By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The 9/11 Attack

Originating in the Western left university, as a fall-back position after the collapse of Marxism, multiculturalism became the prevailing orthodoxy, has been accused of being negligent of moral values, especially when these involve notions of honor or shame (the need for social taboos).

Hence behavior becomes a mere expression of difference which have led social services to turn a deaf ear, even towards children being tortured to eject evil spirits, or women facing murder for defying arranged relationships. Centre-left governments in fact have long since walked quietly away from it, but according to the British author Nick Cohen, multiculturalism in the above form, remains the bridge between reactionary Islamists and the anti-Semitic and anti-US far left.75

According to Cohen, France, with its republican insistence on equality, integration and secularism, was conspicuously opposed to this divisive philosophy. Instead of giving immigrants the training to pursue an economic vocation, this creed actively encouraged a soft form of apartheid, whether by providing translations of official documents, making it unnecessary to learn the dominant language, or actively encouraging welfare entitlement among populations with low levels of educational attainment. Whereas many earlier immigrants, like the Jews, Indians, Greeks and Chinese, regarded welfare payments, assuming they existed, as demeaning handouts, they have now become part of a culture of rights, responsible for such extraordinary facts as Denmark's 5 per cent Muslim minority receiving 40 per cent of its welfare budget. A phenomenon called Islamophobia - elsewhere called 'terrorophobia', or the fear of being killed by Islamist bombers.76

Adolescence and young adulthood bring unique tests for those from a traditional family background who have to make their way in modern, liberal, Western society. Chinese, Indians and Turks seem to have negotiated this very well. Being suspended between Britain and Pakistan, Germany and Turkey, or France, Italy, Spain and North Africa is the common lot of many second- and third-generation Muslims in Europe. Cultural rather than economic issues become hugely significant, for there are no major obstacles to social mobility among South Asians. Do you retreat into the close village your parents have replicated in a suburb of Leeds, Lille or Limburg or do you immerse yourself in a majority society whose mores you find bewildering, decadent and tempting? There seems to be a gender problem too. Whereas Muslim girls toe the line at home, study hard and then rise through work or marriage, Muslim males, cosseted as the 'little prince', seem frequently to go off the rails, with violence as an outlet for pervasive sexual repression in their communities. No wonder they are hell-bent on blowing up scantily dressed 'slags' in British nightclubs, by which they mean young British clerks, nurses and teachers having a night out in clubs and discotheques. Partly by way of generational revolt, many second- or third-generation Muslims turned to Islamism, where they found brotherhood, identity and respect, thereby solving their own existential crises while imbibing a worldview with a clear definition of good and evil. Paradoxically, as Shiv Malik has shown, the ultra-reactionary could be strangely liberating. In addition to rejecting the innocuous piety of their parents, they could also slip free of such traditional practices as arranged marriages with faraway cousins, claiming that this was a Hindu custom falsely adopted by Pakistanis, turning their attentions to the large pool of pious females who donned the hijab, in itself allegedly a form of liberation from the predatory eyes of men. But the veil is also simultaneously totalitarian in the sense that women who do not wear it are routinely intimidated into doing SO.77 Others found their way to radical Islam by way of atonement for a life of crime. Between 50 and 70 per cent of those in French jails are Muslims, while  in Spain Muslims are one in ten of prison inmates.

British authorities predict that by 2012 a thousand Islamists will be in the prison system, where they already seek to subvert institutional order. Such numbers mean that many jails already have Islamist inmate gangs, who provide security and solidarity to new prisoners and a co-ordinated response, up to riot and mutiny, when one of them is confronted by a prison officer. Many of them are bitter and disillusioned, prey for Islamist recruiters operating either among fellow inmates or as social workers and chaplains. Poorly educated, these men are like empty vessels for jihadist recruiters who can peddle them any version of Islam they wish provided it is implacable enough and promises personal redemption through focusing their aggression on the host society. As Irfan Chishti, an imam who leads prayers at Buckley Hall Prison in Rochdale, has commented: 'You've got someone preaching to an empty shell, someone who has been told Islam is the answer to all their problems, the void can be filled.' With their instrumental view of human beings, Islamist recruiters are infinitely understanding rather than condemnatory, focusing a delinquent's violence on a higher cause. The objects include men like Domenico Quaranta or Ruddy Terranova, street toughs respectively from Sicily and Marseilles, who both converted to Islam while in jail. They even acquired a newfound humility and serenity to conceal the violence raging beneath. Both of these men became active jihadist terrorists.78

Richard Reid, the hulking son of a Jamaican father and a white English mother, was typical. His father was so frequently in jail that his wife divorced him. Their son Richard rapidly went astray, as an easily led add-on to south-east London's juvenile gangland. He was the one who was always caught. A stint in a young offenders' institution led to a three year jail sentence after he was convicted of fifty burglaries. During this time the nominal Christian Reid discovered Islam, pursuing this interest on his release in 1996 at Brixton's Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre. From there he gravitated into the much more charged scene around Abu Hamza, as externally manifest in his acquired habit of wearing a camouflage combat jacket over flowing white Arab robes. He found a new idol to worship in the bulky form of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan who had washed up in Brixton in 1986. As a graduate of business studies at South Bank University, Moussaoui was better educated and more intelligent than the gormless Reid, although he was considerably volatile. In 1998 Reid moved into the Pinsbury Park mosque, where he was talent-spotted by an Al Qaeda recruiter, the Algerian Djamel Beghal. A period of training in Afghanistan followed. Back in Britain by the summer of 2001, Reid went to Brussels where his first act was to put his passport through a washing machine. That got him a new one, without the visa stamps he had acquired en route to Afghanistan. Equipped with a blank passport, he flew to Israel, noting the security levels on the EI AI flight, and carried out reconnaissance of various targets in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. His trade craft was good, including taking empty alcohol bottles back to his hotel to leave around the room, in case Shin Beth poked around. He went via Egypt and Turkey to Pakistan, before returning to Britain to undertake the ill-fated operation involving his shoes that would land him in the Colorado Supermax for life.

Of course, it is wrong to imagine that all jihadi-salafists come from deprived or troubled backgrounds. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who is currently on death row in Islamabad for his involvement in hacking the head off Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, was not one of life's dispossessed, but a spoiled child. His father ran a successful clothing business, which enabled him to send Ahmed Omar to a minor Essex public school, where he drank too much and vandalized cars. He had his first flirtations with radical Islam when his parents took him back to Pakistan to straighten him out in Lahore. Back at Forest School by the time he was sixteen, he had evolved into a bullying fantasist, touring local pubs as an arm wrestler. He got decent enough A Level grades to get into the London School of Economics to read maths and statistics, but didn't leave much of an impression amid the Eurotrash and Americans doing 'Let's See Europe'. In 1993 he joined an Islamist Convoy of Mercy to Bosnia, but turned back ill at Croatia. After weapons training at an AI Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, he was despatched to India to lure Western backpackers into the hands of Kashmiri terrorists. During such an episode, he terrified hostages by alternately talking cricket and showing how he would cut their throat. He was eventually shot by Indian police and given five years in prison. When Kashmiri terrorists hijacked an Indian jet, Ahmed Omar was one of those released in exchange for the passengers. He went via Afghanistan to Pakistallr while the British government - whose citizens he had recently kidnapped - forswore opportunities to prosecute him. The latest twist is instructive. AI Qaeda puts a premium on well-educated middle-class professional operatives because they live otherwise model lives, and can move around with relative impunity under the cover of doing good, especially if they are doctors employed with minimal vetting by the British NHS.79

While German police thwarted the Frankfurt cell, they could not criminalize or investigate every single grouping of dedicated Islamists. During 1998 a tight circle of Islamist friends had congregated in a flat they rented in Hamburg. The group eventually included the dozen men who passed through in the course of the next two years. As far as one can see, they had no grouses against Germany, which had bent over backwards to accommodate them. The key members were the Yemeni Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an Egyptian urban-planning student, Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, a Lebanese applied-sciences student, Ziad Jarrah, and Marwan al-Shehi, an Emirates soldier taking time out to study marine engineering once he had mastered German. With the exception of Marwan, whose father was a village muezzin, all of these men came from relatively prosperous backgrounds, from which they had been sent to Europe to do well in their designated careers. They spoke European languages, in Atta's case English and German, and they knew how to act and dress Europeanised. Of the group, Atta was the most grimly resolute, while Shibh had the organizational talent.

This group had come to the peripheral attention of German police when they commenced surveillance on Mohammed Haydar Zamar, a loud-mouthed unemployed auto mechanic, and a Syrian businessman, after they had been contacted by an Iraqi jihadist the US had identified as a senior AI Qaeda agent. One reason given for not taking a closer look at the younger men, apart from limitations of police manpower, was that their espousal of an intense Islam was so open; they successfully petitioned Hamburg's Technical university, where Atta was writing a thesis about the architecture of medieval Aleppo, for a prayer room. Much of the group's time was spent praying, listening to taped sermons by Abu Qatada, or watching horror documentaries from Bosnia and Chechnya. The 9/11 Commission Report says that a series of chance encounters, including one with a stranger on a train, led them to wage jihad in Afghanistan ratherthari Chechnya. A few gaps in our knowledge of Atta's earlier movements make this seem improbable. In late 1999 four of the cell members flew to Pakistan, for the long bus journey to a Taliban office at Quetta, the final staging post en route to bin Laden's Afghan training camps. There they met his operational chief, Mohammed Atef, while Atta, the designated group leader, spent time alone with the sheikh himself.80

In January and February 2000 they returned to Germany, equipping themselves with new passports along the way, so as to lose the Pakistani visas. They needed, US visas for the flight-training programmes they planned to join as ordered by bin Laden and Atef. Atta, Jarrah and Shehi got theirs without a hitch; as a Yemeni putative economic migrant, Shibh was turned down. Their US$120,000 expenses were wired regularly from the United Arab Emirates by Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, with Shibh making up any shortfall from the men's own German bank accounts over which he had powers of attorney. After flying to the US, the three enrolled at two Florida flight schools. Assiduous students, they mastered light aircraft and rented time on simulators for large commercial jets. Across the country in San Diego, two Saudi men, who could scarcely speak English, attempted to enrol at other flight schools. Although both men had been known as terrorist suspects by the CIA, which had monitored their movements in Malaysia, the preferred route to the States, this information had never been passed on to the consular authorities who granted them visas. After frantic attempts to get a visa, Shibh gave up, but not before visiting London where he recruited Zacarias Moussaoui, who, already enrolled at a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma, went first to be appraised by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of this operation. By the time he reached Pakistan, Khalid Sheikh had identified Hani Hanjour, a Saudi living in the US, who already had a commercial pilot's licence. Shibh's role thenceforth would be as the key fixer, an old friend of the Hamburg cell members now in the US, and, as a Yemeni, someone bin Laden would trust, as he urged Khalid Sheikh to set the plot in motion. Another key element was the thirteen men, all but one a Saudi, who arrived in the US in the spring of 2001. These were the muscle-men who would commandeer aircraft to enable the suicide hijackers briefly to fly them. They left videotaped statements in Afghanistan:

I am writing this with my full conscience and I am writing this in expectation of the end, which is near. An end that is really a beginning. We will get you. We will humiliate you. We will never stop following you ... May God reward all those who trained me on this path and was behind this noble act and a special mention should be made of the Mujahid leader sheikh Osama bin Laden, may God protect him. May God accept our deeds.

