak territory despite the fact that Islamabad had earlier stated that any of the hijackers would be jugged at the border. The Pak government had also previously indicated that Azhar would be allowed to return home since he did not face any charges there. Shortly after his release, he made a public address to an estimated 10,000 people in Karachi, firing up the rubes against America and India...
, an ISI operative and United Nations
...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships...
-listed terrorist, toured Britannia in 1993, fundraising and recruiting for the Kashmir jihad, while laying down local networks to continue the job. Some of these networks later defected to the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
. Azhar had created a template for "Londonistan" in the 1990s, where jihadists set up shop in London to provide resources to insurgencies in the Moslem world. There was a de facto agreement with the British state that so long as this activity was directed abroad, the jihadists would not be interfered with.

What happened on 7/7 was a demonstration that this jihadist network ran two ways: what had been exported could come home. The realisation was slow in coming. In September 2005, al-Qaeda released a video to al-Jazeera of Khan’s last testament declaring his "war" on the West and praising "today’s heroes": the late Osama bin Laden
...... who used to be alive but now he's not......
, al-Qaeda’s then-deputy (now emir) Ayman al-Zawahiri
...Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as the real brains of the outfit. Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area assuming he's not dead like Mullah Omar. He lost major face when he ordered the nascent Islamic State to cease and desist and merge with the orthodox al-Qaeda spring, al-Nusra...
, and the founder of the Islamic State movement, which was at that time part of al-Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose real name was Ahmad al-Khalayleh.
And the dismount:
There was certainly some ignorance among Western officials about Pakistan’s game, but a lack of knowledge was never the real problem. The issue was fear, more precisely blackmail, that any challenge to Pakistan’s lawless conduct—its fundamental strategic commitment to the use of terrorism as a state policy under the protective canopy of pirated nuclear weapons—would make things even worse. As one scholar put it: “Pakistan has essentially developed its bargaining power by threatening its own demise.” If the West cut off the vast aid subsidies, let alone adopted a coercive approach to try to change Pakistan’s policies, Islamabad held out the prospect of instability that would lead to terrorists acquiring its nuclear weapons, so the West kept paying Pakistan to help solve a problem it created and sustained—and had every incentive to sustain, since without the problem there would be no more cheques.

Which returns us to the issue of Pakistani blackmail. Now that NATO is out of Afghanistan, with Western intelligence effectively blind, if and when a British citizen goes rogue, in or from Pakistan, the ISI will be there to offer a helping hand in finding them—for a price. And if Britain accepted the apparent necessity of cooperation with the ISI at a time when the ISI was killing British troops, it is unlikely this will change now. The mind-bending logic of relying on the organisation that nurtures the terrorist groups that threaten Britain will win out by bureaucratic exigency and inertia; what that ensnares Britain into giving away—whether in money or political concessions—will only become clear over time.
Link


Britain
Two UK Teens May Have Joined IS in Syria
2015-04-08
[AnNahar] British police said Tuesday they were investigating a report that two teenagers, who come from the same town as one of the 2005 London jacket wallahs, may have joined Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
 jihadists in Syria.

The two 17-year-olds from Dewsbury in northern England are believed to have boarded a flight from Manchester to Dalaman in southwest The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
 on March 31, the regional police force said in a statement.

"We are extremely concerned for the safety of these two boys," the statement said. "Our priority is for their safe return; their families are gravely worried about them and want them home."
How about if the priority becomes protection of Britain from the likes of them?
Assistant Chief Constable Mark Milsom said: "Syria is an extremely dangerous place and the public will be aware of the dangers these boys may face.
The "boys" are the same age I was when I joined the Army.
"The choice of returning home from Syria is often taken away from those that come under the control of Islamic State, leaving their families in the UK devastated and with very few options to secure their safe return," Milsom said.
On the other hand, once they're experienced head choppers you really don't want them back in dear olde Yorkshire or wherever it is.
British media reported that one of the teenagers is a relative of Hammaad Munshi, who is the grandson of a leading Islamic scholar in Dewsbury. In 2008, Munshi became the youngest Briton ever to be found guilty of terror offenses.
Runs in the family, does it?
He was 16 when he was nabbed
Drop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un!
 in a police crackdown on an turban cell and was found guilty of distributing detailed instructions online on how to make napalm, explosives, detonators and grenades.
Normal Islamic 16-year-old hi jinx.
Dewsbury was also the hometown of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader of four homegrown suicide bombers who carried out the July 7, 2005 bombings which killed 52 people on three Underground trains and a bus in London.
Nice place, Dewsbury.
The news comes just days after six people were arrested leaving the seaport of Dover on suspicion of Syria-related terror offenses. Nine Britons were also arrested trying to cross over from Turkey to Syria last week. Hundreds of Britons are believed to have joined the Islamic State group in Syria in recent months despite a new law that reinforces security checks at airports.
Maybe it's because your priority's getting them back instead of keeping them the hell out.
Link


Britain
7/7 inquests: MI5 officer to give evidence
2011-02-21
A senior member of MI5 will give evidence later at the inquests into the deaths of 52 people killed in the 7/7 terrorist bombings in London in 2005. The officer, who will be referred to as Witness G, will be asked whether the attacks could have been prevented.

