Unclear and present danger

The public is still not fully aware of the gravity of the threat posed by Islamist extremists, Britain's anti-terror supremo says:

Britain's top counter-terrorist cop has no doubt the nature of the threat has changed dramatically. Peter Clarke, Scotland Yard's 51-year-old head of counter-terrorism, talks with quiet resolution about the challenge of Islamist terrorism and how it has turned British policing upside down. People often say to Clarke how well placed the British authorities must be to deal with Islamist terror given their long experience of Irish Republican Army killers. No, he responds emphatically. It's a whole new ball game with no defined rules of engagement or carefully delineated boundaries. "The current terrorist threat is almost the reverse of all those parameters," Clarke said in Canberra this week. "What we see is global in origin, global in ambition, global in reach. The networks are loose, they are fluid and they are incredibly resilient," Clarke told a security conference.

Defeating the threat demands a level of resources, including sustained surveillance, unprecedented in modern law enforcement. "Unless you have pace and scale on your side, you will fail to deal with these terrorist conspiracies that we are currently seeing," he stressed. Clarke tells Inquirer the threat posed by radical Islamists in Britain is growing in scale and complexity. "I think the only sensible conclusion is that it is ... because if you look at the pace of terrorist activity since 9/11, it's clearly unabated and there appears to be a consistency, almost a regularity, in the attack patterns. "I don't want to sound unnecessarily gloomy, but I don't see many positive signs in terms of it being diminished." He points out that British authorities have managed to foil four or five attacks in the past 12 months. But the "sad probability" is that another attack will get through at some time....

Clarke says Britain's experience of Islamist terror, including last year's London bombings and the recently thwarted plot to blow up airliners flying to the US, is driving far-reaching changes in the way police now operate. It used to be that police would only intervene in the final stages of a terrorist plot, making arrests at or near the point of attack, with the strongest possible weight of evidence to put before a court. However, Clarke says the scale of the threat means "we can no longer afford to wait until that moment". "It's a complete shift in scale. Mentally we have had to completely change our response in terms of interdiction and intervention to prevent an increased risk to the public."

Clarke says earlier action to pre-empt a mass casualty attack also dictates the need to engage closely with local communities as a key element of counter-terrorism strategy. He believes the British public is still not fully aware of the gravity of the threat posed by Islamist terror groups. This is despite the fact there are now 90 people awaiting trial on terrorism charges. "We have a whole series of trials which over the coming months and years will unfold in the UK. When that hard evidence is produced the public are able to see what has been planned over the last months and years, that will contribute to their understanding of the threat."

Clarke warns it is vital that the aviation industry examines the implications of the foiled plot for air travel. The plotters had been planning to smuggle liquid explosives on board several planes. "I can't go into details about the methodology except to say its very innovative. That will give a clue to the fact that now in response ... new protective measures are required. The methodology is such that there must be an enduring threat to air transport." So a serious threat to aviation safety remains which has to be addressed? "Absolutely," comes the reply.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Some blotted-out history: "It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: Slavery, Secession, Segregation and now Socialism. During the civil rights era of the 1960's, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools."

Alabama blacks unhappy with Donks: "Black Democrats will meet today to discuss their future with the state party and if they should support candidates with an "unacceptable agenda," a move one political analyst said could hurt the party in the Nov. 7 general election. The meeting is detailed in a letter by Alabama Democratic Conference Chairman Joe Reed to the leadership of the Alabama Democratic Conference and other party officials. A copy of the Sept. 12 letter obtained by the Montgomery Advertiser states the meeting in Prattville is dedicated to determining the "quality and status" of the group's relationship to the party and "whether it is in our best interest to continue to maintain our present relationship.... Although the letter questions whether the conference should endorse certain Democratic candidates, the meeting has "nothing to do" with the state party granting its nomination to state legislative candidate Patricia Todd, said Jerome Gray, the conference's field director. Todd is white and openly gay. She was chosen over Gaynell Hendricks, a black candidate".

Homosexuals Prey on Young Boys (Comment by Dick McDonald): "Don't give me any crap about the political correctness of my headline. I was reared in West Hollywood, CA and can tell you as a young blonde athlete of the many encounters I had with homosexuals trying to blow me. Luckily my girlfriend's father was the Chief Commander of the Hollywood Police Station and gave me simple hints how to handle their approaches. One of the simplest was to reply to their standard line "I hear there are a lot of fags in Hollywood" to a hitch hiker like me was by emphatically stating "Yeah I turned one in last night" whereupon the car would screech to a halt and the "fellow" would tell me he wasn't going "my way" anymore. He had to turn. So what do we have now? Representative Tom Foley (R), the Co-Chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, resigned today with the disclosure of sexually explicit e-mails he sent to a 16 year-old page and the hint that he has a history with other pages as well. Tom wrote the young page to inquire "Do I make you a little horny?" How sick is that? Apparently it was well known in Washington that Foley was light in the shoes. How he got to manage "exploited" children is a mystery; a serious management error by the Republican leadership. If you think about it, it is stranger than fiction. Democrat supporters of gay rights are going to forget their support temporarily, the political advantage is just too delicious."

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts on his usual themes of race, IQ and political correctness -- with particular emphasis on the British scene.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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