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The head of MI5 says that Britain is facing a wave of terrorist attacks on two fronts from a new generation of al Qaeda extremists and Irish Republican militants who could strike on the mainland; a “significant number” of British residents are training in camps run by the al Qaeda-linked group al Shabaab. As many as 100 Britons of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and West African backgrounds had traveled to Somalia; in Northern Ireland, there were now thought to be about 600 hard-line Republicans involved in terrorist activity, around half the number during the peak of IRA activity in the 1980s
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Flight IR744 — a round-trip flight from Caracas to Tehran with a stop in Damascus — was listed as a regular flight, there was no way that anyone could buy a ticket and travel without being vetted by the Venezuelan or Iranian government; Western intelligence service suspected the flight was used to carry illicit weapons materials to Iran, while bringing Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian operatives to the Western Hemisphere to prepare for a retaliatory strike against the United States if there was an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities;
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9/11: nine years on
American Muslims say that nine years of denouncing terrorism, of praying side-by-side with Jews and Christians, of insisting “I’m American, too,” and many other gestures have not eased the attitude of suspicion with which Muslims in the United States are regarded; Muslim leaders say that fatigue is setting in add that they wonder how many more times will they have to condemn violent extremism before non-Muslim Americans believe them?
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Surveillance
There are 4,200,000 CCTVs installed in the United Kingdom, leading many to describe the kingdom as a “surveillance society”; 218 of these CCTVs caused a firestorm: they were installed in a predominantly Muslim section of Birmingham — along with 169 automatic license plate recognition (ANPR) cameras; the reason for local anger: the funding for the deployment came from the U.K.’s counter-terrorism, rather than crime-fighting, authorities; residents argue this makes them all look like potential terrorists
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One lesson both Hezbollah and Hamas have drawn from their recent military encounters with Israel — Hezbollah in July-August 2006, Hamas in December 2008-January 2009 — is that both would benefit from increasing even more the use of the Shi’a population in southern Lebanon (Hezbollah) and the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip (Hamas) as human shields against the Israeli military; hiding weapons and explosives in residential buildings, however, increases the number of deadly accident, as the one which occurred in Lebanese village of Shehabiyeh last Friday
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A high-level Pakistani military delegation has cancelled a visit to the United States after members of an earlier delegation, which came to the United States to visit the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), were subjected to stringent — the Pakistanis say “unwarranted” — security checks at Dulles International Airport
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The Taliban continues its violent campaign to push Muslim women back into Medieval times; in Afghanistan, the Taliban is pursuing a campaign against girls’ education; the organization’s latest tactics: poisonous gas attacks on girls’ schools, aiming to scare students and teachers; Taliban operatives launched eight poisonous gas attacks on girls schools since April, and earlier today it launched the ninth attack, this time against a girls high school
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A former Gazan who was in the Islamic Jihad set up a terror network in Morocco aimed at targeting key Moroccan officials and Jews, an intelligence report said
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Iran's bomb
In February 2007, Iran Air launched flight 744 — a bimonthly flight that originates in Tehran and flies directly to Caracas with periodic stops in Beirut and Damascus; passengers cannot book a seat on the flight because it has never been opened to the public; U.S. intelligence services have been worried for a while now that the flight is used for two purposes: first, for smuggling nuclear weapons-related materials into Iran, and, second — in cooperation with Venezuela — for setting up a network of Iranian operatives to retaliate against U.S. targets and Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere in the event of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities
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The Police Federation of Northern Ireland has attributed 49 bomb incidents and 32 shooting incidents to dissident republicans since the beginning of the year; so far this year, on both sides of the border, there have been 155 arrests and 46 charges related to militant republican activities compared with 108 arrests and 17 charges in the whole of 2009; law enforcement authorities in Northern Ireland complain about an alleged lack of information from MI5 about increasingly active republican groups
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The food we eat