While the muscle-men waited in motels, making extensive use of local gyms, the suicide pilots embarked on non-stop transcontinental travel to explore airport security systems and the routines on commercial jets. They usually travelled first class so as to take a close look at cockpit security, noticing that the door was often open during the ten minutes after takeoff. Many of them acquired Virginia driving licenses, which were easy to acquire and would make identifying themselves easier than having to use foreign passports. In July Atta flew alone to Madrid where he spent a week with Shibh, settling the final details of their enterprise. Shibh had obtained two satellite phones, one of which he used to keep in touch with his masters in Mghanistan. On 13 August the suspicious behavior of Moussaoui at his Oklahoma flight school led to his arrest on immigration-violation charges by the FBI. Although an agent noted down that he was crazy enough to fly a plane into the World Trade Center, no one thought to get permission to search the hard drive of his laptop. In mid-August Atta used an internet chat room to send Shibh a message: 'The first semester commences in three weeks. There are no changes. All is well.' The internet facilitated Al Qaeda communications, while enabling them to operate various websites such as As Saba, or 'The Clouds'. Messages could be exchanged through chat rooms, or buried within sites dedicated to such things as pornography, the last place anyone might look. Stanographic software programs enabled them to leave messages concealed within innocuous images. By sharing a common password, it was also possible to access messages left in the draft box of a computer, which technically, therefore, were read but never sent, thereby preventing the NSA from intercepting them. Intelligence of Atta's readiness was relayed by Shibh to Khalid She~/ Mohammed. The attack was coming on 11 September 2001. Atta, Khalid Sheikll and bin Laden had determined on four targets: the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the US Capitol, ruling out the White House on the grounds of difficulty and the potential absence of its occupant. At Congress it would be full house.

The hijackers' last night alive was well prepared so as to pre-empt doubt, nerves and fear. A fifteen-point list contained military-style instructions about knowing the plan backwards, marshalling the necessary kit and inspecting weapons. They were to don tight-fitting socks and to tie their shoelaces tight, little tasks that concentrated the mind. The shaving of all body hair and dousing with perfume was more ritualistic. They were enjoined to be oblivious to the world: 'For the time for playing has passed, and the time has arrived for the rendezvous with the eternal Truth.' The moment of death would take seconds, before they embarked on the 'gladness' of their wedding and their eternal life with the martyrs and prophets. For this was truly a group death cult. The hijackers were enjoined to recite the words of God: 'You were wishing for death before you encountered it, then you saw it, and are looking for it. And you wanted it.' In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and his comrades experienced vivid dreams, bin Laden's consisting of an America reduced to ashes. That he slept at all was partly due to the fact that on 9 September two of his men, posing as Arab television journalists, had assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Mghan Northern Alliance, and the first person the US would turn to when George W. Bush sought just vengeance, as he undoubtedly would, for what was forty-eight hours away. The assassination also pacified mullah Omar, who in animated discussions had been keener to direct major operations against the Jews than against the USA.

The twin towers of the World Trade Center were built to sway, like tall poplars in a heavy wind. This is what they initially did, as Atta, murmuring prayers, slammed American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower, destroying floors 93-99, while Shehi directed United Airlines Flight 175 into the south tower. They were not built to withstand the temperatures of 1,300 degrees Centigrade that erupted when ten thousand gallons of aviation fuel from each plane's heavily laden tanks exploded. The fires collapsed floors and burned through ceilings, melting all that the flames found, while giving out dense black smoke. Trapped inside on the higher floors were, among others, traders from Cantor Fitzgerald and caterers from the Windows on the World restaurant, all starting another day at work on a clear sunny morning. With emergency exists and elevators blocked or incapacitated, terrified people had the non-choice of either burning and choking to death or throwing themselves from broken windows. Fifty to two hundred people made that latter decision, a sight that is so connected to our subconscious terrors that photographic images were quickly taken out of circulation, replaced by epic vistas of the towers burning. Then the towers collapsed, concertinaing hundreds of floors into a seven-storey hill of wreckage as dense clouds of dust billowed down Manhattan streets. Firemen, policemen and priests were among those who died in heroic rescue attempts. A total of 2,792 people perished in a terrorist strike, which included the Pentagon as well as United Airlines Flight 93 which ploughed into a field in Pennsylvania, so major that it resembled an act of war. It had lasted 102 minutes from initial impact to the towers' collapse. George W. Bush was given news of the attacks as he listened to children reading at a Florida primary school, before he was whisked away by the Secret Service to a secure base in Nebraska. The attack spelled the end of his campaign promise to restrict the liberal humanitarian interventionism of his predecessor in favour of a more modest foreign policy. In the White House Presidential Emergency Operation Center, vice-president Dick Cheney watched CNN as the south tower collapsed, his fingers locked under his chin. The room groaned. Cheney closed his eyes after watching the crucial moment, his mind turning to the bureaucratic mechanisms that would wreak destruction on whomever was responsible for this.81

While for leading advocates of globalisation, the world out there had become a terrifying other, in their remote Afghan bases the perpetrators paradoxically took a more global view of what they had done. In Afghanistan, bin Laden and his comrades heard news of these attacks over the BBC's Arabic Service. Bin Laden counted off the falling targets on his fingers. Immediately after the attacks he recorded a discussion involving himself, al-Zawahiri and the visiting Saudi militant Khaled al-Harbi, whose mother reported that she had been taking congratulatory calls all day. This tape was released to the press in December. Bin Laden said:

The sermons they [the 9/11 hijackers] gave in New York and Washington, made the whole world hear - the Arabs, the nonArabs, the Indians, the Chinese - and are worth much more than millions of books and cassettes and pamphlets [promoting Islam]. Maybe you have heard, but I heard it myself on the radio, that at one of the Islamic centres in Holland, the number of those who have converted to Islam after the strikes, in the first few days after the attacks, is greater than all those who converted in the last eleven years.

'Glory be to God,' added his colleagues exultantly. Bin Laden claimed that he and his planners had expected only the passengers in the planes and people immediately where they crashed to die. But he added, 'I was the most optimistic. Due to the nature of my profession and work in construction, I figured the fuel in the plane would raise the temperature of the steel to the point that it becomes red and almost loses its properties. So if the plane hits the building here [gestures with his hands], the portion of the building above will collapse. That was the most we expected; that the floors above the point of entry would fall.'82 In his Karachi hidey-hole Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had set up multiple VCRs to tape his handiwork. He was a little disappointed until the towers collapsed. As the US authorities began to estimate the damage, insurance and reconstruction costs, and loss of airline revenue caused by 9/11, in the billions, bin Laden repeatedly emphasized that the entire operation had cost AI Qaeda US$500,000. He may have spoken of the collapsed towers in terms of the smashing of the ancient Meccan moon idol Hudal, but this did not preclude thinking about it in very material modern terms. By 29 September, when an interview found its way into a Pakistani newspaper, bin Laden was cheekily suggesting that the US should look for the culprits among dissidents in 'the US system' or among other systems: 'They can be anyone, from Russia to Israel, and from India to Serbia.' Following the logic of Oliver Stone and The XFiles, he suggested the CIA might have criminalized 'Osama and the Taliban' to secure their funding stream after the end of the Cold War. There was a secret government within a government within the US which knew the truth of the attacks.

Material damage, increased conversion and CIA plots joined the anticipatory assassination of Massoud in bin Laden's estimation of the effects of 9/11. However, he was only one player in the battle that emerged, operating in an environment that his many enemies would shape thereafter. After a remarkably restrained lull, which surprised even close allies, the US government response was to secure the necessary powers to wage what was rapidly, and unsatisfactorily, described as 'the war on terror'. This was meaningless as one cannot declare war on a tactic. The Red Army declared war not on Blitzkrieg but on Hitler's Germany. Had the word been used in the sense of a war on drugs or organized crime - that is, so as to mobilize all resources to minimise these anti-social activities - then that would have been fine. But it was not used like that at all. The word war was used because the mood called for exemplary displays of military might, even though the best way to fight terrorists is through intelligence, undercover operations, informers, propaganda initiatives and so forth, which do not yield instant victories and which are fought beyond the omnipresent eyes and voracious appetites of a media hungry to consume big events.83 Congress and the Senate authorized Bush 'to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons'. A request to include the United States itself within this sweeping mandate was removed before the motion passed, 98 to 0 in the Senate and 420 to 1 in the House of Representatives. At the time, Washington took no cognizance of the fact that its European NATO allies regarded terrorism as a crime, rather than an act of war amenable to military solutions. Use of the word war inadvertently lifted groups of criminals on to another moral plane where civilized societies also have rules.84

Policy was decided in an atmosphere in which 'flies walking on eyeballs' guys like CIA head of counter-terrorism Cofer Black spoke darkly of sticking terrorists' heads on poles or bringing them back in refrigerator boxes. When a skull thought to be that of Ayman al-Zawahiri was offered to US military intelligence by Afghans hoping to claim the huge reward, the CIA sought to identify it through a DNA match on a brother in custody in Cairo. Egyptian intelligence offered to 'cut off his arm and send it over'. The CIA settled for a blood sample.

