[anglian]

According to U.S. government officials, al Qaeda now uses chat rooms to recruit Latino Muslims with U.S. passports, in the belief that they will arouse less suspicion as operatives than would Arab-Americans.

[goldstategop]

And guess who Gray Davis says have a right to drive on California roads.

[anglian]

Made a mistake it's twice as long!

[livius]

Totalitarian Islamist revivalism has become the ideology of the dystopian new world order.

Excellent summation in an excellent article.

Unfortunately, she didn't discuss radical environmentalist groups like ELF. They have been using the leaderless cell model for some time, and it is one of the things that has made them so difficult to track. Nor did she discuss the anarchist movements, except briefly. She focused on the neo-Nazi groups, probably because the whole focus of intelligence under Clinton was directed at domestic terrorists of this stripe - although somehow Timothy McVeigh and his Islamic/Iraqi connections seemed to slip right by them, and they managed to obscure that connection entirely.

In general, however, the article shows the many frightening aspects of Islamism, and also calls attention to something I think is very important, the Latin American connection.

Ping to Grampa Dave.

[sauropod]

print ping

[Prodigal Son]

The triborder region of South America has become the world's new Libya, a place where terrorists with widely disparate ideologies -- Marxist Colombian rebels, American white supremacists, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others -- meet to swap tradecraft. Authorities now worry that the more sophisticated groups will invite the American radicals to help them. Moneys raised for terrorist organizations in the United States are often funneled through Latin America, which has also become an important stopover point for operatives entering the United States.

This is very worrying in my opinion. Combine this with the already existing sophisticated smuggling network created by South American cocaine kingpins and you have the makings of a serious problem.

[beckett]

Bio of the author for those who may like to know such things:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in New York and raised in Boston, Jessica Stern received her Bachelors Degree in Chemistry from Barnard College, and went on to earn a Masters Degree in Chemical Engineering/Technology Policy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D in Public Policy from Harvard University. She lived and worked in Moscow for a number of years, and is fluent in Russian.

Jessica Stern currently teaches at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and is a former member of the staff of the National Security Council, where she ran the Nuclear Smuggling Interagency group as director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs. Stern also has been a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC and at the Belfer Center for Sciences and International Affairs at Harvard University. From 1994 to 1995, she worked on the National Security Council staff at the White House as the Director for Russian, Ukranian and Eurasian Affairs. Responsible for nuclear smuggling and fissile materials security, she led several interagency groups at the NSC, including the Nuclear Smuggling Group, which she established. She also helped to oversee the final stages of Project Sapphire, a secret operation to transfer over half a ton of highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan to safe storage in the United States.

Stern is the author of numerous articles on nuclear and chemical weapons policy and terrorism, and she was the model for the Nicole Kidman character in The Peacemaker, a Dreamworks film about nuclear-weapons terrorism. She also consulted the filmmakers on the dangerous reality of nuclear weapons smuggling.

[LadyDoc]

It is interesting but Thomas Friedman prophacized this would occur in his book "the Lexus and the Olive Tree"....