The timing of the raids in the U.K. is interesting. Standard procedure (terror raid or not) is to break down the doors early in the morning. The 13 arrests were made early- to mid-afternoon. Sounds like they were rushed by something.

Perhaps this:

The Pakistani Al-Qaeda computer expert captured last month was one of the terror network's top planners with a five million dollar bounty on his head and had plotted to attack London's Heathrow airport, a senior security official said.

Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, 25, alias Abu Talha, arrested in the eastern city of Lahore on July 12, "is in the top hierarchy of Al-Qaeda's external operations wing," a security official closely involved in Pakistan's latest Al-Qaeda swoop told AFP.

Khan had not only been creating websites and secret email codes for Al-Qaeda operatives to communicate with each other, he had also actively plotted terror attacks, the official said on condition of anonymity.

"He was involved in planning for attacks at Heathrow airport London some time ago and was wanted by US government," the official said....

Perhaps. Unless they have SAMs, it seems a strange target. High security, limited vehicle access, concrete bollards in front of entrances, etc.

But then I don't work for al-Qaeda.

This is a bit off-topic, but since this site is often concerned with security, and with North Korea, a link to the following:

THE REV. MOON, THREAT TO U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY?

"It would seem that, a few years ago, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon purchased a small fleet of Russian ballistic missile submarines with the missile-launching hardware intact, then handed the subs over to North Korea"

Link here

Don't really know what to say - except WTF???

What do the national security expert here think should be done?

I will start by honoring what I see as the true things in Mrs. Burke's post, and then follow with the point that Mrs. Burke hasn't addressed, and perhaps is incapable of addressing, given her obvious bias:

1. I am fully capably of admitting this is serious information, and should be treated seriously.
2. I am willing to give credit to Mrs. Burke for noting the importance of the new information.(not that she cares whether I give credit or not - but hey! it's a free forum!)

But she, and others on this site, are either incapable or unwilling to the horrible impression it creates when, out of Tom Ridge's mouth, comes "political spin" in what needs to be a completely non-political process.

NEW YORK TIMES LETTER (8/3/04): "I live in northern New Jersey and work in Midtown Manhattan, near the Citicorp Center. I was listening carefully to Tom Ridge's warning, as the sites he was mentioning for possible attacks basically encompassed all of my daily life. Then he said, “We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror.”
I realized that I was listening to a paid political announcement and turned the radio off. The credibility of the announcement had been reduced to zero."

This is what I'm talking about.

I'm riffing the above from the Daily Howler. Go see today, and go to the bottom. If the Daily Show can make the politicization obvious, isn't it time to just admit the truth of it on a site dedicated to truthful talk about national security?

JC, good try at diverting the conversation here with your first comment. Won't work, but good try.

Ridge should not have made the comment he did. We could debate its accuracy, but it detracts from the effectiveness of the rest of his warnings.

That said, we all here are presumably adults concerned with the serious issues we all face. So go past that and look at the pattern of information we can discern in the news releases.

The reality is that Dean and other democrats reflexively started shouting "political" as soon as the selected threat elevation was announced. They didn't wait for Congressional leaders who were briefed on the intel to weigh in. There was no benefit of the doubt given at all, nor even a serious discussion of the ambiguities and balancing act involved in terror alert decisions.

Even worse, there's been a pattern of pre-emptive claims on the part of some Dems for a while now: Osama-in-the-White-House-basement kinds of nonsense.

I work every day with people involved in national security. I know perfectly well that no administration could keep that sort of thing secret for very long .... and so does this administration. The loss of credibility works both ways .... these voices have little credibility with me, based on my own personal knowledge and experience.

So let me throw the challenge back: when will we hear other Democratic leaders join Lieberman and Miller and make it clear that they are concerned about the very real, and probably long-term, terror threats we will face?

NB: 'threats' plural ... it's my own belief that world-wide tectonic shifts (geopolitical, cultural, economic, technological) will foster a variety of violent upheavals in the short and mid-term. We can have that discussion in another thread, if you like.

Despite your assumptions, JC, I'm not a Republican nor am I coming at these issues with a partisan intent. No question, though, that I bring to these stories my own experience: growing up in a blue-collar ethnic immigrant (and labor union) family, high tech career both as techie and as small company executive, wife of a military officer (now retired from active duty) and currently teaching at a military academy.

And do I need to remind people again not to assume that everyone in the military community shares the same political stance???

