Counterterrorism terminology

The Associated Press reports that the National Counterterrorism Center in the United States has published guidance on using terms when talking about terrorism.

The last one is probably the best piece of advice:

Don’t use “salafi,” “Wahhabist,” “sufi,” “ummah” and other words from Islamic theology unless you are able to discuss their varied meanings. Particularly avoid using “ummah” to mean the Muslim world, as it is a theological term.

(Via Muse.)

Algeria and Syria criticise British human rights record

The United Kingdom came in for robust questioning on its human rights record from other UN member states last week at the Human Rights Council, during the historic first session of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Over the course of three hours, 38 countries took the floor to ask UK Justice Minister Michael Wills about a wide range of issues, including racial discrimination, corporal punishment against children, abuses committed by UK armed forces abroad, and failure to ratify particular UN conventions and their protocols.

Coming at a time when the UK government is trying to pass yet another piece of counterterrorism legislation, which includes extending pre-charge detention to 42 days, it’s no wonder a significant number of countries asked about UK counterterrorism policies. Neighbors such as The Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland expressed concern about 42 day detention, but so did countries like Syria and Algeria. Algeria’s representative pointed out that the Human Rights Committee – the UN body that monitors compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – had recently “upbraided” Algeria for allowing up to twelve days of pre-charge detention.

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Trevor Brooks jailed

So, Trevor Brooks, sorry “Abu Izzadeen”, has been jailed for inciting and funding terrorism, temporarily ending the career of yet another loud-mouthed Celebrity Fanatic.  Funny how these men (and they’re always men, of course) have always called on others to go and kill themselves for The Righteous Cause, yet have always preferred to stay at home (usually at the expense of the state they claim to loathe).

Media ignores terrorism in the name of Christ

The Italian police arrested Mr Sandalo on 10th April 2008; he has subsequently confessed to the attacks, the foundation of the Christian terrorist organization as well as new plots. Mr Sandalo, who was a member of the Lega Nord and subsequently expelled for providing a false name, has been an infamous, bloody killer and terrorist for Prima Linea (Front Line), a Communist terrorist organization similar to the Red Brigades. Mr Sandalo has justified his actions, and future plans to continue a terrorist campaign against Muslims, such as Dr Gonzaga, director of Islamic Relief Italy, as a fight in the name of Jesus against ‘Islamofascism’. The Italian authorities are still investigating the international links of the organization and the official number of members; another four people have been arrested today, among them Maurizio Peruzzi, an expert in chemistry and explosives. I am sure that this will not be the first or last of these anti-Muslim terrorist groups, yet I am not surprised that the first one started in Italy. As I have highlighted in another post, Muslims in Italy suffer, particularly from the extreme right, forms of discrimination as well as violence, and the Lega North is certainly one of the most anti-Muslims parties of Europe.

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Head of FBI says Al-Qa’ida can be defeated in less than four years

In a speech to Chatham House, Robert Mueller, head of the FBI, says Britain and the US are less than four years from defeating al-Qa’ida. The FBI have developed a three-tiered threat from al-Qa’ida:

- A top tier based along the Afghanistan-Pakisan border.

- A middle tier with some links to the top; this is apparently the most complicated.

- A third, lower, tier which meets largely on the internet and not training camps.

Mueller’s remarks seem to tie in with the ‘leaderless jihad’ theory promoted by Marc Sageman (who used to work for the CIA), although Sageman is more forceful in saying the first two tiers (the ‘leadership’ and those trained by the top) have been devastated — the third tier, in his view, is dangerous but does not pose a “civilisational” challenge.

Where does this assessment by Mueller leave the ‘long war’ the Bush administration has talked about so much?

Over at Global Dashboard notes that the current head of head of MI5 and his predecessor are quoted by Mueller, prompting the question: why do we only learn of British counterterrorism efforts through American officials?

Plus, if we win in 4 years time, will the state returns the rights it has taken in the fight against terrorism?

Studies in ‘jihadism’

More than six years after 9/11, the study of jihadism is still in its infancy. Why has it taken so long to develop? One reason, of course, is that we started almost from scratch. Another factor is that it takes time for primary sources to emerge. But the most important reason is no doubt that the emotional outrage at al-Qaeda’s violence has prevented us from seeing clearly. Societies touched by terrorism are always the least well placed to understand their enemies. It is only when we see the jihadists not as agents of evil or as religious fanatics, but as humans, that we stand a chance of understanding them.

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Internment, then and now

[W]e should urgently try to understand how significant change came about for [the Irish during the Troubles]. Much current reminiscence ignores vital factors, such as the inescapable responsibility of the Irish Republic and, above all, the political weight of the Irish diaspora and the far-sightedness of those who began and maintained contact, long before Blair was elected and claimed the ultimate prize. Throughout the thirty years of conflict, forty million Americans of Irish descent formed an electoral statistic that no US administration could afford to ignore. It is said that on the night before he decided to grant a visa to Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton watched a film about the catastrophic injustice inflicted on one Irish family by the British state. Here, Lord Scarman and Lord Devlin, retired law lords, joined Cardinal Hume, the head of the Catholic Church in England, in educating themselves in the finest detail of three sets of wrongful convictions involving 14 defendants. At one critical moment Cardinal Hume confronted the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, challenging the adequacy of his briefing.

