Ginna — It seems that the easiest way for our intelligence community to do this is just to ignore any relevant information. We in Britain have just learnt that the police were informed a couple of years before the 7/7/05 terrorist attacks on London about the suicide group’s existence and intentions, from a programmer who was helping them create a web-site. It seems that despite repeated attempts to inform the police authorities, this man was ignored. He was first interviewed after the fatal attacks.

After all, ordinary citizens had no idea BP or anything like it was going on until years (20? 30?) after the war.

Keep in mind that one of the biggest problems in intelligence is knowing something, and figuring out how to act on it without the other side realizing how you knew what they were up to.

Go well,

– Peter

We don’t agree. I think that both groups of people — present-day Islamic suicide bombers and 16th-century Catholic Jesuit martyrs — are (or were) sincere people of faith. Your comment expresses my point exactly: that we present-day westerners have difficulty understanding such deep faith, and such people. To call them nihilists or accuse them of suffering mental illness just shows how inadequate is our conceptual framework and hence reveals our lack of understanding. Mis-understanding doesn’t help identify effective solutions to the problems caused by their violent actions, or help us identify likely future recruits to their cause.

Since my ealier comment, I realized we have another recent example in western societies of violent political action: the various left-wing groups which engaged in violent direct action from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. For instance, the Weather Underground (in the USA), the Baader-Meinhof Group (Germany), the Red Brigades (Italy), the Nihon Sekigun (Japan), and the Angry Brigade (UK). These people had legitimate political ends and most members were certainly not insane. Most of their fellow citizens disagreed with their political ends (usually the overthrow of capitalism), and with their use of violence to achieve those ends.

If we want to solve the problems of suicide bombers and groups engaged in violent direct action (whether religious-based or not), it behooves us to first understand the motivations and drivers of the people involved. To do this, IMHO, requires some empathy, however distasteful this may be.

“They are jealous, conceited and not able to socialize or fit into many aspects of culture. Doesn’t matter whose culture it is, they are typically disaffected youth then when older narcissist shows up more and obviously they even want to compete and steal the thunder at houses of worship.”

Western society has been here at least twice before. Once, in the 19th century, when a wave of anarchist bombings took place across Europe and the US, and only ended with the First World War. Even in far-off New South Wales in the 1880s, anarchists became a political movement to be reckoned with, until a clever Government gave away free land (thus dispersing them) and their leaders took the stongest supporters to found an anarchist colony in Paraguay (the New Australia settlement).

And, before that, in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, when an oppressed Catholic underground engaged in activities which the English Government interpreted as subversive, and which led to widespread arrests, fines, acquisition of their property by the State, removal of their childen, torture, long-term imprisonment, and public executions. I think there are very strong similarities between modern-day suicide bombers and the Elizabethan Jesuits willing to be martyrs for their faith. One of the similarities is that in both cases we sophisticated westerners fail to understand their mentality, their motivations or their beliefs and attitudes. Yet, most of the Catholic martyrs were not loners, nor jealous, nor disaffected, nor narcisstic, nor conceited, nor any of the adjectives Candy uses. They WERE devout religious believers and felt that the ends (eternal grace versus eternal damnation) justified the means (eg, placing bombs in the basement of the Houses of Parliament). I was raised as a Catholic to believe they were correct to think this.

So, I would add a good Elizabethan recusant historian to your multi-disciplinary team, Grant.

Now there is a separate threat, as noted by many of the commenters, from AQ-inspired but not linked groups. The downside is that these guys are hard to find. The upside is that they aren’t as competent as the original AQ cadre and so are easier to catch. There is little evolutionary pressure on them to get better, either, because getting caught ends the learning and reproduction process. (Plus, there’s the whole suicide thing, which reduces intergenerational transmission of knowledge, but doesn’t help us much because most of the suiciders aren’t the brains of the operation these days.)

So we’re going to get hit by some of these guys when they get lucky. But I don’t think getting info off the Internet is equivalent training to going through camps with personal instructor contact (I’m a skeptic on university distance learning, too), so the threat level will be lower overall. The problem is going to be when new infrastructure gets set up somewhere else, whether Somalia or the wilds of Montana.