Recently in Terrorism Category

In light of the stunning revelations, provided entirely willingly and never under duress or while being tortured (yeah right), from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, I thought it important to highlight some of the many things he did confess to that have gotten lost in the mix:

1. I shot Andy Warhol because of those damned soup cans,
2. I shot Archduke Ferdinand, thereby plunging Europe into WWI,
3. OJ is innocent. I stabbed Nicole and Ron,
4. I am responsible for New Coke,
5. I secretly sent those IMs, not Mark Foley,
6. I blew up the Hindenburg,
7. Oh, I gave John Wilkes Booth the gun he used to shoot Lincoln,
8. I created that dinosaur Barney,
9. I've was Katherine Harris' lover in college,
10. and I voted for Nader!

I bet he feels better getting all of that off his chest. I know I would.

After Hamas was elected in Palestine as the new government the US cut off funding and decried it as a terrorist organization (a move which I supported, by the way) and some people criticized us for reacting that way.

News came from the Gaza Strip today that Hamas gunmen sprayed the car carrying the three children of a rival Palestinian faction while they were on their way to school. The children were ten, eight, and six.

I recognize that the actions of a few don't necessarily represent the movement as a whole, and I also will not sit here and glibly claim that it's because the actors involved were Muslim that they acted this way. There's plenty of hatred and violence in all sects that drives people to act in despicable ways.

But I know these actions are not beyond the normal MO of Hamas, or Fatah for that matter, and while Hamas now claims it had no responsibility for the crime, they're most certainly the perpetrators.

The fact that they will not turn the person over to a civilized criminal court, but instead perpetuate the cycle of violence does not bode well for the future of Palestine or our relations with them.

What does it take to get you detained at the airport these days? Well, other than being Ted Kennedy or being randomly placed on the no-fly list by some prankster at the TSA that is, or unfortunately having been born with a skin tone other than white? Call the director of the TSA, Kip Hawley, an idiot.

Last week, Ryan Bird, of Milwaukee, dutifully put his highly explosive personal grooming liquids into a plastic baggie (because Lord knows, when a bomb's about to go off, nothing stops it faster than Ziploc), and wrote the words "Kip Hawley is an idiot". It was his own little way of protesting the stupidity of the whole theatre of security we're being made to go through with planes right now.

Instead it got him detained for almost 30 minutes while the TSA and a sheriff's deputy and the TSA supervisor questioned him. According to the TSA supervisor, and the deputy for that matter, we don't have freedom of speech past the checkpoint at the airport. Because the phrase maybe made the supervisor feel "threatened", writing that wasn't protected speech.

Wow.

Ryan's first-hand account of the incident if available here.

Two weeks ago I highlighted the comments of former NPR correspondent Sarah Chayes, who's living now in Afghanistan and recently reported that all of the reports made by the Northern Alliance about how hard they fought the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were US fabrications. This week I finally got around to watching the CNN special "In The Footsteps of Bin Laden" by Christiane Amanpour. In it, Amanpour interviewed a former CIA operative that was in Afghanistan directing efforts in the Tora Bora mountain range against Bin Laden. He claimed that they'd captured a radio from a dead Al-Qaeda fighter and they could hear Bin Laden apologizing to his soldiers for leading them to this mountain range where they were trapped. The operative said that he kept calling Washington and asking for 500 or more US soldiers to arrive to complete the mission and capture Bin Laden but that Washington continued to rebuff him.

The maximum number of soldiers they gave him? 50.

If Bin Laden was going to be captured "dead or alive" as Bush promised in the days after 9/11, why send only a few troops and let him slip away?

There are more blasts in India today. Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1971077,curpg-1.cms

Mostly Muslims and a mosque were targeted. Will I get stoned for thinking that this might be retribution for the Mumbai bombings this summer by hardline Hindu elements in India? It would not be the first time Muslims were killed by Hindus.

Anyway, India immediately blamed Pakistan but that doesn't make sense to me on the surface. Sure I can spool out conspiracy theories, but I don't want to walk that path yet.