The bereaved families in court will be able to see him but reporters in a nearby annexe will only hear his voice.

Four suicide bombers detonated their devices on three Tube trains and a double decker bus on 7 July 2005.

Witness G will be asked about a key moment months before the bombings when the security service came across two of the terrorists during an investigation into another plot.

Many of the relatives of those who died want to know why those under surveillance were not subjected to detailed scrutiny. MI5 has always maintained it did not uncover any intelligence that would have identified the pair as potential suicide bombers.

BBC correspondent Peter Hunt says it will be a significant day as the senior MI5 officer will sit in the witness box and be questioned in public.
Lest we forget who the real terrorist criminals are:
The attacks were carried out by suicide bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Hasib Hussain, 18, and Jermaine Lindsay, 19. They targeted Tube trains at Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square and a bus in Tavistock Square.
Link


Britain
Jihadi who helped train 7/7 bomber freed by US after just five years
2011-02-14
An American jihadist who set up the terrorist training camp where the leader of the 2005 London jacket wallahs learned how to manufacture explosives, has been quietly released after serving only four and a half years of a possible 70-year sentence, a Guardian investigation has learned.

The unreported sentencing of Mohammed Junaid Babar to "time served" because of what a New York judge described as "exceptional co-operation" that began even before his arrest has raised questions over whether Babar was a US informer at the time he was helping to train the ringleader of the 7 July tube and bus bombings.

Lawyers representing the families of victims and survivors of the attacks have compared the lenient treatment of Babar to the controversial release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Babar was imprisoned in 2004 -- although final sentencing was deferred -- after pleading guilty in a New York court to five counts of terrorism. He set up the training camp in Pakistain where Mohammad Sidique Khan and several other British beturbanned goons learned about bomb-making and how to use combat weapons.

Babar admitted to being a dangerous terrorist who consorted with some of the highest-ranking members of al-Qaeda, providing senior members with money and equipment, running weapons, and planning two attempts to assassinate the former president of Pakistain, General Pervez Perv Musharraf.
... former dictator of Pakistain, who was less dictatorial and corrupt than any Pak civilian government to date ...
But in a deal with prosecutors for the US attorney's office, Babar agreed to plead guilty and become a government supergrass in return for a drastically reduced sentence.
Link


Britain
London bombers instructed by phone from Pakistan: inquest
2011-02-03
[Dawn] The ringleader of the July 7, 2005 suicide kabooms on London's transport system received advice from a mystery figure in Pakistain just days before the attacks, an inquest heard Wednesday.
I repeat myself: Pakistain currently holds the same position as al-Qaeda HQ that Afghanistan held in 2001.
Mobile phone records showed a series of calls made from phone boxes of Rawalpindi to bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan, a police officer told hearings in London into the deaths of 52 people.

Metropolitan Police detective Mark Stuart said many of the calls were made through different Pak phone boxes within minutes of each other, suggesting that the caller there wanted to conceal their identity.

Hugo Keith, counsel to the inquests, asked Stuart: "Did you assess that those calls therefore were probably connected to some guidance or some means of communicating information concerned with the manufacture of the bombs and then ultimately their detonation?" "Yes, I think they had to be," replied Stuart.

The inquest heard that Khan never made any calls to Pakistain himself, but that he had instead given contacts in that country the numbers of four phones used purely for the purpose of the attacks.

Most of Khan's conversations with the unknown person in Pakistain took place between May and June 2005 but one lasting six minutes happened five days before the bombings, the inquest heard.

The final, unanswered call to the phone was made on the afternoon of July 7 after Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Hasib Hussain, 18, and Jermaine Lindsay, 19, had blown themselves up on three subway trains and a bus.

Khan and Tanweer are both known to have travelled to Pakistain in the months before the attack where they are believed to have had contact with members of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.

A video statement by Khan is believed to have been filmed there.

Britain's domestic security service MI5 has admitted it monitored Khan on several occasions before the attacks, including meeting members of a separate bomb plot, but that it failed to follow up the lead.

Britain opened the long-awaited inquests into the deaths of the victims in October and the hearings are expected to last until March. They will examine whether the intelligence services could have prevented the attacks.
Link


Britain
I'm a victim too says the widow of 7/7 bomber, in legal aid claim that could delay inquest
2010-08-26
The widow of a July 7 suicide bomber yesterday launched a High Court bid to be represented at the victimsÂ’ inquest - saying she had also suffered the loss of a loved one in the atrocity.

Hasina Patel, whose husband was terrorist mastermind Mohammad Sidique Khan, is seeking legal aid to challenge the coronerÂ’s decision to exclude KhanÂ’s death from the hearing for the 52 victims of the 2005 London bombings.

If the mother of oneÂ’s application is granted, OctoberÂ’s long-awaited inquest could be delayed by months of legal wrangling, to the distress of those who have waited more than five years for it to take place.

