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Posted on 07/11/2005 8:12:04 PM PDT by nwctwx
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Sure. I will add a link to the handbook page for people to submit links when I get a chance. I am always open to adding info people want to share.
I added it, click link up top: 'TM Terrorism Handbook.'
Thanks so much, Ian.
When an attack occurs, I always try to sift through and compare dates, but always had to go back and search through pages of notes to find a good list. LOL
This list seemed pretty complete and now I'll know where to find it!
Yeah, there are certain things that would be better if we didn't lose them in the shuffle of 150,000 posts. ;)
I'm going to be organizing that as I add more, it's just a place-holder for now.
The dogs nose knows. :-)
Lucky for us that you're on summer break and have time to do all this.
It is a good time to get things done. Organization is key, makes things easier on everyone. I think we have come a long way in that regard... still don't like some of the limitations of FR. I wonder if there is a way to make the threads more searchable.. I can come across some stuff in google, but not everything.
Summer is going by too fast, I'm hoping my first grad classes won't be killer... I gotta take some statistics class, -eek!-
http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=102373
"Bovine TB found in Minnesota cattle herd"
ARTICLE SNIPPET: "Bovine tuberculosis has been detected in a Minnesota cattle for the first time since 1971, most recently in a herd in far northern Minnesota.
The Minnesota Board of Animal Health reported Wednesday that an federal inspector monitoring the slaughter of a 5-year-old cow spotted suspicious internal lesions. Laboratory tests later confirmed the cow had TB.
The animal was traced back to a herd in Roseau County, which is on the border with Canada. Testing showed that a majority of the herd had internal lesions consistent with bovine tuberculosis.
The herd will be killed, said board spokeswoman Malissa Fritz. The owner of the herd, who was not identified, is cooperating.
Bovine TB is a highly contagious lung bacteria, spread by infected cattle coughing, bellowing and snorting in the confines of a feedlot or pasture. It is rarely passed along to humans."
Situation still not resolved at Humphrey terminal
"CHOPPER 5 was asked to leave the airport's airspace and move to a location six miles south of the airport. CHOPPER 5 Pilot Ken Melchoir said this hasn't happened since 9/11."
http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S9302.html?cat=1
I think if we remembered to add keywords to the thread, the searches might be easier.
Statistics? For you, it'll be a breeze.
GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN
CHIEF NEWS CORRESPONDENT
July 14, 2005
ONE of the suicide bombers who struck in London was probably recruited when he attended a religious school in Pakistan with strong links to al-Qaeda and its south-east Asian offshoot, Jemaah Islamiyyah, The Scotsman can reveal.
Security sources in Pakistan are investigating a tip-off that Shehzad Tanweer attended a religious school run by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) during a recent visit to the country. The group's founder has publicly stated that he believes suicide bombing to be the "best form of jihad [holy war]".
The revelation came as Pakistan claimed that it helped thwart a terrorist attack in Britain before the May general election, and that its intervention led to arrests in several countries. However, Pakistani authorities refused to comment on reports that the UK was seeking access to Zeeshan Siddiqu, a 25-year-old British national arrested in May near Peshawar.
Excerpted
LOWELL, Fla. (AP) — About 3,100 inmates and 800 staff members are being tested at Florida’s largest women’s prison after six inmates and one staff members contracted tuberculosis, the Florida Department of Corrections reported Wednesday.
The first three cases of the potentially fatal disease were reported over the past 14 months at Lowell Correctional Institution in Marion County, said Debbie Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the department. The other four cases were discovered in a massive testing program started this week.
Downloadable jihad
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - With training in terrorism accessible at the click of a mouse, an increasing number of wannabe jihadis with martyrdom on their minds are logging on to the Internet. Experts say that there has been a sharp surge in dissemination of online jihadi training in recent weeks.
Excerpted
Iraq, Internet fuel growth of global jihad
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0712/p01s03-woeu.html?s=t5
Analysts suspect Thursday's attack in London was motivated by Britain's role in Iraq.
By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
CAIRO – Investigators still don't know who carried out last Thursday's attacks in London. But they say those responsible were probably Islamist terrorists who viewed their assault as revenge for Britain's part in the Iraq war.
The attacks that killed at least 52 in London follow two years in which the Iraq war has inflamed Islamist hatred of the US and key allies like Britain.
According to US assessments, the turmoil in Iraq has replaced the still-simmering conflict in Afghanistan as the chief recruiter of international jihadis. Analysts say anger over the conflict is helping to spread the ideology of global jihad to young Muslims in Europe.
But it is the confluence of America's decision to invade Iraq and new communication technologies that has created the most powerful machine for recruiting new terrorists in history, says Evan Kohlmann, an American terrorism consultant who has tracked jihadi websites since the late 1990s.