The important bit:

"Then some other officers came over with blue plastic suits on, put both suspects' arms into plastic bags. Their feet were then put into plastic bags and they were put in a white suit... and led away to an unmarked police car."

Preserving evidence of materials they'd come in to contact with?

If #26237 and #26238 were to be deleted, I'd appreciate it.

JC, good try at diverting the conversation here with your first comment. Won't work, but good try.

Sorry, JC. That was snarky. Understandable and perhaps warranted -- or not, in which case I apologize for the tone. OTOH, I get annoyed when accused of obvious bias ....

The NorK subs are off-topic here. If I have time later I'll try to post something on them, their likely condition and what's involved in converting them for use with the reported missiles being developed there. But let's keep this thread on topic.

Done, Colt.

Breaking on CNN:

Intelligence indicates suspected al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan “contacted” at least one person in the U.S. in recent months, sources tell CNN. Details soon.

Hat tip: Command Post

Much obliged, Robin.

You know, if I were AQ, I'd be driving truck bombs into grocery stores, packing C4 in garbage cans in food courts at shopping malls, and so forth. They're smart, but one thing that haven't realized is that our economic system is consumption driven. Striking at financial institutions in NYC and so forth are not as powerful as hitting the kind of everday symbols of American economic life.

Can you imagine how terrified Americans would be if shopping malls and grocery stores were suddenly targets? How much damage the resulting decline in spending would do to our economy?

praktike:

The infrastructure necessary to maintain that sort of pressure is immense. It would mean large numbers of bomb manufacturers, a system to indoctrinate 'martyrs', millions of dollars, etc.

colt-

they just have to hit a few, wait for a year or so, and strike again.

in other news, why was Laura Bush at the site of a potential terrorist attack?

The CNN breaking story is now posted:

Intelligence found in Pakistan suggests that suspected al Qaeda operatives in that country contacted an individual or individuals in the United States in the past few months, according to two senior U.S. government sources.

These officials would not characterize that communication.

But the sources also said there is other information from Pakistan that has led to investigations in the United States to uncover whether there are any individuals or terrorist cells plotting an attack on U.S. soil.

In addition, two senior Pakistani intelligence sources told CNN that there is evidence at least six individuals in the United States were contacted by Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, an alleged al Qaeda operative who was recently taken into custody in Pakistan. U.S. officials have not confirmed that information.

In short, it would mean a more widespread yet more discreet version of the terror network in the P.A. territories. You can't set that up without people noticing.

Praktike,

I agree with you. Those kinds of attacks would have been especially effective if they had occurred right after 911 and the anthrax attacks. Lee Harris addresses that in his book Civilization and Its Enemies. As someone who spent 20 years studying the interpretation and philosophy of texts, I have a theory for what it's worth. I don't think AQ types think about the big picture in strategic, linear terms though they are obviously good at practical planning for individual attacks. I believe they think in symbolic and poetic terms. They want to attack American economic and military power as it is embodied in concrete symbols recognized as such around the world. I beieve it's a sort of magical thinking. The kind of correspondence thinking that had medieval farmers copulating in their fields to increase the fertility of the fields.

Along those lines, it's worth considering the nature of Arabic as a language ... excellent for poetry, but very clumsy when dealing with abstract concepts of the sort common in, say, Western mathematics.

The Semitic language tenses aren't quite like those of IndoEuropean languages, either. We're used to a clear distinction between past, present and future. The Semitic languages, on the other hand, make a fundamental distinction between what has completed and what has not. When that happens in time is less important ....

Think about that next time you read that an Islamacist web site talks about restoring the glory of Al Andalus (which to us has not existed since 1492).

You know, if I were AQ, I'd be driving truck bombs into grocery stores, packing C4 in garbage cans in food courts at shopping malls, and so forth.

The underlying assumptions in that statement are that the audience for al Qaeda actions in this country is the American people and that the target is our economy. I don't believe either of these things. I believe the the audience is (mostly) Middle Eastern Muslims and the target is the Saudis. We're just collateral damage.

Citicorp as a target makes much more sense in that context.

AQ heavies have been quoted as saying that they wanted to hit our "economic center of gravity."

I take them at their word. Don't forget, also, that Bin Laden has a degree in economics. Now, it may be messed up Saudi economics, but it shows that he has a mind for these sorts of things.

