Posted on 08/13/2006 4:10:42 PM PDT by PajamaTruthMafia
Sunday papers [UK]
Some news and views related to the terror plot from the Sundays.
Observer:
The full extent of the terror threat facing Britain became apparent last night as security sources revealed that 'up to two dozen' terror investigations were operating across the country and that a number of suspects associated with last week's plot to bring down 10 airliners remained at large.
Pakistani intelligence sources alleged that one of the men arrested in connection with the bomb plot had been held following the London terror attack on 7 July last year. British security sources also linked the present investigation to that atrocity, saying the operation that led to Thursday's arrests began days after the 7 July attack. There are also claims that voicemails discovered after the first attack link the two events.
Mail on Sunday:
Terror suspects involved in the plot to bring down passenger jets over the Atlantic posed as relief workers to travel to Al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan.
Key members of the British terror gang are understood to have travelled to the country's lawless border region with Afghanistan to learn bomb-making techniques.
Sunday Times:
SECURITY sources believe that a man arrested in last week’s anti- terror raids in Britain is Al-Qaeda’s leader in this country.
Home Office officials say that one of those arrested is suspected not only of masterminding the foiled plot to bring down up to nine transatlantic airliners, but also of involvement in other planned atrocities over the past few years.
They believe that he was instrumental in sending the ringleader of at least one previous British terror plot for training at a camp in Pakistan last year. He is described by counter-terrorist officials at MI5 as the senior figure in a British terror network involving Kashmiri, north African and Iraqi cells.
Sunday Telegraph:
Prof Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's centre for intelligence and security studies, criticised university authorities for ignoring the threat to national security in their midst. "Institutions have not sought to address the problem: they have instead sought to undermine those who have raised the issue," he told this newspaper.
Extremist Muslim groups had been detected at more than 20 institutions, both former polytechnics and long-established universities, over the past 15 years, Prof Glees said...
According to security sources, "several" of the 23 people still in custody over the alleged plot last week are suspected of links to universities, appearing to confirm growing fears that campuses are providing Britain's biggest security threat.
Sunday Times leader comment:
Why is Britain such a breeding ground for these young men, for that is what most of them are? Much can be ascribed to timidity on behalf of the authorities, wedded as they are to a multiculturalism that isolates many young men in ghettos and a reluctance to espouse British values through our schools and institutions. That appeasement was epitomised by the sanctuary offered to extremist Islamic groups in Britain — “Londonistan” — in the pathetic hope that it might offer some form of immunity from violence.
Echoed by Iain Martin in The Telegraph:
The elephant in the room is multiculturalism, which has become almost a religious tenet for much of our governing class.
Nick Cohen:
If they think about fascism at all, the majority of people in rich countries believe it died in the Forties. The idea that people will murder without limit for the impossible dream of an imperial caliphate still makes no sense to them. Within living memory, Europeans murdered without limit in the name of the equally impossible dreams of the 1,000-Year Reich and New Roman Empire, but modern Europeans can't see that the fevers they incubated have infected others.
So they pretend that Islamism doesn't exist or rationalise it as an understandable, if regrettably bloody, critique of Anglo-American foreign policy, as if what we are up against is the armed wing of the Liberal Democrats. I wonder how many explosions it will take to blow their comfort blanket away.
(You can imagine how well that's gone down in the comments.)
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