Lawyers for Miss Patel claim there should be ‘no material distinction’ between her and the families of those killed, because she ‘equally suffered the loss of a relative’.

But the move will anger bereaved families, who do not want the deaths of the terrorists included in the same inquest as the 52 innocents whose lives they took.

Miss Patel hopes to overturn the decision made by Lady Justice Hallett in May to hold a separate hearing into the deaths of the four bombers - Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Hasib Hussain, 18, and Jermaine Lindsay, 19.

The Government has already agreed to give legal aid to the families of the 52 victims. But Miss PatelÂ’s request for equal funding was refused in May this year.

Link


Home Front: WoT
A Not Very Private Feud Over Terrorism
2008-06-09
Every once in a while the NYT brings home an interesting analysis piece. This is one of those.
WASHINGTON — A bitter personal struggle between two powerful figures in the world of terrorism has broken out, forcing their followers to choose sides. This battle is not being fought in the rugged no man’s land on the Pakistan-Afghan border. It is a contest reverberating inside the Beltway between two of America’s leading theorists on terrorism and how to fight it, two men who hold opposing views on the very nature of the threat.

On one side is Bruce Hoffman, a cerebral 53-year-old Georgetown University historian and author of the highly respected 1998 book “Inside Terrorism.” He argues that Al Qaeda is alive, well, resurgent and more dangerous than it has been in several years. In his corner, he said, is a battalion of mainstream academics and a National Intelligence Estimate issued last summer warning that Al Qaeda had reconstituted in Pakistan.

On the other side is Marc Sageman, an iconoclastic 55-year-old Polish-born psychiatrist, sociologist, former C.I.A. case officer and scholar-in-residence with the New York Police Department. His new book, “Leaderless Jihad,” argues that the main threat no longer comes from the organization called Al Qaeda, but from the bottom up — from radicalized individuals and groups who meet and plot in their neighborhoods and on the Internet. In his camp, he said, are agents and analysts in highly classified positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

If Dr. Hoffman gets inside organizations — focusing on command structures — Dr. Sageman gets inside heads, analyzing the terrorist mind-set. But this is more important than just a battle of ideas. It is the latest twist in the contest for influence and resources in Washington that has been a central feature of the struggle against terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001.

Officials from the White House to the C.I.A. acknowledge the importance of the debate of the two men as the government assesses the nature of the threat. Looking forward, it is certain to be used to win bureaucratic turf wars over what programs will be emphasized in the next administration.

If there is no looming main Qaeda threat — just “bunches of guys,” as Dr. Sageman calls them — then it would be easier for a new president to think he could save money or redirect efforts within the huge counterterrorism machine, which costs the United States billions of dollars and has created armies of independent security consultants and counterterrorism experts in the last seven years.

Preventing attacks planned by small bands of zealots in the garages and basements just off Main Street or the alleys behind Islamic madrasas is more a job for the local police and the F.B.I., working with undercover informants and with authorities abroad. “If it’s a ‘leaderless jihad,’ then I can find something else to do because the threat is over,” said Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, who puts himself in Dr. Hoffman’s camp. “Leaderless things don’t produce big outcomes.”
But it doesn't take very much to provide leadership, as Osama bin Laden demonstrated. A charismatic man, or small group of men, with some kind of funding can bring together a fair number of leaderless men seeking jihad and provide the direction required to create a 9/11, a 3/11, or a Bali. One of the major lessons of modern terrorism is that it can be surprisingly low tech and remain off the radar screens of local and national police. It's what you can do with a small cadre of committed people. Given the bureauocratic, officious nature of police and the inability of many analysts to find dots, let alone connect them, the complacency Mr. Bergen advocates seems fatally misplaced.
On the other hand, if the main task can be seen as thwarting plots or smiting Al QaedaÂ’s leaders abroad, then attention and resources should continue to flow to the C.I.A., the State Department, the military and terror-financing sleuths.
The NYT presents this as an 'either/or' scenario, when what is needed is, of course, both, but without the hidebound structures that spend more time in empire-building than they do in rooting out problems.
“One way to enhance your budget is to frame it in terms of terrorism,” said Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But the problem is that ‘Al Qaedatry’ is more art than science — and people project onto the subject a lot of their own preconceptions.”

The divide over the nature of the threat turned nasty, even by the rough standards of academia, when Dr. Hoffman reviewed Dr. Sageman’s book this spring for Foreign Affairs in an essay, “The Myth of Grass-Roots Terrorism: Why Osama bin Laden Still Matters.” He accused Dr. Sageman of “a fundamental misreading of the Al Qaeda threat,” adding that his “historical ignorance is surpassed only by his cursory treatment of social-networking theory.”

In the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Sageman returns fire, accusing Dr. Hoffman of “gross misrepresentation.” In an interview, Dr. Sageman said he was at a loss to explain his rival’s critique: “Maybe he’s mad that I’m the go-to guy now.”