America and its allies are now facing a multifront war: In Iraq, which is turning out a new generation of Arab jihadis; in Europe, where Muslim admirers of Al Qaeda are embracing the cause because of anger over the Iraq war; and on the Internet, which has become a megaphone for radical jihadi ideologies.
Counterterrorism officials often talk about the phenomenon of "terrorist dispersal," which is when radicalized foreigners carry jihad and their guerrilla skills back to their homelands.
But most analysts speculate that those responsible for Thursday's attacks in London were not veterans of the Iraqi insurgency. Instead, the best guess is that they were composed primarily of Muslims living in Europe, inspired by Al Qaeda sympathizers who promise salvation and glory in exchange for violence, much as was the case with the Madrid blasts that killed 190 last year.
"The world is just starting to understand the real influence of the Internet as an open university of jihad,'' says Reuven Paz, the head of the Project for the Research of Islamic Movements in Israel. "Like the attacks in Madrid, the bombings in London should be viewed as an export of the war in Iraq to Europe, based on local adherents of global jihad rather than on volunteers from the heart of the Arab world."
In the 1980s, the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, with its thousands of Arab fighters financed by the US and others, also served as a potent rallying point for would-be martyrs. Not only was Al Qaeda - "the base" in Arabic - created from among these fighters, but clandestine videos of brave Mujahideen attacks were spread around the world.
Today, videos and messages of support for Islamist fighters spread much faster. Insurgent in "martyrdom operations" appear on websites within days of attacks in Iraq, and the latest calls to carry jihad to Western capitals from the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's No. 2 and Al Qaeda's chief ideologue, spread around the globe within minutes.
"Whatever framework we use to talk about Iraq - take Afghanistan for instance - it's whatever happened there, but on steroids,'' says Toby Craig Jones, a political scientist and analyst of events in Saudi Arabia for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. "It seems to be proceeding much more quickly this time."
To be sure, the vast majority of Muslims are as horrified by such attacks as anyone else, and a growing number of Muslim scholars are speaking out against the methods and motives the global jihadis. But Islamist terrorism has never been a widespread phenomenon. "If we're talking about percentages, maybe the supporters of global jihad are only 1 percent of the Muslim world,'' says Paz.
A Saudi ideologue who goes by the handle "Lewis Attiyatullah" online and with whom Paz held an e-mail correspondence with until Lewis apparently went underground, spelled out what Al Qaeda and its ideological allies see as the benefits of the US presence in Iraq in an open letter to Tony Blair first published in April 2004.
In his letter, Lewis said he expects that fighting in Iraq will create "a resistance that would develop into a culture of jihad," and that attacks must be made on Western capitals like London that have supported the war in Iraq. He also expresses pleasure about how Iraq, in his view, is inducting new members into the global jihad. "I wish you could listen to what the returnees from Iraq say. Fighting the enemy became their greatest pleasure ... this notion became like a virus for them."
Within Iraq, a small percentage of the insurgency is composed of foreign fighters. The US military in Iraq estimates that there are around 1,000 members of an insurgency that many others say numbers at least 15,000. But foreign fighters are far more likely to be suicide bombers than Iraqi fighters, a reflection of the extreme religious convictions that underpin their involvement.
Paz calculated in a March 2005 paper that of around 200 documented suicide bombers in Iraq, 61 percent were Saudi. In an assessment running through June by Mr. Kohlmann, of 300 foreigners reported killed in Iraq, 165 were Saudi, 38 were Syrian, 16 Kuwaiti, and 14 Jordanian. Kohlmann says nine Muslims from Europe have also been reported killed in Iraq, one of them from Britain.
Both men expect that foreigners who survive the fighting in Iraq are likely to carry the fight back to homelands like Saudi Arabia, a close US ally whose monarchy is frequently attacked on Islamist websites as corrupt. The foreigners in Iraq, based on "martyrdom wills" and websites linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has been declared the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, appear to have few qualms about even killing other Muslims.
Paz says the frequency with which jihadis in Iraq are willing to justify the killings of civilians and Muslims is a sharp departure from the previous generation weaned on Afghanistan, which was brutal to be sure, but generally had stricter limits on what were seen as legitimate targets. "The Iraqi alumni are going to be more dangerous than the Afghan alumni. They have no limits, no red lines," he says.
Thanks to people who post terrific links like you two do! Incredible work both of you do for us!
Or if they're just dopes!
No way I can keep up...grin.
Be well.
