"A former CIA officer who still carries out freelance work for the agency voiced the irritation of some American spies. 'It's certainly frustrating that Britain is an Islamist swamp,' he said. 'You don't want to have to spend time spying on your friends'."
"CIA tracking 4000 UK terror suspects," by Tim Shipman for the Telegraph, January 5 (thanks to Sr. Soph):
The CIA has begun an unprecedented intelligence-gathering operation in Britain to help MI5 monitor 4000 terrorist suspects.
More than four out of 10 CIA operations to prevent attacks on US soil are now conducted against targets in Britain.
This has led to friction between British and American spies, with some US intelligence officers irritated that resources are being diverted to gather intelligence on suspects in their closest ally's backyard. British intelligence officers do not know the identity of all the CIA informers and are uneasy about some of the uses to which the intelligence has been put.
MI5 as a whole is glad of the help, however, and works closely with its sister service. US spies share information when it concerns security in Britain.
Intelligence from CIA informers is believed to have helped thwart more than one terrorist atrocity on British soil. Information passed on by a CIA source in Britain was also instrumental in locating Rashid Rauf, a British-born al-Qaeda operative killed by a US air strike in Pakistan on November 22.
A British official said: "There is a great deal of CIA activity inside the UK. The CIA has been given a free rein to raise, handle and process from intelligence sources inside the UK.
"In many cases we do not know who their assets are. Several of the recently foiled terrorist plots inside the UK were uncovered by informants run by US source handlers. We've been able to interdict these plots."
A former CIA officer who still carries out freelance work for the agency voiced the irritation of some American spies. "It's certainly frustrating that Britain is an Islamist swamp," he said. "You don't want to have to spend time spying on your friends." [...]
Bruce Riedel, a Middle East intelligence analyst for the White House National Security Council, said: "A great deal of concern about threats to the US homeland is based upon attacks coming out of the UK. The 800,000 or so British citizens of Pakistani origin are regarded by the American intelligence community as perhaps the single-biggest threat environment."
And yet on knowing this the British government is letting in 5,000 Pakistani Halal Butchers. Something here is amiss. If MI5 has been told this then it would be halting all immigration from Pakistan. If the government was concerned with Islamisation and the Terrorist threat then these people would not be coming in.
It is Ironic that America's greatest ally is its greatest threat. Worse still because of Islam in the UK, British citizens face far tighter security measures that come to the USA.
So many terrorists, so little time.
MI5 welcomes help from the CIA.I am gald to hear it.Hopefully they will stop a large influx of Muslim terrorists there and hopefully here as well.
I just wish we could handle them in the same type of condtions as the Muslims would use our people.
But then again I am not a civilized man. The liberals and "bleeding-hearts" want to negotiate with them and learn to reason with the terrorists. They have not learned yet that there is NO reasoning with people who do not understand reason. An old Muslim proverb states,"Until all seek peace one must keep his sword sharp and his intentions true" as so it goes with dealing with terrorists.
If there were no Mohammedans in the UK there would be no mosques, no Islamic Schools, and no sea for the jihadists to swim in.
That's what Ockham's Razor tells us.
Imagine the cost of tracking 4000 terror suspects. How many full-time workers, and how much technology, how many vehicles and how much fuel, are required to track that 4000 terror suspects? Are they tracked 24 hours a day? That's three shifts. Presumably we are talking about hundreds of full time trackers at work 24 hours a day. If it takes 400 people plus technology to track 4000 terror suspects, multiply that 400 by three, for three shifts 24 hours, and you get 1200 people full time keeping tabs on the 4000. If the average salary of those 1200 is $40,000/yr, that's 40,000 x 1200, which is 48,000,000, or 48 million dollars a year. Then add in fuel, vehicle, and technology costs.
So the issue, perhaps, is not the money, but the risk of having a population 5 to 10 percent of which believes in violent jihad, and 1 percent of which is willing to carry it out. Or even worse is to reflect that perhaps half the Muslim population of the UK has expressed a preference for Islamic law over Western legal institutions. If, then, Muslims do become a majority over time in Britain (as differential birthrates seem to indicate will happen) will freedom disappear there?
There needs to be visa requirements for Brits to enter the USA. This sucker-hearted country is a real menace to America.