For almost a century Maple Grove Farms of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, has produced maple syrup and maple candies; for much of that time, tourists have been able to watch the production process from the factory floor — but not anymore: fears about terrorists, disguised as visitors, contaminating some of the more than twelve million pounds of maple products processed every year lead company to end tours
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Security clearances granted to members of the FBI’s network of regional terrorism task forces jumped to 878 in 2009, up from 125 in 2007, signaling intensified attention to domestic terror threats; part of the increase is because of the rapid expansion of the terrorism task forces created after the 2001 assaults to disrupt future terror plots; since 2001 the number of terror units, which draw on federal, state, and local investigators, have grown from 35 to 104 nationwide
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Nuclear matters
Research has revealed that it is not just the immediate effect of radiation that makes adults and children sick; rather, the radiation damage can remain relatively undetected in key tissues and organs, but will trigger life-threatening illnesses after an injury that occurs later; new project places the University of Rochester Medical Center firmly in a leadership position in the counterterrorism effort
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More than 1,000 attend 3-day al Hidayah event at University of Warwick campus to learn how to fight arguments of extremists; those attending are taught practical ways of countering extremist views in their schools, universities, and communities, and are learning how to engage with people expressing extremist views and are being directed to passages in the Qur’an and other Islamic texts to allow them to argue against them
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Indonesia considers joining a growing list of countries, including India, Saudi Arabia and the UAE in banning BlackBerry devices; Research in Motion is receiving increasing pressure to allow government access to data generated by the hand-held devices
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From the 1993 attempt on the Twin towers, to Timothy McVeigh, to Faisal Shahzad, the United States has experience with terrorists using vehicles to carry out their plots; TSA’s First Observer program will roll out lesson plans for workers such as parking attendants and meter maids to help them become the latest anti-terror weapons
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There may soon be no need for water-boarding or other “enhanced interrogation” to extract vital information about pending attacks from captured terrorists or terrorism suspects; Researchers at Northwestern university were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the lab
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A Grad rocket exploded early Monday in the Jordanian seaside resort of Aqaba, killing one person and injuring at least three; al Qaeda operatives launched a similar rocket attack on Aqaba on 8 July 2007, in which a Jordanian soldier was killed; one of the targets of the 2007 attack was the USS Ashland, which was docking at the Aqaba port at the time
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Leaked U.S. military documents offer detailed and disturbing accounts of the degree and scope of the cooperation between Pakistan’s intelligence agency and anti-American forces in Afghanistan; this cooperation comes from an agency of a country that receives more than $1 billion a year in aid from the United States; ISI, the Pakistani secret service, recruits insurgents, trains them, supplies them, helps them choose targets, and provides them with the weapons to carry out attacks; the cooperation has resulted in the death of many American soldiers and, more broadly, is aimed to undermine U.S. strategy and goals in Afghanistan
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Gen. David H. Petraeus is pushing the Obama administration to have top leaders of the Haqqani network, a feared insurgent group run by an old warlord family, designated as terrorists; the group’s power lies in its deep connections to Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, which sees the Haqqani network as a way to exercise its own leverage in Afghanistan; move could add more tension to U.S.-Pakistan relations, and complicate Afghan political settlement with the Taliban
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The long view
Southport Attacks: Why the U.K. Needs a Unified Approach to All Violent Attacks on the Public
The conviction of Axel Rudakubana for the murder of three young girls in Southport has prompted many questions about how the UK handles violence without a clear ideological motive. This case has also shown up the confusion in this area, and made clear the need for a basic reframing of how we understand murderous violence against the public today.
Mis- and Disinformation Trends and Tactics to Watch in 2025
Predicting how extremists may weaponize false narratives requires an understanding of the strategies that allow them to spread most effectively.
Evidence-Based Solutions to Protect Against Mass Attacks
Mass attacks like the New Year’s Day incident in New Orleans stir public emotion and have tragic consequences. While the investigations into this case will take time, we know from our work that there are things law enforcement and the public can do to mitigate and perhaps stop mass casualty events.