It surely is a sign of the times that several South Asians on a flight to Mumbai, which shouldn't be surprising, Indians flying to India, wow, were arrested for passing around their cellphones and ignoring the flight attendants, but a white kid flying in from Argentina with DYNAMITE in his luggage, plus blasting caps, ammonium nitrate, and a detonator is cleared of any possibility of terrorism.

Link to the CNN story or or the MSNBC story if you like

Bruce Schneier has an interesting article on fighting terror with anti-terror: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/what_the_terror.html

There's one point that I'd like to highlight from his piece:

“Imagine for a moment what would have happened if [the London plotters] had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that's basically what's happening right now.”

The most effective thing terrorists could do now is further isolate the Muslim and Southern Asian communities in the West. I'd pointed at this in my article Is Bin Laden Important Anymore?. By isolating those communities and putting them under a cloud of permanent suspicion it creates a culture where

1. More terrorists grow organically in their host countries
2. More people in non-Muslim nations distrust all Muslims
3. And we adopt all of the markings of a truly violent conflict between Islam and non-Islamic cultures

The recent acts that Schneier highlights of people refusing to fly with South Asians, with people hyper-ventilating on planes out of fear of blowing up, points to a ratcheting up of people's suspicions, suspicions which will only drive communities further apart. Conspiracy theories would abound on both sides of the cultural divide, further increasing the distrust. Angry young men, desperate, and feeling hopeless, will organize themselves into active, undirected but dedicated cells, and the cycle of real violence will continue. I believe this to be bin Laden's primary goal, and I think we're 30 - 40% of the way there.

Keeping these ideas in mind, Rich Harlos and I ran through some mental exercises recently where we identified one tactic, one which I think we'll see used soon, if it hasn’t been already:
Handlers in another country would create several cells in Western communities, and are given plans for several different acts to carry out. A month or two before the terrorist plans are to be carried out, those same handlers who organized the cells would leak information about the plans so that the information is intercepted by Western intelligence. The information is quickly analyzed and used to send the police to arrest the cells. The arrests of more cells causes further panic, distrust, and tighter security measures. Politicians would call for even tighter immigration controls, more limits on people’s freedoms, and broader police powers. And people would, for the most part, give in.

To add one further wrinkle though, if I were planning this whole affair, the leaked information would contain details for twice as many cells as really existed. The threat of ghost cells never found would make police and intelligence forces twist in the wind and arrest scores of innocent people in the hope of snaring terrorists that never existed in the first place.

The psychological toll taken on the Western nations would be immeasurable. I’d be inclined to think that hate crimes against Muslims and Indians would be almost tolerated, and people would almost certainly protest for all South Asians to leave the country, causing irreparable harm to our economy and culture. In fact, I think this constant culture of fear and panic is already destroying our culture.

In light of that, I think Schneier's point, and mine previously, about not over-reacting to this information, and to acts of terrorism in general is crucial to not letting the terrorists win.

Word is, when they do the sequel to Snakes on a Plane, probably next year sometime, they're going to forego snakes and other creepy crawlies all together in favor of South Asians, because that's what really seems to scare the shit out of white people these days:
"Everybody Listen! We have to put a barrier between US and the BROWN PEOPLE Brown People on the MuthaFuckin Plane".

Luckily an air marshal was on the plane to stop the brown people (who were suspiciously traveling to Mumbai, what's with all the brown people in Mumbai? It's like they live there or something) from settling in for the 18 hour flight by playing video games on their cellphones and getting drinks out of their bags. (CNN Link)

We've heard many times in the last few years about the jihadi videos being found in the homes of suspected and actual terrorists, usually containing stirring music, rhetoric from bin Laden, and scenes of Westerners and Israelis dying. Why do young Muslim terrorists keep showing up with these videos?

They're pornography. More directly, it's terrorist pornography. No, there's no jiggling boobs or acts of lust in the videos. But it's purpose is the same. It was made to titillate and excite and arouse the viewer. In some Muslim households it would probably be worse for the person to be found with a copy of Battered Buttholes 8 than bin Laden's latest tape. Hmmm, now that I've said that, I wonder how true it is.