Mainstream CIA spooks were unsettled by this, and by the wholesale recourse to freelance paramilitary contractors, many of whom might otherwise have been robbing banks had it not been for 9/11.85 The mores of a Wild West movie prevailed as charts appeared with photos and matching biographies of the major culprits who could be crossed out when they were caught or killed. The Texan president talked like a little sheriff about bringing in 'evildoers' dead or alive, terms which sat ill with the military operations he was undertaking. Such talk excited the media, which ignored the duller stuff of orientating vast rival bureaucracies for the war on terror. The CIA and NSA were belatedly forced into reorientation their main activities from a non-existent Soviet threat, so as to focus on myriad shadowy groups capable of mounting international terrorist operations. The CIA's many critics warned that the burgeoning intelligence services attached to the Defense Department might do its job for it, or that. the whole field might be contracted out to the private sector. The FBI, with its woeful lack of Arabic speakers- about eight at the time - was told to sharpen up its act and to co-operate with the CIA, a shotgun marriage eventually arranged by the appointment of a coordinator of national intelligence reporting directly to the president.

Having located the source of the attacks, the plan was to step up the CIA field presence in Afghanistan, in order to combine armed opponents of the Taliban with incoming special-forces soldiers, who would smash the regime (and Al Qaeda) with the aid of US airpower coming in from Diego Garcia or direct from Missouri. CIA agents hurried around Mghanistan with aluminium suitcases and holdalls crammed with millions of dollars to bribe Afghan warlords to fight the Taliban. All this conformed with Donald Rumsfeld's doctrine of using US ground forces lightly, chiefly to guide in precision airpower.

Within weeks of 9/11 Bush became the first US president to acknowledge the desirability of a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine, in an attempt to cauterize the issue that so antagonizes the Muslim world. He then spent six years doing nothing about it. But there was another opportunity that was taken. Despite weak evidence that Al Qaeda had any connection with Saddam Hussein, a belligerently abrasive clique, including former Trotskyites turned 'neo-conservatives', who are wearying to listen to, were bent on fusing their long-standing campaign to rid the world of his presence, preparatory to redesigning the entire Middle East around a democratized Iraq. That chimed with grudges lurking within the Bush family, involving the unfinished business of the first Gulf War and Saddam's attempt to kill Bush's father, and a desire, partly born of 9/11, to downgrade the untrustworthy Saudis. The Afghan plan was implemented with extraordinary success, with Al Qaeda's military supremo, Mohammed Atef, an early casualty of an armed Predator drone which killed him on 16 November in a Gardez hotel. His effects included evidence of a Jemaah Islamiyah reconnaissance operation on US interests, and the city subway system, in Singapore.

By that time, US and Afghan forces had killed or captured about 250 Al Qaeda fighters, while its top leadership and eight hundred fighters had fled into the inhospitable terrain of Tora Bora. The US launched a ferocious air assault on this fifteen-square-mile area, including fuel-air bombs so large that they had to be heaved off the back of a transport plane, before devastating an area six hundred yards square in a combustible mist of ammonium nitrate and aluminium whose shockwaves liquefied the internal organs of men hiding in caves. A massive device called Blu-82 was the size of a car and consisted of fifteen thousand pounds of explosives. That was dropped too, before three B-52s cruised overhead, unleashing forty five-hundred-pound bombs on the same target. Northern Alliance fighters watched in awe as their bearded, horseriding US shadows with names like Dave or Chuck pointed laser beams at Taliban and AI Qaeda positions which were triangulated with smart bombs and missiles. The last direct communications from bin Laden were the orders he barked into the group's short-wave radios, some of which were lifted from AI Qaeda corpses by an Arab-American agent; those who survived the bombing slipped out through a back door that was supposed to have been closed by the Afghans and a force of Army Rangers who were never dispatched. Bin Laden is presumably holed up with teams of fanatical bodyguards in one of two ungovernable tribal territories in Pakistan. The hunt for him was fatally disabled when the expert trackers of Task Force 121 were taken off the case and relocated to Iraq to find Saddam and his offspring.86

Domestically, the US applied the tactics used in the 1930S to imprison AI Capone, who on learning that he was being prosecuted for tax evasion, blurted out: 'The government can't collect legal taxes from illegal money.' Terrorists of various stripes rely for money not just on Islamist pseudo-charities but on organized crime. A chemical called pseudoephedrine that is used to make anti-allergy or cold medicines is purchased in Canada, shipped to California, and then sold to Mexican drug gangs since it is one of the key ingredients of illicit methamphetamines. As the PIRA discovered, cigarette smuggling can also yield profits of US$2 million a truckload. Cigarettes are purchased in states like Virginia where the tax is 2.5 cents per pack and then resold in New York City for less than the legal price plus the local tax of US$1.50 per pack. A carton of ten packs bought for US$20 doubles in value through this process. Another major means of raising revenue is intellectual property theft, through knockout handbags, T-shirts, trainers, Prozac and Viagra. Viagra is always in demand and pills can be moved around in quantity with low risk attached. In addition to these crimes, which carry heavy penalties, US law enforcement agencies have been active since 9/11 in prosecuting instances of immigration fraud and visa violations, notably those practiced by so-called students. This has been in marked contrast to Britain where cash-strapped universities solicit fee-paying customers without making much of an effort to establish their bona fides, and where deportation of bogus and failed asylum seekers is non-existent.87

The AI Qaeda and Taliban prisoners represented another problem that the US would contrive to turn into a PR disaster, aided and abetted by fervent human rights lawyers who, while prepared to believe the detainees innocent of every charge of abuse, reflexively believe the worst of the US military and CIA. The phenomenon of activist lawyers aiding and abetting terrorist clients is also not unknown, as we repeatedly saw in the cases of the Red Brigades and RAF in Europe.

US policy towards terrorist detainees has led to unease among European allies who have likewise zealously occupied the moral high ground, partly because their domestic legal systems had more experience of dealing with terrorists, including - in Roman law systems - far wider powers of search and of investigative and preventative detention, and less restrictive rules of evidence. In these areas the Europeans were not 'surrender-monkeys'. The French police do not need judicial warrants to search someone's home, and the Italians seem to be able to put electronic devices where they like. The French and Italians can detain a suspect for years before he comes to trial as magistrates assemble their case. The Germans can detain prisoners after they have served their allotted sentence, on grounds of public safety. Common law systems, like those of Britain and the US, invariably bend over backwards to guarantee the rights of suspects, ruling out of court great swathes of evidence that in Roman law systems are part of detailed dossiers compiled by investigative magistrates. Rather than fundamentally rewriting the US legal system to make it conform with relatively illiberal arrangements in Europe, both the Clinton and Bush administrations relied on the laws of war. Treating international jihadists as criminals, to be arrested and brought before courts, was not much of an option, given the sanctuary such people enjoyed from the Sudan or the Taliban, who would have to be charged with aiding and abetting terrorists too. Sending in US marshals was a fantasy in these circumstances. The laws of war enabled the US to kill such people, as Clinton tried to do in 1998.88

Efforts to keep detainees out of the hands of lawyers who would, doubtless, have become celebrities during any civilian trial led to a PR disaster. Instead of following secretary of state Colin Powell's advice to be seen to follow the rules of the Geneva Convention governing prisoners of war, so as gradually to winnow out un-uniformed enemy combatants, Cheney and his legal advisers resolved to treat them as 'unlawful combatants' without rights under the Convention. This rightlessness could be best guaranteed by keeping these men offshore, at a US base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba, or in a network of CIA-run centers that was set to expand, with the connivance of the governments of Britain (Diego Garcia), Poland and Romania. Not a new gulag, as the international left preposterously claimed, in its typical ignorance of socialism's grim record, but little pools of extra-legal darkness nonetheless. Then there was the matter of interrogation methods. The high-value target Ibn aI-Sheikh al-Libi, for example, was delivered into the hands of the Egyptians. On the Bagram tarmac, a CIA case officer charmingly explained: 'You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there, I'm going to find your mother and fuck her.' Renditions to Morocco are said to include encounters between penises and razor blades. The CIA was also pondering what to do with those captives it planned to interrogate itself. They needed precise definition of what was legal. This was not so much a matter of blood lust as a concern not to fall foul of the US's own legalistic culture, where writs come back to haunt people and modest pensions can be devoured by legal fees.

Cheney's legal team endeavored to unpick the Geneva Convention's elision of torture with cruel, inhuman and degrading methods of interrogation. While agonizing tortures like electric shocks or pulling out fingernails were ruled out of bounds, those that rely on extreme physical or psychological discomfort - shackling, darkness, noise and so on - or, like simulated drowning, that trigger extreme panic, were ruled in. None of the latter leaves any physical trace either. Also legalized were threats to hand the suspect over to countries like Egypt or Morocco where torture is something of a fine art. In fairness, these efforts to 'come off Geneva' were vigorously contested by the Justice and State Departments, while the CIA and the military were extremely anxious to ensure that what they did had precise legal cover. The US Supreme Court is still contesting vital aspects of extraterritorial military jurisdiction in actions brought by the detainees' own military counsel. Ironically, accounts by US military interrogators (mostly civilian reservists) make it abundantly clear that psychological methods of interrogation are more effective than torture is ever likely to be, and never involve the ticking-time-bomb scenario envisioned by torture's academic apologists. The chief advocate, from within the government, where he was deputy assistant attorney-general, was John Woo of Berkeley, while Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, perhaps best known for the acquittal of Claus von Bulow, was keen on judges issuing 'torture warrants'. 89

The US coalition defeat of the Taliban, whose leader mullah Omar was last seen speeding off on a motorbike, was accompanied by a stealthier war against minor terrorist groups whose absurd gangster names - such as Commander Robot - would not have inclined the US to take them seriously six months earlier. Kidnappings and money from media interviews were the terrorists' main sources of income; after they had got as much as US$lO,OOO per interview, they logically decided to kidnap the reporters for larger ransoms. In May 2001 Abu Sayyaf terrorists based on the Philippines island of Basilan used high-powered speedboats to raid the island of Palawan (three hundred miles away) so as to kidnap Western tourist divers. This would bring big ransom money and destroy the tourist trade. Instead, they captured three Americans, a middle-aged man living with a Filipina girl, and Martin and Gracia Burnham, a pair of Christian missionaries. The kidnappers also took the Filipino chefs and servants. The group's leader, Aldam Tilao, was built like a brown pit-bull, with a black dorag on his head and wraparound sunglasses. He fancied himself as a bit of a D J whenever he managed to commandeer a local radio station. A long bolo knife and an earring completed the piratical image, although this pirate sang Beatles songs as he sped away with his captives. These men were rapists and murderers who adopted Islamism as an ancillary pose. On their trek into the jungle interior, they grabbed more hostages from a coconut farm, hacking the heads off two men who annoyed them, a fateful decision as it turned out, because one of the victims was the uncle of a tennis coach who boasted that he was Tilao's oldest friend. The US sex tourist also got on their nerves, partly because he stood in the way of the terrorists and his pretty Filipina girlfriend. He was soon led into the dense foliage where his head was cut off too. Along the route to their hideout, a further ten people were decapitated, their heads left every few yards. The survivors included children of ten, six and three, although the three-year-old turned four in the course of this ordeal.

