Go Back   Professional Soldiers ® > UWOA > Terrorism

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 01-23-2010, 09:11   #1
LongWire
Quiet Professional
 
LongWire's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: N.E.WA
Posts: 1,137
UK terrorist threat level raised to 'severe'

Quote:
UK terrorist threat level raised to 'severe'

The UK terror threat level is being raised from "substantial" to "severe", Home Secretary Alan Johnson has said.
The new alert level means a terrorist attack is considered "highly likely". It had stood at substantial since July.
Mr Johnson refused to say it was linked to the failed Detroit airliner bombing, and said the government would not reveal specific intelligence details.
The home secretary stressed there was no intelligence to suggest a terrorist attack was imminent.
'Real threat'
The decision to raise the threat level was made by the UK's Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC).
Mr Johnson said JTAC kept the threat level under constant review, making its judgments based on a broad range of factors including the intent and capabilities of international terrorist groups in the UK and overseas.
He said: "We still face a real and serious threat to the UK from international terrorism, so I would urge the public to remain vigilant and carry on reporting suspicious events to the appropriate authorities and to support the police and security services in their continuing efforts to discover, track and disrupt terrorist activity."

The home secretary said the new level meant people needed to be "more aware".
He said the decision to raise the threat level was not specifically linked to the failed Christmas Day bomb attack on a plane bound for Detroit or to any other incident, he said.
Mr Johnson said: "We never say what the intelligence is and it would be pretty daft of us to do that."
He added: "It shouldn't be thought to be linked to Detroit or anywhere else for that matter."
But the UK had not reached the highest threat level of "critical", which would mean an attack was imminent.
Mr Johnson said: "We have a very adept and very focused counter-terrorism facility in this country, which consists of many police officers as well as security officers, so the public should be reassured by that."
'More vigilant'
Lord Carlile, the government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said the change was designed to make the public more aware, not to scare people.
He said: "The government has quite rightly decided that if you don't tell the public to be vigilant, they're not going to be vigilant.

"The message from the current change of assessment is not that we should be more afraid, but that we should be a little bit more vigilant than we have been.
"It is crucial that the public report to the police anything suspicious they see."
But the chairman of the home affairs sub-committee on counter-terrorism, the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, criticised Mr Johnson's decision not to tell the public why the threat level had been increased.
Mr Mercer said: "Key targets - the energy sector, the transport sector - who are told individually what is going on and have access to a certain amount of intelligence, it will be helpful for them.
"It would be so much more helpful, though, if only the public knew what it meant. At the moment it is merely vacuous."
Security plan
The US Department of Homeland Security said the move meant the UK would be on a similar level of alert to America.
In a statement it said: "The UK is raising their measures to effectively where we are with the airport security measures that we have taken and announced over the last few weeks.
"We have enhanced our security measures and communicated specific information to industry, law enforcement and the American people."
Mike Granatt, a former head of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, said the move would have an effect both on the public and behind the scenes.

"The main reason for alert states is to warn people who have a specific task that they ought to do something differently, they ought to be taking more steps or they ought to move to a different phase of the security plan," he said.
"It also raises awareness among the public to keep their eyes open, and one shouldn't forget that the millions of pairs of eyes of the public are an extremely useful weapon in the fight against terrorism."
BBC home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford said the perceived threat from Yemen since the Christmas Day attempted attack may be one factor behind the decision to raise the threat level.
But he added there might be additional factors which have not been revealed by the government.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced on Wednesday that direct flights between Yemen and the UK were to be suspended over fears about their safety.
The change in threat level comes days ahead of two major international conferences, on Yemen and Afghanistan, in London on Wednesday and Thursday.
There are five levels of terror threat, ranging from low - meaning an attack is unlikely - to critical, when an attack is expected imminently. Severe is the second-highest level on the scale.
The threat level was first made public on 1 August 2006, when it was set at severe.
It was raised to critical on 10 August that year after a series of arrests over an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic aircraft but lowered to severe again the following week.
The threat level was last at critical in June 2007, following the attack on Glasgow Airport and the failed car bombings in central London.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8476238.stm
__________________
"Most of us here can attest that we never took the easy way. Easy just is............easy. Life is a work in progress, and most of the time its a struggle." ~ Me

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

"A Government that is losing to an insurgency is not being outfought, it is being out governed." Bernard B. Fall
LongWire is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-24-2010, 09:29   #2
98G
bonum medicina malis locis
 
98G's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Blue Ridge, GA and Orlando, FL
Posts: 305
UK Telegraph: Al-Qaeda has trained female suicide bombers to attack West

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/de...ials-warn.html

Looks like they assume we will profile.

Quote:
Al-Qaeda terror cells have trained a group of female suicide bombers to attack Western targets, US officials have warned.

By Phil Sherwell, in New York and Sean Rayment, Security Correspondent
Published: 8:30PM GMT 23 Jan 2010

The women, who may have a "non Arab" appearance and be travelling on Western passports, have been prepared for their missions by the Yemeni group responsible for the operation to blow up an airliner over the United States on Christmas Day.
Details of the bombers emerged just hours after British spy chiefs raised the UK threat state to "severe" amid fears that al-Qaeda was planning a wave of attacks against western targets.


