Whiskey said:
>My main guess is that if UAVs were to be
>used as a weapon, that some sort of Napalm
>would be used. The technology is relatively
>crude and simple, forgiving of poor
>containment and manufacture, and potent in
>killing, without issues of wind shifts or
>dangers of leaks killing the attacking crew
>or arousing detection. Use on soft targets
>is horrifically effective.
UAV testing for Jihadis is far to easily detected before use.
Please see Sadam’s pre-1991 Gulf War UAV programs.
Both the most deadly and most likely threat profile is that of western educated, 13-35 year old, Muslim male who is suffering from “The Qutb Syndrome.”
See:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-homegrown-terrorist-threat-15345?page=all
While they come from diverse ethnic and regional backgrounds, most of the men involved in homegrown plots fit a similar profile: they are middle class and well-educated. The same can be said of many, if not most, Islamist terrorists, whether it be the son of the former Nigerian finance minister who attempted to bring down a plane on Christmas Day near Detroit; the seven British doctors (and one medical technician) who plotted to carry out car bombings in 2007; or Osama bin Laden himself, whose family operates a massive construction empire worth billions of dollars. This reality contradicts the trendy, post-9/11 contention, as wrong then as it is now, that terrorism is caused by poverty.
In this sense, America’s homegrown terrorists resemble Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian-born cleric widely credited as the leading intellectual founder of contemporary political Islam and a prominent figure in the Muslim Brotherhood. Qutb, who gained prominence in the 1950s and was executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime in 1966, was radicalized not by his childhood experiences or encounters with American imperialism but rather by a two-year visit to the United States that commenced in 1948. It was there that he developed a hatred for what he considered to be the unparalleled materialism and licentiousness of American culture; he was particularly scandalized by a church dance in Greeley, Colorado. “Jazz,” Qutb wrote of the prototypical American, “is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires.”
and
Ultimately, there is little more that the United States can do to prevent homegrown terrorism, other than maintain the counter-terrorism policies enacted by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11, policies that proved so successful in preventing another terrorist attack on American soil. Given the rhetoric and actions of the present administration, which wants to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, prosecute CIA officers for using interrogation techniques disfavored by the American Civil Liberties Union, and generally approach the war on Islamic supremacism as a legalistic exercise, it is hardly certain that such a course will be followed. But the least we can ask of our nation’s political and intellectual elite is that they stop wailing about the phantom menace of “right-wing” terrorism and start paying more attention to the genuine article.
These people cannot cooperate in large numbers over time in the west without attracting both official and unofficial attention.
That means we will see more loners doing suicide attacks with guns and bombs.