What before 9/11 might have elicited nothing more than diplomatic expressions of concern now attracted the full attention of the CIA when president Gloria Arroyo asked George W. Bush for help in freeing the hostages. The FBI tried paying US$300,000 ransom, but this was absorbed by the Filipino police. Rather than sending in the Marines, the CIA quietly set up shop in a container parked on a naval base, bringing in tracking devices and spotter aircraft made available from Afghanistan. The tactics adopted minimised a heavy US presence. They would work through the local Marines, including colonel Juancho Sabban and captain Gieram Aragones, a Muslim convert whose hatred of the jihadists' perversion of his religion made him vow not to shave or cut his hair until Tilao was dead. They and the CIA realised that the kidnappers' weak point was when they used couriers to pick up supplies in towns and villages. They recruited Tilao's oldest friend, while playing on the hip-hopper terrorist's vanity. As a test of his friend's reliability, he was instructed to take a local TV reporter, who had interviewed the terrorists before, on a two-day trip into the jungle, which would also establish the group's rough whereabouts. Having tested the connection, the CIA's Kent Clizbee complied with Tilao's request, via his friend, for a satellite phone. This would enable them to track his whereabouts every time he used it. They also made the friend the sole source of supply, by arranging disabling accidents, like a couple of broken legs, for other known couriers. One item handed over was a backpack with a hidden tracking device.

As the Marines kept the group under surveillance, the CIA prepared to deploy a Navy SEAL team to rescue the hostages. That was preempted after the Filipino army decided to blunder in, when on 7 June 2002 they stormed Tilao's camp, killing Martin Burnham and a Filipina nurse the group had also abducted. They freed Burnham's wife Gracia, although she was shot in the leg too. With incredible stupidity, Tilao resolved to flee the island on the same high-powered boat he had used to reach it. The Marines turned the two-man crew and hid tracking devices aboard it. When Tilao and his men cautiously left the jungle for the darkened beach, they had no idea that two CIA spotter planes were circling overhead, while four Marine and SEAL teams cruised offshore. The CIA watched black and white images on computer consoles in their container. When the terrorists' boat was far enough out for no one to swim back alive in shark-infested waters, it was suddenly crushed by a heavier Marine craft, hurling the terrorists over the side. Shooting while treading water is not smart since muzzle flashes reveal positions. Tilao did that and was ripped in half by a Rumpelstiltskin-like Aragones who emptied the magazine of an assault rifle into him. Aragones called Clizbee: 'We just killed the motherfucker.' Abu Sayyaf ceased to be anything more than a local nuisance in the southern Philippines.90

The first priority for AI Qaeda's leaders was their physical survival and the speedy resumption of operations through networks they had cultivated already. They did obvious things like ceasing to use satellite phones, and constructing camouflaged hides with multiple exits to avoid being crushed and buried alive by bombing. One major setback, in March 2002, was a joint Pakistani-US raid on an apartment building in Faisalabad which netted twelve AI Qaeda suspects, including Abu Zubaydah, the successor of Mohammed Atef. Zubaydah had planned innumerable terrorist attacks and was rebuilding AI Qaeda from the hundreds of men he had recruited. Information gleaned from him, with the use of extreme measures, led to the arrests of Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Karachi and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi in September 2002 and March 2003. The US had the key players behind 9/11, although this is often overlooked because of the escape of bin Laden. The arrest of Zubaydah seems to have prompted Abd al- Halim Adl to write to 'Brother Muktar', believed to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, complaining that bin Laden was not listening to sound advice, and rushing into ill-considered operations that were making AI Qaeda 'a laughing stock' of the world's intelligence agencies.91

All terrorist groups have to adapt to their environment if they are to survive; if they do not they will have the limited life-cycle of nineteenth century anarchists or nihilists. On the run, AI Qaeda proper decided to use AI Qaeda Plus - that is, the couple of dozen affiliated groups which AI Qaeda armed, financed, trained or influenced through its leaders.92 AI Qaeda proper would thenceforth be a form of incitement, as well as an example, method or rule that others followed without being directly part of the organization. Widely perceived as a clever evolutionary move, it in fact reflected a concern with security that overrode the drawbacks of such a strategy.93

This networked terrorism is not new, any more than Osama bin Laden is unique as a financial sponsor of international terrorism, a role once performed in Europe by millionaire publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The PLO was an umbrella organisation for dozens of armed groups. The German RAF had no military-style hierarchy befitting an 'army', and it had extensive contacts with the Red Brigades, ETA, IRA and the Palestinians. Loosely affiliated networks, especially if they consist of ad-hoc amateur groups devoted to a similar objective as the parent firm, have several strengths. Lacking a hierarchy, or state sponsorship, they cannot be decapitated or stopped by regime change. If communication with AI Qaeda merely consists of subscribing to its ideology, and allowing it to claim responsibility for one of the networked groups' atrocities, then they are not regular or sustained enough to represent a weak point that intelligence agencies can exploit.94 The drawbacks of networked terrorism are multiple, paradoxically jeopardizing the very security they are supposed to ensure by the abandonment of hierarchy. It provides opportunities to disaggregate the groups through their own internal dynamics since it is notoriously difficult to plant agents inside.

From AI Qaeda's perspective, there are no means of controlling the operational choices or levels of violence used by remote groups not subject to the discipline of a hierarchical organization. Indeed, they may be far more violent than the franchising group, whether in terms of launching indiscriminate attacks or killing anyone sent to restrain them. UVF terrorists in Northern Ireland complained that an admiral in the Royal Navy does not have to fear being shot by a renegade rating if the latter decides to sell drugs. Technical information on bomb making has to come from sources like the internet, which leaves plenty of scope for security agencies to fake sites filled with misinformation. This forces groups to contact the parent franchise more frequently, increasing the likelihood that these contacts will be monitored. If it is the case that, for reasons of paranoia, terrorists recruit from kin groups, then pressure on the wider kin will create the perception that this source of recruits is insecure too, and it will be if commitment to terrorism clashes with wider social obligations.

Finance is a further vulnerability. In the absence of centralized funding, and the sort of regular accounting AI Qaeda is known to practice, money has to be raised through crime. This presents opportunities for embezzlement, or the temptation to become full-time drug traffickers, extortionists and armed robbers, presenting many opportunities to be caught. Money derived from crime also has to be laundered, which routinely diminishes the proceeds to a considerable extent as each person in the laundering chain takes a cut. Even the legal hawala system, for moving money without wire transfers, intermediary correspondents or cash, usually involves deliberate under-invoicing or the disregarding of reporting requirements, which is a criminal offence in most jurisdictions. For these reasons, it may be advantageous for governments not to advertise attacks on terrorist funding, so as to spread suspicions of fraud throughout the ranks. The people who are engaged in relatively low-risk terrorist financing are widely disliked by those who take the major risks of active operations, especially if there seems to be some ethnic dimension to who does what within an organization like Al Qaeda. The huge differences in the sentences passed by courts for the two types of activity are beneficial since they help fracture terrorist organizations through different degrees of perceived risk. That is also why Guantanamo Bay is misconceived, on pragmatic rather than moral grounds, since an indeterminate limbo land does not provide the calibrated incentives needed to turn terrorists into betraying their former comrades, in marked contrast to what the Indonesian and Saudi Arabian authorities have achieved by confounding the widespread expectation that arrested terrorists will be routinely tortured.95

When Al Qaeda struck back, it was through surrogates who quite independently had sometimes already extended their local operations to attacks on generic Western targets in conformity with global jihadist objectives. This was the case in Indonesia. Between 1999 and 2001 parts of Indonesia had been afflicted by savage violence that began (on Java) with the killing of 160 alleged sorcerers and witches, and spread into vicious sectarian pogroms in which Protestant Christians were just as liable to be the aggressors as Muslims, who were often the victims. The immediate trigger for these attacks, which involved youth gangs sporting white or red headbands to indicate whether they were Muslim or Protestant, which in turn were backed by adult criminals and elements of the security forces, was the country's first free elections held in 1999. Beginning with axes, hammers, iron bars and knives, the weaponry used escalated to firearms. In certain areas the elections threatened to upset the delicate equilibrium with which an authoritarian state had distributed power and patronage between clients from each faith. Worse, the Muslim leaders who came to power (moderate Islamist parties having lost the election to the ecumenical and secularist party of Megawati Soekarnoputri by a margin of 34 to 20 per cent) bent over backwards to accommodate moderate Muslims and non-Muslims by eschewing an Islamic agenda. Democracy spelled defeat for the Islamists. Some of them did not like it.

Although the government got a purchase on this mindless sectarian violence, to the satisfaction of Christian rioters, on the Muslim side the pogroms provided the nationwide recruits for jihadist groups who were formed from the remnants of sectarian gangs and paramilitaries. From 2000 onwards they embarked on a campaign of bombing Christian churches. On Christmas Eve 2000 some forty churches were bombed, leaving nineteen dead and a hundred wounded. The perpetrators were from Laskar- Jihad, the locally focused terrorist group whose leader Ja'far Umar Thalib condemned 9/11 and bin Laden, and from Jemaah Islamiyah, whose leader Abu Bakar Ba' asyir had more expansive aims, and whose group included Filipinos, Malaysians and Thais. Although both groups included men who had fought in Afghanistan, only Jemaah Islamiyah had significant contact with Al Qaeda. As the former US ambassador to Jakarta, deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, was urging the Indonesian government to crush domestic terrorists, it was unsurprising that the latter readily took up Ayman al-Zawahiri's request to J emaah Islamiyah to attack a soft Western target in South Asia.

