About that plot of Islamists in Britain to kidnap a couple of British Muslim soldiers and behead them (”Let this be a warning to you all. . . “) , it turns out that the two Muslim soldiers designated by the terrorists to be snatched were aware of the plot. And, better yet - and bully for them - they actually agreed to put themselves at risk to help authorities nab the terrorist wannabes.

The soldiers - who are not thought to have told their families that they were potential targets - were placed under unprecedented surveillance for weeks as officers waited for the terrorists to strike.

And as they tried to carry out their ordinary duties, the pair were aware that if the gang attempted to stage their abduction they could be attacked and bundled into a waiting vehicle at any time.

To prevent this, the security forces mounted a sophisticated surveillance operation.

In an operation reminiscent of a spy drama, their every move was monitored by a team of crack MI5 agents - linked to the soldiers by the latest in modern technology. ...

Incredibly, the two men carried on with their daily routines but were secretly shadowed around the clock by police and intelligence personnel, using high-technology tracking and bugging techniques. Surveillance teams kept a constant watch, looking for any sign of the plotters.

The two men were fitted with discreet tracking devices, with similar beacons attached to their cars, and armed response teams were on permanent standby to stage a rescue mission in case a kidnap plot was sprung. ...

The 330 Muslims serving in the UK military - including some 250 Army soldiers - have been ordered to take particular care over their own security.

An amazing story, and major kudos to the two soldiers who agreed to place themselves at lethal risk to defend their country. I hope this part of the story gets major publicity. If Western Muslims are sometimes criticized for passivity in the face of Islamist terrorism, then their courage against it should be widely acknowledged. I’ve done my part, anyway.

The Guardian:

Fanatiques sans frontières are on the march. It’s wrong to describe this as a single “war on terror”; our adversaries and their ideologies are so diverse. But if you think we are not engaged in a struggle against manifold enemies of freedom, as potentially deadly as those we faced in the 1930s, you are living in a fool’s paradise. Which is to say: you are a fairly typical contemporary European. (And most Brits are, in this respect as in many others, closer to Europe than to America.)

In the first decade of the 21st century, the spaces of free expression, even in old-established liberal democracies, have been eroded, are being eroded and - if we don’t summon ourselves to the fight - will continue to be eroded. Free expression is not just the particular preserve of writers and artists. It’s a first-order freedom, the oxygen on which other liberties depend. Not for nothing did John Stuart Mill devote a whole chapter in his On Liberty to “the liberty of thought and discussion”.

Read the whole thing.

As is being exhaustively covered this morning, UK and American authorities busted a plot to bomb 10 US-bound airliners en route from Britain, over the Atlantic.

Is there a North Korea connection?

Authorities have not confirmed that the plotters are al Qaeda members, but have strongly hinted they are. The plotters, authorities said, planned to bring binary liquid explosives aboard the planes in handbags. “Binary” means that the explosive would be formed by mixing two apparently-innocuous liquids after takeoff.

One airliner, a Boeing 707, was destroyed in a similar manner:

Korean Air Flight 858 was a flight that flew from Abu Dhabi International Airport in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates to Gimpo Airport near Seoul, South Korea via Bangkok International Airport in Bangkok. On November 29, 1987, it mysteriously disappeared.

According to the South Korean authorities, the Boeing 707 took off from Abu Dhabi and was flying to Bangkok on the way to Seoul. Two passengers who departed from the plane at Abu Dhabi left a radio containing 350 grams of C-4 and liquor bottle containing cca 0.7 l of PLX explosives in an overhead rack on the airplane. The bomb exploded while the plane was over the Andaman Sea near Thailand. Radar contact was lost at the time of the explosion.

All 11 crew members and 104 passengers on Korean Air 858 were killed, making it the deadliest terrorist attack against South Korea.

Two North Korean agents were arrested by South Korean officials shortly after the bombing. One killed himself with a suicide pill but the other, Kim Hyon Hui, was captured before she herself could commit suicide. She told investigators that the bombing was ordered by Kim Il Sung’s son, Kim Jong-il.

