Bending the Third Rail
Because We Should, We Can, We Do
Friday, August 11, 2006
New Jihadist
Salon has a pretty good op-ed piece on the recent "terrorists" arrests in Britain:
Security experts close to the German government say the arrested suspects need to be viewed as "passionate amateurs." The disaster averted in London, they say, can't be the "official" al-Qaida attack that some expect the terror network to stage on or around the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It's not the bearded man in the cave or his footsoldiers that are giving counterterrorism officials a headache, say intelligence agents and academic terrorism experts, it's young killers from Europe who are radicalizing quickly and almost invisibly.
Certainly "passionate amateurs" are capable of killing just as well as centralized al Qaeda. But it is important to know where these guys come from. In this case it appears these were homegrown, decentralized, independent jihadist with no central affiliation to anyone. It also appears that they've been radicalized by world events in the past few years.