CurrentTerror Plots.

[Del Boy]

BRITAIN is facing 30 current known terror plots a report from the first ever National Security Strategy warns. Intelligence services are monitoring 200 terrorist networks and 2,000 individuals.

There is a 'serious and sustained threat' from extremists. Many want to cause 'mass casualties without warning' using suicide attacks. Some 'aspire' to use chemical, biological and radiological weapons.

Terrorists also seek to attack key sites such as power stations and shipyards by electronic means.

It also says the legal system should be strengthened to ensure more prosecutions and deportations.



**
So much for panic and scaremongering. I don't think so - just reality checking. Brits never panic.

 

[MontyB]

Oh come on you can do better than selectively quoting 2006 news reports.

Here I will do it as well just to show how easy it is:

Alarmist?
Bill Durodie, senior lecturer in risk and security at the U.K. Defense Academy, said high-profile speeches and headline-grabbing numbers risked exaggerating the scale of the threat facing Britain.“It’s easy to pull out alarmist headlines,” he said. “What we’re seeing here on the whole are lone individuals (and) small groups.”

But I will go one step further and post the report I took the information from...

British MI5 tracking 30 terror plots Head of Britain’s MI5 spy agency says many tied to Al-Qaida in Pakistan
The Associated Press
updated 12:31 p.m. ET Nov. 10, 2006

LONDON - British authorities are tracking almost 30 high-priority terrorist plots involving 200 networks and 1,600 suspects, the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency said, adding that many of those under surveillance are homegrown terrorists plotting suicide attacks and other mass-casualty bombings.
Prime Minister Tony Blair backed his spy chief’s assessment and warned that the terrorist threat facing Britain “will last a generation.”
In a speech released by MI5 Friday, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said her agency had foiled five major plots since the July 2005 transit bomb attacks in London.
Speaking to a small audience of academics in London on Thursday, Manningham-Buller said officials were “aware of numerous plots to kill people and to damage our economy.”
“What do I mean by numerous? Five? 10?” she said. “No, nearer 30 that we currently know of.”
She described those as "Priority 1" plots, saying they represent a caseload increase of 80 percent since January.
By contrast, the United States says its caseload has remained steady. FBI Director Robert Mueller said in September that the number of overall domestic terrorist investigations has remained fairly static for the past two years, after spiking immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Al-Qaida in Pakistan cited
Manningham-Buller added that “today we see the use of homemade improvised explosive devices, but I suggest tomorrow’s threat will include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology.”
She said MI5 and the police were tracking 200 cells involving more than 1,600 individuals who were “actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts here and overseas.”
The threat includes “mass casualty suicide attacks in the U.K.,” she said.
Manningham-Buller, who has headed MI5 since 2002, said the plots “often have linked back to al-Qaida in Pakistan, and through those links al-Qaida gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale.”
Inayat Bunglawala, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, said Manningham-Buller had given “a very sobering warning.” He said, however, it was essential that “British Muslims are seen as a partner in the fight against terrorism and not some sort of community in need of mass medication.”
“Holding a community responsible for the actions of a few would be counterproductive,” Bunglawala said.
Alarmist?
Bill Durodie, senior lecturer in risk and security at the U.K. Defense Academy, said high-profile speeches and headline-grabbing numbers risked exaggerating the scale of the threat facing Britain.
“It’s easy to pull out alarmist headlines,” he said. “What we’re seeing here on the whole are lone individuals (and) small groups.”
Senior anti-terrorist officials have previously said that they have foiled several plots since the July 2005 attacks, but Manningham-Buller’s speech provided the first public estimate of the threat by the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency.
She warned that radicalization, especially of young people, was one of the biggest problems facing anti-terror investigators.
On July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on three subway trains and a bus in London. Three of the four bombers were British-born.
This August, police said they had foiled a plot by a British terrorist cell to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners in mid-air. More than a dozen people, all British, are awaiting trial in the case.
On Tuesday, a British Muslim convert, Dhiren Barot, was sentenced to life in prison for plotting to attack U.S. financial landmarks and blow up London targets with limousines packed with gas tanks, napalm and nails.
'With us for a generation'
Manningham-Buller said some of the plots MI5 was tracking could be less serious than the one that ended in the 2005 attack, but that they still must be investigated.
She said the threat from international terrorism “is serious, is growing, and will, I believe, be with us for a generation.”
“It is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalized and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow U.K. citizens,” Manningham-Buller said. “Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers.”
Blair told reporters at his Downing Street office that Manningham-Buller was “absolutely right that it will last a generation.”
“We need to combat the poisonous propaganda of those people that warps and perverts the minds of younger people,” he said.
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15646571/

 

[Del Boy]

Oh dear, Oh dear. Silly old me. There I go again, publishing the truth. Trust me to do that. I really should stop doing it , seeing as how it does upset certain people so!