Jihadist Propaganda Brigade in need of information
http://jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2369739
By Stephen Ulph
On June 25, a posting appeared on the jihadi internet forum al-Qal'a [www.qal3ati.net] calling for resources and assistance in the propaganda efforts. Their list of required information gives insight unto how they intend to proceed in the information war. The text of the original posting is as follows:
"Your brothers in the Katibat al-Jihad al-I'lami (Information Jihad Brigade) have need of information on the Crusader losses in their war against Islam, so as to use this to attack Crusader forums and confront them with these truths. A large number of pictures and films have already been collected, and the numbers continue to rise, …it would be nice to [amass such materials] from their celebrated journals:
· the costs of the war to date
· the number of killed
· the number of wounded
· the number of deserters from military service
· the number of troop transport vehicles destroyed
· the number of armoured vehicles destroyed
· the number of helicopters brought down
· the number of fighter aircraft brought down
· the number of remote-controlled aircraft brought down
· the number of mercenaries killed to date
· the average daily tally of Iraqi resistance operations"
The Internet forums, as with the example above, serve a direct strategic function for militant Islamists engaged in Iraq beyond simply providing a means of communication. It further illustrates the importance of the jihadi forums as an active vehicle of the new warfare, enlisting the participation of a diaspora of mujahideen and tacit supporters across the globe in a collective effort to translate, design and distribute the material, is well illustrated. (For more information, see "A Guide to Jihad on the Web" in Focus Volume II, Issue 7).
The brigade announced last March that they had "sent to the soldiers, their dependents and families frightening, terrifying letters to shake them to the core" in several languages and to innumerable forums and web groups, particularly in the United States, eliciting a reaction, they claim, beyond their expectations.
A Guide to Jihad on the Web
http://jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2369531
By Stephen Ulph
The role of the internet in providing a communications medium for the statements of high profile mujahideen figures such as Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi is well known. Many will be aware of the existence of jihadi chat forums as well — Terrorism Focus itself makes ample use of this medium for gathering primary source material — but the sheer wealth of materials now made available on the web may perhaps not be generally appreciated. For in addition to the publication of ‘official' jihadi statements, or the ad hoc ruminations on the discussion forums, the internet now holds a constantly expanding library of military and technical monographs along with ideological treatises underpinning the culture of jihad. Most of this literature, in terms of quantity, detail and spectrum, is in the Arabic language and therefore remains unknown to the western media.
The literature can be distributed in several ways. For instance, via sites belonging to specific jihadist groups or at non-specific jihadist-oriented websites. These may be sites belonging to individual radical ideologues and sheikhs or doctrinally focused sites carrying literature and opinion concerned with internal ideological conflict — anti-Shia or anti-Wahhabist sites in the main. Some of the most productive of locations, both from the point of view of the delivery to publication of jihadist works, or originating material, are the jihadist-oriented websites, news magazines and chat forums. Broadly speaking the jihadist web literature falls into three categories: military and technical training (periodical publications; individual essays; manuals and encyclopedias); operational communications (single declarations and notices; news updates) and propaganda and morale (periodical publications; individual treatises and essays).
A ‘Virtual Afghanistan'
While the literature of jihad, as such, has been flying around the web almost as long as the web has been a mass communication medium, the post-9/11 period saw its conversion into a major distribution system for jihad-related material to a mass readership. In a sense, it has compensated for the loss of Afghanistan as a major training arena in both the ideological and tactical senses.
The best illustration of this is perhaps the Peninsular Arab productions from the Sawt al-Jihad (The Voice of Jihad) stable, primarily the Sawt al-Jihad magazine itself, which deals primarily with doctrinal matters and the Mu'askar al-Battar (Al-Battar Training Camp), a publication specializing in the more practical aspects of the jihad. Though both web magazines ceased publication since late 2004, they remain the model, in terms of both production quality and format, for subsequent publications. Their complementary doctrinal-military role, for instance, has been imitated in Iraq with the new publications Majallat al-Fath (Conquest Magazine) and Dhurwat al-Sanam (The Pinnacle).
The Mu'askar featured heavily the work of Shaykh Yusuf al-Ayyiri (killed in June 2003) on physical training, the former Egyptian military officer Sayf al-Adel on security and communications, and the one-time head of the Peninsular Al-Qaeda organization, Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin (killed in June 2004) on military tactics and guerrilla warfare. Over its 22-volume history it has published a full sample of military and ideological preparation, much of which must have formed part of the curriculum in Afghanistan. Issues of tactical application covered by the magazine include: the planning of special and covert operations, maneuvering skills in towns and urban warfare, communications security and the use of codes, surveillance and covert reconnaissance techniques, intelligence gathering, camouflage and concealment techniques, the use of safe houses, the tactical employment of propaganda and counter-propaganda. Issue 6 of the Mu'askar is particularly of interest, in that it contains a detailed description of how to form a secure operational cell, with separate teams designated for command and control, reconnaissance, preparation and execution.
The Military Arts
Much of the material in these publications was drawn not only from published works in print, but also from monographs still circulated on the net. These range from monographs on tactical training, often translated from western originals, such as the Al-Baqaa fi al-Zuruf al-Sa'ba (Survival in Difficult Circumstances), a translation of an U.S. army manual, to more original productions, such as Abu Miqdad al-Falastini's Harb al-Ightiyalat, specializing in war through assassination and dedicated to Bin Laden and Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi. Chapters of this work cover all methods of assassination — letter bombs, point blank range and the use of poisons and also include topical materials on assassination through explosives-laden cars, detonated either through suicide drivers or through remote control.