It has long been established that North Korea is in terrorist bed with Iran. Iran is the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism and has the technical capability to produce sophisticated exlosives. Although al Qaeda in Iraq, under its fortunately-martyred, former leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, considers Shiite Muslims its enemy, there is no such enmity between Iranian mullahs and the upper levels of al Qaeda’s leadership. Both Iran and Osama bin Laden characterize the United States as the “Great Satan,” with the UK not far behind.

Whether the plot actually has an Iranian or North Korean connection we may never know, but remember that the man who ordered the destruction of KAL 858 now runs North Korea.

Updates at end of post.

The total news focus this morning is on the arrest of 21 suspected al-Qaeda-related terrorists for a plot to blow up 10 airliners over the Atlantic Ocean, en route to the US from Britain.

British authorities have admitted its fulfillment was very close; US Secretary of Homeland Defense Michael Chertoff said this morning at a televised press conference that the plot was “well advanced.” Only in the last two weeks did the investigation of the plot conclude that it was directed at the United States, Chertoff said. He also said the plot was “getting very close to the execution phase.”

If the plot had succeeded the death toll might have exceeded that of al Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Ten Boeing 747 airliners easily carry far more than the 3,000 people who died in New York, Arlington and Pennsylvania. Airliners.net says that the Boeing 747-300 model has a,

Flightcrew of three, with two pilots and one flight engineer. Typical two class seating arrangement for 470 (50 business class including 28 on the upper deck and 370 economy class).

Adding the three flight crew and 10 attendants per plane gives a total of 483 souls on board per plane when filled. That capacity filled at only 63 percent average per plane means that more than 3,000 people would have died if all 10 planes crashed.

On Dec. 21, 1988, Libyan terrorists used explosives to bring down Pan Am flight 103, flying from London to New York. The aircraft fell onto Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 aboard as well as 11 persons on the ground.

On July 17, 1996, another Boeing 747, TWA flight 800, blew up after taking off for Paris from Kennedy International Airport in New York. All 230 persons aboard died, the aircraft falling, burning, into the water. An investigation concluded an electrical failure caused the crash.

Update: is there a North Korea connection?

Update: The Telegraph writes about, “How terrorists could have made a ‘liquid bomb‘”

Update: Commenter Lost Knight says that the 747-300 is used for cargo flights, having been superceded for passengers by the 747-400. Airliners.net says that the passenger capacity for the dash-400 is 416 plus two flight crew and a flight attendant cohort of (my estimate) 10, making 428 altogether.

If the aircraft targeted by the plotters were modern Boeing 777-300s, the death toll potential looks even worse. It can carry up to 550 passengers (the “all economy high density configuration”). But a “typical” passenger configuration is 386, plus two flight crew and, say, 10 attendants. Even so, 10 “typical” 777s only three-quarters-full carry as many people as died on 9/11, give or take a dozen or so.

That’s why some observers say the “Thwarted plot may have been ‘the Big One’.”

A British army brigadier with lengthy Iraq experience has made headlines by very bluntly accusing American forces in Iraq of massively botching the counterinsurgency.

The blistering critique, by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was the second most senior officer responsible for training Iraqi security forces, reflects criticism and frustration voiced by British commanders of American military tactics. …

The US army, he says, is imbued with an unparalleled sense of patriotism, duty, passion and talent. “Yet it seemed weighed down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a predisposition to offensive operations and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on.”

Which has really bothered British army officers since, um, 1776 (but not, curiously, on 6/6/44).

Anyway, here is the comment that my post title refers to:

Colonel Kevin Benson, director of the US army’s school of advanced military studies, who told the Washington Post the brigadier was an “insufferable British snob”, said his remark had been made in the heat of the moment. “I applaud the brigadier for starting the debate,” he said. “It is a debate that must go on and I myself am writing a response.”

Before D-Day 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the overall commander of Allied forces that would mount the invasion, fired an American officer and sent him home. The offcer’s offense was referring to someone as “a British SOB.”

Eisenhower dismissed the American officer not because he called the Brit a foul name, but because he had linked that insult to his Britishness. So he sent the staffer packing.

The brigadier’s criticisms come at a time when I was mulling over the similarities between how the Allies won the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2 and the present fight against Iraq-based insurgents. For three years Allied shipping suffered terribly from German submarine attacks, yet the month of the U-Boats’ greatest success was followed the very next month by their crushing defeat that did not relent until the Allies had almost swept the seas of U-Boats.