QUESTION - Ref your opening quote - Just when did Bill Durodie say that and in response to what? Date?
Is this also a piece of your outdated 2006 stuff?

Tell us if it refers to the report which follows it.



BEFORE I bother to respond - why do you assume that this 2oo6 stuff is the same report as today's?

How easy is that? Looks like you are the one going straight to collect the 2006 stuff! 'Cos I ain't; you are obviously confusing me with some guy who is the Wiki Kid.

I never seek to dig back to make points. It is all happening here, living it day to day.

OK -Waiting here boss.

 

[senojekips]

Mueller, John. "Simplicity and Spook: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii, Mar 02, 2005 Online <.PDF>. 2008-02-24 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p70917_index.html>

ABSTRACT It has been common to exaggerate and to overreact to foreign threats, something that seems to be continuing with current concerns over international terrorism. This paper assesses threat exaggeration and overreaction from Pearl Harbor to the post-Cold War period and applies that experience to post-9/11 fears of, and policies toward, international terrorism. Alarmism and overreaction can be harmful, particularly economically. And, in the case of terrorism, they can help create the damaging consequences the terrorists seek but are unable to perpetrate on their own. Moreover, stoked by the terrorism industry, many of the forms alarmism has taken verge on hysteria. The United States is hardly likely to be facing an existential threat in the sense that it will be toppled by dramatic acts of terrorist destruction, even extreme ones. The country can, however grimly, readily absorb considerable damage if necessary, and it has outlasted more potent threats in the past. A reasonable policy might be to seek to reduce fears about what may well prove to be quite a limited problem.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Real world Intelligence agencies play their cards very close to their chests and any real threats are not heard of until the arrests are made.

 

[Del Boy]

We are talking real world here. I am only putting up day to day fact s of life here, as it happens.

I have asked for some info ,in my last post, from Monty , and when that has been answered I will put the matter to bed.

There is no exageration here, far from it. We are constantly keeping a lid on things, as the most tolerant people in the world. Only a few days ago, an East London vicar was attacked outside his church by muslims, battered and kicked and left in a heap in the road, to shouts of ' our f****** church should be a mosque'. Just another everyday incident that we have to live with. But I guess that vicar brought it on himself by being here. He is in a sad state. As far as I know, this has never happened yet to an Imam here.

Regarding the approach of academics to the subject, and their individual agendas, I prefer to judge by what I see, what I hear, what I know is going down in my corner and on my watch. Just like a soldier in the field has to.

I have no interest in alarmist or exagerated themes, only in sticking up the facts as the unfold, for interest and discussion.
I can hear what the extremists tell us they want, and what they are going to do, they make no secret of it.

Tell those who have been bombed around the world that they are crying wolf. Absolute nonsense that would be.

Facts, reality, facing up. That is all that counts. The books about it can be written later.

I prefer to listen to our security services, who have served us well. They are very experienced and not given to over-cooking.
We know something of living with terrorism you know, but they haven't been able to terrify us yet, and they won't now.

But that doesn't mean we should not mention it or act as tho' it is not happening. Only complete idiots would try that as a policy.

 

[senojekips]

Like I said if these threats were even vaguely real, you and I would not know of them until the Police made the arrests. Unless of course our intelligence agencies are trying to tip them off so they can change their plans,... which is hardly likely.

The most effective weapon that the terrorists have in this war, is terror itself, most ably disseminated by those whom that they terrify. Panic is a powerful weapon used by a cunning enemy, some of us don't fall for it.

Did you know that more people have drowned in their own toilets than have been killed by terrorism in the USA in all years other than 2001.

 

[Del Boy]

Well, there is one current threat greater to Britain than terrorism, and that is a flu pandemic, which could wipe out 750,000 people here, and of which we are aware , but that is not the point.

Our own particular situation is that we would be barmy to not recognise that we are in the front line of such terrorist ambitions as I have outlined, and here we are striving to find a solution but staying on our toes at all times. I have no political agenda whatsoever, other than the successful peaceful absorption of our immigrant population, as always in the past.

This is entirely unrelated to racism or panic, rather the opposite, as an effort to overcome the growing threat of division by multi-culturism. God forbid we should ever have culture fighting culture, as is common in the middle-east and Asia.

So - we have to bite the bullet and face reality; for far too long we have remained silent and frightened to mention the subject for fear of being branded racist. The time for that is past.

In this respect my first post could be seen in the context of a pat on back, a congratulation of our security services for looking after us so well.

