"Something doesn't quite compute. The law of averages would indicate the near-certainty of terrorist sleeper cells in the United States. The FBI, with 12,000 agents for 300 million people, is roughly comparable to Britain's counter-terrorism MI5 that employs 2,400 agents for 60 million people (scheduled to rise to 3,500 next year). But MI5 has a wider and deeper writ. Admittedly, the FBI's cultural shift has been arduous work. Door-kicking crime investigations that lead to the arrest of bad guys are a different adrenaline rush than the patient and diligent collection of intelligence that may uncover the next 9/11. The new mission also includes what is officially denied: racial and religious profiling. The Brits would be nowhere without it.
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate Committee this week, "We are actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting." Former CIA chief George Tenet, promoting his new book "At the Center of the Storm," says al-Qaida's nuclear threat is "real." In the spring of 2003, "senior al-Qaida leaders were negotiating for the purchase of three Russian nuclear devices." And Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted he could not account for all of Moscow's 10,000 nuclear weapons.
Both the FBI and MI5 and allied agencies know they are working against the clock. " De Borchgrave
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In this column Arnaud De Borchgrave has put his finger on something that has been bothering me. I think it is true that the Muslim "community" in the United States is better assimilated than those in Europe. The USA is not the homeland of an ethnic people like the Germans or Spanish. That tends to make emergence from the closed communities typically inhabited by new arrivals easier as well as absorption into the larger population. That promotes a rapid "disappearance" into American life over a couple of generations. Greater economic opportunity in the world's biggest economy helps with this process.
Nevertheless, as De Borchgrave writes, the odds are against a complete absence of "sleeper cells" in the United States. Surveillance of potential action groups is imperfect at best and often completely absent. The Islamic faith in the minds of the great majority of believers does not encourage attacks on a society like that of the United states which does not threaten Islam. At the same time we must remember that Islam is a religion of laymen. There are no truly definitive lines of authority in the faith and religious opinions are largely derived from the consensus (ijma') of a group of the faithful. Any particular opinion can be challenged by the learned (ulema') but that does not mean that the challenged opinion will not retain legitimacy and force in the minds of the group that share it.
What that means is that, a small and disaffected group could decide to take violent action however much the larger Islamic community might disapprove.
We should not take this possibility lightly. pl
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