The Clipboard The Clipboard: The Strange Case of the Vanishing Terrorists

Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs Home
« U.S. judge blasts FBI case against Albany Muslims | The Clipboard archives | Protesting While Immigrant »
Trackbacks (0 in, 0 out) | 

Email this link | Print this article | RDF

Further Reading | Elsewhere | Search Options
Add this entry to your hotlist (View your hotlist)

The Strange Case of the Vanishing Terrorists

Date: August 25, 2004 | 8 Rajab 1425 Hijriah
Blog: The Clipboard
Subjects: antiterrorism
The French newspaper Liberation published a most interesting interview last week with Marc Sageman. Sageman is identified as a 51 year old American psychiatrist of French origins, and a terrorism specialist. He was formerly with the CIA, and directed Mujahadeen groups in Afghanistan during the eighties. He has created a data base with the profiles of 382 terrorists who claim to be from Al-Qaeda or other closely linked Islamist movements, and has been consulted by the Bush administration...

...Asked to comment on the administration assertion that Al-Qaeda has succeeded in preserving "certain elements of its centralized command structure," Sageman replies:

Al-Qaeda is a social movement, not a hierarchical organization. There's always a desire to communicate, to send messages by audio or video cassette...But this desire does not find expression on the ground. The Madrid, Casablanca, and Istanbul attacks were entirely conceived, planned, and realized at the local level. No order came from a centralized authority.

In other words, there is no serious Al-Qaeda command structure. Whatever capacity for centralized organization Al-Qaeda once possessed, that capacity has been seriously degraded. The Bush administration, of course, still prefers to promote on occasion the image of an Osama-led directorate, communicating with its minions and coordinating future campaigns of terror through cleverly coded audio tapes and internet messages. Or even, as G.W. might say, through "subliminable messages."

Sageman, on the other hand, seems to tell us that what is now left of Al-Qaeda is a diffuse social movement of local actors, still potentially dangerous, but with little coordination or capacity for major operations of the 9/11 sort. The vaunted "global reach" of Al-Qaeda is no longer in evidence. It is Sageman's impression that Al-Qaeda is over-estimated:

Because we want to prevent the worst. The authorities sound the alarm at the least incident. They send three FBI agents to the airport because some guy has simply forgotten to take a cutter out of his bag. Everything is considered suspect. The danger is that the security services can no longer recognize real signals that indicate something happening in the deluge of information - this "noise", as it is called. (link to original interview in French)

More commentary is available from the New Century Journal blog.
~ Posted by Al-Muhajabah, a fair and balanced niqabi, at 04:28 AM

Trackbacks

What is trackback?
You Pinged Me

Here's who's pinging me:

(no pings yet)


Further reading

Recent entries

The following is a list of the ten most recent entries in The Clipboard as of Mar 16, 2006:

View a list of all entries in The Clipboard

Related entries

This entry has been tagged as covering the following subjects: antiterrorism. The following is a list of the ten most recent entries in Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs that share any of these tags:

A semantic analysis of this entry also suggests the following keywords to search for related content on: social movement, command structure, bush administration, qaeda, Qaeda, Sageman, sageman, French, messages, centralized, french, administration, capacity, longer, still, interview, command, terrorists, desire, because, local, organization, movement, Bush, social

What links here: View a list of other entries in this blog (if any) that link to this entry

Deepen your understanding of the issue of terrorism by reading Controversial Issues About Islam: Terrorism.

Or look generally for informational pages on my website tagged with antiterrorism

Results of Semantic Search

A semantic search of Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs suggests the following as the ten entries most closely related to this entry:



Elsewhere

External resources

Check out other web pages (if any) that I've bookmarked via del.icio.us that share the same tags: antiterrorism

Explore reference materials from Answers.com about these subjects: antiterrorism

Read news stories at Common Times about these subjects: antiterrorism

View search results at gada.be metasearch service for these subjects: antiterrorism

Find books at Amazon.com on these subjects: antiterrorism

Other views

Want to see what other bloggers have to say about the article I cited above? Check these resources to see lists of blogs (if any) with entries that are about this article or have linked to it.

Check Waypath for blog entries generally related to this entry, or Technorati or Bloglines for blog entries that link to this entry.

Technorati tags: View blog entries, bookmarks and photos tagged by others with the same subjects as this entry:



Search options

     

For external resources on the topic of this entry, you can run a search for its title the strange case of the vanishing terrorists (Google, DayPop, Feedster) or keyword(s) antiterrorism (Google, DayPop, Feedster). DayPop is a search engine similar to Google that focuses on searching news sources and blogs. Feedster searches blogs via RSS feeds.

Home
Notice on copyrighted content: This entry in The Clipboard is arranged as follows: an excerpt is posted in italic text, followed by my commentary in Roman text. Below this is a horizontal bar. The first paragraph below the horizontal bar is a citation, followed by the full text of an article, in roman text. The excerpts and articles, as defined above, are copyright their authors. These materials are being copied here for educational and research purposes and to advance understanding, under the Fair Use section of U.S. Copyright Law. My commentary, as defined above, may be copied, displayed, or distributed for non-commercial purposes as long as you give me (Al-Muhajabah) proper attribution as the author.