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The Mutating Al-Qaeda Threat

(Washington Times) Mitchell D. Silber - Ten years ago last month, "shoe bomber" Richard Reid boarded an American Airlines flight bound for Miami from Paris, intending to kill himself and all of the other passengers by detonating an explosive device he had concealed in his shoes. What was unknown at the time is that Reid was not supposed to act alone. Saajid Badat - like Reid a British citizen - was supposed to ignite his own pair of explosive shoes on a different trans-Atlantic flight, but he dropped out in the plot's final stages. A careful dissection of 16 of the most important "al-Qaeda" plots launched against the West since 1993 reveals a consistent trend. They used men who radicalized to violence in Western cities such as Hamburg, Montreal, London and New York, who showed up on al-Qaeda's doorstep on their own initiative and then were trained, turned around and launched back at the West by al-Qaeda. Whether it was the Madrid transit-system attacks of 2004, the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, or the New York City subway plot of September 2009, the bombers lived in the great cities of the West, were radicalized in the West and turned to violence in the West. The writer is director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department.
2012-01-02 00:00:00
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