Comment on the Belmont Club "Storm petrels"

When seconds count the police (SAS) are only minutes away.

"al-Qeada doesn't take a holiday."
Rust never sleeps.

One possibility is that busy bees have been building information firewalls again.
What is Jamie Gorelick up to these days?

The links between al-Qeada and Iran were denied and ridiculed by the Left. They are now becoming more certain. The Saudis have gone to some effort, and we must be careful since they do engage in sophisticated intelligence and disinformation operations themselves, to claim that Iran is backing the insurgents in Yemen who shelter AQ. Osama bin Laden's family were living in Tehran under state protection and have recently fled to the Saudi Embassy. There are wheels within wheels here as they betray each other. Sometimes both sides are the bad guys.

Is there a Yemen linked network in America? There was a cell exposed in upstate NY a few years ago. The Somalis are very present and the public has not been warned of the threat hosted within that community. The presence of Black African Islamists from West Africa is something that the public is also completely unaware of. There are links between these groups and Europe. Who was this bomber seeing in The Netherlands, which mosque did he attend? Another key locus in their network is Milan. The foot soldier with the explosives is the simpler problem. The Imam who builds the network but who has no prohibited items on him is the harder problem that we must learn to intercept.

It is very hard for the average airport screener to identify these people. If they have a foreign man in front of them with a collection of pamphlets in arabic how can they know if these are harmless tracts urging wives to be faithful and children to brush their teeth or readings from the hadith that are used to justify jihad? We need trained translators and intelligence specialists at the airports. That is a very expensive and demanding program to set up.

Remember though that when the threat is flying in to the United States identifying them and stopping them is not something for US Homeland Security to do. In this case it was the Dutch airport security that should have caught the guy and didn't.