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COUNTER-TERRORISM: People Smugglers Moving Terrorists Around
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February 3, 2005: Islamic terrorists have long relied on criminal organizations for help, and there’s been an alarming increase in their use of people smugglers to move terrorists to Western countries. Normally, most criminals will not knowingly get involved with terrorists. The heat from law enforcement agencies is not worth the opportunity to make another illicit deal. People smugglers are also wary of dealing with terrorists, and many of these smuggling operations prefer to know the old country kin of the people they are moving. This makes it easier to collect the high fees charged to move illegal migrants long distances and across heavily guarded borders. But not all people smugglers are that careful, or as put off by the greater danger entailed from moving terrorists. In turn, the terrorists will try to pass themselves off as non-terrorist migrants, or will simply pay a premium to get the smugglers to cooperate. The smuggling operations are also a source of false documents, and terrorists are getting what they need from this source as well. The smuggling of illegal migrants is a huge business, second only to moving illegal drugs, and in most cases, more profitable. While it’s more difficult to move people, the billions of dollars in fees has attracted hundreds of well organized criminal organizations to the business. It’s politically popular, in the receiving nations, to crack down on the smuggling, so counter-terrorist organizations are likely to get more resources to go after the people smugglers. But it is also unlikely that these efforts will stop all the smuggling.
February 1, 2005: Islamic terrorists are not a wealthy lot, and they are always coming up with new, usually illegal, ways to raise money for their operations. One of the more recent scams includes life insurance fraud. The terrorist takes out as many life insurance policies as he can, then travels to the Middle East, where local officials can be bribed to verify that he “died” in a fake automobile accident. Then, the “dead man” goes off and becomes a suicide bomber in Iraq, to make sure that the insurance companies never catch on to the scheme, and come looking to get their money back. Rackets like this can yield several hundred thousand dollars for the cause. But expenses are high. Terrorists move around a lot, which means high travel expenses. This also precludes having a regular job, so the living expenses (not very high, actually) have to be covered by the income from illegal activities. Credit card and Internet related scams are favored as well. The down side of these illegal income sources is that it exposes the terrorists to arrest. Indeed, many terrorist cells have been discovered and destroyed because members of the cells got caught by the police. It’s been known for several years that Islamic terrorists have favored this kind of crime for raising money, and the police are on to them. It is believed that some police agencies have infiltrated al Qaeda cells via the criminal underground of credit card, insurance and Internet scams. This has resulted in some disputes between the police and intelligence agencies. The cops want to bust as many of these criminals as possible, and prevent more crimes, while the intelligence agencies want to keep known terrorists under surveillance (at least until they try to kill someone, or leave the country), so they can detect and prevent a future terrorist attack. This way, more terrorists can be identified, and eventually rounded up. This tension between the police and intelligence agencies is generally kept quiet, but it has led to cases where the cops just busted people who they suspected were terrorists, but did not want to bring intelligence services in lest the police be forbidden to make the arrests. These are all aspects of the war on terror that don’t get reported much, but could be a matter of life and death for a lot of people one of these days.
January 28, 2005: One reason Europeans are so upset with American operations in Iraq, is because the United States has been too successful in shutting down terrorist operations within the United States. As a result, Islamic terrorists are concentrating more on carrying out terrorist attacks in Europe. As far as Islamic radicals are concerned, an infidel is an infidel. Besides, three years of efforts to carry out any kind of attack in the United States has met with many costly failures. American counter-terrorism forces have not captured a lot of Islamic terrorists in the United States, but the terrorist planning efforts meant that there were a lot of messages, and people, who could be intercepted. Many arrests were made overseas, or searches begun for newly identified terrorists. Going after Europe is simply a much less costly target for al Qaeda to take on.
The United States has always been a difficult target for Islamic terrorists. It’s not just the longer distances that must be traveled, but the nature of the Islamic and Arab-American population there. In Europe, Islamic, and especially Arab, immigrants are more likely to maintain their old country culture, to the exclusion of loyalty to the place they have moved to. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants. Anyone arriving is met with an attitude that, “you can be one of us.” The higher proportion of loyal-American immigrants makes it more difficult for Islamic radicals to hide, recruit and plan their attacks inside the U.S..
In Europe, there is a much larger number of Islamic radical clergy, many of whom openly preach the need to “fight the infidels.” European countries try to crack down on these radical clergymen, but the damage is already done. Moreover, there are ten times as many Moslems in Europe than there are in the United States. The combination of all these factors makes the Europeans very nervous. It was thought that European opposition to American operations in Iraq would provide a measure of protection. But this proved to be an illusion. The bombings in Spain last March made that very clear. The arrest of hundreds of Islamic radicals by European police, and discovery of dozens of terrorism plots, and growing radicalization of young European Moslems, has increased the danger. Islamic terrorist leaders now openly call for attacks in Europe, and some Islamic clergy in Europe call for the forcible conversion of Europe to Islam.
The only good thing to come out of all this is enthusiastic cooperation by European police and intelligence organizations in American efforts to find and stop Islamic terrorism. But that may not be enough to prevent more bombs from going off in Europe. |