The technical side of military training is understandably more amply catered for. Individual monographs, along with extracted chapters from longer works, are circulated on the internet forums in subjects ranging from detailed instructions on artillery and range-finding, to the manufacture and use of poisons, suicide explosive belts, anti-amour shells, rockets and chem-bio weaponry. The breadth of military technology finds its reflection in the provision of reference works for the mujahideen in the field. In May 2000 the discovery of an extensive manual, the ‘Military Studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants,' at the home of an al-Qaeda suspect in the United Kingdom caused a stir, not least for the details given on recipes for the manufacture of poisons. But the publications now available on the net dwarf that work. The contents list of Mawsu'at al-Aqsa al-Jihadiyya (The Al-Aqsa Jihad Encyclopedia) contains a detailed library of instructions for the preparation of explosives. A more comprehensive manual still, indeed one phenomenal for its exhaustiveness, is the Mawsu'at al-I'dad, (Encyclopedia of Preparation). This is unique in its form, since the contents list on weaponry, guerrilla warfare, training and tactics — which is itself extensive — is a construction of myriad URLs leading to further pages — with further URLs leading the researcher to ever more precise information. Constantly updated, it is now available, according to a recent posting on the Al-Ma'sada jihadi forum, as a CD.
Propaganda and Operational Morale
In the Sawt al-Jihad productions, attention was paid to maintaining the morale of the mujahideen via post-operation debriefings, the justification for activities and excuses for failures. The ‘culture of jihad' was also maintained by interviews with mujahideen famous for successful operations, eulogies of martyred mujahideen and the correction or denial of news reports from the regional and international media. This function was particularly put to the test in Saudi Arabia where for the first time the issue of Muslim victims in the violence came to dominate media discussion. This caused the Peninsular mujahideen much vexation. The online web magazines countered the negative propaganda as far as they could, but the Sawt al-Jihad publishers eventually felt the need to put out two treatises to extinguish the flames of dissent; a first bullish response entitled "Myths and Idle Talk", followed by a more considered 82-page treatise, entitled "Doubts and Questions Concerning the Jihad in the Arabian Peninsula".
The above documents marshaled a hefty complement of Islamic law citations to make the case. But the mujahideen have long been serviced by radical shaykhs to help negotiate the doctrinal terrain, all of which are available to the web surfer at times of need. The case of Shaykh Hamid bin al-Fahd and his treatise in defense of employing weapons of mass destruction against the infidel is famous. But the ideological underpinning is responsive at the detailed level, and impacts on the operational procedures of Islamist militants. A good example of this is Shaykh Ayyiri's Hidayat al-Hayara fi Jawaz Qatl al-Asara (The Gift for the Perplexed on the Permissibility of Killing Prisoners), where the practical considerations of the militant captors are embedded in doctrinal precedents to assuage potential doubts.
Up to now the information war has been waged by the mujahideen in a largely inward focusing way — countering what it holds to be tainted media coverage, and interpreting events through the lenses of jihad ideology. But the formation early in March of the new Katibat al-Jihad al-I'lami (Information Jihad Brigade) in Iraq has taken the militants' propaganda war onto the offensive. Here, interestingly, the value of the jihadi forums as an active vehicle of the new warfare, enlisting the participation of a diaspora of armchair mujahideen across the globe in a collective effort to translate, design and distribute the material, is well illustrated.
The Jihadi Internet Forums
But it is perhaps the web forums themselves that encapsulate this new warfare best. In a typical jihadist forum, the sections divide themselves equally between elements of information, and pro-active reader communication and contribution. The list of information sub-sections include da'wa (Islamic preaching), news from the front lines, official declarations from jihadist groups, audio-visual productions and photo essays on jihad, and a general text distribution section. All forums include general discussion sub-categories where highly detailed experiences mingle with material often of a banal nature. But the most interesting categories are the ‘Jihadi cells' and ‘electronic jihad' sections. In the first of these are found the detailed exchanges of participants requesting or providing specific information on military technology, requests for supplies or funding, or enquiries on how to join a cell on the front line. The ‘electronic jihad' section hosts the cyber war and gives up to the minute instructions or warnings of website penetration, suggestions for targets or timing of attacks, with detailed advice on method.
But aside from the ‘virtual warfare' which both the counter-propaganda unit and the electronic jihad units illustrate, no less vital an ingredient is the ‘virtual culture' of education and doctrine which the internet manages to sustain among the mujahideen. Taken as a whole, this element fully complements the military resources and, as reflected in its heavy representation online, forms a fundamental part of the jihad warfare.
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