Leaked No 10 dossier reveals Al-Qaeda’s British recruits

[seriousstan]

AL-QAEDA is secretly recruiting affluent, middle-class Muslims in British universities and colleges to carry out terrorist attacks in this country, leaked Whitehall documents reveal.
A network of “extremist recruiters” is circulating on campuses targeting people with “technical and professional qualifications”, particularly engineering and IT degrees.



Yesterday it emerged that last week’s London bombings were a sophisticated attack with all the devices detonating on the Underground within 50 seconds of each other. The police believe those behind the outrage may be home-grown British terrorists with no criminal backgrounds and possessing technical expertise.

A joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier — Young Muslims and Extremism — prepared for the prime minister last year, said Britain might now be harbouring thousands of Al-Qaeda sympathisers.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1688261,00.html

[Maple]

1. Technical expertise?

They were amateur home-made bombs with ordinary timers in back-packs.

[seriousstan]

3. I am an amateur at bomb-making and I believe it would be very

difficult to make one. I think I understand the technology behind a pipe bomb but I would piss myself trying to make one.

[Maple]

5. Well google it

easy as pie.

[AndrewJacksonFaction]

13. That saying has always bothered me.

Why is pie so easy?

[bitchkitty]

18. All-ready pie crust. n/t

[Eloriel]

21. The saying pre-dates ready-made pie crust by decades

if not centuries. Just so you know.

[bitchkitty]

24. I know - I was being funny -

but not very funny, evidently.

I guess compared to some things our female ancestors had to bear, pie was easy.

[napi21]

4. Is it that easy to have all the devices detonate within 50 seconds?

I don't know anything about explosives, except what I've seen in movies, so I'm asking...if these people were really just amateurs, could they have easily made all the devices to detonate within such a short time? That does sound like at least a bit of sophysitacation, don't ya think?

[Maple]

6. That would be what

timers are for.

[daleo]

14. But to get timers to synchronize within 50 seconds of each other...

Why that is an astounding level of technical prowess, only available for the last 300 years or so. This is cutting edge stuff.

Odd that on Friday we were told:
Bomb 1, 8:51
Bomb 2, 8:56
Bomb 3, 9:17
Bomb 4: 9:47
Now, the first three were within 50 seconds of each other instead of spanning 26 minutes. I just find it hard to believe the authorities would have been out by 25 minutes for the first 2 days, and the world media just went along.

[FreakinDJ]

16. How long does it take to dial a cell number

they used cell phones to detonate the bombs in spain

[daleo]

17. They said that wouldn't be likely in this case

Supposedly cell phones aren't reliable in the London subway.

[adolfo]

15. Ridiculous

There is nothing amateur about this bombing. The results described from various reports point to possible military grade bombs.

Technical expertise is required to manufacture and handle high explosives.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. This is distressing.

Muslim ma-mas, don't let your babies grow up to be terrorists! Oh, I wish I could picture them reeling in their kids.

[MGKrebs]

7. Yikes.

Recruiting on campuses???!!!
How could they know this and not be able to intervene?
I thought all the terrorist resources were being devoted to Iraq?

I don't care how amatuer the bombs themselves were. They had people successfully go throught training and practice for this. They acquired the material and built the bombs. They obviously selected targets, with the attendant research and planning.They were able to do all of this apparently without attracting any undue attention from police, neighbors, stores, passengers, credit card companies, telephone companies, ISP's. Then they got the bombs in place and detonated them. I think that is damn scary. (I keep saying 'they' because it seems unlikely that one person could run around placing those devices without them being discovered in the interim. )

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

12. "How could they know this and not be able to intervene? "

You've placed your finger in the bullshit.

[Larkspur]

8. If this is true, then Al Queda has a better recruiting plan than the US

Army and Marines.

[bahrbearian]

9. If it is true/ Whitehall documents reveal. White house documents

all the same, can not be verified.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. The Aum Shinri Kyo in Japan recruited its

followers from among scientifically and technologically trained people. :shrug:

But yes, if British intelligence knows about this recruitment, why aren't they trying to catch the recruiters?

[FormerOstrich]

11. What is this crap.....

It paints a chilling picture of the scale of the task in tackling terrorism. Drawing on information from MI5, it concludes: “Intelligence indicates that the number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1%.”

This equates to fewer than 16,000 potential terrorists and supporters out of a Muslim population of almost 1.6m.

I'd like to see a similar estimate of other extremest groups numbers.

Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police chief, revealed separately last night that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.

So explain this to me...do they turn in attendance reports for educational funding or what? How is it we are so familiar with the camps, their attendees, and demographics and we don't go in and shut them down? Did they train 3,000 in such a short span we just couldn't get there in time?

It's been said repeatedly that Iraq is now the training ground. So how successful do you think the recruiters are at gather "“technical and professional qualifications”, particularly engineering and IT degrees" and sending them, not to a sheltered blow up things training camp but into Iraq to train on the job? I'd think that would be a tougher sell than recruiting into the US Army.

And why doesn't anybody ever mention.....if it's true that they have IT type terrorists, why would they have them out bombing with explosives instead of infiltrating the many many outsource firms which handle most of our software. If I was bent on destruction I'd be salivating over that code knowing full well that the US companies have implemented next to nothing in the way of checking it.