In 1999 the Jemaah Islamiyah cell in Singapore had reconnoitred several targets, taking the family out for the day to camouflage the five films an engineer called Hashim bin Abbas and a printer called Mohammed Khalim bin Jaffar recorded. These had soundtracks: 'This is the bicycle bay as viewed from the footpath that leads to the MRT station [where a shuttle bus dropped off US troops]. You will notice that some of the boxes are placed on the motorcycles - these are the same type of boxes that we intend to use.'

An edited master disc was sent by Hambali to Mohammed Atef in Afghanistan who greenlighted the project. It was found intact in the debris of Atef's house, along with targeting notes that he had taken as Khalim spoke with him. The Singaporean cell had about sixty to eighty members, including women and several people with well-paid jobs. They paid an extra income tax that went to Al Qaeda and to cross-subsidizing Jemaah Islamiyah in Malaysia as a whole. While Ate licensed one line of attack, Jemaah Islamiyah's leaders in Malaysia authorized the Singapore cell to attack water pipes on which the city depended and to crash a Russian airliner into Changi airport by way of avenging the Chechens. They also wanted to attack a US warship with a suicide boat at a point where a narrow channel would restrict its evasive manoeuvres. Al Qaeda had this second set of projects shelved while it pushed ahead for a spectacular.

As he put the final touches to 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's mind turned to this new venture. The idea was to rig seven trucks with ammonium nitrate and fuel-oil bombs each weighing three tons. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed dispatched Farthur Roman al-Ghozi, or 'Mike the Bomb Maker', and an Arab code-named 'Sammy', the former being the master bomber behind the Christmas campaign in Indonesia. The targets were the US and Israeli embassies, the Australian and British High Commissions, a US naval base and other American commercial interests. They used codes like 'market' (Malaysia), 'soup' (Singapore), 'book' (passport) and 'white meat' for Westerners. The targets were filmed and recorded on a video CD entitled 'Visiting Singapore Sightseeing'. As the group had four tons of ammonium nitrate in store, they only had to get a further seventeen. A friend of a friend knew a despatch clerk at a firm of chemical importers. When the friend came to buy the bomb ingredients, he was arrested. His interrogation led to the arrest of twenty-three Jemaah Islamiyah members in Singapore. The Singaporean government insisted that the dominant ethnic Chinese should not blame the Malay Muslim minority, while explaining to the latter that they would be subject to specific security checks, on the grounds that if you are looking for a stolen Jaguar you do not stop all Mercedes. They did not bother with vacuities about hearts and minds. Lee Kuan Yew, the ever vigilant father of the nation, demanded that Singapore's neighbors co-operate in the fight against terrorism, while simultaneously criticizing distortions in Western foreign policy.96

Thwarted in their desire to cause simultaneous havoc with seven suicide truck bombs, AI Qaeda fell back on Plan B, soft Western targets in South Asia. Meetings were held in Thailand at which Noordin Top was appointed head of logistics. Dr Azahari Husin of the Technological university of Malaysia was the bomb master, and Mukhlas, a founder of Jemaah Islamiyah, was in charge of the attack. Behind all of them was Hambali, and behind him Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who contributed US$30,000 for the attacks. An engineer and computer expert, imam Samudra, was the field commander. He had named his son Osama. Mukhlas's brother-in-law, Amrozi bin Haji Nurhasyim, bought the necessary chemicals and a car with Balinese plates, for a target had been decided on this predominantly Hindu island.97

The specific target was selected after it proved too difficult to hit the Dumai fuelling station or ExxonMobil storage tanks. Sheer racial hatred was the motivating force behind the attack, on the part of a group whose members had travelled from the larger groups with shared prejudice via a more exclusive persecutory bigotry to the obsession killing rage that characterizes many terrorists. This was about killing 'whitey' and nothing else, although that aspect of jihadism rarely receives much consideration. Imam Samudra recruited five young Indonesian men as suicide bombers. For three weeks he and this separate cell kept two bars on Bali's Kuta Beach under surveillance. As Samudra recalled: 'We sat in the car in front of the Sari Club. I saw lots of whiteys dancing, and lots of whiteys drinking there, that place - Kuta and especially Paddy's Bar and the Sari Club - was a meeting place for US terrorists and their allies, who the whole world knows to be monsters.' When it was subsequently pointed out that most of their victims were Australians rather than Americans, Amrozi quipped: 'Australians, Americans, whatever - they're all white people.'

They rented a white L-300 Mitsubishi van. After removing the seats they loaded it with twelve small filing cabinets, each filled with a mix of potassium chlorate, sulphur and aluminum powder. They wired this up to ninety-four detonators made from three grams of RDX plastic explosive and a booster of TNT. Not trusting in fate, there were four separate detonation systems: a mobile phone, a trigger operated by Arnasan, one of the suicide drivers, a timer in case he could not pull this switch, and a booby-trap trigger inside one of the filing cabinets which would go off if opened. At the last minute they discovered that Arnasan could not change gears or turn a car. Ali Imron, a brother of Mukhlas, had to take his place, with Arnasan and 'Jimi', a suicide bomber, alongside. Imron parked the van and left.98

At five past eleven at night on 12 October 2002, Jimi walked into a crowded Paddy's Pub on Legian Street. It was a popular haunt of young Australian and American tourists, some breaking their long journeys with an exotic holiday involving cheap booze and easy sex.99 As Jimi exploded, many patrons rushed outside, where they were incinerated in a double-tap attack by a one-ton device detonated by Arnasan in the white Mitsubishi van. The effects on the 'white meat' were catastrophic, although many Balinese trinket and food sellers died too as the blast set their straw-roofed shacks alight. Two hundred and two people perished, eighty-eight of them Australians, a huge loss for a relatively underpopulated country. Many victims received horrific burn injuries and had to be immersed in hotel pools. Others were flown to hospitals in Darwin and Perth. A third smaller device in a package Imron had earlier carefully dropped from a motorbike was detonated outside the US consulate in Denpasar by a mobile phone call, the detonation system representing a new level of sophistication.

Swift police work meant the arrest of the operation's immediate commander, Amrozi, who announced, 'Gosh, you guys are very clever, how did you find me?' His home had the usual bombers' paraphernalia of receipts for chemicals, training manuals and copies of speeches by Abu Bakar Ba'asyir and bin Laden. A mobile phone had the stored numbers of several of his associates, who were arrested too. Ali Imron was also arrested. At a bizarre news conference, he boasted: 'The capability of our group as one of the Indonesian nation [sic] should make people proud.' Attempts to connect Abu Bakar Ba' asyir with the bombing failed, although he was subsequently given a two-year sentence for inciting it and other terrorist outrages. He saw himself as like the salesman of sharp knives who is not responsible for how his customers use them, a peculiar view of the role of religious preacher. 100

Hambali used US$15,OOO to support the families of the imprisoned terrorists. Although he did not need this pretext, from then on Australia's prime minister John Howard, the most successful conservative leader in the world, would be a loyal ally in the 'war on terror', bringing his fellow countrymen's characteristic lack of circumlocution and toughmindedness to the issues. 101 Azahari was killed during a siege by Indonesia's elite Detachment 88 counter-terrorism unit. He threw bombs from a house, urging the police to enter so as to join him in paradise. Colonel Petrus Reingard Golose of Detachment 88 remarked: 'he said he didn't want to die alone, but I made it dear I didn't want to join him'. Azahari was shot dead by police snipers. Noordin Top fled to fight another day. The most wanted man in South Asia continues to issue bloodcurdling threats against Australia. Imam Samudra set up a website devoted to justifying the Bali atrocity.102

Another soft target identified by Al Qaeda for its comeback was Europe. With Afghanistan out of bounds, predominantly Algerian European-based terrorists were despatched via Georgia to camps in Chechnya's Pankisi Gorge for their training. Much of their training involved the use of chemical weapons, the instructor being a one-legged Palestinian jihadist called Abu Atiya. About twenty of these men returned to Europe in the autumn of 2002, entering through Spain. The French DST and two smart magistrates, Ricard and Brugiere, encouraged by interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, were on the case, organising raids on several suburban Parisian apartments, which yielded high-grade arrests and a haul of cyanide, methylene blue (an antidote to cyanide), laboratory equipment and protective suits. Their likely target was the Russian embassy in Paris, as an act of revenge for Russia's assassination of Ibn al-Khuttab, the Arab leader in Chechnya, with a poisoned letter. They were also interested in hitting the Eiffel Tower, a department store and the Metro system.

Inevitably, the sinews of this Paris-based group led to 'Beirut-on Thames' or 'Londonistan' as the French intelligence services cynically called the British capital. One key player was 'K', who had been deported from Georgia back to London after he tried to enter using a false French passport. 'K' had been denied asylum by the British in 1998 and 2001, being granted temporary admission instead. He disappeared until use of false documents landed him in Yarl's Wood Detention Centre, from which he fled when the detainees burned it down. Together with Abu Doha's replacement Rabah Kadre, 'K' built an Algerian cell in Wood Green's 'little Algiers'. In January 2003 MIS and the police raided a flat there after the Algerian authorities had warned that the Algerians were about to go active. Six men were arrested, somehow inhabiting a council flat occupied by an Algerian and an Ethiopian who were on benefits. Together with Rabah Kadre, they were charged with attempting to produce toxic substances, which detectives speculated may have included the tiber-poison ricin, which was to be spread on the handrails of Underground escalators.

On 14 January police and MIS struck at a house in Manchester in search of a man whose name was connected to the Wood Green cell. Twenty-four unarmed policemen entered the house, where they found three men, including their suspect. A Special Branch detective thought he recognized one of the two extras in the flat. Scotland Yard radioed in the intelligence that this was Kamel Bourgass. What to the three men had seemed like a routine raid on false asylum seekers turned critical once Bourgass was asked to don a forensic suit that would reveal if he had handled toxic substances. Since none of the three was handcuffed, Bourgass lurched at a knife and attacked four officers, killing detective constable Stephen Oake. All three Algerians were failed asylum seekers who had not been deported, through the predictable combination of laxness and incompetence that was now lethal in its effects. Oake's killer had entered the UK illegally in 2000, having already destroyed his identity papers. His requests for asylum were rejected three times, which did not stop him from committing petty crimes, or from murdering detective constable Oake.

