Today is the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. AP quotes the commander of EU peacekeepers in Bosnia saying “the net is closing in” on the two men responsible for the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.
Nice, except that’s followed up by the dumbest quote I’ve seen this morning (it’s early yet): “It’s a bit like getting Osama bin Laden,” he said.
No, it’s not.
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This Financial Times article about the enormous quantity of photos received by news media associated with the London bombing. The BBC alone received “more than 1,000 still pictures of the unfolding events and 300 different bits of amateur video”. Helen Broaden – BBC director of news – is quoted as saying that “the gap between the professional and non-professional news gatherers is getting narrower”.
Another piece of evidence for this would be the growing interest in Blog postings, the London Times has a roundup. (Link from Tim Worstall).
Today is the tenth anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica. Nearly 8,000 people died. We will not forget.
It is also, by one of those rare coincidences, the day on which the trial of Mohammed Bouyeri – a Moroccan Dutch national who is accused of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh – opens.
This must be a hard day in the Netherlands.
Just in case everyone had forgotten, Luxembourg voted today in a referendum on the EU constitution. They voted yes, by 56.52% to 43.48% to be exact. Not that it changes much since Luxembourg has a population of just 465,000. Junker will soldier on as Prime Minister, and now someone else has to think up a good excuse for terminating the process, but that is about all you can say.
Speculation has begun about who exactly is behind the July 7th bombings. The Sunday Times names Mustafa Setmariam Nasar. The grounds for this is information allegedly received from Spanish authorities.
Nasar, who is Syrian,is thought to have been behind the March 11 bombings in Spain and is considered by Spanish intelligence to have established a ‘sleeper cell’ in the UK. Spanish police did arrive in London on Friday to assist in the enquiries, but there can be a variety of reasons for this.
The Sunday Telegraph also run the story:
“Ministers now believe that the bombings – which left at least 49 people dead in Britain’s worst terrorist attack – were the work of a “very, very small number” of individuals who arrived from mainland Europe or North Africa on false passports within the past six months.”
The Mail on Sunday and the News of the World run what may seem to be the rival theory of native born British involvement as detailed by a former Metropolitan Police Chief John Stevens. In fact the two ‘theories’ may simply form different parts of one single picture: Mustafa Nasar may be the brain, and the UK born participants (if they in fact are such) may well be those who placed the bombs. At this stage no combination is obviously ruled out.
Attentive readers of the link in this post yesterday will have noted that Mustafa Setmariam Nasar also goes under the name of Abu Musa?ab al-Suri, and under this name he apparently recently revealed that he is working on a manifesto for designing the future of jihad. According to the Jamestown Foundation in his vision of the future he calls for “a new holy war that employs nuclear, chemical and ?bacteriological? (biological) weapons, and dirty bombs”.
There is a consensus view emerging that the economic impact of last Thursday’s terrorist attack will be minimal. I beg to disagree: it *may* not be. The reasoning behind this is economic not WoT/political. The apparent stylised fact we are being offered is that “a look at previous terrorist attacks… suggests that any impact on the economy tends to be small and short-lived”. We are dealing with a class of incidents basically containing two prior members: New York, and Madrid. Now circumstances alter cases. No one will deny that these attacks constitute a *potential* shock to the economic system. The stock market impact is not the important one (this may well be described as ‘bounce’), the really important issue is consumer confidence. Now the US was in September 2001 bottoming out of a recession (the NBER officially declared the recession over in November 2001). Spain was in the middle of an ongoing housing driven boom of some magnitude, and this had sufficient momentum not to be driven off course. But the UK is on the edge of a possible precipice, one good shove can push it over, the risks here are much higher.
The starting point for a consideration of the issues raised would be Paul Krugman’s 2001 article: The Fear Economy. Let me be clear, I am not saying that anything is, or is not going to happen. I am saying that the risks of an economic consequence this time are greater. A lot depends on how quickly the culprits are caught, and how convincingly the ‘forces of order’ can persuade people that the situation is under control.
Those who want a break from all the introspection over terrorism could do worse than let their minds run free on the implications of what is happening in China and India, or puzzle about holiday destinations now that the euro is going down while some other destinations are evidently seeing the value of their money rise.
I?m grateful for the thought (and the information and the links) that have gone into recent posts by my co-blogger Edward. I find myself disagreeing with him about only one thing: That the London bombing will (or should) lead to a major change in the way we see things, or to the West?s anti-terror strategy in particular.
I certainly don?t support aspect of Western leaders? anti-terror strategy, although I?ve been a proponent of a global war on terror since 2001. (I think the war in Iraq has turned out pretty disastrously, for instance.) So yes, I think something should change. I?m just not sure what the London bombings have to do with it.
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I am emphasising and emphasising, and emphasising over again: following what has been happening in Spain is important to understand *one* of the evolution pathways of radical Islam in Europe. Unfortunately most of the relevant material is in Spanish. Googling I found this. I cannot vouch for the source, but the information contained in the article conforms with my general understanding. One or two extra points:
I had missed the fact Castells appeared before the 11M commission. I think it important that network theorists are involved in strategic thinking. I think the idea that there are simply a fixed quantity of terrorists to be eliminated is absurd, and those who argue this kind of view probably commit themselves to something like the ‘lump of labour‘ fallacy.
Secondly illegal immigration is a really important issue. This phenomenon probably explains this sentence in the link: “The apparent ease with which foreign jihadists motivated Spanish Muslims to radicalize their religious beliefs and recruit them for suicide operations in Iraq illustrates a demographic and ideological shift among Spanish Muslims”.
Following this up, illegal immigration is the perfect cover for such activities as those who are in this situation have almost minimal contact with the value system of the ‘host’ society, and may experience many of its less desireable features. The Italian authorities seem to be taking this possibility seriously.
The bus bomb puzzle.