[fedsron2us]

19. 'It is British Muslims wot done it'

says the ex Head of The Met, News of the World, Times, BBC etc based on absolutely no evidence at all. History appears to be about to repeat itself. I was in Guildford on the night that the Horse and Groom was blown up in 1974 and I well remember the hysteria whipped up by the press that led to four innocent people of Irish descent being jailed for years whilst the real culprits walked free to kill again.

From what I can see the modus operandi of these attacks using multiple bombs set off simultaneously on public transport is almost identical to that used in Madrid which was the work of a terrorist cell made up mainly of North Africans. Juan Cole, whose views I respect, has stated on his web site that British Muslims of South Asian origin are very unlikley to have been the organisers of this attack. He thinks the 'Qaeda al-Jihad in Europe' who claimed to have carried out the bombings may well be responsible. Contrary, to what I have seen touted on some parts of DU it did not misquote the Koran nor was it written in bad Arabic. Even more interestingly the language used was very similar to that expounded by the 'Muslim Brotherhood' which has a powerful following in Egypt and certain other parts of North Africa.

http://www.juancole.com /

It now seems that high grade plastic explosives were used to construct the bombs and this substance is certainly not readily available in the UK. The material would have to be obtained outside the country and smuggled across the border.This requires an international organisation. In addition, from my memory of past IRA activity, terrorist groups rarely used mainland based sympathisers to carry out bombings. Instead they brought in teams from outside the country to do the attacks. This made it far harder for the authorities to infiltrate their organisation and to stop the bombers. Contary, to what the press may be saying, the nightmate scenario for the authorities is not that the bombers came from the local Muslim population because such a network would be relatively easy to penetrate and roll up. More worrying is the fact that large amounts of explosives and the people who use it are getting into the country undetected. It is one of the little mentioned prices for living in our glorious 'global economy'.

This sounds like a spoiler story circulated by the UK authorities via the Murdoch press to divert attention away from the huge intelligence failure that has taken place here.

[allemand]

20. Juan Cole's linguistic analysis is very convincing.

Cole: Unlikely to be by British Muslims (...)

The statement was in Arabic. The instances of British Muslim participation in terrorism given in the CNN piece were all non-Arabs: Richard Reid and several South Asian British, all of whom undertook operations abroad rather than in the UK. None of them probably even knew Arabic well or could compose a statement in it. Britain's South Asian Muslim community is almost certainly not the origin of this attack. The statement celebrated Arabness or `urubah along with Islam. No Bangladeshi-Briton or Pakistani-Briton wrote that. (...)

So, if the statement is a guide to the identity of the attackers, this bombing could not have emanated from the British Muslim community.

I did a keyword search in OCLC Worldcat, an electronic database with 40 million volumes, for `urubah and Islam. Virtually all of the hits came from Egyptian Muslim thinkers publishing in Cairo and Giza during the past 30 years, roughly in a Muslim Brotherhood tradition. Egyptian Muslim revivalist intellectual Muhammad Amara wrote the big book on Uruba and Islam. Likewise, there was a book on Islam and uruba in Darfur, presumably supporting the Sudanese government (the Fur of Darfur are Muslims and often know Arabic, and the Arabic-speaking Sudanese living there are a minority, with whom the Fur will intermarry. The Arabic speakers, who look just like the Fur in being black Africans, have engaged in predations against the Fur in the past few years, with tens of thousands killed, even as some of the Fur sought greater regional autonomy from Khartum).

My guess is that the author of the statement is Egyptian or Sudanese, with some sort of intellectual genealogy in the radical fringes of the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad al-Islami.

http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/update-on-london-bombing-investigation.html

He also sees no link to Zarqawi:

By the way, if the communique issued by Qaeda al-Jihad in Europe is authentic, then this attack cannot be linked to Zarqawi. They say they are taking revenge for British troops' "massacres" of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Zarqawi's Salafi group would never celebrate "Arabism" or speak of "heroes" (abtal) when referring to the "holy warriors" or mujahidin. Urubah and batal, Arabism and hero, are typical of the vocabulary of secular Arab nationalism-- in, say, the tradition of Gamal Abdel Nasser. That message is coming from a group of terrorists that is much more comfortable with this language than are typically the extremist Salafis like Zarqawi. "Hero" would sem a term of humanistic pride to them, and Arabism would seem narrow and idolatrous as a competitor with Islam. There are Muslim thinkers who meld political Islam and Arabism-- this is common in Egypt, e.g. But they belong to a different religious and intellectual tradition than Zarqawi.
http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/london-bombing-by-less-sophisticated.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. There are British Muslims of Arab descent

so I think Cole's claim "this bombing could not have emanated from the British Muslim community" if the website claim was true doesn't actually hold up. Maybe if he said "British Asian Muslim" (yes, I know Arabia is in Asia too, but in Britain, 'Asian' as a description of a person's ethnicity normally means South Asian, ie Indian sub-continent or Sri Lanka). Most British Muslims are from South Asia, but there are some from Arab countries too.

[fedsron2us]

23. True, but as you well know most Britons

will identify Muslim with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who make up the overwhelming majority of the UK's Muslim population. Individuals from the Middle East and Africa are a very small minority of this group.

All this is really irrelevant because, even if the bombers had support and used elements of the British Muslim population to carry out their operation the methods and materials used strongly suggest that the attacks were planned and organised from outside the country.