Some terrorism experts find the argument silly — and dangerous. “Sometimes it seems like this entire field is stepping into a boys-with-toys conversation,” said Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of New York University’s Center on Law and Security. “Here are two guys, both of them respected, saying that there is only one truth and only one occupant of the sandbox. That’s ridiculous. Both of them are valuable.”
And both would spend more time at each other's throats than they would dealing with the major problem at hand.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a former director of central intelligence, sees merit in both sides, too; he said in Singapore last week that Al Qaeda is training European, and possibly American, recruits. But, he added, “You also have the development of violent, extremist networks.”

One argument for playing down Al Qaeda’s importance — Dr. Sageman’s point — has been the public declarations of some prominent Sunni clerics who have criticized Al Qaeda for its indiscriminate killing of Muslim civilians.

A leading Syrian-born militant theorist believed to be in American custody, known by the nom de guerre Abu Musab al-Suri, also has argued in favor of leaderless jihad. In his 1,600-page life work, he advises jihadists to create decentralized networks of individuals and local cells bound by belief, instead of hierarchical structures that could be targets of attack. He has referred to Mr. bin Laden as a “pharaoh.”

Dr. Hoffman’s principal argument relies on the re-emergence of Al Qaeda, starting in 2005 and 2006, along the Afghan-Pakistan border. There is empirical evidence, he says, that from that base, Al Qaeda has been “again actively directing and initiating international terrorist operations on a grand scale.”
The al-Qaeda model has been to find a faraway place that can be used for a base of operations, so that young men can be trained for terrorist or paramilitary operations. It's what Binny did in Afghanistan in the late 90s and what he was seeking to do in the Sudan and in Somalia before that. In turn that came from his experiences during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Binny wants a hierarchy with himself as director; that hierarchy needs a physical location. The other type of model, what al-Suri advocates, is a decentralized network that needs little if any physical plant. A look at al-Suri's life demonstrates why he favors this model; he's never had the opportunity to slip a leash and build a terrorist structure for himself.
But it has been easy for intelligence agencies to get the analysis wrong when faced with piecemeal and contradictory evidence.

One example is the 2004 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people. Declarations by several Spanish officials and experts of such a link were undermined by evidence that the group was self-motivated, self-trained and self-financed, and that the explosives were bought locally.

Other examples are provided by the 2004 plot to attack the London area with fertilizer bombs, and the July 7, 2005, transit bombings in London. At first, both were thought to support the home-grown terrorist thesis: British citizens, most of Pakistani descent, had carried out attacks with homemade bombs. Only later did evidence surface that in both cases, at least some had trained in Pakistan at military camps suspected of links to Qaeda operatives.

So a question remains: Was Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the suicide bombers in the 2005 attacks, a local kid gone wrong, a full-fledged Qaeda operative, or both?

“You can argue that if you subtract his travel to Pakistan, there’s no 7/7,” said Samuel J. Rascoff, an assistant professor of law at New York University and a former intelligence official with the New York City police. “You can also argue that if you subtract his radicalization in Northern England, there’s no 7/7.”

Dr. Sageman’s critics argue that his more local focus plays to a weak point in gauging threats: People tend to feel the threat nearest to home is the most urgent. In April, for example, the Kansas City office of the F.B.I. met with state and local authorities from Kansas and Missouri to analyze “agroterrorism,” a big issue in America’s heartland. The discussion was about the possibility of terrorists causing an outbreak of diseases that could poison cattle or crops, crippling the economies of farm states.

Terrorism-weary prosecuting judges and police investigators in Europe listen to the debate on the other side of the Atlantic and tend to find it empty. They say it is hard to know where radicalization starts — among groups of friends, in an imam’s sermon in Europe or at home on the Internet — and when operational training by Al Qaeda is a factor. They prefer a blended approach.

France, Spain and Italy, for example, pour resources and manpower into investigations at home — from studying radicalization and wiretapping suspicious individuals to infiltrating mosques and community centers. These countries also track movements of suspicious individuals abroad and networks with both local and foreign connections. Terrorist-related cases fall under the authority of special investigative superjudges who have access to all classified intelligence, and can use much of the information in trials.

The Europeans say that for them, the argument is not theoretical. Somewhere in Europe, just about every week, a terrorist plot is uncovered and arrests are made.
We at the Burg sometimes forget that the Euro anti-terror organizations are very, very good at what they do, even if their courts and their politicans don't back them up.
“The danger of this ‘either-or’ argument could lead us to the mistakes of the past,” said Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s leading antiterror investigatory magistrate. “In the ’90s, we saw atomized cells as everything, and then Al Qaeda came along. And now we look at Al Qaeda and say it’s no longer the threat. We’re making the same mistake again.”
So for America, a suggested perscription is 1) vigorous prosecution of home-grown threats 2) continued surveillance at home without stomping on our civil liberties, as bureaucracies tend to do over time 3) cooperation with competent anti-terror units around the world 4) revising our national and international legal structures to be more effective against terrorism and, important, to prevent terrorists from using those legal structures against us 5) treating countries that harbor terrorists, or who can't police their own countries, as pariahs subject to removal (with or without UN blessing) and 6) treating regions of the world that lack sovereign governments as free-fire zones.
Link


Britain
Death threats on YouTube for mosque opponent
2007-11-06
A leading opponent of plans to build Europe's largest mosque in east London has seen a chilling "obituary" for him posted on the internet.