 

[senojekips]

Being aware of the danger goes without saying and needs no reinforcement, especially in a country such as yours where terrorist acts have already been perpetrated. Anyone not specifically certified insane is already aware of the threat. Those who are, are a lost cause.

Stuff such as you quoted in your first post is most often little more than a poorly disguised attempt by one body or another to squeeze more money from the public purse in the never ending pursuit of empire building, nothing at all to do with genuine attempts at winning the war.

I feel that further quoting of this propaganda is little more than aiding and abetting the enemy in the dissemination of terror, their singularly most effective weapon.

 

[A Can of Man]

Yep it'd be a secret wouldn't it?
By exposing such information they are giving enemies clues as to where they have human intelligence sources. I wouldn't do it. I don't think they would either.
And yes, the most desirable outcome of a terror attack is the spread of FEAR. That is what they want. In America, I can see that the terrorists have gone leaps and bounds. They have managed to plant so much fear that everyone thinks everyone who's not white is a terrorist, have locked down so many things for security reasons that it's even affecting the economy in a VERY negative way.
I'd say the terrorists are winning in America. And America's doing all the hard bits.
Remember guys.... ALWAYS consider, "what outcome does my enemy want?" And DENY it. The enemy doesn't necessarily want to just kill the people in the bus... or the building.... no, that's a means to an end. He wants to spread fear. He wants to make things grind to a halt. And they couldn't have asked for a better outcome.

 

[senojekips]

Yes Redneck it most certainly would be kept very confidential.

There have been many arrests made on persons who have planned terrorist activities in the US, UK, Australia, and no doubt many other places. But were the public made aware of these threats before the arrests,... NO!

The last thing we should be doing is helping the enemy by sowing the seeds of fear.

 

[MontyB]

Yep it'd be a secret wouldn't it?
By exposing such information they are giving enemies clues as to where they have human intelligence sources. I wouldn't do it. I don't think they would either.
And yes, the most desirable outcome of a terror attack is the spread of FEAR. That is what they want. In America, I can see that the terrorists have gone leaps and bounds. They have managed to plant so much fear that everyone thinks everyone who's not white is a terrorist, have locked down so many things for security reasons that it's even affecting the economy in a VERY negative way.
I'd say the terrorists are winning in America. And America's doing all the hard bits.
Remember guys.... ALWAYS consider, "what outcome does my enemy want?" And DENY it. The enemy doesn't necessarily want to just kill the people in the bus... or the building.... no, that's a means to an end. He wants to spread fear. He wants to make things grind to a halt. And they couldn't have asked for a better outcome.

What better way is there to create fear than spread half truths about there being thousands of terrorists about to attack in a multitude of ways, the sad thing is that he is probably right about the numbers and their plans but what he continually over looks is that a sizable number of these plots are planned by crazy nut jobs and will amount to nothing and the ones that do have a shred of credibility are already being monitored by law enforcement.

As far as the terrorists winning in America goes I disagree strongly in fact I think Americans are handling the "home front" extremely well but are failing dismally on every other front.

 

[Del Boy]

come on you can do better than selectively quoting 2006 news reports.

BUT obviously you can't do better! And that's ripe, your use of the word 'selective'.


Anyway - wrong again! And as you failed to answer my challenges re. these old 2006 reports which you have dug up and are relying on, I will now carry on.


THIS WAS the first ever national strategy, published 2 days ago, the Government having drawn up plans for dealing with huge death tolls caused by such potential national emergencies as Flu Pandemics, extreme flooding, cyber attacks, climate change and terror strikes.

A new civil defence network is to be set up. The number of security service staff is to rise to 4000 and four regional counter-terrorism units and four regional intelligence units are to be set up.

New measures would be published next month to boost the way schools, universities and prisons work to disrupt radicalisation in their midst.

A new National Secutrity Forum featuring uip to 30 experts from academia and other areas will advise another body set up last summer, the National Security Committee.

There will be greater transparency in the work of the Intelligence and Security Commitee, a Parliamentary which overseas the security services.

A seperate 1000 strong civilian force, made up of emergency service workers and judges will be created.

A register of risks- a regular up-dated assessment of the dangers facing Britain is also to be published.

A large section of the report conceded that Britain faces a "serious and sustained" threat from al-Qaeda and other suicide bombers and others prepared to use chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the name of Islam.

The report included details of the threats from The Enemy Within and from Climate Change.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

**
So much for the patronising accusations of propaganda, and of my trying to resurrect 2006 information. As I pointed out, that is your Wiki game not mine. I think this information also kicks your pathetic post No.11 into touch, but I will bother to return to it later. I will enjoy that certainly, particularly as you singularly failed to answer the previous questions I challenged you with.

I post legitimate fact, always of some consequence, whereas it seems to me that you simply slip away to see if you can snipe at others' efforts.