This is not some peculiarly Muslim institution. In the US we've got the "Turner Diaries" and "Hunter", which in book format are essentially the same thing.

I don’t think Bin Laden’s important any more. Certainly not as important as he was 5 years ago, or 10 years ago. There’s certainly a bump in the amount of terrorism and suspected terrorism going on around the world right now, but I think his, and Al-Qaeda’s role is vastly overstated. Let me explain:

Bin Laden’s never been shy about his intentions: to drive a wedge between Western culture and Muslims, to preserve the strict form of Islam he practices, and to start a world-wide holy war between Islam, and non-Muslim powers. He clearly believes that in that jihad, Islam will come out the victor and will overtake the world.

Pre-9/11, Bin Laden worked with Muslims, through Al-Qaeda, to prepare for this war. But it didn’t prepare for war like a standing army or citizen militias like Hamas and the IRA. Al-Qaeda was meant to return to their countries and wait. They didn’t have to wait long.

The attacks of 9/11 were a wake-up call to the world. Governments around the world realized they were all at risk from Muslim extremists, and reacted immediately. For a while all Muslims became suspect. Even Sikhs from India were killed in the US because people thought they were somehow part of Al-Qaeda. The Muslim community pulled inward, isolating itself in countries, and living in fear of their own governments, of other people, and created the exact kind of environment that nurtures homegrown cells.

These homegrown cells, only loosely directed by the Al-Qaeda organization, led by the ranks of people trained in the years before 9/11 have taken off, planning and executing attacks through Europe, the Middle East, India, and Asia.

Bin Laden doesn’t need to call the shots any more. The young disaffected Muslims in countries feel persecuted, singled out, and put upon. Worse yet they see American and European foreign policies that support what they see as the further persecution of Muslims in places like Israel, Iraq, Chechnya, and Kashmir. This perceived feeling of persecution (interestingly enough the same kind of perceived persecution that leads Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to claim that Christmas is under attack) feeds their rage and helps to propel them to action. Bin Laden’s only role in this is to make video tapes and audio tapes urging them to action.

But I don’t think capturing Bin Laden will have much effect at this point, other than satisfying the desire for justice in the US. He’s not in charge any more.

He didn’t direct the angry protests, riots, and murders that came from the Danish Mohammed cartoons. The rose spontaneously out of those same feelings that Bin Laden sought to engender. He didn’t have to direct someone to put bombs on German trains (that thankfully didn’t go off): http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2139974,00.html. Homegrown Muslims felt their own furor at the Israeli bombing of Lebanon and acted. Homegrown Muslims in India blew up trains in Mumbai to protest their lack of involvement in the political process. Local Muslims in England blew themselves up on 7/7, and more recently a different group were at least discussing doing something new.

And this is why I don’t think Bin Laden’s important any more. He doesn’t direct anything anymore, in any tangible sense anyway. Instead he probably sits in some house in Peshawar watching the events of the world unfold and makes policy statements, like an elder statesman of terror. He drove a big wedge between cultures, or if you believe some, shone a spotlight on an existing gulf between cultures, and making that separation hurt.

Capturing Bin Laden would certainly soothe our desire for justice and for a time probably make the world feel safer, but if anything I think that it would increase the general sense of persecution and rage in some Muslim circles. And things would probably, for a time, get much worse from there.

The terrorism arrests in London pose a particular problem for me. There's been a lot of evidence that shows that torture DOES NOT WORK. If you torture a person long enough he'll admit to and tell you whatever it is he thinks you want to hear so you'll stop torturing him. Now, while the British have said for some time that they've been watching this group of young Muslims, the big break came when two people were arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of working with bin Laden. (source: http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-08-11T151934Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-263229-6.xml) Soon after the arrests, Pakistan notified the UK and the US about the plot and the people were arrested. Now, some in the UK said that investigators were not planning to arrest these folks for a while, but were pressured by the US (source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14320452/)
based on the Pakistani intelligence. What if these suspected jihadists was tortured for information, and that was what set this whole chain of events into motion?