No similar allies for the Muslim community are evident today, capable of pushing and pulling the British government publicly or privately into seeing sense. Spiritually, the Muslim Ummah is seen as being infinite, but the powerful regimes of the Muslim world almost without exception not only themselves perpetrate oppression, but choose to work hand in hand with the US and the UK in their ‘war on terror’. It is for us, as a nation, to take stock of ourselves. We are very far along a destructive path, and if our government continues on that path, we will ultimately have destroyed much of the moral and legal fabric of the society that we claim to be protecting. The choice and the responsibility are entirely ours.

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Ayman al-Zawahiri says Al-Qa’ida ‘doesn’t kill innocents’

Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qa’eda’s second in command, has defended the group’s terror tactics and insisted that Osama bin Laden is in good health.The ninety-minute audio interview, released on Wednesday with a 46-page English transcript, was the first installment of answers to a raft of online questions submitted on extremist websites.

“We haven’t killed the innocents, not in Baghdad nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria, nor anywhere else,” he said, according to the transcript, in response to the question “excuse me, Mr Zawahiri, but who is it who is killing with Your Excellency’s blessing the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria?”

“If there is any innocent who was killed in the Mujahideen’s operations, then it was either an unintentional error or out of necessity,” Zawahiri added, saying that it was al-Qa’eda’s enemies who killed the innocent, “intentionally [taking] up positions in the midst of the Muslims for them to be human shields for him”.

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Prosecutors lay out case against ‘soft drinks bombers’

Eight British men planned to explode bombs hidden in soft drinks bottles aboard planes heading across the Atlantic from Heathrow causing civilian “carnage” on an “unprecedented scale”, a jury was told yesterday.More than 1,500 passengers and crew would have been killed on at least seven flights taking off in the space of three hours from the same airport terminal.

Opening the case Peter Wright QC said the plan was for a “series of coordinated and deadly explosions” which, if successful, would have had a “truly global impact”.

“These men and others were actively involved in a deadly plan designed to bring about what would have been … a civilian death toll from an act of terror on an almost unprecedented scale,” he told the jury. Wright said the suicide mission was to be carried out “in the name of Islam”, and as the defendants watched from the dock at the top security Woolwich crown court, he said: “They are men with the cold-eyed certainty of the fanatic.”

The eight men – seven from London and one from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire – all deny conspiracy to murder.

Prosecutors said the bombs would have evaded detection at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 because the components appeared to be innocent.

Liquid explosives were to have been hidden in Lucozade and other soft drinks bottles. Disposable cameras would be used to help set off the devices which would also contain regular batteries, hollowed out to contain chemicals.

The jury was told the bombs would be constructed on board. Wright said: “Once assembled they would have the capability of being detonated, we say, with devastating consequences.”

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The postmodern middle-class laptop jihadist ideologue (with an engineering background)

Abu Musab al-Suri never received an advance for his magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, written in safe houses after the fall of the Taliban and published in December 2004 by a clandestine press. But a few weeks before his book appeared, the Bush administration bestowed an honour on him more valuable than anything the jihadi market had to offer: the announcement of a $5 million reward for his capture.

Abu Musab al-Suri is the nom de guerre of the Syrian jihadi Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar, al-Qaida’s most formidable and far-sighted military strategist. Al-Suri played a key role in the 1990s in establishing al-Qaida’s presence in Europe and forging its links to radical jihadis in North Africa and the Middle East, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, South and East Asia. He was a spokesman for the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé, a press attaché for Osama bin Laden in London and an adviser to Mullah Omar in Kabul, and he appears under a variety of aliases in books by foreign correspondents he escorted to meet the man in Tora Bora. Until he was captured in Quetta by Pakistani intelligence agents in October 2005 and handed over to the CIA, he went wherever the jihad travelled. Indeed, it was al-Suri who first argued that in order to survive, al-Qaida had to become a kind of travelling army based on mobile, nomadic, flexible cells operating independently of one another, unified by little more than a common ideology – and by the sense of shared grievances that the West’s ‘war on terror’ was likely to foster among Muslims. The concept of ‘leaderless jihad’, now much in vogue among so-called terrorism experts, is to a great extent al-Suri’s invention.

[...]

[W]hat’s most eerie about al-Suri’s book is not so much its content as its form. The Call is a military manual written in a strikingly secular – at times even avant-garde – idiom. His aim in writing is no different from what it was when he trained mujahedin at camps in Afghanistan: to produce better, smarter fighters, and to defeat the enemy. Most of his arguments, he emphasises, are not drawn from religious ‘doctrines or the laws about what is forbidden (haram) and permitted (halal)’ in Islam, but from ‘individual judgments based on lessons drawn from experience’: ‘Reality,’ not God, ‘is the greatest witness.’ Though he embroiders his arguments with the occasional quote from the Koran, he clearly prefers to discuss the modern literature of guerrilla warfare. Jihadis who fail to learn from Western sources are ridiculed for their inability to ‘think outside the box’. Just as weirdly familiar is al-Suri’s celebration of nomadic fighters, mobile armies, autonomous cells, individual actions and decentralisation, which recalls not only Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, but the idiom of ‘flexible’ capitalism in the age of Google and call centres. His vision of jihadis training themselves in mobile camps and houses, presumably from their laptops, is not so far removed from our own off-site work world. Guerrilla life has rarely seemed so sterile, so anomic, so unlikely to promote esprit de corps. The constraints of the New World Order make jihad a rather grim, lonely crusade, a form of private combat cut off from the movement’s – mostly imagined – following.

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