ABC: White Europeans training in Pakistani camps
posted at 4:53 pm on June 21, 2008 by Allahpundit
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The news here is that this isn’t news.
Dozens of white Europeans have trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan’s tribal regions in recent months, U.S. intelligence sources tell ABC News, in what officials fear may be the beginnings of a new breed of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorism.
Government officials suspect the terrorists, recruited in Europe, have been dispatched to plan attacks against Europe and possibly the United States. The alleged terrorists hail from Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Romania and Estonia, sources said.
There is growing evidence that some European recruits may have already gone operational. Two of the suspects arrested in a September 2007 plot to kill American soldiers in Germany were native Germans, and U.S. officials say they are investigating whether they were trained in Pakistan…
“They’re recruiting operatives from Europe. Why? If you’re from Europe, it doesn’t require a visa to fly to the United States,” Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence, said in a speech in March.
A “new breed”? Remember the suicide bomber graduation ceremony last summer (also reported by ABC), featuring one jihadi conspicuously speaking in English about an attack on the UK? How about Newsweek’s report from last October about “the English brothers,” an alleged A-team of nine Brits, two Norwegians and an Australian being trained by Al Qaeda in Waziristan as ringleaders to organize plots back home? The brothers were supposed to be a top-secret unit but Newsweek’s man on the scene supposedly saw one of them (“a European with light-colored eyes”) and, wouldn’t you know it, kept bumping into Taliban who had heard rumors about them. One eyewitness — a former Gitmo detainee who had evidently rejoined the team after being released — even dropped the name of Adam Gadahn as someone who’d been seen with the brothers. All of which is to say that, for obvious reasons of psychological warfare, Al Qaeda very much wants westerners to believe they have an army of undetectable well-trained white jihadis positioned in the west to strike. Otherwise they wouldn’t be jeopardizing valuable assets the way they did in putting on that dog and pony show for Newsweek or videotaping a suicide bomber graduation with, um, some of the recruits’ faces shown.
That’s not to say, of course, that the problem of jihadi converts isn’t real. They pop up all the time in terror plots: Gadahn is the most famous case but see this survey of “blue-eyed emirs” from the Jamestown Foundation for a more exhaustive list. Two of the suspects in the British airline plot were white and Canadian intel warned shortly before the Toronto plot was uncovered in 2006 about cases of white Christians being sucked into radical Islam. Not all converts are white either, needless to say. Steven Chand, one of the accused plotters in the Toronto case, was a convert from Hinduism, as was top AQ henchman Dhiren Barot. But whites are obviously at a premium since they blend in most easily; hence the emphasis in online recruiting on “white-skinned militants.” I just wonder what the ratio is between the actual number training in Pakistan and the number they’d like us to think they have with this periodic whispering about the trojan horses in our midst. 1:100, maybe? Ah well. One is all it takes.
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I knew it! John Murtha, John Kerry, & Nancy Pelosi have been secretly training in Pakistan & Syria.
Keemo on June 21, 2008 at 5:05 PM
Wasn’t a Pakistan
basic trainingtour included in Jimmuh Carter’s schedule last year?Aristotle on June 21, 2008 at 5:05 PM
Seriously, this dynamic will test our intelligence capabilities. Sure hope the good guys around the world are up for this test.
Keemo on June 21, 2008 at 5:07 PM
Keemo on June 21, 2008 at 5:05 PM
LOL ThaT was hilarious!
Although the story isnt. but I’m not surprised either.
becki51758 on June 21, 2008 at 5:10 PM
What is the real draw for these converts? What is it in their lives that is so lacking that they would join up for such a fate?
raiderdav on June 21, 2008 at 5:13 PM
They get to unleash their primordial instincts to kill - without feeling bad about it. All their worst instincts are now licenced by the false, evil religion they’ve been initiated into.
aengus on June 21, 2008 at 5:24 PM
- Somebody pretends to love them
- They feel important, when otherwise they’re failed nobodies
- The 72 ‘virgins’
- what aengus said
Entelechy on June 21, 2008 at 5:26 PM
Also, they hate the West.
Entelechy on June 21, 2008 at 5:26 PM
Could be many things. The romanticism of the “freedom fighter” so gushingly promoted by the MSM and Hollywood, false promises from the recruiters, a pathetic attempt to fill the void in their worthless lives…
Personally, I don’t care why they joined, as no reason could be good enough for me. Hope they get what’s coming to them.
Grayson on June 21, 2008 at 5:27 PM
Keemo (5:07)
RE: testing out counter intelligence.
For just how long, and just how public has the debate over electronic surveillance of potential covert agents been? Is there anyone on the planet who doesn’t know what we’re doing or how?
You ever play basketball? Have you ever heard of something called ‘flooding the zone’?
There’s a post over on Op-For.com titled ‘How we fight’ with an 8:40 video. Is there anyone in any military anywhere that hasn’t seen that video, or something like it? Clips just like that were on the nightly news for weeks.
Look at all the news coverage about how we’ve persuaded Iraqi’s to change sides, or how we’re ‘helping’ (showing) Iraqi government officals what it means to govern a country.
There have been times when I’ve deleted a coment before posting it after realizing it would start people thinking about things when it would be better ‘those people over there’ didn’t think about it that way.
So here we are with another newspaper article claiming that ‘those guys’ are training and infiltrating covert agents. Even a recent report that covert cells have been activated.