The film on video-sharing website YouTube is entitled In memory of Councillor Alan Craig and contains pictures of him with his wife and two young daughters. It was apparently posted in retaliation for his opposition to the mosque. Mr Craig has now contacted police in fear of his family's safety and demanded that the video be taken down.

Islamic group Tablighi Jamaat wants to open the 12,000-capacity "megamosque" in Newham near the main 2012 Olympic site. The FBI has described the group as "a recruiting ground" for al Qaeda, which it denies. Shoebomber Richard Reid and 7/7 bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were members.

Mr Craig, 61, a member of the Christian Peoples Alliance on Newham council, has led a local campaign against the mosque which is planned for the site at Abbey Mills next to West Ham Tube station. The businessman today said he would be seeking advice about whether his 40-year-old wife, Sally, and daughters were safe. He said: "Targeting me is one thing. But to use my wife and children is outrageous. This video obituary is either a threat or a very sick joke. Some people will look at this as an open invitation to take me out because I am opposing the mosque. That is not the way to operate in a democracy."
It's the way classic fascisti operate, but don't go calling that a spade.
The video opens with its title and the words "To God we will all return" before showing a series of photos of the councillor, his family and political allies set to Elvis Presley singing You Were Always On My Mind. The two-minute video ends with the message "The mosque will be built in time for the 2012 Olympic Games."

The video was posted by abdullah1425 whose page on YouTube claims he is 23-year-old Muhammad from Stevenage. It has links to material relating to Tablighi Jamaat. In one comment to another user posted on the site he said: "Jihad starts from the moment your mother gave birth to you."

There is a link directly to the page from the mosque's official website but a spokesman promised to take it down if anything "inappropriate" was found. He added: "We are not responsible for the content of external websites. But we condemn totally anyone who incites violence."
"But we'll still link to it."
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Britain
Brown mulls bar on offenders visiting Pakistan
2007-07-13
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is considering introducing restrictions on offenders travelling to Pakistan and other countries in an attempt to stop radical Muslims going abroad for training by terror groups, the Guardian reported on Thursday.

According to the British daily, powers to ban those convicted of terror-offences from travelling overseas on their release are to be included in a new crime and terrorism bill. However, ministers acknowledge that such a measure would not have stopped Muktar Ibrahim, the 21/7 bomb plotter jailed for life yesterday, from going to Pakistan because his previous convictions were for only minor offences. Travel to certain countries could be restricted, and those convicted of less serious crimes could be included in a ban. “We may need to go wider than just terrorist offences,” Brown’s spokesman said.

Answering a question on Wednesday, Brown said he was “looking very carefully” at how Ibrahim was allowed to travel to Pakistan for terror training. “He applied for a passport, he applied for citizenship of this country, and received citizenship because all his offences as a juvenile had been wiped off. That would not happen now and he would not get citizenship of this country. And I’m looking very carefully at the circumstances that surround his visit to Pakistan.”

According to the Guardian, Brown also indicated on Wednesday that he was ready to move forward on proposals to extend the time police can detain terror suspects without charge. After resisting talk of changes to anti-terror laws during the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow, Brown told MPs he wanted to extend the maximum time for pre-charge detention from the current limit of 28 days.

In November 2005, the House of Lords defeated government plans to extend the maximum pre-charge detention to 90 days. Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of anti-terror legislation, supports an extension with stronger judicial oversight, but the Tories and the Liberal Democrats have resisted it. Other anti-terror measures are likely to be less controversial, including changes to enable post-charge questioning of terror suspects, and enhanced sentences for terrorist-related offences. Links between Ibrahim and Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 suicide bomb attacks, are still being investigated, but a senior security source believes both men may have attended the same training camp in North Waziristan. The source told the British newspaper that intelligence suggested Khan and Ibrahim had both gone to Pakistan in late 2004 to fight jihad but were sent back to attack Britain by Al Qaeda.
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Home Front: Culture Wars
Irshad Manji Nails it: Religion is the root cause of terrorist threat
2007-07-07
Needless to say, she receives death threats from ROP'ers constantly. The irony is that all she's advocating is some introspection and dialogue within the muslim community. I guess they're too busy being insulted by everything, being intolerant in a society that requires tolerance, seething and feeling like victims. Oh. And blaming the jooos.

THIS week's arrest of Mohamed Haneef in Brisbane may be more curious for the fact he's a professional lifesaver than for the possibility that he's a terrorist. So far, most of those being investigated in the latest British car bomb plots are, as is Haneef, doctors. The seeming paradox of the privileged seeking to avenge humiliation has many scratching their heads. Aren't Muslim martyrs supposed to be poor, dispossessed and resentful?
September 11 should have stripped us of that breezy simplification. The 19 hijackers came from means. Mohammed Atta, their ringleader, earned an engineering degree. He then moved to the West, opting for postgraduate studies in Germany. No aggrieved goatherder, that one.

