Al-Qaeda-linked, or ideologically linked? The continuing focus on Al-Qaeda is misleading. That group could disappear altogether and the jihad ideology would remain (which, of course, is not to say that AQ was not behind the bombings). From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
LONDON — London police have three suspects in custody after last week's failed terrorist strikes but say they are looking for many more because investigators now believe a wide network of Al Qaeda-linked operatives staged the attacks.The network they are trying to roll up could include bomb makers and those who coached the young homicide attackers before their mission, according to police.
Investigators were also pursuing leads that seemed to indicate a link between the unsuccessful attacks on July 21 — when bombs only partially detonated — and the homicide bombings two weeks earlier which killed the four bombers and 52 other people.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said he believed Al Qaeda terrorists were involved in both attacks.
"The way in which Al Qaeda operates is not a sort of classic cell structure," Blair told Britain's Sky News television on Sunday. "It has facilitators, so we're looking for the bomb makers, we're looking for the chemists, we're looking for the financiers, we're looking for the people who groomed these young people, so it will be a wide network that we're trying to penetrate."
Asked if the two attacks were connected, Blair said "we have no proof that they are linked, but clearly there is a pattern here."
The failed attacks on 7/21 were Al-Qaida "wannabees". Sheik Al-Sharm...That's Al Qaida. They thrive on the spectacular. They are muderously effective and it makes me sick!
Solemn discussions of whether this or that attack is to be linked to, attributed to, Al Qaeda are largely a waste. They make Infidels believe that there is one organization, Al Qaeda, and that somehow if that organization is destroyed, all manner of things shall be well. This contributes to misunderstanding.
It does not matter if it was something we call Al Qaeda, or Hezbollah, or Laskar Jihad, or Lashkar-e-Toiba, or a thousand other groups or groupuscules, or even a bunch of mates who decide to teach the Infidels a lesson by mass-murdering them. What matters is the ultimate source of the beliefs and attitudes that all of these people, and many more who support or defend them, or who by their misrepresentations help to prolong Infidel innocence, and hence Infidel susceptibility to future attacks and other instruments of the Jihad that is being conducted everywhere it can be, everywhere it is not ruthlessly suppressed (as it is in Xinjiang, for example, by methods that includ the swamping of the Uighur population by non-Muslim Han).
The same absurdity tied the government up in knots as it tried to link "al Qaeda" to agents of Saddam Hussein. Maybe Atta met someone in Prague; maybe he didn't. It doesn't matter. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a menace -- a Muslim menace. It could not be permitted to obtain certain kinds of weaponry. For that weapoonry, if not used by the regime itself (Ba'athism is not in opposition to pan-Islamism, but rather, a variant upon it, convenient for Alawites and Sunnis in majority-Shi'a Iraq, alike, as an alternative to straight-from-the-mosque Islam).
But since Bush, Rice, and company cannot bring themselves to discuss Islam, and seem incapable of figuring out how allusion and synecdoche can be drafted into rhetorical service, they are now stuck with "an evil ideology" even as they continue to prate, as Stephen Hadley did, aobut the "proud religion" of Islam, and the usual remarks that are made which continue to misinform the American public (but who cares if the American public remains misinformed about Islam, just as long as we don't offend Muslims in any way? And even if that misinforming of the public prevents that same public from being able to intelligently judge the efficacy and wisdom of remaining in Iraq, who cares? What matters are what Muslims think, and the American public can continue to be deluded or misinformed.)
You would have to be as essentially stupid as that Scheuer fellow, the simpleton, with his quickness to see quasi-Zionist conspiracies as well (and someone who suffers from that mental pathology is unlikely to free himself from the idea that the Arabs and Muslims are only reacting to a particular grievance -- Israel's "occupation" or Isarel's mere existence -- rather than to every perceived act by Infidels, whether foreign or domestic, that stands in the way of Muslim demands, Muslim desires, and ultimate Muslim goals, which are not fabricated by Al Qaeda, but to be found in the canonical texts of Islam, in the standard works of Qur'anic commentators and Muslim theologians, and which have been demonstrated, again and again, in the long history of Islamic conquest, and attempts at conquest, over time (1350 years) and through space(from Spain to the East Indies).