Public outrage triggered Operation Mermant, a huge armed raid on Pillsbury Park mosque, where police arrested seven men, including an Algerian described as a major player in the Algerian terrorist group. Bourgass received a life sentence for killing Oake, and another seventeen years for the ricin plot, which was probably focused on the Heathrow Express connecting London to the airport. The mosque had been a home from home, not just to Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, but to many of the Algerian terrorists in London and Paris. In April 2004, the British finally charged Abu Hamza, notwithstanding the fact that as early as 1998 his son and stepson had kidnapped Western tourists in Yemen, calling 'Dad' in London to report their success. The British refused Yemen's requests to extradite him because of the existence in that country of the death penalty, one of those issues where elite opinion is massively at variance with that of the general public who understand that terrorism is not a risk-free activity. It would take a further outrage to prompt the British government to introduce tougher measures and to adopt a new tone. At the time of writing, the imprisoned Hamza is facing extradition to the US on further terrorism charges.

Medieval Islamic Spain figured prominently in the jihadi-salafist imagination long before the Spanish conservative leader Jose Maria Aznar committed thirteen hundred troops to Iraq. It was 'Andalus' or 'the land of Tarek Ben Ziyad', who had conquered southern Spain in the eighth century. Muslims liked to point out that the sprinkling fountains and cool courts of the Alhambra existed when most Europeans were living in rat-infested huts; they don't mention medieval Europe's cathedrals and palaces or that most Iberian Moors lived in rat-infested hovels too, nor the antecedent achievements of Visigothic Spain before the Moors arrived. Apart from this Islamist fantasy, which makes Spanish people laugh, contemporary democratic Spain was also a threat. It is a liberal, modern, prosperous society of enormous vitality, which has lured five hundred thousand legal, and five hundred thousand illegal, North Africans over the short gap separating it from the Maghreb. That is why Spanish governments now seek Catholic Latin American or eastern European migrants. Spain also wants to help transform Morocco's absolutist state into a constitutional monarchy. Grounds for attack aplenty there.

Spanish intelligence agents believe that, from 2001 onwards, jihadist terrorists in Spain were conspiring to attack the nation's train system, in other words long before Spain dispatched troops to Iraq. Terrorists struck on the morning of 11 March 2004 when a series of bombs, triggered by mobile-phone detonators, exploded on commuter services at local stations or on trains entering Madrid from the capital's eastern suburbs. Seven devices hidden in backpacks exploded on two trains entering Atocha station. They killed a hundred people, including three Moroccan Muslim immigrants, who had gone to Spain to make a new life. Had the trains been in the station, it would have collapsed, crushing tens of thousands of commuters. On one of the trains, two young Romanian girls had flirted with a good-looking Syrian, named Basel Ghalyoun. When he rushed off the train, they shouted that he had forgotten his backpack. When it exploded, it killed one of the girls. Shortly afterwards, two more bombs went off in two suburban stations. All together, within five minutes 191 people were killed and fifteen hundred injured.

Islamist attacks in Spain had become a racing certainty once Aznar committed troops to the 'coalition of the willing'. The Islamists called the Spanish prime minister Bush's 'tail'. A lucid communique, issued by a cyberspace Islamist think-tank, entitled 'Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers' claimed that Spain was the alliance's weakest link. Al Qaeda was thinking strategically. Britain and Poland could not be bombed out of Iraq, but Spain was another matter. Sixty-seven per cent of Spanish people were opposed to the war, and the country had been devastated when seven of its intelligence agents were massacred outside Baghdad, leaving Iraqi children kicking their corpses. If Spain was forced out of Iraq, then a domino effect might lever Britain and Poland out too.

Not without reason - for three months earlier police had arrested two ETA terrorists planting bombs on trains - Aznar leaped to the conclusion that ETA was responsible for the Atocha outrages, a hard line on Basque separatism being one of the distinguishing marks in the imminent election he was predicted to win. He persisted with that line, which may have been conditioned by earlier efforts by ETA to assassinate him, even as the investigation questioned it. Telephone intercepts revealed that ETA was as surprised by the bombings as anyone else. A van was found at the station from which the bombed trains originated. Inside were detonators and a cassette of Koranic verse. This intelligence was passed to Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's opposition Socialists, some commentators suspect, because elements of the security services appointed under Felipe Gonzalez were keen on a Socialist victory. A group claiming to speak for Al Qaeda released a communiqué which said: 'The squadron of death has managed to penetrate the heart of  Crusader Europe, striking one of the pillars of the Crusaders and their allies, Spain, with a painful blow. This is part of the old game with Crusader Spain, ally of America in its war against Islam.' Skepticism greeted this since the same group had also claimed responsibility for a major US power outage that was not a terrorist strike at all. Meanwhile some eleven million Spanish people filled the streets in silent vigil.

On 12 March a policeman sifting through personal effects at El Pozo station found a bag with a bomb connected to a mobile phone. The police traced the phone to a shop owned by two Indians in a Madrid neighborhood. The owners said they had sold a batch of thirty SIM cards to a Moroccan who owned a shop in Lavapies, a North African quarter of the city. Some of these cards had been used to trigger the bombs, but fifteen were unaccounted for. They arrested Jamal Zougam, the shop's owner, and two men, Mohammed Bekkali Boutaliha and Mohammed Chaoui. That night a TV station was directed to a tape in which Abu Dujan al-Afgani identified himself as AI Qaeda's chief military spokesman in Europe. He claimed responsibility for the attacks, notoriously adding, 'You love life and we love death,' a remark that has encouraged the view that AI Qaeda is nothing but a nihilistic death cult. It is, but it also thinks strategically. This communication decided the outcome of the Spanish elections, which the Socialists won. The troops were pulled out of Iraq, although some were quietly redeployed to Afghanistan. No wonder Jamal Zougam's first thought as he appeared in court after five days of isolation was 'Who won the election?'

French and Moroccan authorities had alerted the Spanish police to Zougam months before. Apparently well integrated in Spain, he was connected to Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, who had steered Spanish North African migrants to training camps in Afghanistan and Chechnya, while associating with the ominous Abu Qatada in London and mullah Krekar in Oslo. He had also facilitated the meeting between Mohammed Atta and Shibh in Madrid prior to 9/n. The Moroccans had him down as an associate of Abdelaziz Beniyach who in May 2003 had orchestrated suicide bombings in Casablanca, and of Mohammed Fazazi, who had preached to the 9/11 attackers in Hamburg. The Spanish authorities took virtually no action to follow up this huge weight of incrimination against Zougam, partly because the police did not dispose of a single Arabic speaker, except for eight over-worked civilian interpreters and translators, a problem they share with the FBI and MI5

After Atocha they arrested about seventy people, including two of the men who had planted bombs on the trains. One of them was a professional drug dealer. The investigation gained added urgency when a bag containing twelve kilograms of the same commercial high explosive was found attached to a command wire next to the high-speed railway line from Madrid to Seville - evidence that, even though Spain had retreated from Iraq, this was not going to pre-empt further attacks. Signals from the missing SIM cards drew police to an apartment in Leganes, a grim suburb of Madrid to which commuters flee at night. They surrounded a five-storey apartment block on Calle de Martin Gaite, alerting the inhabitants of a flat. Cries of 'Allahu Akhbar!' prefaced bursts of machine-gun fire from the occupants. There were seven men inside, the planners of the Atocha attacks. Warning the police 'We will die killing,' they drank holy water from Mecca and chanted verses of the Koran. They made phone calls. 'Mom. I'm going to paradise. I am ready' was one, and they tried to reach Abu Qatada in Belmarsh maximum security jail. In mid-evening the Spanish police assaulted the apartment, blowing off the lock and firing tear gas inside, shortly before it erupted as the men detonated twenty kilograms of explosives. A Spanish anti-terrorism officer, Francisco Javier Torronteras, was killed in the blast. The body of one of the terrorists flew out into a neighbouring swimming pool.

This was Jamal Ahmidan, a fugitive from Tetuan, where in 1993 he had murdered his accomplice in an armed robbery. Tetuan is the epicentre of Morocco's US$12.5 billion hashish business, with local drug barons joining Lebanese dealers in West African conflict diamonds as an alternative source of terrorist funding after movements of money became harder after 9/11. He and his brother ran a small business in Lavapies, combining this with dope dealing through his cousin Hamid. Drugs were the medium of exchange when Hamid bartered explosives from a Spanish miner who was a drug addict in return for thirty kilograms of hashish. Deported in 1993, Ahmidan had served a two-anda-half-year sentence in Morocco where incarceration led to his vehement espousal of Islam. Back in Spain, he had a blousy girlfriend and continued to deal drugs, but he no longer consumed them himself. This was a matter of takfir, the art of deluding the infidels. You can drink, smoke, womanize, so long as you have hatred in your heart. He gathered around himself four friends from Tetuan as well as Zougam whose shop was near a barber shop and the Alhambra restaurant where the group hung around. In 2001 Zougam stabbed a stranger who presumed to bring a dog into the restaurant, a bad thing to do when Moroccan Islamists were around. This was when Yarkas, the AI Qaeda cell leader in Madrid, took an interest in this group of dealers and toughs, converting their cultural Islamism into the jihadist variety, through media that would engage their limited attention spans.

A middle-class Tunisian student provided more intellectual sobriety than the drug dealers disposed of, while Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, also known as 'Mohammed the Egyptian', was brought in as leader after Yarkas had been arrested. Ahmed was an electronics graduate who had served for five years in the explosives branch of the Egyptian army before going to jail for Islamist activity. By posing as a Palestinian, a common ploy to elicit automatic European sympathy, he had conned his way into Germany, using a special substance to modify his fingerprints whenever the Germans took them and compared them with their databanks. He knew how to 'work' Germany. One just had to rise early, eager for a day's work, which in his case meant being the Lebach asylum centre's resident demagogue arguing 'rights' with German social workers. After simply walking out of this unguarded facility, Ahmed headed for Spain. He rented the country house where the group assembled their eleven bombs, but was careful to leave Spain before the bombings. A lucky break enabled the Spanish police to track him to Milan, where the Italian secret service reported that he was working as a decorator. They bugged a flat he shared with other Egyptians. This is probably the single most important source available for insights into how a jihadist recruiter operates, insights we owe to Italian intelligence.