There are tighter controls on visa waiver program countries entering USA since this month. Basically visa waiver still applies but visa like checks occur online prior to travel.
http://www.travel.state.gov/
Can we just start calling the UK "New Pakistan" already? If 40% of all prevented US attacks come through Britain then the cycle must go like this: money from KSA goes through some Ikhwan front, possibly not even by way of Egypt anymore, then it goes to Pakistan for a training camp, comes to the UK on asylum or as a halal butcher or something, and then it gets thwarted.
This story is actually semi-encouraging, in a way. American intelligence is at least one thing we still do well, I mean, since we can't make cars, our computers suck (shut up, Mac people; I've gotta defrag sometimes and how you do without right-clicking ability is beyond me), our consumer electronics suck, and Congress tries to hold up selling arms to Israel, which will eventually cause them to make their own superior weapons, thereby rendering us no longer the best at anything in particular.
No offense to our British posters, but it's also sad because, not that we would do this anyway, nancy bitches that we are, but we should be shunning the UK. They should be persona non grata until they once again have one law for all people. We shouldn't be dealing with the UK at all because of their approach to dealing with Islam, and yet, we HAVE TO deal with them because of their approach to Islam. Also, nations which divest from Israel are not our ally. They're just not. We shouldn't even be trading with them. It's tough love for your own good. We all want the same thing. Now they're in over their heads and they're parasitizing us instead of recognizing the problem and dealing with it. Ugh.
Note that they're not dealing with the Mossad. Israel, as always, is on her own, even though terrorists want to mess her up just as much. Mumbai proved that you don't have to be Arab to be an Islamonazi. If anything, Pakis are probably more brutal to Jews.
'How many full-time workers, and how much technology, how many vehicles and how much fuel, are required to track that 4000 terror suspects? Are they tracked 24 hours a day? That's three shifts. Presumably we are talking about hundreds of full time trackers at work 24 hours a day.'
This is an issue I have been thinking about for sometime and the related cost to the country that could be better spent on other things. I would say surveillance of suspects could account for thousands of agents and not hundreds. If a suspect is static probably 3-shifts would be sufficient. However when the suspect is on the move it could involve teams of agents who need to be highly mobile. The scale of this exercise to keep the nation safe is staggering yet our government continues to allow potentially dangerous individuals into the country daily.
Here you all go again!!
I live in England and I am sick to death of Islam. I, and many others want to see it removed once and for all from England, it does not belong here. It threatens to destroy my freedom and way of life. I have always regarded Pakistanis as undesirable outsiders who should be removed peacefully back to their country of origin, as did Enoch Powell.
However, I will soon I fear, be seeing the first raft of Islamic appeasement laws passed by your new President. You also will see Islamic immigration soar, you will see more mosques, the insidious spread of Sharia. You will also see great rafts of "equal opportunities" laws forcing your police and other public services (even the CIA!) to employ Muslims in ever increasing numbers.
Your government, as has ours, will fall into the trap of appeasement and "dialogue".
England will be having a General Election soon, we will not be electing another Lefty Liberal Government. Where did you guys go wrong?
Eurabia is great, isn't it?
FM wrote:
There needs to be visa requirements for Brits to enter the USA. This sucker-hearted country is a real menace to America.
......................
My mother's a British citizen, and she just waltzed into the US in the late '50s as a visitor from Canada, liked San Francisco, and stayed. She didn't even bother to get a green card for many years--many American companies at the time--even big companies like the airlines and the phone company--had no problems hiring someone with a British passport.
Of course, there have always been a few British criminals in the US (and a few American criminals in England)--but in general, Americans at the time considered Brits to be not just as safe in dealing with as native US citizens, but probably *safer*.
Sadly, those days are gone for good.
That *40% of all prevented US attacks come through Britain*--not through Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or some other Islamic hell-hole, but *through Britain*, is appalling.
Far better to have CIA agents operating in the UK now than to have Predator strikes on British soil later, though if Brown wins the next election it may still come to that. He has probably already ensured that MI5/6 are thoroughly penetrated by Jihadists.
And if the ineffectual Cameron wins then we will not be very much better off. D**n the Conservatives for deliberately choosing a weak leader...
We may actually have been better off back in the days when British Intelligence was run from Moscow ?