Monday, November 10, 2003
TERRORIST STRIKE WARNINGS?
Certain elements of the blogosphere are alert to a new phenomenon, fairly specific "warnings" about terror attacks found in Arabic language online message boards. This post at Little Green Footballs is typical. Follow the links to see more specific discussion of the underlying sources.
What to make of these? On the one hand, given the efforts to choke off the means formerly used by the Islamofascist terrorists to communicate with their action cells (cell phones, satellite phones, direct email), this kind of "talking in plain site" form of communication could conceivably be a way that a real network of strike groups could be coordinated and activated. But I'm skeptical. I'm more inclined to agree with those who think this phenomenon is a freelance effort by people not connected with real terror networks. The posting to the message boards is traceable enough that someone in the real intelligence community would know from whence come the posts. (UPDATE: The more I think about it, the weaker this point seems -- posts probably could be made in a relatively untraceable way.) More importantly, I think that the real terror network is still not well enough equipped or organized to carry out concerted or effective attacks against the U.S. Agents who can "pass" in the U.S., but that are sufficiently motivated (i.e. thoroughly infected with the Islamic mind-virus), skillful and intelligent to actually do anything will be quite rare. While there are millions of violently fanatical jihadis, most of them are too ignorant and stupid to accomplish anything in the U.S. without detection. They can sneak into Iraq and fire an RPG at a helicopter, but they can't work their way into the U.S., manage to blend in to American society for a long time and then carry out a sophisticated attack on a coordinated basis.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:33 AM