Fred raises a good point, though, about the importance of symbols to these guys. Yet the economic damage caused by 9/11 was pretty substantial, no? What AQ may have failed to understand is that the US economy is remarkably resilient, and GDP actually goes up when disaster strikes (though after 9/11 the BEA adjusted its methodology somewhat to account for this).

I see a strategic logic, though, in infrastructure attacks in Iraq and Nigeria that will have repercussions in SA down the line.

They may not have a complete grasp on how the US economy works, but they're certainly trying to raise oil prices, depress the stock market, etc. And they have people putting together kind of freelance analyses and posting them on jihadi websites -- remember the Spain/Iraq paper?

"The underlying assumptions in that statement are that the audience for al Qaeda actions in this country is the American people and that the target is our economy."

Well, yeah. Their goal is to change US policy.

[Arabic is] excellent for poetry, but very clumsy when dealing with abstract concepts of the sort common in, say, Western mathematics.

You're aware, of course, that algebra and algorithm are both words of Arabic origin. Nor, I would point out, does Israel seem overly handicapped by a national language whose root vocabulary and grammar are similar.

It hardly matters, as I'm a (philosophical) conservative insomuch as I reject the "Language constructs reality" premise.

AQ heavies have been quoted as saying that they wanted to hit our "economic center of gravity."

It would be a fine strategy if we had one. I doubt that striking shopping malls would have the effect of crippling the American economy. It would probably make a lot of people mad, however.

You're aware, of course, that algebra and algorithm are both words of Arabic origin. Nor, I would point out, does Israel seem overly handicapped by a national language whose root vocabulary and grammar are similar.

Yes, those words come from Arabic roots. However, the concept of both algebra (in the symbolic sense we mean the word today) and algorithm (ditto) are not Arab / Islamic inventions at all. For a very detailed and scholarly analysis, read Jacob Klein's Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, which discusses the conceptual evolution of symbolic manipulation in mathematics during/after the Renaissance.

Re: Israel, it is sufficient to note that modern Hebrew was crafted by importing many new words -- and the people who did this in many cases were well educated in the Western tradition.

Nor, I would point out, does Israel seem overly handicapped by a national language whose root vocabulary and grammar are similar.

Although Arabic and Hebrew belong to the same language family, Hebrew had not been a vernacular language for a thousand years when the state of Israel was established. Modern Hebrew is a revenant and it's the only one. It's difficult to generalize from its example.

praktike

Can you imagine how terrified Americans would be if shopping malls and grocery stores were suddenly targets? How much damage the resulting decline in spending would do to our economy?

Perhaps you recall the incident of the snipers in the Washington DC Metropolitan area. I certainly do. Not only were people frantic they were just as upset at that time as they are about acts of terrorism now. Most however approached the problem with some sense of sanity and risk analysis.

The difference between the Washington DC area incident and A.Q. is that people were only interested in the problem of bullets from left field if and only if it was their neighborhood that was affected. As the area of sniper activity increased so did public awareness. In this regard terrorism and terrorist activity is no different.

Sure there were some worry warts and yes they had valid concerns everyday the snipers were on the loose but it didn't stop them from buying GAS. It made the local area residents more cognizant of their surroundings.

Think about this for a minute. Why would Mayberry RFD be concerned about what happens in NYC? I’ll bet my last dollar most of them could have cared much less about NYC prior to 9/11. So why should they care now? As tragic as it seems and yes the towers collapsed but Mayberry RFD for the most part (aside from emotional trauma) was unaffected. The majority of the people screaming about it or looking at it with serious consequences for inaction are those that have been affected or those that see it as a potential threat to their seemingly isolated way of life.

If anything Mayberry RFD is laughing at those who claim I need to know, I need to know, I need to know. and hh and BTW don’t tell me right now because it’s inconvenient.

Political pandering or not, the focus should be placed on terrorism and terrorist activity. The politics of dissemination of terrorist information in this regard has very little if any consequence when you consider the aftermath of an act of terrorism. Especially if it’s in your neck of the woods.

Robin points out that modern Hebrew was crafted with an influx of new import words by people skilled in Western modes of thought. It's deeper than that. The Jewish inventiveness comes not merely from a cadre of Western-educated Jews, but an ongoing dialogic mode of thought honed for centuries of Talmud study and disputation plus ongoing critiquing of all the cultures the Jews encountered in the last few thousand years, taking the useful elements, fitting them into the Torah context, and leaving the rest.

