Posted on 05/23/2006 3:32:39 AM PDT by aculeus
MADRID -- From secret hideouts in South Asia, the Spanish-Syrian al-Qaeda strategist published thousands of pages of Internet tracts on how small teams of Islamic extremists could wage a decentralized global war against the United States and its allies.
With the Afghanistan base lost, he argued, radicals would need to shift their approach and work primarily on their own, though sometimes with guidance from roving operatives acting on behalf of the broader movement.
Last October, the writing career of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar came to an abrupt end when Pakistani agents seized him in a friend's house in the border city of Quetta and turned him over to U.S. intelligence operatives, according to two senior Pakistani intelligence officials.
With Spanish, British and Syrian interrogators lining up with requests to question him, he has turned out to be a prize catch, a man who is not a bombmaker or operational planner but one of the jihad movement's prime theorists for the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world.
Counterterrorism officials and analysts see Nasar's theories in action in major terrorist attacks in Casablanca in 2003, Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. In each case, the perpetrators organized themselves into local, self-sustaining cells that acted on their own but also likely accepted guidance from visiting emissaries of the global movement.
Nasar's masterwork, a 1,600-page volume titled "The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance," has been circulating on Web sites for 18 months. The treatise, written under the pen name Abu Musab al-Suri, draws heavily on lessons from past conflicts.
Nasar, 47, outlines a strategy for a truly global conflict on as many fronts as possible and in the form of resistance by small cells or individuals, rather than traditional guerrilla warfare. To avoid penetration and defeat by security services, he says, organizational links should ...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
/sarcasm
In the war of ideas, out side has the big guns - but we've picked up broken pea shooters to do battle...
We do have a way to win. Remember what Rome did to Carthage?
All we have to do is turn Medina into fused glass and tell the Islamic world that Meccca will be next. "Next" being the next time some drooling Islamic nut carries out any act of terrorism.
We retain the right to define when an act of Islamic terrorism has occurred.
Should it become necessary, we do have sufficient nukes and delivery systems to kill off all Muslims, if we decide that the incessant Muslim calls for Holy War against us are worth responding to.
I hope that Western intelligence agencies are competent enough to turn the 'fame' of this guy and his writings into a weapon against the jihadis. For example, by distributing copies of his manifesto laced with deliberately incorrect weapon-making instructions that will lead his followers into traps, either by having them make mistakes that lead to 'work accidents', or by leading them into exposing their intentions by seeking certain required materials, so that they can be rounded up. In addition, publicizing arrests made as a result of the perp's 'cooperation' with authorities (whether or not he actually provided the names) will go far in discrediting him and his advice. Also, by publishing disinformation purportedly from other jihadis, criticizing him and his methods, villifying him for his Zionist links, and blaming his methods for various jihadi defeats and humiliations...
Good thinking.
Optimist. <no sarcasm intended>
For a suicide cult, this would be just seen as an opening gambit. Pakistan has the bomb, and would have 100% internal approval to slip it to terrorists, or have the ISI themselves slip as many as possible across our borders.
The communists, being atheists, weren't so willing to shuffle off the mortal coil. These nuts are. Mutually Assured Destruction held off Russia and China, because they did not care to die early. China has found that beating us in economic war is a lot more fun anyway.
MAD, or in the immediate case Assured Destruction since we assume they don't have enough bombs or delivery vehicles, doesn't work well against a suicide cult; dropping only one simply confirms their notion that we aren't willing to drop enough that, while at the same time giving them thousands of martyrs to avenge.
On the other hand, nukes slipped up the Potomac and Hudson Rivers and found prior to detonation would raise a hue and cry about what have we done to deserve this! It might be better for the IslamoNazis to deliver but not detonate the bombs to get us to surrender.
Not bad... Not bad at all. Throw in a few web links to intelligence agency run "front" sites as well...
Surrender just isn't the American thing - ask the Japanese.
;-)
Not for most of us, but the margin is getting smaller. I would have thought that 9/11 would have had the same effect as Pearl Harbor, yet we still haven't recognized the enemy nor shut our borders to them.
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