What changed? Allied Technology and tactics, the latter resulting from some basic realizations by British navy commanders that winning the U-Boat fight required intentional lethality. Sometimes it is a lesson that must be relearned. More later.

Update: The brigadier’s entire article is here, PDF.

I have scanned most of it (11/14ths so far) and have to say that most of the criticisms, observations and explanations appear well founded and accurate to me. This is a highly worthwhile work.

Osama Saeed, a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, asks in The Guardian just what all the calls for Muslim self-examination are about:

The position of Muslim organisations and mosques has been consistent for years. Killing civilians is murder, and a crime in Islam. We have consistently said that Muslims must help the police to track down those responsible.

This is why I’ve found it strange that many Muslim leaders have offered to look deep within our community now.

Maybe it’s because they better than he understand that there is a deep rot within much of modern Muslim rhetoric and practice that is both destructive and self-destructive. Many western Muslims have awakened to that fact, exemplified by among other things, the Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Leeds

Some of the 7/7 bombers hung out at the bookstore. …

Iqra not only sold hatemongering Islamist literature, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, was “the sole distributor of Islamgames, a U.S.-based company that makes video games. The video games feature apocalyptic battles between defenders of Islam and opponents. One game, Ummah Defense I, has the world ‘finally united under the Banner of Islam’ in 2114, until a revolt by disbelievers. The player’s goal is to seek out and destroy the disbelievers.”

Or consider the words of Ahmed Rashid, writing of London’s July 7 bombers,

Britain has allowed militant Muslim preachers freedom to preach their message of hate in the mosques, the meeting halls and the sitting rooms of British Muslims. Literature and videos promoting extremism have been allowed to spread deep into the Muslim community. While some outsiders saw this as typical British eccentricity or liberalism, foreign intelligence agencies have been furious with British laxity for some years.

The four July 7 bombers did not have to enrol in a Pakistani religious school or madrassa to learn about Islamic extremism, because it was available in Yorkshire. Experts now think it unlikely that the three London bombers who came to Pakistan last year enrolled in a madrassa to become ideologised. Instead, they arrived fully brainwashed and probably used their time making contact with al-Qa’eda and Pakistani militant groups to train in explosives.

Then there is Khalid Kelly, British resident and follower of radical cleric Abu Osama, who said,

“Some of the people tell you Islam is a religion of peace because they think that then you’ll want to convert. But you cannot possibly say Islam is a religion of peace; jihad is not an internal struggle.

“We can fight wherever, in Iraq, London, Paris, or Berlin. There is no such thing as innocents. The idea of the Islamic state is terror against anyone who doesn’t support Islamic ideology.”

There are many other Muslims who have been vocally critical of the growing tilt of mainstream Islam toward violence. Thomas Friedman quoted Husain Haqqani, author of the new book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military,

Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers’ words also need to be disseminated globally. “The rulers in these countries have no interest in amplifying the voices of moderates because the moderates often disagree with the rulers as much as they disagree with the extremists,” said Husain Haqqani, author of the new book “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military.” “You have to deal us moderates into the game by helping to amplify our voices and exposing the extremists and their amen corner.”

Other Muslims speaking against this trend include:

— Muslim activist Irshad Manji:

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general for the Muslim Council of Britain, is an example [of Muslim denial about Ismalmist terrorism]. In the midst of a debate with me, he listed potential incentives to bomb, including “alienation” and “segregation.” But Islam? God forbid that the possibility even be entertained.

That is the dangerous denial from which mainstream Muslims need to emerge. While our spokesmen assure us that Islam is an innocent bystander in today’s terrorism, those who commit terrorist acts often tell us otherwise [italics added- DS].

- Pakistani Muslim Nasra Hassan’s delineation of the Islam-based (if not actually true Islam) motivations of more than 200 suicide-bombers in training or some who were apprehended or even survived:

[An imam] explained that the first drop of blood shed by a martyr during jihad washes away his sins instantaneously. On the Day of Judgment, he will face no reckoning. On the Day of Resurrection, he can intercede for 70 of his nearest and dearest to enter Heaven; and he will have at his disposal 72 houris, the beautiful virgins of Paradise. The imam took pains to explain that the promised bliss is not sensual.

