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FBI Chief Faces Pakistani Pandora’s Box
Without cooperation from Islamabad, America will have trouble identifying terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S.
Hours after terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team last week in Lahore, Pakistan, killing eight people and injuring seven players, FBI Director Robert Mueller landed in Islamabad to meet with Pakistani officials. Mueller was seeking information about … terrorists.
Mueller wanted access to 20 Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) suspects being held in Islamabad; men believed to have been involved in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 170 people last November. The timing was a macabre coincidence. But if that didn’t underscore just how big the Pakistani terrorist problem is, the fact that Pakistani officials denied Mueller access to the LeT suspects certainly did. Mueller is America’s top investigator. Without cooperation from Pakistan, America faces a much harder job in identifying LeT sleeper cells in the United States.
Since 2001, more than a dozen American citizens have been convicted in American courts of training at Lashkar’s foreign terrorist camps. Remember the ten convicted “paintball jihadis,” also known as members of a “Virginia jihad network”? They all trained at camps run by LeT in Pakistan. In April 2005, Ali al-Timimi, an American-born Muslim cleric living in Virginia, was convicted of “inciting followers to wage war against the United States just days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” Al-Timimi was the most high profile in a case of nine other LeT terrorism-related convictions.
According to the the Investigative Project on Terrorism, tens of thousands of Pakistanis have trained in Lashkar’s terrorist training camps in Pakistan since 1989. There, weapons training includes the use of explosives, assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades. In a post-Mumbai world, the FBI wants to learn who else has been trained there, hence Mueller’s visit. The Mumbai attackers have been linked to LeT training camps, making it clear exactly how much carnage can be wrought by a low-tech attack in a major urban city.
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Annie Jacobsen writes about aviation and intelligence. She blogs at TheAviationNation.com and is working on a new book for Little Brown and Company.
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7 Comments
1. Chido:The author is simply wrong when she says ‘every terrorist incident in the UK has been linked to British residents of Pakistani descent’ and is exposing her ignorance. There have been Irish terrorist attacks on Britain this century i.e. the Ealing bombing of 2001 as well as bombing conducted by ‘white supremacists’ against gays/coloureds e.g. try googling the names of David Copeland and David Tovey in this regard. Astonishing to see that someone who describes themselves as an expert on these mattters can get the facts so wrong unless they have a particular agenda?
Mar 12, 2009 - 3:09 am 2. canuck:The solution is the same here or for the Brits…shut down immigration and deport all non-citizens of Pakistan and any other “moslem” country. Any cooperation we get from the ISI is going to be superficial and more for show than any serious effort to help us out.
Interestingly enough, the principal reason we have a federal government is to protect us at home. The want to do everything else but do that…our Southern border is porous and our immigration policies suck all in the name of diversity. I don’t remember diversity in the Constitution and I didn’t get to vote on it.
Mar 12, 2009 - 4:04 am 3. Broadsword:This,” …carnage can be wrought by a low-tech attack in a major urban city”,of course, will never happen because there are 22,000 commonsense gun laws in this country which will prevent it.
Mar 12, 2009 - 5:13 am 4. Broadsword:Chido, the Irish were not terrorists but ‘gunmen’. Or were they ‘militants’?
Mar 12, 2009 - 5:16 am 5. tinfoilhatter:“3. Broadsword:
This,” …carnage can be wrought by a low-tech attack in a major urban city”,of course, will never happen because there are 22,000 commonsense gun laws in this country which will prevent it.”
The real first responders should be an armed citizentry. While many, undoubtably, would still be killed in such an attack (even by responding forces blue-on-blue,) they would
1) be highly tactically disruptive to the attackers. Disrupted attack timelines and the potential splitting of supporting pairs, for example, would give the responding police a huge tactical advantage.
2) have at least a fighting chance to survive, especially if they could create defensive “hedgehogs” that the attackers would bypass seeking softer targets.
3) be in a position to immediately augment security forces with trained (and more importantly) vetted personnel, in some kind of “Home Guard” organization, such is found in Denmark.
Instead, our “first responders” to Mumbai-style attack will be stuck in the resulting traffic made indescribably worse by panic, setting up checkpoints and roadblocks, all while attempting to cobble together an on the fly some response. The police, especially in major Eastern cities are miserably trained and underequipped for a Mumbai-type attack (specifically hampered by a lack of rifles and good fire team training, mostly for political “scary guns are icky!” and financial reasons.
Setting up a real “Home Guard” tips too many rice bowls to politically viable, and most Americans are too passive to take more than “glance at the DHS Threat level” approach to security.
Also, don’t think the next Mumbai is going to be guys with SATphones, AKs, and the occasional IED. There are off-the-shelf things they could bring in a rucksack that would cripple the response to their attack. I’m sure their thinking of it now. They learn, we learn. Or at least we should learn.
Mar 12, 2009 - 5:51 am 6. Leatherneck:Just check the Mosques, their phones, and computers. Any terror related information found, and the Mosque should be destroyed with the American flag flying high over the rubble for the world to see. For starters.
How many Islamic examples do you need? Read Robert Spenser’s latest book as a field guide.
ROPMA!
Mar 12, 2009 - 8:34 am 7. Meryl:Can’t obama just ask the terrorists to sign their names to some list or something and turn it in to him?
He just loves to talk with our enemies and he promised last fall that once he was elected he would talk to them and everything would be alllllllllllll better.
He can give them his Blackberry contact info, so they don’t have to be embarrassed by going through a third party or anything. I know he doesn’t like all that diplomatic crap and how it complicates things.
Mar 12, 2009 - 5:32 pm