In 2003, I interviewed Mohammad al-Hindi, the political leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

A physician himself, al-Hindi explained the difference between suicide and martyrdom. "Suicide is done out of despair," the good doctor diagnosed. "But most of our martyrs today were very successful in their earthly lives."

In short, it's not what the material world fails to deliver that drives suicide bombers. It's something else. Time and again, that something else has been articulated by the people committing these acts: their religion.

Consider Mohammad Sidique Khan, the teaching assistant who masterminded the July 7, 2005, transport bombings in London. In a taped testimony, Khan railed against British foreign policy. But before bringing up Tony Blair, he emphasised that "Islam is our religion" and "the prophet is our role model". In short, Khan gave priority to God.

Now take Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch-born Moroccan Muslim who murdered Amsterdam filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Bouyeri pumped several bullets into van Gogh's body. Knowing that multiple shots would finish off his victim, why didn't Bouyeri stop there? Why did he pull out a blade to decapitate van Gogh?

Again, we must confront religious symbolism. The blade is an implement associated with 7th-century tribal conflict. Wielding it as a sword becomes a tribute to the founding moment of Islam. Even the note stabbed into van Gogh's corpse, although written in Dutch, had the unmistakable rhythms of Arabic poetry. Let's credit Bouyeri with honesty: at his trial he proudly acknowledged acting from religious conviction.

Despite integrating Muslims far more adroitly than most of Europe, North America isn't immune. Last year in Toronto, police nabbed 17 young Muslim men allegedly plotting to blow up Canada's parliament buildings and behead the Prime Minister.

They called their campaign Operation Badr, a reference to prophet Mohammed's first decisive military triumph, the Battle of Badr. Clearly the Toronto 17 drew inspiration from religious history.

For people with big hearts and goodwill, this must be uncomfortable to hear. But they can take solace that the law-and-order types have a hard time with it, too. After rounding up the Toronto suspects, police held a press conference and didn't once mention Islam or Muslims. At their second press conference, police boasted about avoiding those words. If the guardians of public safety intended their silence to be a form of sensitivity, they instead accomplished a form of artistry, airbrushing the role that religion plays in the violence carried out under its banner.

They're in fine company: moderate Muslims do the same. Although the vast majority of Muslims aren't extremists, it is important to start making a more important distinction: between moderate Muslims and reform-minded ones.
ain't gonna happen. too many benefit from the status quo.

Moderate Muslims denounce violence in the name of Islam but deny that Islam has anything to do with it. By their denial, moderates abandon the ground of theological interpretation to those with malignant intentions, effectively telling would-be terrorists that they can get away with abuses of power because mainstream Muslims won't challenge the fanatics with bold, competing interpretations. To do so would be admit that religion is a factor. Moderate Muslims can't go there.

Reform-minded Muslims say it's time to admit that Islam's scripture and history are being exploited. They argue for reinterpretation precisely to put the would-be terrorists on notice that their monopoly is over.

Reinterpreting doesn't mean rewriting. It means rethinking words and practices that already exist, removing them from a 7th-century tribal time warp and introducing them to a 21st-century pluralistic context. Un-Islamic? God, no. The Koran contains three times as many verses calling on Muslims to think, analyse and reflect than passages that dictate what's absolutely right or wrong. In that sense, reform-minded Muslims are as authentic as moderates and quite possibly more constructive.

This week a former jihadist wrote in a British newspaper that the "real engine of our violence" is "Islamic theology". Months ago, he told me that as a militant he raised most of his war chest from dentists. Islamist violence: it's not just for doctors any more. Tackling Islamist violence: it can't be left to moderates any more.
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Britain
Police check Bluewater gangÂ’s links to bomb attempts
2007-07-01
Detectives hunting the West End car bombers believe the suspects are most likely to be home-grown extremists linked to an overlapping network of terrorist cells implicated in previous plots against British targets.

Some may be known to police and be on the run after escaping Home Office control orders.

Those in the frame may be associates of the so-called Crevice gang, which planned to attack the Ministry of Sound nightclub in central London and the Bluewater shopping mall in Kent.

Members of the five-man cell, who were jailed for life in April, were directed by “core” Al-Qaeda figures after training in terror camps in Pakistan.

Five men who hoped to kill thousands with a fertiliser bomb were described as ruthless misfits who betrayed their country

The brother of one jailed gang member, who has been on the run since breaching a government-imposed control order six weeks ago, is said to have been keen to bomb a nightclub.

“There is a real possibility the suspects may have a connection through a family of cells with the Crevice gang,” said a senior government security official. “It is very possible these people met each other at training camps.”

The suspects may also have drawn inspiration from another cell led by Dhiren Barot, an Al-Qaeda “general”, who drew up sophisticated plans to target London hotels and office buildings by parking limousines packed with gas canisters in underground car parks.

Barot, now serving 30 years in prison, outlined his plot in a document called Gas Limos Project, which he prepared for Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

Security officials insist there was no intelligence pointing to a car bomb attack in the West End. But there are concerns that extremists who were on the surveillance back-burner could have escaped their attentions.