- A Muslim who in October 2001 wrote that Islam had become its own worst enemy:

The struggle against violence in the Muslim world is much more than a struggle against murdering fanatics like the Taliban. Or despotic leaders like Saddam Hussein and Mahathir Muhammad. It is also a struggle against the Islamic movements whose simplistic and virulent rhetoric often ends up sanctifying the fanatics and demonises everything else in the absolutist, unquestioning terms of all totalitarian perspectives.

- Or a self-described “unhappy American Muslim” who says that

. . . one of the biggest problems in the Muslim world [is] the total inability to deal with any kind of criticism of Islam or its practices, no matter how kindly or sincerely it was intended. The legitimacy of any criticism is denied; either the criticizer, Muslim or non-Muslim, is part of the plot to destroy Islam, and/or working for Satan, the “Jewish/Zionist conspiracy,” or whatever nefarious organization dedicated to destroying Islam, and/or condemned as heretical/apostate. Whatever is said is “lies” and “slander” and “hate” regardless of its veracity.

Mr. Saeed is not even familiar with the voices of his own fellow Muslims, including British Muslims. Nonetheless, he plunges ahead:

Mr Blair has attacked the idea of the caliphate - the equivalent of criticising the Pope. He has also remained silent in the face of a rightwing smear campaign against such eminent scholars as Sheikh al-Qaradawi - a man who has worked hard to reconcile Islam with modern democracy.

Seriatim:

(1) The caliph of Islam’s classical age was a political ruler of an empire, the caliphate, that was gained almost exclusively by the sword. Within 81 years after the death of Mohammed, Islam came to dominate land masses from the Arabian Peninsula to the Atlantic Ocean. Muslim armies stormed into Europe from the east and the southwest. Spain fell under Arab domination in 713 and was not fully freed until 1492. In 732, an Arab army under Abd er Rahman marched toward Paris; it was defeated near Tours by Charles Martel.

The Muslim Ottoman Turks penetrated into eastern Europe as far north as Poland, and into Russia all the way to St. Petersburg, where there is still today a large, active mosque. Arab naval raiders reached England, the western coast of Europe and even Iceland. The West was almost constantly on the defensive; the cultural and religious survival of Europe was a close-run thing.

One of al Qaeda’s stated goals is to restore all the lands of the old caliphate to Islamic rule. For Mr. Saeed, living in Britain, to fail to understand why this idea is abhorrent to Europeans betrays severe historical un-awareness. Does he not realize how offensive the whole idea of the caliphate is to everything Britain holds dear? Saeed’s claim that opposing the restoration by force of a ancient military empire is equivalent to criticizing the pope is simply absurd and would be laughable if the subject weren’t so serious. We’re back to the unhappy American Muslim’s observation that for so many Muslims, Islam itself is sacrosanct and completely off limits to criticism. Finally, let’s face it, criticizing the pope itself is no offensive idea to millions of Westerners, it’s done all the time. Why, Mr. Saeed, should the caliphate be off limits?

(2) Sheik al-Qaradawi does indeed have a reputation - among Muslims - as a moderate, mostly because he insists on being described that way. He was once a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian, original Islamist movement of the 20th century and the prototype for almost every Arab terrorist organization since; it is Hamas’ direct sire, for example. And even the BBC reported al-Qaradawi defends suicide bombings against Israel.

Defending suicide bombings that target Israeli civilians Sheikh A-Qaradawi told the BBC programme Newsnight that “an Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier.

“I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an evidence of God’s justice.

“Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do”.

Mr. Saeed, we do not accept the claim that al-Qaradawi is “moderate.” No longer will we parse one kind of Muslim terrorism from another. By his own words, Sheik al-Qaradawi is seen for what he is: an advocate of terrorism committed by Muslims against non-Muslims. This is your idea of “moderation?” And you fail to understand why he has been criticized? Mr. Saeed, you are showing yourself to be an unserious man.

But Mr. Saeed’s piece de la resistance is his closer about the bombings in London:

You can regard these acts as part of Islam, or as an irrational reaction to injustice taking place in the world. If it’s the former you have to explain why this started only 12 years ago and not 1,400.