Lahore attack heralds spread of Taliban-trained groups to Pakistani heartlands
Terror experts within the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, a unit of MI5, now believe that an attack against the UK is "highly likely".

US law enforcement agents have been told to be on the lookout for female suicide bombers who may attempt to enter the country.

At least two are believed to be connected to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula which dispatched underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who tried unsuccessfully to bring down a transatlantic airliner over Detroit.
Richard Clarke, a former chief White House counter terrorism adviser, said: "They have trained women.

"There are others who are still out there who have been trained and who are clean skins – that means people who we do not have a record of, people who may not look like al-Qaeda terrorists, who may not be Arabs, and may not be men."
Security sources said that it was "inevitable" that al-Qaeda would eventually turn to using women with a western appearance to carry out suicide attacks.
Officials said that airliners and all forms of transport could be targeted as well as sports stadiums, ports and power stations.

Although female suicide bombers have been used to carry out attacks by al-Qaeda in Iraq and Palestinian groups in Israel, none are thought to have been used against European or US targets before.

It has also emerged that two male Arab nationals were refused permission to board planes from Heathrow Airport to the United States earlier this month after their names appeared on a US "no fly list".

The first incident happened last Saturday when British officials refused to allow an Egyptian man permission to fly on American Airlines flight 113 from Heathrow to Miami.

The following day a Saudi Arabian passenger was stopped from boarding United Airlines flight 929 to Chicago. Officials said the man was sent back to Saudi Arabia by British immigration officials.

Both men were denied permission to board the US-bound flights after their names were "flagged" as being linked to potential Islamist terror groups.

Washington officials said the men were part of a surge of people named on its "no fly" list who have attempted to board flights to or in the US in recent days.

In two other cases involving people on the no-fly list, a man in Nairobi, Kenya was kept off a flight last Sunday that would have connected in Amsterdam to Dallas, and a passenger attempting to fly on an American Airlines flight to Los Angeles was stopped in Saint Maarten, in the Caribbean, before he could board a connecting flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico.

American officials say there were two additional incidents, in Minneapolis and in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in which people on the no-fly list were denied boarding, questioned and then allowed to leave the airport without being detained.
Mr Clarke, who was talking to ABC news in the United states, added: "What we don't know is whether this is because everyone is doing a better job of enforcing the no-fly list, or because the list has been expanded, or because the terrorists are attempting to probe our security."

A US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations report has also revealed that around 70 American citizens, some ex-convicts, have disappeared into Yemen and Somalia and pose a Jihadist threat to the US.

The latest revelations follow the decision by the Joint Terrorism Analysis centre (JTAC), which is based at MI5's headquarters in London, to raise the UK threat state from substantial to severe – a move which indicates that a UK-based attack is now "highly likely".

The threat is believed to come from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular. Whitehall sources said that the group had demonstrated that it had both the "intent and capability" to mount an attack against a western target.

The decision to raise the threat level was made following briefings to the Prime Minister by the heads of the security services MI5, MI6 and Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), the covert listening agency, and a meeting of the Government's Cobra emergency committee.

It is understood that the threat state was raised because of the increases in "terrorist chatter" picked up by GCHQ in the last month – a development corroborated by officials on Capitol Hill.

World Foreign ministers are preparing to meet in London this week for two conferences to discuss the threat of terrorism in both Yemen and Afghanistan.
But Whitehall sources were insistent that there was no specific intelligence which suggested that either conference was a potential target.

Announcing the raise in threat level, Alan Johnson said on Friday night that "there is no intelligence to suggest than an attack is imminent".

He added: "We still face a real and serious threat to the UK from international terrorism so I would urge the public to remain vigilant and carry on reporting suspicious events to the appropriate authorities and to support the police and security services in their continuing efforts to discover, track and disrupt terrorist activity."

But Patrick Mercer, the Tory chairman of the Commons Counter Terrorism Sub Committee, described the governments warnings as "vacuous".
He said: "Without any information about what to do or how to do it, then informing us of the threat level is meaningless."

Gordon Brown warned earlier this week that "a number of terrorist cells are actively trying to attack Britain and other countries."

His speech to the House of Commons came after he received a briefing on the latest intelligence at a meeting of the Cabinet's National Security Committee.
Mr Brown said the failed attack over Detroit signalled "the first operation mounted outside Arabia by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."

He also talked about the increased threat from Somalia in east Africa and the Sahel in West Africa, adding that there would be a greater degree of intelligence sharing with foreign countries.

Abdulmutallab, who tried to set off a bomb in his underwear, has warned his FBI interrogators that up to 20 "more like me" may be preparing further attacks.
__________________
SEMPER VIGILIS

The two easiest things to spend; someone else's time and someone else's money.
98G is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
 
Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump



All times are GMT -6. The time now is 08:53.



Copyright 2004-2022 by Professional Soldiers ®
Site Designed, Maintained, & Hosted by Hilliker Technologies