Please find below an example of UPI's continuing coverage of homeland security, the war on terror and related issues. I hope you find it interesting. You may link to it on the web here:
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20050708-121750-4975r Subscribers to UPI's Terrorism and Security service received this story when it was first published last week. If you have any comments or questions about this piece, need any more information about UPI products and services, or want to stop receiving these alerts, please get in touch. Thank you, Shaun Waterman UPI Homeland and National Security Editor E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: 202 898 8081 London blasts highlight new Euro-jihadi threat By Shaun Waterman UPI Homeland and National Security Editor WASHINGTON, July 7 (UPI) -- The bomb attacks in London thought to be the work of extremists linked to al-Qaida have focused attention on what counter-terrorism officials on both sides of the Atlantic say is a new, potentially more dangerous form of Islamic violence. "Since Sept 11 and our very aggressive counter-terrorism activities the al-Qaida organization that we knew really has changed fundamentally," a senior U.S. intelligence official told reporters in a conference call Thursday evening. He added that "We don't know who was responsible for the attacks," but that their "methodology is consistent with what we know that al-Qaida has planned for in the past." Four bombs -- three on trains and one on a bus -- exploded during rush hour in the British capital Thursday, killing at least 37 people and injuring 700 more. The official echoed the analysis provided by many counter-terrorism specialists over the past year or more: Al-Qaida has metastasized into a much more amorphous, and therefore elusive, kind of group. "From being a relatively hierarchical organization with much of the activity and operational planning ... taking place from the top, it has become a much more horizontal phenomenon with regional nodes, affiliates (and) associates," said the official, who demanded anonymity, even though he was briefing in a conference call organized by the public affairs office of the director of national intelligence. At a recent law enforcement conference in Florence, Italy, European officials said the gravest threat they faced was from a new generation of Islamic extremists, organized in loose networks rather than conventional cells, and often with no history of affiliation with al-Qaida or other established terror groups. Balthazar Garzon, the Spanish investigating magistrate who heads that country's effort to prosecute Islamic terrorists, told the conference that those who carried out the Madrid railway bombings in March 2004 were largely such neophytes. The bombings, he said, were carried out by "a whole network based on personal contact, where a single person was a kind of catalyst." It remains to be seen whether the London bombings were carried out by a similar "second generation" network, but British counter-terrorism officials have told United Press International in the past that they, too, were concerned about what Garzon called "spontaneously generated" terror cells among the grownup children of Muslim immigrants recruited to the extremist cause in jails or over the Internet. Rather than being organized in discrete cells, Garzon said, these second-generation jihadis tended to form loose constellations defined by "the system of personal relationships among the members." Rather than a hierarchy, they were "individuals who make up a sort of galaxy." Most importantly from the point of view of intelligence operatives seeking to track these militants and disrupt their plans, Garzon said that for these networks, "Al-Qaida is an ideological reference point, not a real articulated structure with a command chain." Because of this autonomy, officials say, it is harder to interdict their plans. "What we're looking at now," said the senior U.S. intelligence official, "are these different cells that might be operating in Europe or other places and their association with al-Qaida central, and what type of autonomy and independence they have as far as carrying out attacks at their discretion." This decentralization makes it harder to identify key individuals in time to disrupt preparations for attacks. In Madrid, for instance, investigators said they were aware of some of those involved in planning the attacks, but had no idea that they were "operationally active." Autonomy also means the new groups can act with greater speed. "We saw what happened in Madrid," said the U.S. official, "A local cell was able to move forward with an attack in a relatively short time frame -- within the space of two months." Worse yet, because these neophytes often have no history of connection to extremist groups, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies can remain unaware of their existence. "They are unknown people," said one senior European law-enforcement official at the Florence conference, who asked for anonymity because of his involvement in prosecuting such groups. The final deadly ingredient in this new cocktail is the opportunity that the Iraq insurgency presents for young radicals to learn the skills needed to build the kind of bombs that exploded with such deadly effect in London. Officials from several European countries said they recently discovered networks of Islamic extremists recruiting and making travel arrangements for such volunteers who want to go to fight the U.S. military in Iraq. Only a handful of the foreign insurgents killed or captured so far by the U.S.-led forces in Iraq have been Europeans. But as Cofer Black, who until recently was the State Department's counter-terrorism coordinator, told the conference, "Not many have to get past you when they are trained so well" before there is a real problem. The U.S. official said there was no specific intelligence about an Iraq link to the London blasts at this stage, but "we know that (insurgent leader Abu Musab) Zarqawi has in fact pursued efforts to expand his reach outside of Iraq and the Iraqi theatre to the European homeland. "We're looking at that," he said. Evidence of an Iraq link may have huge political repercussions in Britain, where opposition to the war continues to grow. But it will also be a realization of the worst fears of some counter-terror specialists -- that Iraq is creating a new generation of terrorist, with the skills and experience to survive. Those that survive their apprenticeship in the insurgency will be used to "being hunted in a much more aggressive fashion than by law enforcement," Roger Cressey, White House deputy counter-terrorism coordinator during President Bush's first term, told UPI. They will have acquired skills "in terms of operational security, counter-surveillance, communication and overall tradecraft that are going to make it very difficult to track them and take them down." He said the creation of a new cadre of hardened Islamic terrorists was "one of the biggest unintended consequences of the war in Iraq." "The administration had no appreciation of the danger of creating a new cadre of jihadis," Cressey said. Nor are those consequences going to be limited to Europe, he pointed out. As citizens of European nations, these second-generation radicals can easily travel to the United States without a visa. Copyright (c) 2001-2005 United Press International -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