On 26 May they recorded his efforts to recruit a fellow Egyptian as a 'martyr'. He had audiotapes, a two-thousand-page manual on jihad, and three hundred video-cassettes, for a morbid fascination with heads being sawn off or bomb blasts is very much part of the mindset. So too is a mastery of modern technology. The internet is what bin Laden once described as the electric current connecting the global ummah. It makes this 'real' and 'warm' at least in virtual reality, where complete strangers exchange intimate thoughts in Al Qaeda chat rooms such as 'The Fortress', 'The Fields' and 'Reform', none of which can be accessed without the original Arabic titles. How intimate they are can be gauged from the fact that Anthony Garcia, one of the British jihadists jailed after Operation Crevice, 'met', and became engaged to, Zenab Armend Pisheh, a student in Minnesota, in an internet chat room. Associates of Garcia, whom she never physically met either, soon asked her to wire US$5,000 to support a trip they were planning to an AI Qaeda camp in Pakistan.103

The internet also provides a combination of nationhood and morality. The tens of thousands of Islamist sites represent the electronic birth of a nation, because they provide the Islamist equivalent of anthems, flags, patriotic poetry, heroes, martyrs and bloodcurdling injunctions. These sites also increasingly supply the fatwas which license homicidal and suicidal violence, giving the jihadists their peculiar code of ethics which turns homicidal suicides into martyrs. As Mohammed aI-Massari, a Saudi dissident based in London, explains on his jihadist internet forum Tajdeed.net, 'No jihadi will do any action until he is certain this action is morally acceptable.' The acceptable includes killing innocent civilian bystanders, who will simply go to heaven or hell as they were meant to anyway. Killing children is not an issue either, as they are not accountable for sin before the onset of puberty. Gone straight to heaven, they will instantly mature to twenty and enjoy the same virgins that the martyrs get. Taxpayers and voters are all liable to be killed since they support enemies of Islam. As Khalid Kelly, a convert of Irish extraction, puts it: 'We have a voting system here in Britain, so anyone who is voting for Tony Blair is not a civilian and therefore would be a legitimate target.'104

Wits speak of the net as 'Sheikh Google'. These web sites and blogs are simultaneously authoritative and demotic, part of a world where Everyman's thoughts, be they banal or crazed, assume the respectability conferred on the written word. The technology enables a reversion to a pre-Gutenberg world, where anyone can chop and change a key text, rather as medieval scribes inserted their own thoughts between the lines or in the margins of manuscripts. They can be blocked, or filled with porn, by intelligence agencies and freelance counter-terrorist cybernauts, but as the jihadists have commandeered even the servers of the Arkansas Department of Highways and Transportation to bury their trail, this can seem like a losing battle. Incredibly, AI Qaeda's own television outfit, As-Sahab or 'The Cloud', managed to relay itself for a few months via a Centcom satellite conveying orders to US forces in Iraq.IOS The 'television service' consists of a webcam and a mini editing suite installed in the back of a van, with more fancy technology available in Lahore. Trusted Arab or Afghan cameramen are also brought in to record major statements by Ayman al-Zawahiri or the latest frontman, Azzam the American. The films are copied on to CDs and then passed on through several hands to the television station Al-Jazeera.106

In Milan Ahmed and his target watched the internet for hours, taking special delight in al-Zarqawi's beheading of Nicholas Berg, a twenty-sixyear-old American businessman. 'Watch closely. This is the policy of the sword. Slaughter him! Cut his head off! God is great!' cried Ahmed. Judging by his actions, al-Zarqawi was addicted to the coppery smell of blood. There was a special audiotape, the one that 'enters inside your veins', which Ahmed repeatedly played to the Madrid jihadists until they had it memorised by heart. Ahmed was especially proud of Oxygen Phone Manager 2 software which enables a computer to command remotely all the functions of a Nokia mobile phone, as it presumably did with the detonators used at Atocha station. In the course of this long conversation, Ahmed lowered his voice and said:

There is one thing I am not going to hide from you, the attack in Madrid was my project and those who died martyrs' deaths are my very dear friends ... I wanted to plan it in order that it was something unforgettable, including me, because I wanted to blow up too, but they stopped me and we obey the will of God. I wanted a big load but I couldn't find the means. The plan cost me a lot of study and patience, it took me two and a half years ... beware ... beware! Don't you ever mention anything and never talk to Jalil, in any way, not even on the phone ... You have to know that I met other brothers, that little by little I created with just a few things, before they were drug dealers, criminals, I introduced them to faith and now they are the first ones to ask me when it's the moment for jihad.

Although seventy people were detained in connection with the Madrid attacks, and at the time of writing many have been sentenced, this does not mean that the jihadists have abandoned Spain, even as Zapatero essays inter-civilisational dialogue with the Maghreb and Iran courtesy of a Spanish-Iranian oil tycoon. Having attended one of these sessions in Madrid hosted by a foundation that has now been wound up, I can report that they consist of the usual obfuscatory cloud of ecumenical goodwill, in which Anglican female clerics trade homely platitudes with stony- faced imams and muftis in a conference centre ringed by hundreds of armed policemen. A ten-man cell of Pakistanis was broken up as they prepared attacks on high-rise buildings in Barcelona. They were also drug dealers, as 180 grams of heroin were found in their flat. In October 2004 police  arrested forty people who were planning to drive five hundred kilograms of explosives into the criminal court where all terrorist cases are held. They may also have been planning suicide attacks on home supporters of Real Madrid. This group, called Martyrs of Morocco under Mohammed Achraf, an Algerian, had been formed among Muslim inmates in a Salamanca jail. They were the usual mix of drug dealers and credit-card fraudsters, contaminated while inside with hardened GIA terrorists. Astonishingly, while serving time in a Zurich jail, Achraf kept in email and mobile contact with his Spanish recruits, receiving correspondence too from Mohammed Salameh, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, buried deep inside a US federal Supermax.

As fine studies carried out by the Police Service of Northern Ireland of IRA prisoners, not grouped in their hundreds in Northern Ireland's Maze, but as half a dozen inmates of Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, have revealed, they can rapidly achieve positions of organized dominance within the prison, without the IRA threat of murdering the guards' relatives so commonplace in Ulster that many prison officers committed suicide. They do this by teaming up with the roughest London gangsters, who admire the terrorists' dedicated hardness and access to arms and money. Connections with criminals are then used to forge and steal documents, launder money, trade drugs and purchase arms, one of the reasons why Al Qaeda is now currently exploring the lawless 'tri-state' zone of northern Latin America.107 Spain is discovering the need to treat terrorism holistically, from initial radicalization, recruitment and training to what happens after sentencing. Terrorism also ventures beyond the grave in more senses than one. The body of Francisco Javier Torronteras, the officer killed in the raid on the terrorists' Madrid flat, was dug up one night. It was dragged away, mutilated, doused with petrol and set on fire.

The invasion of Iraq m early 2003 provided the latest of a series of inflammatory causes which further incensed many Muslims, and millions of non-Muslims too, although only the former seem to respond hysterically to Theo van Gogh's film Submission, Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet, or, for the second time, the honoring of writer Salman Rushdie. It is interesting how this rage takes time to be fomented. This is not the place to rehearse the reasons given for war, but it would be simple-minded to pretend that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have not served to re-incite Islamist anger and grievance, which is rather different from accepting the monotone in which such people engage with the world. Despite the evidence of their eyes, most Muslims do not seem to grasp the fact that the vast majority of killings in Iraq are carried out by fellow Shia and Sunni Muslims and not by coalition soldiers, and that it is the strategy of AI Qaeda in and beyond Iraq to trigger a wider sectarian religious war.

The initial demonstration of coalition airpower seemed another instance of Goliath stamping on David, notwithstanding the fact that much of this assault involved precision weaponry devised with a view to minimizing civilian casualties in a world where warfare is under twenty-four-hour media scrutiny, with legal repercussions whenever anyone screws up. The US has developed artillery systems which calculate possible collateral damage, so that at a certain point the guns cannot be automatically fired. Apparently a new generation of robot weapons with built-in moral systems to factor out such human emotions as anger and vengeance are only a couple of years from deployment. The massive investment such systems require makes no sense if the intention is to kill Muslims indiscriminately. The technology is designed to do the opposite.

It became apparent that intelligence materials had been deliberately contaminated by political concerns, specifically to support the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction whose deployment was imminent. The fact that he had used such weapons in the past, notoriously with devastating effect against the Kurds, was elided with flimsy evidence that he was planning to use them against coalition armies, and even flimsier proof that he had been consorting with AI Qaeda terrorists. This double deceit has caused long-term damage to some of the intelligence agencies involved, which may find it hard to make a plausible public case in the event of future conflicts. Promoting one of the key figures involved in putting together that intelligence to the post of director of MI6 seemed dubious to many observers. At least the US largely stuck to the line that its primary goal was to remove a dictator who had flouted any number of UN resolutions.

