Connecting the dots with the Charlie Hebdo terrorists
All three perpetrators in the recent terror attacks in France—the two Kouachi brothers at Charlie Hebdo, Coulibaly at the kosher market—were known to French authorities. And not just known, but well known to be jihadis who supported the Islamic terrorist cause. They also knew each other, and Cherif and Coulibaly had been convicted of terrorist-related offenses and had served time for them.
Said, the elder of the Kouachi brothers, spent several months in Yemen in 2011, receiving weapons training and working with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to U.S. officials.
His younger brother, Cherif, has a long history of jihad and anti-Semitism, according to documents obtained by CNN. In a 400-page court record, he is described as wanting to go to Iraq through Syria “to go and combat the Americans.”…
Cherif was a close associate of Coulibaly, a Western intelligence source told CNN.
Here’s a lengthy article about their known ties, both to each other and to other terrorists. It’s an impressive list. Read the whole thing and you’ll end up wondering, as the author of the article does, how they could possibly have slipped through the radar screen:
It’s not as if, 10 years ago, the threat posed by these young men was unrecognized. “Those who aren’t dead and who come back will be the future chiefs of al Qaeda or Zarqawi in Europe,” French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard said at the time. But then, as now, there was no clear way to end it.
In Kouachi’s case, the court sent him to prison from January 2005 to October 2006, and there he began a new stage in his radicalization in the company of a new mentor, Djamel Beghal, who had plotted an attack on the U.S. embassy in Paris in 2001. After Kouachi got out, he was accused of joining a plot to free one of the most notorious terrorists held in France, Smaé¯n Aé¯t Ali Belkacem, who is serving a life sentence for his role organizing the bombing of a commuter train in central Paris in 1995.
It goes on, and on, and on. Why is it so hard to regard people like this as ticking time bombs who must be deported (if non-citizens), watched like hawks if they haven’t yet committed a crime and are citizens, or put away for a long, long, long time if they have committed one*? Why aren’t crimes of terrorism given penalties that are longer than a year or two, which is obviously way too short?
The fact that there may be too many of these people in a country like France (or the US, for that matter) to properly monitor them is no excuse whatsoever. Two of these three people were actually in the prison system and were then let out prematurely, and that could be seen even without the hindsight of knowing what they were about to do subsequently.
[NOTE: *I also have written a lengthy post arguing that in some cases, citizens who join terrorist causes should be stripped of their citizenship.]
Let’s see. Aggressive non-assimilation, apartheid, extra-territorial enclaves (no go zones), cultural supremacism, social intolerance, inferiority angst, grievance mongering, psychopathic misogyny, female genital mutilation, honor killing, gay, Jew, and kafir (blacks) hatred; censorship, violence, antipathy to science, education, invention, art, music, free will, creation, and God; anhedonic in all aspects of the pleasures of life excepting barbaric cruelty; pretensions to religion, demands for religious freedom and protections while denying same to all others; and known ties to other terrorists, along with indictments and convictions for attempted terrorism. Dots! What dots? You see dots? Islamophobe.
Why is it so hard to regard people like this as ticking time bombs who must be deported (if non-citizens), watched like hawks if they haven’t yet committed a crime and are citizens, or put away for a long, long, long time if they have committed one*?
Do you not realize that the Leftist alliance and Islamic Jihad are allies? Why would they put their reliable votes and cultural invasion force in jail? They can’t rape the culture or take it over, then, nor can they vote for socialist parties. What would be the point of importing them in to fight a race war against the locals, from the Left’s pov?
At the BBC: Charlie Hebdo attack: A French intelligence failure?
It’s by a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and worth a read. It basically says the answer isn’t clear-cut. One thing that struck me was this:
That sounds so pre-9/11. Very worrisome.
Why isn’t it a felony to associate with or support known terrorist groups. A very long mandatory sentence to a prison that served pork would perhaps act as a bit of a deterrent.
One other connection I saw mentioned this morning on CNN: Said Kouachi, who was studying Arabic grammar, shared a small apartment with the ‘underwear bomber’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for one to two weeks in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/m6e2c3b
Guess we can stop it with the claims that each of the attacks are just crazed lone wolves.
or put away for a long, long, long time if they have committed one
10% of the French are Muslim. And 60% of the jailed in France are Muslim. Finishing school.
Ymarsakar:
Yes, I realize the left would be completely against my suggestions. But the left is not the majority in this country—not yet, anyway.
Claire Berlinski of the Manhattan Institute is in France and said she witnessed the terror attack. She had a very interesting conversation wight the guys off Powerline podcast, remember those Neo?
Anyway, her critic of the French police is not pleasant. I loved her tenacity, she pulls no punches.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/01/the-power-line-show-episode-7-claire-berlinski-reporting-from-paris.php
But the left is not the majority in this country–not yet, anyway.
The way the Left works is via infiltration, at best, and slaughter via totalitarian force later. So all it takes is that the leaders be corrupted. The people may just be clueless, they don’t actually matter much in the strategic level.
Currently the Left has almost total control of the police unions, the teacher’s unions, and so forth. There was the AFL CIO merge, I believe, which appointed certain new leaders. Those new leaders were Leftists, primarily. It took some years for them to get the police departments militarized, corrupt, and more incompetent, with the help of DHS, so the solution is ongoing for control.
It will only get harder to enforce law and order, because the Left plays both sides of the fence. They support the criminals in order to obtain a pretext to control the police forces. They make the police forces crush the insurgents, in order to promote more criminal passion. They benefit from such. The same strategy is used with Islam, they promote Islamic violence and then use the backlash to stomp down on Christians and Jews.
This makes it harder to enforce law and order.
The Gaystapo, another Leftist faction, goes around looking for baker discrimination against gay weddings. IN order to heighten the differences and freeze people personally, so that they take damage.
Neo: “you’ll end up wondering, as the author of the article does, how they could possibly have slipped through the radar screen”
Structural limitation. The difference between a law enforcement approach to terrorism and a counter-terrorism approach to terrorism is the difference between prosecution and prevention.
A succinct explanation is provided here by a retired CSIS agent (Canadian equivalent of the CIA) who investigated the 1985 Air India 182 attack:
http://youtu.be/yS_4ZNa1ByI?t=16m30s
Like the Paris attack, the Air India 182 perpetrators were known and under surveillance.
The whole documentary (1:30 long) provides useful insight on the difficulty of counter-terrorism, more so the law enforcement approach to counter-terrorism.
Some Americans did tell the anti war profiteers and the Europeans that fighting terrorists in the ME would be better than the alternatives. It looks like people refuse to believe things when it is easy for them. They’ll have to deal with the consequences now when it is harder.
What does Hilary say? She’s good at empathizing.