Neptunus Lex

There’s a lot moving and shaking over in the UK. Hard on the heels of news that an Islamist cell intending to kidnap a British Muslim soldier and behead him on video had been broken up, the UK papers are trumpeting that this was no home-grown plan, but rather an AQ-inspired plot:

ISLAMIC terror cells in Britain have been instructed to carry out a series of kidnappings and beheadings of the kind allegedly planned by the nine terrorist suspects arrested in Birmingham last week.

The “strategic” assassination instruction was issued by Al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Iraq to dozens of their followers in this country. It was uncovered by MI5 last autumn, senior security sources say.

As a result police are on standby for multiple attempts by terrorists to kidnap and then behead people across Britain. MI5 is conducting a counter-terrorism surveillance operation to prevent such an attack.

The alleged attempt to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier or soldiers in Birmingham was just the first of a series of planned attacks, security sources say.

The revelation explains the recent deployment of a permanent SAS unit to London. The unit has been placed on 24-hour standby to respond to a terrorist attack in the capital. It would aim to carry out a hostage rescue mission within minutes of being alerted.

This at least shows a quicker cycle of learning than the 7/7 bombings of two years ago, during which politicians and pundits of every stripe contorted themselves at first to deny the possibility of any foreign sponsorship of their homegrown terrorists: Life would be much simpler if it had just been a case of disaffected youths and copycat tactics. The competing notion - that a committedly multi-cultural Britain might have nursed a post-colonial viper to its bosom - was an unwelcome one. Reality has a way of beating on the door however, and the dramatic evidence of a Pakistani connection to the bombers disabused those who hoped to believe that the attack was an aberration.

Britain’s political class may be engaged right now in a frenzied bout of fiddling while the capital burns, but there are still hard-edges in the security services and military that are fiercely resistant to wear. The SAS are exceptionally professional operators, and the detachment of a permanent unit to the London environs shows that the threat is being taken seriously. An interesting question has been raised as to whether the nine men arrested in Britain last week had any connections to a similarly lurid plot exposed last year in Canada.

Domestic voices are being raised too, claiming that things have gone too far, and perhaps this is a bad time to be brown in Britain. It’s worth keeping in mind that this kind of terror plot is not linked so much towards a political goal - middle England will not be cowed, and Al Qaeda cannot hope to rule Britania - but rather to inflict retributive pain. A security crackdown that further radicalizes a disaffected and disenfranchised minority is only a side benefit to those who answer perceived humiliations with televised throat cuttings and suicide bombs.

Still, a ounce of introspection to leaven the pound of indignation would be welcome.

In related news, a British army detachment is using the counter-terrorism experience garnered during The Troubles to root out Al Qaeda in Iraq:

Deep inside the heart of the “Green Zone”, the heavily fortified administrative compound in Baghdad, lies one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the war in Iraq. It is a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit that goes by the deliberately meaningless name of the Joint Support Group (JSG), and it has proved to be one of the Coalition’s most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror.

Its members - servicemen and women of all ranks recruited from all three of the Armed Forces - are trained to turn hardened terrorists into coalition spies using methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles, when the Army managed to infiltrate the IRA at almost every level. Since war broke out in Iraq in 2003, they have been responsible for running dozens of Iraqi double agents.

Working alongside the Special Air Service and the American Delta Force as part of the Baghdad-based counter-terrorist unit known as Task Force Black, they have supplied intelligence that has saved hundreds of lives and resulted in some of the most notable successes against the myriad terror groups fighting in Iraq. Only last week, intelligence from the JSG is understood to have led to a series of successful operations against Sunni militia groups in southern Baghdad.

Plenty enough to keep Britania busy.