Posted on 08/26/2005 3:43:33 PM PDT by naturalman1975
IN the commonwealth legal offices in Sydney, a scenario once branded a doomsday fantasy was this week placed high on the national agenda with cold, matter-of-fact reality.
The group of prosecutors, with access to hundreds of hours of intelligence reports, was well aware that Australia had faced at least four serious terrorist threats since 9/11.
In the latest scenario, the prosecutors cleared the way for up to 10 Australian residents to be charged with being members of a terrorist organisation.
And here's the catch. The suspects had not signed up to the global network of radical Islamists inspired by Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida. Nor had they been whipped into a mood for jihad by firebrand clerics abroad.
Those being targeted are mostly home-grown males. They have no formal links to Islamic terror groups. Many were born in Australia, while the rest have, at face value, found comfort in their new standards of living and embraced much of our way of life.
Their terrorist group does not even formally exist, except in the eyes of those who have watched, listened and learned about the men's alleged plans to attack prominent landmarks in Melbourne and Sydney.
Legal advice prepared in the past month suggests all that needs to be proved at law is that the suspects fostered an act of terror.
To be liable for prosecution, they need not progress to the next step of preparing for an attack. And in the rising threat that many believe Australia now faces, prosecutors are more than willing to chance their arm with a test case.
Since 9/11, Australian police and agents have foiled at least four serious terror plots aimed at Australian targets, including an alleged plot to attack the nation's electricity grid, a suspected move against Melbourne's public transport system and stock exchange building, and targets along the Sydney Harbour foreshore.
According to investigators who have worked in the national counter-terrorism scene, Australia has moved from the periphery of the radical Islamists to a position close to the centre of their priorities.
Authorities have recorded the emergence of a growing number of men and women willing to champion violence in the name of Islam. Australia, in their view, is at real risk of an attack that could well come from within, as with the London bombings.
The home-grown threat is not an assessment that sits comfortably with intelligence chiefs who have for the past three years kept the national security threat level anchored at medium.
Nor has a rethink been forced by the arrest of six Australians on terror charges, the capture of three alleged home-grown terrorists in Afghanistan, two more in the Middle East, and the recent emergence of a balaclava-clad jihadi with a suburban Australian accent threatening to rain more bombs on non-Muslim nations.
But a pull-together of all Australia's brushes with radical Islam since the weeks before the 9/11 strikes on the US throws up a scenario that is almost impossible to reconcile with the public confidence of our policy-makers.
While the mastermind of history's most devastating act of terror, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, was putting the finishing touches to the jet hijackings in the US, he found time to drop into the Australian High Commission in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, to apply for an Australian visa.
As The Australian revealed on September 22 last year, KSM, as he is now known, was granted a multiple entry visa, but never got around to using it. Why he wanted to travel to Australia at such an important time in his career as a terrorist leader has never been established.
However, his interest was the first of many wake-up calls for ASIO and the AFP, both of which were well and truly asleep at the wheel, along with the CIA and the FBI.
In the 12 months that followed the 9/11 attacks, a virtual terror network of would-be Southeast Asian jihadis was uncovered in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. In the weeks that followed the Bali bombings of October 2, 2002 -- which claimed 202 lives, among them 88 Australians -- the homes of 12 people across the three cities were raided and their occupants linked to Jemaah Islamiah, the network behind the Bali atrocity.
Within weeks, the first home-grown terrorist was arrested. Jack Roche, a former taxi driver, admitted to plotting to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra after he had met bin Laden and his inner circle in Afghanistan.
By then, former Sydney cleaner Mamdouh Habib and Adelaide man David Hicks had been rounded up in Pakistan and Afghanistan and flown to the US-run prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In 2003, the interest in Australia by foreign jihadis and the willingness of locals to dabble in their causes escalated.
The visit in May that year of Frenchman Willie Brigitte has been assessed by ASIO to be the most serious terrorism threat Australia has yet faced.
Three men Brigitte met during the six months before he was deported to France are now facing terror-related charges.
Federal ministers point to the lack of success of the three plots that have targeted Australia as a reason for maintaining the threat assessment status quo.
However, they have for the past eight weeks been casting a nervous eye towards Britain, where security agencies believed they could keep an Islamic terror attack at bay until the slaughter of July 7.
The harsh lessons learned in London are just as relevant in Sydney and Melbourne. The radical Islamists who have shown interest in us are resilient, resourceful and capable.
Foiled plots are no indicator of long-term success. The experience of the past four years has shown that in many ways they are a means to an end.
Call out every armed Aussie citizen for home defense!
And entirely hypothetically, of course, if I am going armed, I'd rather that people not be aware of the likelihood that I am armed.
I didnt see a source, could you provide that please? Thank you.
Condi was right, we have to be right 100% of the time while they only have to be right once.
Sorry, I didnt see it right in front of me, haha. Disregard.
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