Again, historical ignorance on Mr. Saeed’s part. “This” didn’t start 12 years ago, it did indeed start 1,400 years ago. The Islamic caliphate and the West have been in intermittent combat or open warfare since not long after Mohammed’s death. Only beginning in 1688, with the defeat of an invading Muslim army near Vienna, has there been anything approximating political peace. It lasted only a little more than 100 years, after which French and British armies invaded the Middle East in open imperialism (as well as power struggles between them).

Neither did “this” start only 12 years ago even in the sense Saeed means. Jihadism, an outgrowth of Islamism, has its roots in the 1980s, when Saudi clerics declared a general jihad against Soviet forces that had invaded Afghanistan.

Prof. Olivier Roy, author of Globalized Islam, wrote,

[T]he first generation of Al Qaeda left the Middle East to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. Except for the smallish Egyptian faction led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now Mr. bin Laden’s chief deputy, these militants were not involved in Middle Eastern politics. Abdullah Azzam, Mr. bin Laden’s mentor, gave up supporting the Palestinian Liberation Organization long before his death in 1989 because he felt that to fight for a localized political cause was to forsake the real jihad, which he felt should be international and religious in character.

From the beginning, Al Qaeda’s fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

Second, if the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam.

If Mr. Saeed continues to insist that Islamist terrorism is an “irrational reaction to injustice taking place in the world,” then he’d best also admit that the injustice is taking place in Arab lands and acknowledge that terrorism, according to a Harvard University study, “is more more accurately viewed as a response” to the terrorists’ own “political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances. We suspect that is why international terrorist acts are more likely to be committed by people who grew up under repressive political regimes.”

Perhaps now, Mr. Saeed, you understand why your own leaders have offered to look deep within your community as a seedbed of Islamist killers. Perhaps you should, too.

BBC reports,

Scotland Yard has admitted that a man shot dead by police hunting the bombers behind Thursday’s London attacks was unconnected to the incidents.

Reuters reports,

Plainclothes police chased the man onto an underground train on Friday after he ignored warnings to stop, shooting him five times in the head because they feared he was carrying a bomb and was going to detonate it.

“We are now satisfied that he was not connected with the incidents of Thursday 21st July 2005,” police said on Saturday.

“For somebody to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets.”

Update: “The man was identified by police as Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian, described by officers as an electrician on his way to work. “He was not connected to incidents in central London on 21st July, 2005, in which four explosive devices were partly detonated,” a police statement said [link].” Relatives said he was Roman Catholic and understood English very well, having worked in London for three years.

Even so, this is probably how it will play out.

Update: Arthur Chrenkoff acknowledges the incident was bad enough all around and ponders in such circumstances, “So what do you do?”

London police have just released security-camera photos of their four suspects in yesterday’s bomb attacks. Police operations specialist Andy Hayman said at a media briefing that “assistance is urgently needed” in identifying these men and their location.

Update: Indepundit has a transcript of Commissioner Hayman’s remarks.

Sky News of England is reporting that London police have surrounded a house on Harrow Road and have positioned canine teams and snipers. British authorities are mum on what’s going on.

I am thinking, though, that the police work in the last 24 hours has been awfully good, awfully fast in reacting to a series of attacks for which the police had no warning. Example: This morning, London time, police shot and killed a man described “believed to be one of the bombers who escaped after yesterday’s failed quadruple attack across London … Specialist armed police shot the man five times after he vaulted a ticket barrier at Stockwell station and boarded a stationary Tube train at just after 10am.” Now the police cordon at Harrow Road.

London police are outstanding on their own merits, but even considering the energy with which they investigated yesterday’s bombings and followed leads gained from forensic investigation, these events seem awfully focused and fortuitous. As Yogi Berra once said, “It’s too coincidental to be a coincidence.”

So I am thinking that some London Muslims are ratting on the terrorist cell(s) and giving them up to police. I don’t expect the London police to announce this if for no other reason that the Muslims involved are probably risking their lives. We’l hear vague police generalties such as “intelligence analysis” or “leads developed” and so forth, and that’s about it.

Now, I don’t know that London Muslims are assisting the police like I have described, of course, but that’s how I call it. And if true, it’s good news.

Update: Joe Gandelman has more.