Why would they tell us that?
Yes, the unknown, amorphous ‘they’.
rockhauler on June 21, 2008 at 5:34 PM
rockhauler on June 21, 2008 at 5:34 PM
One things for sure rockhauler; I don’t care what or how “they” shape the news between here and November, my focus will be on the need for America to become energy independent; drill now, drill everywhere we know oil exists; drill as if our lives depend upon it. No way can we allow “them” to take our focus off those who have utterly failed us.
Keemo on June 21, 2008 at 6:00 PM
The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford.
While you’re there, search books for:
intelligence, counter intelligence, CIA, NSA, code breakers, encryption, surveillance, counter surveillance, trade craft,
covert ops, delta force, special ops, FBI, DEA.
Hell, that’s enough to get you started. Don’t worry, Amazon will suggest book titles that are related to your search.
Oh, The anarchist cook book, if you can still get it.
you want a list of mil blogs?
It’s all online.
rockhauler on June 21, 2008 at 6:03 PM
I’m with you, I don’t why they want to kill us just that they do. For me, kill them before they kill us.
Bogeyfre on June 21, 2008 at 6:04 PM
Its all on line..
And in the New York Times, Washington Post,
Time magazine.. .. ..Times of London, Guardian, Telegraph
sorry, hit a nerve…. maybe its was the sugar in the coffee..
rockhauler on June 21, 2008 at 6:10 PM
Absolutely nothing to worry, or panic about folks. The Democrats are in control to protect us. Plus we can always use senator Dick Turban’s feather torture, and red carpet Club Med techniques to extract information. I feel safe all ready, don’t you? /Sarc
byteshredder on June 21, 2008 at 6:40 PM
Sorry Mr. Pundit, I killed the thread.
rockhauler on June 21, 2008 at 7:13 PM
So,this means awhile back,there was a coordinated satellite
launch of a new sophisticated search and track satellite
capability to grid the entire Pakistani region looking and
locking on various would-be Jihadys and their Jihady trainers!
And this new capability is so sensitive,it can detect
and monitor people walking,and catalogue the various
walking patterns of their feet,in any wheather!
And then,at will,or leisure,death from above,anywhere in
the entire Pakistan region to eliminate such threats!
What do you mean it doesn’t exist,damm!t, it should!! :)
canopfor on June 21, 2008 at 7:40 PM
Great. Black Prez, and white males under extra scrutiny at airports soon. Lovely.
johnnyU on June 21, 2008 at 8:20 PM
Can we send Obama over to talk to these people without waiting for the election? Only Buraq can convince them of the error of their ways.
Cicero43 on June 21, 2008 at 8:52 PM
Going back to the 1970s, there were strong connections between leftist radical groups in Europe, the Far East, and the U.S. (notably Baader-Meinhof in Germany, Brigade Rosse in Italy, Renko Sekigun in Japan, The PIRA in Ireland, and the Black Panthers and Weather Underground here), and the various Islamist radical groups, such as Fatah, Black September, and Black June ( better known here as the “Abu Nidal Group”; actual name in Arabic translates to “The Corrective Movement for el-Fatah”). The connection then was the various training camps set up by Arafat’s PLO, etc., in Libya. There was also a long-standing “policy” on the part of the “radical chic” crowd of trendy Trotskyites to do “favors” for their “brothers in the war against Imperialism and Zionism” (i.e., the PLO, etc). Hence it was Renko Sekigun, the “Japanese Red Army”, that attacked the Lod Airport concourse in 1974 on behalf of the PLO, and when Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez (alias “Carlos the Jackal”) held the OPEC ministers hostage in Switzerland in 1975, it was on behalf of Fatah.
This is nothing new, although supposedly Colonel Qaddafi no longer allows the training camps in the Libyan desert. (I’ll believe that after a good set of satellite photos of the region in question.)
A good reference on this subject is The Terror Network by Claire Sterling.
We seem to be going back to the Seventies with a vengeance here.
Not my favorite decade.
cheers
eon
eon on June 21, 2008 at 9:57 PM
I guess this puts the ISLAM = race bs to bed. These guys are psychopathic whack jobs.
dogsoldier on June 21, 2008 at 10:06 PM
Any white Westerner who fights for this enemy should hence forth be known as “Ephalities” or a “Janasarie”
Tony737 on June 21, 2008 at 10:17 PM
Any guesses as to how many of these new recruits are Kossacks and DUmmies?
And how many are operators for Western intelligence agencies?
soundingboard on June 22, 2008 at 6:08 AM
How much of the constant Bush hatred 911 and Iraq War lies emanating from the US has contributed to recruiting efforts.
davod on June 22, 2008 at 7:24 AM
raiderdav: “What is the real draw for these converts? What is it in their lives that is so lacking that they would join up for such a fate?”
They are lost souls who are happy to find themselves in a mass movement which provides all the answers, defines their being, gives them value.
For more, read Eric Hoffer’s “True Believer.”
Tantor on June 22, 2008 at 11:06 AM
Well, when the NYT exposes the intelligence operation for this, I believe that will make a hat trick for treason for Old Gray Whore.
Amendment X on June 22, 2008 at 11:47 PM
These intimations of a creeping danger are among the reasons I have favored crippling Islam by taking away its natural resources, best lands, and faith.
Kralizec on July 3, 2008 at 1:21 AM