True enough ... as my fellow St. Johnnie attests by his own work. [smile]

Why couldn't Arabic borrow the same words? Hebrew, indeed, had further to go, having many more years to make up, as it were. Indeed, I very much doubt if Hebrew, with its small extant vocabulary, is an especially well-suited language for philosophy according to your criteria. In particular, does its verb tense structure differ from Arabic, and if so, when did it diverge? (I speak Hebrew, but not Arabic.)

I don't know Chinese, but I was once told its tense structure is extremely simple: would this be good or bad for use in philosophy and abstraction? How do Korean and Japanese fit into the linguistic theory of abstraction? We can hardly conclude from one example.

How did Averroës manage?

I am interested in why Western Europe "took off" in the 15th Century (approx), but grammar is a new one to me. My first reaction is somewhere between quizzical and skeptical.

Andrew, I (at least) am not arguing linguistic determination of thought in any absolute sense. Nevertheless, I will say that the language we use in common shapes our shared experience. One reason philosphy is hard to do well is that philosphers struggle to capture in their given language distinctions that are not commonly made.

Moreover, translation is a difficult art where important concepts are involved. Let me give a brief example: the opening verse of the Gospel of John.

En arche an ho logos - "in the beginning was the Word". But to unpack this is to find a great deal more being invoked, simply at the level of the words used.

Arche - 'beginning' in the sense of early in
time, yes, but more centrally, the root carries the strong meaning of "first in preeminence" and hence, "leader, ruler" - from whence the office of archon in classical Greek cities.

Logos - 'word', yes -- but more centrally, the root carries the strong meaning of speech and of the connectedness of meaning that makes language possible.

Now, a Jew reading this verse would immediately think of the Hebraic tradition in which YHWH usually speaks to his prophets (unlike the pagans who are seized by visions).

But an educated Greek of the 1st century AD would immediately remember that Euclid uses 'logos' to mean 'the relationship one can draw between things that are not directly comensurable with one another".

As Jacob Klein and others have pointed out, our modern tendency to assign number to lots of things is very foreign to classical mathematics. We say "the area of this figure is 4 sq. inches". But to the ancient Greeks, number (on the one hand) and area or length or similar continuous measures, on the other hand, are fundamentally different things that cannot be directly compared to one another. Therefore, Euclid would say (of our little example) that "the ratio of the number 4 to the number 1 is in proportion to the ratio of the area of this figure to the area of a unit figure". The inability to relate quantity to area or length was a major stumbling block that prevented the ancient Greeks and Romans from developing algebra.

Thus, while ordinary common people of the time would probably read 'logos' to mainly mean 'spoken word' or 'the meaning or meaninfulness behind words' or perhaps 'reason (as in rational thought)', an educated Greek of John's day would also have read 'logos' to mean that which brings otherwise incommensurable things into relationship with one another.

Which is a theme that then carries throughout that Gospel: that at the very center of meaning and truth - and first in pre-eminence among us - is the Christ who bridges the otherwise unbridgeable gap between God and man.

Are we poorer for having lost the richness of classical Greek concepts? In some ways, yes. On the other hand, by stripping away the deep belief in essential natures, in the eidei (forms) of which Plato talks, Western thought moved to an understanding of mathematics in which symbols can stand for unknown quantities or extents - and can relate them to one another directly. This gives rise to algebra, to Newtonian physics and the integral and differential calculus, and hence to the modern world around us. You and I now say "The area of this figure is 2.456 square inches" and we don't have any sense of how outrageous that would have been to Euclid.

I studied the foundations of mathematics seriously for about 5 years, and read Classical Greek authors in the original for about the same length of time. Only after that effort could I begin to feel some confidence that I was reading the ancient Greeks as they would have.

A similar difference of underlying concepts lies between the poetical thought of classical Arabic literature / religious teaching and the West's reduction of essence to symbols which can be manipulated by computers or rotely in e.g. algebra. I have some sympathy for those who love that Arabic tradition and who mourn the loss of rich poetic layers of meaning it echoes.

Were there Arab mathematicians who approached some of the insights that led to algebra, and later to the calculus etc? To a limited degree, yes: but the fundamental and deep move, of stripping mathematical language of layers of meaning and reducing it to symbols which can be manipulated without knowing the values to which they point, or even the nature of what is being measured -- that is a move that would require the creation of new meanings and assumptions in Arabic and the withering away of old ways of thinking.