“They are saying this is leftfield, that it came out of the blue,” said a senior Whitehall official. “What that means is they think it’s possible that these were people they have been aware of who suddenly did this.

“It may be that these are people that they know about – but just hadn’t realised what they were up to.”

Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP and security expert, said: “The real nervousness for the agencies is that these may be people they know but haven’t picked up. It’s happened before. It calls into question the strategy about leaving these people in play and not arresting them.”

Such concerns reflect the fall-out from the investigation into the July 7 attacks two years ago, which killed 52 people.

The authorities initially claimed the suicide bombers were unknown “clean skins”, but it soon emerged that Mohammad Sidique Khan, the 7/7 leader, and Shehzad Tanweer had been under surveillance a year earlier.

The two bombers were photographed at meetings with Omar Khyam, the leader of the Crevice gang that was plotting to detonate a fertiliser bomb.

Bugged conversations of the Crevice cell revealed the plotters’ disdain for nightclubs. Discussing the Ministry of Sound, one gang member said: “No one can put their hands up and say they are innocent...those slags dancing around.”

A key member of the Crevice gang was Anthony Garcia. During his trial, an Al-Qaeda supergrass revealed that GarciaÂ’s brother, Lamine Adam, had allegedly wanted to bomb a nightclub and was seeking a formula for explosives.

The supergrassÂ’s testimony was not considered strong enough for prosecution. However, Adam, 26, and his younger brother, Ibrahim, 20, were placed on control orders in February 2006 on the grounds that they planned to kill British soldiers serving abroad.

The two brothers and a friend, Cerie Bullivant, 24, who was put on a control order last July, went on the run six weeks ago. Police think they may have slipped abroad, but they cannot rule out that the trio could still pose a threat within the UK.

Lord Carlile, the government’s terrorism watchdog, said: “I would certainly not view this as a failure by the authorities in any sense,” he said. “Looking for home-grown cells is like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
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Fifth Column
Is London's future Islamic? (mind-boggling redux)
2007-06-06
ItÂ’s the capitalÂ’s fastest growing religion, based on noble traditions and compassionate principles, yet Islam can still be tainted by mistrust and misunderstanding. Here Time Out argues that an Islamic London would be a better place

The noise from the expectant crowd hushed to a murmur as an open-backed lorry that had driven slowly up the Mall – known since the Islamic revolution of 2021 as The Way of the Martyrs – nudged its way through the thousands gathered in Mohammad Sidique Khan Square. On the lorry, two masked guards held a young man, black hood over his head; a quiver running through the material suggested he knew what was coming.

The lorry halted by the plinth that had once held Marc Quinn’s sculpture ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ – long since removed as an insult to decency – and was now the place of public execution. A rope noose attached to a wire cable hung from a mechanised hoist. The main doors of what had been the National Gallery flung open and an Imam walked down the steps of the new Institute of Islamic Jurisprudence, opened only a week before by Sultan Charles, Prince of Islam and protector of the faithful in England.



The official executioner placed a stepladder against the plinth. The lorry pulled up and the young man was pushed out, then forced up the ladder. The noose was forced over the condemned man’s head. The crowd chanted ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is greater than everything).The hoist driver put his finger on a green button … Okay, not really – that’s a hysterical, right-wing nightmare of a future Muslim London: where an cruel alien creed is forced on a liberal city. A society where women are second-class citizens, same sex relationships a crime and Sharia law enforces terrible public disfigurement and death. But the reality is a long, long way from this dark vision.

For a start, Islam is not an alien religion to London. At the end of World War I the city sat at the heart of an Empire that had 160 million Muslim subjects, 80 million in India alone. London was the largest Islamic capital in the world. Forty years later and the end of the Empire, unrest and war and poverty in south Asia had lead to mass immigration to the mother country and London became a Muslim capital in another sense.

According to the 2001 census there are 607,083 Muslims living in London (310,477 men and 296,606 women). The majority of Muslims live in the east of the city and, by 2012, the Muslim Council of Britain estimates that the Muslim population of Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest and Hackney will be 250,000. There are plans afoot (though no formal application has yet been submitted) to build the UKs biggest mosque – capable of welcoming 40,000 worshippers – near the 2012 Olympic site, a move which has prompted predictable outrage from some quarters. Consequently, Muslim disillionment with a reactionary and often ill-informed press is at an all time high.

But rather than fear the inevitable changes this will bring to London, or buy in to a racist representation of all Muslims as terrorists, we should recognise both what Islam has given this city already, and the advantages it would bring across a wide range of areas in the future.


Public health
On the surface, Islamic health doesnÂ’t look good: the 2001 census showed that 24 per cent of Muslim women and 21 per cent of Muslim men suffered long-term illness and disability. But these are factors of social conditions rather than religion. In fact, Islam offers Londoners potential health benefits: the Muslim act of prayer is designed to keep worshippers fit, their joints supple and, at five times a day, their stomachs trim. The regular washing of the feet and hands required before prayers promotes public hygiene and would reduce the transmission of superbugs in LondonÂ’s hospitals.