 

[MontyB]

I can see the only thing that will get through to you is 10lb hammer between the eyes so I will make this simple...
Provide sources when you make statements.
Unless of course you figures are purely your opinion then I guess it doesn't matter.

Now before you start ranting on that you are far to manly to take orders from me, don't because its not a request from me it is a forum rule...

6. Please provide sources (links preferred) for things you have posted if requested by other members. Lack of sources may be considered spamming!

and if that isn't enough for ya, here is a link (you may want to learn that process yourself)...

http://www.military-quotes.com/forum/faq.php?faq=forum_rules_features

As far as the term selective goes I guess we can determine that once you have posted your sources can't we.

Tally ho, Toodle pip, whato and chokes away old bean.

 

[Del Boy]

The key words are 'if requested'.

You do not need to red ink me as though you have specifically asked me for the link before. So where the hammer has been required I am sure I don't know. However, rest assured that you will never have the advantage of me on a point again. So enjoy while you have the opportunity.

You do not need to be so patronising. I have never made a secret of the fact that I am not very computor literate. This is an inconvenience but not a tragedy.

As you have asked I will attempt to master providing links, which I never yet made a success of.

I picked up the story in question from one of the news reports over the past two days, but the source of the information was Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, The Cabinet Office Strategy Report ,to which David Cameron retorted that it sounded more like a list than a strategy, which it does of course, but that does not negate the content. And the source could hardly be more official.

As this involves a forum rule I will deal with it in future. No hammer needed.

(BTW - that's a funny language you have there, at the end - is it Maori? And surely that should be 'chocks away', should it not, Blue.)

 

[DTop]

Be careful in this thread folks. More infractions will follow any violations of the rules that come to the staff's attention. Keep these (and all rules of the forum) in mind when posting:

1. Be polite and respect the other members.

4. Flaming, Name Calling, Country Bashing, Spamming, Hate or Racism related posts are not accepted!

5. Almost all opinions are welcome, as long as they are well presented and in a respectful manner.

8. Do not try to be a moderator (if you're not one of course...).
Sarcastic replies are not allowed! Please use the "report post" button, or PM one of the forum staff instead if you think that some of the posts should be removed or edited.

 

[Del Boy]

Like I said if these threats were even vaguely real, you and I would not know of them until the Police made the arrests. Unless of course our intelligence agencies are trying to tip them off so they can change their plans,... which is hardly likely.

Government and security services are even more aware of such matters than you, and if they see fit to issue warnings they must have good reason and are unlikely to spread panic in doing so. Britain is a very good example - they have been hit - they have been warned - but not the least sign of panic. So I feel we can disregard the comment in this case. In fact I would say that wherever these criticisms have arisen, we have to respond that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Please remember that no-one is in a position to tell the British how to suck these particular eggs.

The most effective weapon that the terrorists have in this war, is terror itself, most ably disseminated by those whom that they terrify. Panic is a powerful weapon used by a cunning enemy, some of us don't fall for it.

Ah, but those who have been hit a few times might not be prepared to suffer silence on these important matters. And bringing them into the light is called 'news', perhaps even more so 'responsible news'. For 'panic' again - see my last response above.[/quote]

Did you know that more people have drowned in their own toilets than have been killed by terrorism in the USA in all years other than 2001.

I am sure that is a great condolence to victims in America. I am almost tempted to respond 'Tell that to the Marines'.

But then again - I often feel like responding with that phrase.

 

[FULLMETALJACKET]

I am sure that is a great condolence to victims in America. I am almost tempted to respond 'Tell that to the Marines'.

But then again - I often feel like responding with that phrase.

ha, i feel the same.

 

[84RFK]

Eh, first of all: (in a hope that the thread gets locked that way)

It may sound ridicolous, but we should keep in mind that all the people reading this forum may not be as interested in keeping order and sustaining the present political and religious systems as we are...

Let's try not to give "the other guys" some good ideas, and just be thankfull that they are obsessed with blood&gore, and turning themselves into martyrs.

I'm just waiting for some moron to spread the news that the Sellafield facility is running their security systems on an old 384 with Win. 3.1... :bang:

Remember the old signs:

You talk, who listens.

Der feind hört mit

En svensk tiger

And all the other slogans meant to tell people to SHUT UP!

The terrorist threat in the UK is not represented by illiterate ragheads riding camels and carrying bomb-belts you know.

 

[03USMC]

I won't lock it because of that. Because you do make a valid point. I will however edit the first comment.

 

[Del Boy]

I'm just waiting for some moron to spread the news that the Sellafield facility is running their security systems on an old 384 with Win. 3.1... :bang:

Hello - I wouldn't have thought so - until you just have! Ironic, considering the direction of your comments. Valid point was it?