Can it be done? Sure. Will it be easy? It certainly wasn't easy for the West to develop the concepts in the first place - it took centuries. It's less difficult to adopt the concepts once they have been articulated and developed into useful tools, as algebra and the calculus have been. But doing this wholesale, for instance, embedding Western math into the schools across the Arabic-speaking world, will in many ways require and produce a shift in deep conceptual patterns.

That's one reason, I think, that cognitive dissonance causes Western-educated engineers to adopt the most rigid Islamacist fundamentalism - they can learn to use the tools of mathematical computation, but the concepts are so starkly different from the culture in which they grew up that they are deeply torn. Like many of us, they then seek to reject the ideas and the world which challenges them so deeply ....

Wow. Marvelous post Robin.
Possibly an object lesson in why learning is never a waste of time :)

I wonder if there is any sort of reverse analogy with South Pacific "cargo cults". Instead of creating symbols in the hope of "magically" obtaining Western goods, the destruction of symbols to emphasise, and subconciously perhaps "magically" obtain, the rejection of Western contamination.

Though we cannot know what has been forestalled, there are a lot of moves al-Qaeda could have made if they had wanted to strike Western economies, but have not. Perhaps they are just dumb.

More likely, than either the economic or psychological/cultural explanations, IMHO, is that al Qaeda are primarily thinking as terrorists, i.e. politically, if at all.

So the preference is for dramatic, high-profile, preferably mass casualty, attacks which maximise publicity and political impact, particularly in the M.E.

Multiple minor attacks would probably have more economic and disruptive impact, but would likely appear unimpressive or aticlimactic to the target audience of Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11.
Also their main base has been eliminated, members captured or killed, networks disrupted, intelligence collected.

But though al Qaeda would like to match or top 9/11 if they could, I suspect they may feel an increasing need to mount some, amost any, sort of attack in the US (and UK).
They might be reaching the point where a handful of bombings would be "good enough", just to shoe they are still active and can reach beyond the Islamic world.
Which may be worrying for our security services.

For instance, Colt remarks, of Heathrow:
"Unless they have SAMs, it seems a strange target"
They don't need SAMs if they plan it through and have the people needed.
Though perhaps it's back to symbolism, or a nasty tradition. Arab terrorists appear to have had an obsession with planes since the 1970's, compared to other terrorist groups (e.g. the IRA).

[blush] Thanks, John.

John F, Your reverse analogy to the cargo cults is fascinating. I wish I'd thought of it. The Arab terrorists obsession with planes is interesting too. When you think about it, the planes symbolize a lot about the West. They are central to our economies; they can also represent military power (fighters, bombers etc). But maybe more importantly, they could represent the violation of nature by Western science (if man were meant to fly he'd have wings) and the arrogance and blasphemy of infidels reaching toward heaven. (All sheer speculation here. I know nothing of the Arabic language and not much more about Arab culture, having only read one or two books and articles on the subject and met a few Arab exchange students).

AJL, I'm completely with you on the philosophically conservative rejection of the Sapir-Whorf (sic?) hypothesis and other "language forms thought" theories. Nonetheless, you have to admit that our language does influence the way we perceive the concrete reality around us. Shelley wasn't completely wrong when he said, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

John F, good one on the reverse cargo cult. It adds a useful dimension.

Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology by Lee Harris will snap that thought into greater focus, and flesh out the full context.

I'm sure this comment to the post is too late in the game for anyone to read - but here it is anyway:

Mrs. Burk's post makes two claims:

1. Because of new captures, a lot of good information has been learned about Al Queda, and released to the public.
2. Secondarily and inferentially, this post also "exculpates" (maybe too strong a word?) the Bush administration timing of the release of this information - almost as an aside excusing the timing of the release of this information.

My own opinion, is that point number 1, I agree with - and agree that this is the priority, especially for the long-term.

Point number 2, I have disagreed with, as there are certain facts which make apparent the political positioning of what should NOT be political.

The following link from Washington Monthly lays out the groundwork:

Link here

Read the whole thing, as Kevin Drum summarizes this well.

Points to consider:

The opportunity cost of announcing the capture of Ghailani so early - see the New Republic article.

The strange spectacle of Laura Bush, AT one of the buildings at which warnings were increased - functioning in your normal meet and greet.

Do you really think that if there were a SERIOUS belief that attacks were imminent at this building, that Laura Bush would be there?

And yes, you could say "you go on with your normal schedule, and don't let fear rule". But come on - if it was serious, the trip could have been delayed.

That's it. Consider this a postscript.