On Wednesday Sept. 5
th, German police stopped a
major
terrorist
attack.
The planned bomb consisted of 730 kilogramms of hydrogen peroxide to be mixed with other chemicals.
The explosive power would have been equivalent to 550 kilogramms of TNT.
The
IHT reports the possible targets were the Ramstein US Air Force Air Base and Frankfurt International Airport.
The suspects had been under observation for 10 months, the chemicals had been
clandestinely rendered harmless
by German authorities.
What caused the final arrest?
Two things: 1) they had just recieved a call from north Pakistan urgently ordering them to follow through within 14 days.
2) a local village policeman
blew the surveillance cover by literally telling them at a routine road stop that they were on a watch-list. German intelligence immediately knew the policeman had blown their cover. How? They had bugged the car
[
Spiegel,
rough translation].
[more inside]
posted by umop-apisdn
on Sep 8, 2007 -
45 comments
Osama bin Laden,
littérateur and new-media star. A thought-provoking analysis of bin Laden's adept use of Koranic language and the Internet by Bruce B. Lawrence, an Islamic scholar at Duke who edited a new anthology of bin Laden's public statements called
Messages to the World. The Western media -- says the millionaire mass-murderer
formerly trained as a useful ally by the CIA via
Pakistan's ISI -- "implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media are doing!" Know thy enemy.
[via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted by digaman
on Nov 3, 2005 -
57 comments
Terror's myriad faces Al-Qaeda, conceived of as a tight-knit terrorist group with cadres and a capability everywhere, does not exist in that form. It barely existed before the war in Afghanistan in 2001 destroyed Osama bin Laden's carefully constructed infrastructure there. It certainly does not exist now. Instead, we are facing a different kind of threat. Al-Qaeda can only be understood as an ideology, an agenda and a way of seeing the world that is shared by an increasing number of predominantly young, predominantly male Muslims. Eliminating bin Laden and a few hundred senior activists will do nothing to counter this al-Qaeda. Hundreds more will come forward to fill their ranks. Al-Qaeda, however understood, will continue to operate. The threat will remain and it will grow. See also
Sowing The Dragon's Teeth.
Or, alternately,
Hercules and the Hydra.
posted by y2karl
on May 20, 2003 -
25 comments