Pakistan is known to torture prisoners, even sometimes with the help and approval of the United States. (source: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/05/24/pakist11005.htm)

Does that still mean it's a victory against terrorism? Was the plot as serious as it was made out to be? Or was it made to be more than thought due solely to the information provided from the dark corners of the Pakistani interrogation rooms?

I saw this news story yesterday on the wire: Two LeT Men Arrested In Delhi. Two members of LeT were travelling through Delhi carrying 2 kilos of RDX (a plastic explosive) and detonators.

This came just before an advisory to Americans in India, particularly in Delhi and Mumbai, to be on alert for potential terrorist attacks. It's interesting to me that the Indian government would then say that that advisory is "innocuous". It definitely seems that there are major terrorist activities afoot, this month (10 year anniversary of Al-Qaeda declaring war on the US) and I think that Al-Qaeda is looking to strike on or near 9/11 again. They have this thing for anniversaries and symbolism.

In other thoughts, I was thinking about bin Laden, and how they claim that he's in Pakistan, hiding in the hills near Peshawar. But I always remain skeptical. And thinking laterally, I keep thinking about where I would hide if I were bin Laden, and I think of places like Miami Beach or the Catskills ("This is my new friend Benny Bin Laden") but then a thought occurred to me:

What if bin Laden were hiding in Venezeula? Stay with me for a moment. Hugo Chavez has repeatedly rattled sabers with the US and has no love for us. What if bin Laden asked him for refuge? I think he'd offer it. Speaking only partially glibly, they'd sit around and laugh at how much they both hate Bush, and how the US has troops marching all over eastern Afghanistan looking for bin Laden and Al-Qaeda when in truth they're hanging out in the jungles of South America. I don't think it'd actually happen, in part because there are so many Americans running around Venezeula, and there are still lots of people in that country who like the US, and more importantly, our military runs narcotics enforcement surveillance operations in the country, but it's an interesting idea. I propose it to get other people to think about other places where bin Laden might be hiding that's not Pakistan.

In a crime that could only make Michelle Malkin happy, a Sikh in Northern California was stabbed in the neck with a steak knife because his attacker wanted to kill a member of the Taliban.

Never mind the fact that just because the victim, Iqbal Singh is a Sikh, not a Muslim, and had nothing to do with 9/11, he was obviously wearing a turban and had brown skin, so he must have been involved. So goes the logic.

Having worked with so many Indians now, I know the trouble they go through, especially the Sikhs, who do traditionally wear turbans. In Philadelphia, one guy that I worked with was routinely addressed as a Muslim, especially by members of the Nation of Islam (the radical religion purporting to be Islam but something totally FUBAR). Eventually he worked to educate people, and especially the police in Philadelphia so there wouldn't be as many mixups.

I keep thinking I should do the same thing here in Harrisburg.

Sepia Mutiny has a great writeup about the whole affair here.

Two news stories have crossed my desk, so to speak, that talk about an Al-Qaeda connection to the 7/11 Mumbai Bombings:

http://ia.rediff.com/news/2006/jul/12raman.htm?q=tp&file=.htm

http://autofeed.msn.co.in/pandorav3/output/News/a7178664-612f-45eb-8141-88422bc019ef.aspx

The second one is of interest to me because it talks about Al-Qaeda sending out a fax in Kashmir praising the bombings and claiming that Al-Qaeda has started a cell in Kashmir.

I think Al-Qaeda already has cells in Kashmir, and doesn't want to necessarily make announcements in this manner. It smacks of Zacarias Moussaoui standing the courtroom screaming "I am Al-Qaeda", or in other words, it sounds like a bunch of hooey.

Kashmir is one of those global flashpoints that I think Al-Qaeda has been working in for months, training groups like LeT, etc in an attempt to foment trouble.

I do believe that Al-Qaeda had a direct hand in the 7/11 bombing, and is trying to radicalize the Muslim population of India. I can't speak to how successful they can or will or have been, but I think the consequences of us, the US, or the rest of the world for that matter, ignoring the possiblities of radicalized Indian muslims is something we do at our great peril.