One consequence of an invasion whose occupying aftermath was culpably mismanaged with the passive connivance of the entire Blair government, including all hold-over’s to the Brown administration, was the activation of Europe's AI Qaeda/Ansar aI-Islam networks, with the result that some hundreds of Belgian, British, German, French and Italian jihadists were recruited and sent via Kurdistan or Syria to fight coalition troops inside Iraq. The latter were perplexed to discover that one suicide democracy merely leads to the election of parties which believe in 'one man, one vote, one time', then it is perhaps not worth encouraging at all. That also means investment in liberal, secular alternatives to the infrastructures Islamists have established - notably the madrassas, but also clinics and hospitals - starting with primary education, where the cartoon characters will no longer blow up Jews, and going on to Arabic translations for university students of the classical texts of Western freedom, from Burke to Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. We need a samizdat culture in reverse. The advent of an Arabic Booker Prize is encouraging. That might remind Muslims that the West consists of more than MTV or chatlines where one can ring pouting Pauline. The thrust of educational campaigns should be especially directed towards younger children, for they are as yet unradicalised, despite the best efforts of Ham as and the like to do so by having Mickey Mouse kill Jews.120

On a much larger scale, non-Arab Muslim states should be encouraged to contest the imperialist dominance, within the faith, of Arabic and Arab authorities, while the Arab states themselves should be enjoined to spread oil and gas wealth more fairly within their societies, so that young men have some meaningful careers other than that of full-time jihadist. The West has a direct interest in the creation of affluent and aspirant middle classes with a cosmopolitan outlook. Even in a predominantly Muslim society like Indonesia, where about twenty local districts and municipalities are currently trying to impose sharia law, there are plenty of people to protest against this. Women do not like having the lengths of their skirts dictated, and young couples do not like being arrested for kissing on a park bench or going dancing under so-called anti-pornography laws. In the industrial city of Tangerang, west of Jakarta, authorities made it illegal for a woman to go out after 7 p.m. unaccompanied by a man, despite there being numerous textile and Korean-owned shoe factories which rely on women working night shifts. A local mother of two out at night was convicted of prostitution because police found lipstick in her bag. The governor of Bali has threatened to secede if these laws are applied to Western tourist resorts, so catastrophic is the predicted effect on Bali's economy.121

The West should also encourage moderate forms of Muslim orthodoxy, which stress the mystical and personal, as well as the 'nextworldly', both in the real and the virtual electronic realms. It should also grasp that Muslim fundamentalism is no more inherently menacing than its Christian, Jewish or secularist equivalents. Western priests and rabbis should understand that any ecumenical dialogues must automatically involve clear and unambiguous denunciation of terrorism by all of those involved and as a precondition for participation. It was dismaying to learn in August 2007 of the advice issued by Tiny Muskens, bishop of Breda, that Dutch Catholics should call God 'Allah', in the interests of easing tensions between Muslims and Christians. The abandonment of clerical appeasement and equivocation might also realign clerics with what most of their Christian parishioners think (92 per cent of more than four thousand people polled disapproved of bishop Muskens's lame proposal). Since the jihadists exploit the internet so thoroughly, and since we apparently cannot emulate the Chinese or Singaporeans by controlling it, efforts need to be made to disrupt sites or to sow disinformation, about bomb making for example. Since most servers are US based, they should avail themselves of a new, free, electronic translation service so that they can comprehend what they are funnelling on to the internet, the precondition for the servers refusing to host such sites.

Above all, perhaps, all those opposed to terrorism should be highlighting the chaos and criminality that accompany jihadi-salafist activity and which would characterise their rule, judging from the only known instance of it under the Taliban. Islamist supremacism is as unattractive as any other, and equally relies on coercion and intimidation. The chaos and bloodshed we witness each day in Iraq are the element in which these people operate. The most reliable assessments of future AI Qaeda strategy suggest that they want to provoke an all-out Sunni-Shiite war, which will be a cataclysmic disaster for the Middle East. The jihadisalafists have no positive vision, except the desire to visit chaos and bloodshed elsewhere. If that is clearly understood by enough people, particularly in the Muslim world, we may have a rather shorter long war. Looking back over the history of terrorism, we can see any number of ideological causes which once fed violent passions but which have passed into oblivion. These things take time. The Cold War lasted from 1947 to 1989. On that calendar, we are in the equivalent of 1953 in the struggle with the jihadi-salafis.122
 
 

75 Nick Cohen's honest and informed What's Left? How the Liberals Lost their Way (London 2006)

76 Walter Laqueur, The Last Days of Europe. Epitaph for an Old Continent (New York 2007) p. 85; and for the final discussion see Rod Liddle, 'The Public Know How These Attacks Happen - Unlike the Politicians' Spectator 7 July 2007 pp.14-15

77  Ed Husain, The Islamist pp. 69-70

78 Jamie Doward, 'Extremists Train Young Convicts for Terror Plots' Observer 15 July 2007

79 Jason Burke, Evening Standard 8 August 2007

80 Thomas H. Kean and others, The 9/11 Commission Report (New York 2002) p.166

81 Barton Gellman and To Becker, 'Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency' Part ii, Washington Post 24 June 2007 p. 5

82 Fawaz A. Gerges, Journey of the Jihadist. Inside Muslim Militancy (Orlando 2006) pp. 207-9

83 See the useful discussion by Michael Howard, 'War against Terrorism' Royal United Services Institute Address 30 October 2001 pp. 1-5

84 Ron Suskind, The One Per Cent Doctrine. Deep Inside America's Pursuit of its Enemies since 9/11 (London 2006) p.17

85 See the interesting memoir by Tyler Drumheller, On the Brink (New York 2006) p. 48. Drumheller was the head of CIA clandestine operations in Europe

86 Christina Lamb, 'The Invisible Man' Sunday Times magazine 18 March 2007 pp. 48-57 is an informed account of the search effort

87 David Gartenstein-Ross and Kyle Dabruzzi, 'The Convergence of Crime and Terror: Law Enforcement Opportunities and Perils' Center for Policing Terrorism 26 March 2007 pp.I-24

88 For the above see David Rivkin and Lee A. Casey, 'Family Feud: The Law in War and Peace' National Interest (2007) 89, pp. 66-75 and John Yoo, War by Other Means. An Insider's Account of the War on Terror (New York 2006)

89 See the thoughtful review by Alasdair Palmer, 'American "Oppressors" Have a Right to a Fair Trial Too' Sunday Telegraph 3 June 2007 reviewing Clive Stafford Smith's new book on Guantanamo Bay

90 Mark Bowden, 'Jihadists in Paradise' Atlantic Monthly March 2007 pp.54-75

91 West Point Counter-Terrorism Center Harmony Project Adl to Muktar dated 13 June 2002

92 See Rohan Gunaratna, 'Terrorism in Southeast Asia: Threat and Response' Hudson Institute (New York 2006) pp.1-12

93 Jason Burke, 'Al Qaeda after Madrid' Prospect (June 2004)

94 See the discussion by David Tucker, 'What's New about the New Terrorism and How Dangerous is It?' Terrorism and Political Violence (2001) 13, pp. 1-14

95 See the important paper by Stanford University's Jacob Shapiro, 'The Terrorist's Challenge: Security, Efficiency, Control' Center for International Security and Cooperation 26 April 2007 pp. 1-36

96 For recent examples see Lee Kuan Yew, 'Winning the War on Terrorism' Foreign Affairs January/February (2007) 86, pp. 2-7

97 Simon Elegant, 'The Terrorist Talks' Time!CNN 5 October 2003 p. 2 which quotes from CIA briefings

98 The most detailed account is by Maria Ressa, Seeds of Terror. An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda's Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia (New York 2003) pp. 143ff.

99 Arabinda Acharya, 'The Bali Bombings: Impact on Indonesia and Southeast Asia' Hudson Institute (New York 2006) pp. 1-5
100 Kumar Ramakrishna, 'The Making of the Jemaah Islamiyah Terrorist' in James J. F. Forest (ed.), Teaching Terror: Strategic and Tactical Learning in the Terrorist World (Oxford 2006) pp.223ff.

101 For a splendid account of contemporary Indonesia see Tracy Dahlby, Allah's Torch. A Report from behind the Scenes in Asia's War on Terror (New York 2005) as well as the equally informative John T. Side!, Riots, Pogroms, Jihad. Religious Violence in Indonesia (Ithaca 2006) especially pp. 196ff.

102 Zachary Abuza, 'Jl's Moneyman and Top Recruiter: A Profile of Noordin Mohammed Top' Terrorism Focus (25 July 2006) 3, pp. 1-2 and Jay Solomon and James Hookway, 'In Indonesia, War on Terror Shows Both Gains and Worrisome Trends' Wall Street Journal 8 September 2006

103 'Terrorists Proving Harder to Profile' Washington Post 11 March 2007

104 Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet, 'The Guidebook for Taking a Life' New York Times 10 June 2007 pp.1-4

105 See Lawrence Wright, 'The Terror Web' N~v Yorker 2 August 2004

106 Kathy Gannon, 'Cameraman Sheds Light on al-Qaida Tactics' Associated Press 26 June 2006

107 Douglas Farah, Blood from Stones.The Secret Financial Network of Terror (New York 2004) is the authoritative account by the Washington Post West African bureau chief

108 House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (Chairman Paul Murphy MP) Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005 (London 2006) for these remarks on the Committee's findings. That the Committee is heavy with MPs with intelligence and military connections tends to render it the elected version of what it is supposed to monitor rather than a forum that asks original questions. The need for secrecy (pervasive in Britain) counts for more than the ability to pose questions from beyond the security community's conceptual horizons. An important corrective is Crispin Black, 7/7. The London Bombs. What Went Wrong? (London 2005)

109 Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005, HM Stationery Office (London 2006) for these details

110 Sean O'Neill, 'Silence in (and out) of Court' The Times 12 May 2006 p. 24. This point was made by Peter Clarke in Learningfrom Experience. Counter-Terrorism in the UK since 9/11 Colin Cramphorn Memorial Lecture at Policy Exchange (London 2007) pp. 34-5

111 Sean O'Neill, 'Refugees Who Tried to Wage War on London' The Times 10 July 2007 front page and pp. 6-7

112 'How 7/7 killers Slipped MIS Net' and related stories in Daily Mail 1 May 2007

113 Anon., 'An Army on Operations'.

114 Terence Henry, 'Get Out ofJihad Free' Atlantic Monthly June 2007 pp.39-40

115 Christopher Boucek, 'Extremist Reeducation and Rehabilitation in Saudi Arabia' Terrorism Monitor (2007) 5, pp. 1-4; a similar Egyptian scheme has been hampered by lack of funds, see Manal El-Jesri 'Given the Chance' Egypt Today October 2007

116 Peter Coleman, A Liberal Conspiracy (New York 1989)

117 Gerald Robbins, 'Dutch Treat. The Netherlands Tries to Assimilate its Muslim Immigrants' Weekly Standard 13 Jury 2007

118 Pascale Combelles Sigel, 'An Inside Look at France's Mosque Surveillance Program' Terrorism Monitor (2007) 5, pp. 1-3 is an excellent analysis of French domestic security measures

119 See Frank Gaffney and others, War Footing (Annapolis, Maryland 2006) pp.68-70

120 See Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat New York City Police Department Intelligence Division (New York 2007)

121 Solomon and Hookway, 'In Indonesia' 122 Peter Grier, 'Where Does Al Qaeda Stand Now?' Christian Science Monitor 5 March 2007.

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