Alcohol is haram, or forbidden, to Muslims. As London is above the national average for alcohol-related deaths in males, with 17.6 per 100,000 people (Camden has 31.6 per 100,000 males), turning all the cityÂ’s pubs into juice bars would have a massive positive effect on public health. Forbid alcohol throughout the country, and youÂ’d avoid many of the 22,000 alcohol-related deaths and the ÂŁ7.3 billion national bill for alcohol-related crime and disorder each year.

Ecology
‘The world is green and beautiful,’ said the prophet Muhammad, ‘and Allah has appointed you his guardian over it.’ The Islamic concept of halifa or trusteeship obliges Muslims to look after the natural world and Muhammad was one of the first ever environmentalists, advocating hima – areas where wildlife and forestry are protected. So we could expect more public parks under Islam, but halifa also applies to recycling: in 2006, 12,000 Muslims attended a series of sermons at the East London Mosque explaining the theological evidence for a link between behaving in an environmentally sustainable way and the Islamic faith.

Education
Presently, Muslim students perform less well than non-Muslim students. In inner London, 37 per cent of 16 to 24-year-old Muslims have no qualifications (the figure for the general population of the same age and location is 25 per cent). When it comes to university education the picture is equally gloomy: 16 to 24-year-old Muslims are half as likely to have degree level or above qualification than other inner London young people.

Again, social factors rather than religion have led to this state of affairs. Young Muslims in London are often of south Asian origin and therefore more likely to live in households where English is not the first language, more likely to encounter racism (both intentional and unintentional) during their education, and more likely to suffer from poverty and bad housing conditions.

But Tahir Alam, education spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, claims Muslim children do better in their own faith schools than in the mainstream state sector: ‘Muslim schools have their own distinct ethos. They use the children’s faith and heritage as primary motivators to provide the backdrop for their education and behaviour. This ethos is consistent with the messages that children are getting at home, so it is a very coherent operation between the home and the school.’

If Islam became the dominant religion in London the same ethos could be applied to schooling across swathes of underprivileged and deprived areas of the city. This could have a revolutionary effect on educational achievement and, perhaps just as importantly, general levels of discipline and self-respect among London’s young people. While controversy rages over faith schools, there are 37 Muslim schools in London. As of 2004, only five were state schools, but there is growing pressure to bring more into the state sector which, according to Alam, will ‘help raise achievement for many sectors of the Muslim community. Many private Muslim schools are under-resourced and if they can be brought into the state sector this valuable experience can be extended to more children.’

Food
Application of halal (Arabic for ‘permissable’) dietary laws across London would free us at a stroke from our addiction to junk food, and the general adoption of a south Asian diet rich in fruit juice, rice and vegetables with occasional mutton or chicken would have a drastic effect on obesity, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorders and associated public health problems. As curry is already Londoners’ and the nation’s favourite food (see our Brick Lane food feature), it would be a relatively easy process to encourage the adoption of such a diet. Not eating would be important as well. The annual fasting month of Ramadan instils self-discipline, courtesy and social cohesion. And Londoners would benefit philosophically and physically from even a short period when we weren’t constantly ramming food into our mouths.

Inter-faith relations
In an Islamic London, Christians and Jews – with their allegiance to the Bible and the Talmud – would be protected as ‘peoples of the book’. Hindus and Sikhs manage to live alongside a large Muslim population in India, so why not here? Although England has a long tradition of religious bigotry against, for instance, Roman Catholics, it is reasonable to assume that under the guiding hand of Islam a civilised accommodation could be made among faith groups in London. This welcoming stance already exists in the capital in the form of the City Circle (see Yahya Birt interview), which encourages inter-faith dialogue and open discussion.

Arts
Some of the finest art in London is already Islamic. The Jameel Gallery at the V&A houses ‘ceramics, textiles, carpets, metalwork, glass and woodwork, which date from the great days of the Islamic caliphate of the eighth and ninth century’ up until the turn of the last century. Or take a free daily tour of the Addis Gallery of Islamic art (at the British Museum). London-based Nasser David Khalili, an Iranian-born Jew, has amassed what is considered to be the world’s largest private collection of Islamic art. Islamic influences have also flourished in other areas of the arts, with novelists, comedians (Birmingham-born Shazia Mirza was an instant hit on the London circuit), and music (from rappers Mecca2Medina on, to the less in-your-face Yusuf Islam).

Social justice
Each Muslim is obliged to pay zakat, a welfare tax of 2.5 per cent of annual income, that is distributed to the poor and the needy. If the working population of London, 5.2 million, was predominantly Muslim this would produce approximately ÂŁ3.2bn each year. More importantly, everyone would be obliged to consider those Londoners who havenÂ’t shared their good fortune. London would become a little less cruel.

Race relations
Under Islam all ethnicities are equal. Once you have submitted to Allah you are a Muslim – it doesn’t matter what colour you are. End of story.


Michael Hodges. Additional research: Elizabeth Austin, Tue Jun 5
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