Mr Hegghammer – thanks for the post. Very interesting. I wanted to also ask whether there might be any new news about the AQ linked group in Oslo that you can share?

Permit me to congratulate you and your team on your excellent website. I came to discover jihadica purely by chance. I use Google Chrome as a browser and among the added extras under “gadgets” it is possible via the reader to link to various websites and that was where I discovered yours. For over 30 years, I have been engaged in intelligence work, predominantly counterespionage and if I may say, at a senior level. After retirement, I found myself immersed in counterterrorism, and being a fairly fast learner, I soon became au fait with most of the major terrorist groups around the world. It would be reasonable to say I monitored hundreds of websites on a weekly basis and some daily including those standbys, Jihad Watch, Creeping Sharia, the Rubin report and translations from the Islamic press. I have to admit that the stage that the name I use is my writing identity because I have a legacy of being targeted. In addition to working in intelligence, I’m also a social scientist and one of the rare breed–the rapidly vanishing empirical researcher. I have found my academic training to complement my intelligence work and I am particularly interested in the dynamics of Islamic migrants in Western countries and have been forced to conclude that Samuel Huntington was basically correct when he wrote The Clash of Civilizations back in the late 1980s, firstly in journal form and then the book. It was extremely unfortunate that he died in near penury, supported by a few friends from the academic community, which had repudiated him and subjected his work to the worst ravages of political correctness. It is axiomatic that we face an extraordinarily hard task in convincing governments that the root cause of our current problems lies with immigration and multiculturalism. There have been too many instances of migrants obtaining documents in a new country and then organizing for jihad. The situation appears to be worst in the UK where it has been said that the Pakistani diaspora is seamless with Pakistan. I maintain that although Al Qaeda gets the headlines, Pakistani-based intelligence groups, especially L-e-T draw on an immense reservoir of talent. At present, the Australian parliament is debating for the first time, our commitment to Afghanistan and while there is bipartisan support, forces on the left remain strong and are depicting the US presence as imperialism. We have been lucky in this country that although we have uncovered quite a number of terrorist plots and there have been a substantial number of prosecutions, we have yet to experience the full horror of an attack on home soil. The closest attack yet was in Bali and the number of Australian civilians killed by terrorist attacks from 9/11 to Bali and beyond is quite substantial.

The latest gambit by opponents of the troop commitment to Afghanistan is to claim that the Taliban is strictly a nationalist force with no intentions beyond the border of that country. There are sufficient references on the Internet and elsewhere of authoritative figures from the Taliban making it abundantly clear that they stand shoulder to shoulder with Al Qaeda in the worldwide struggle against the forces of the infidel/Crusader. There are also disturbing accounts of young Westerners making their way to Pakistan and Afghanistan for training by Al Qaeda and it was no surprise to read Thomas Hegghammer’s “An Ex-Jihadi in the Arctic” of October 15. I have tried to drive home the dangers posed by Jemaah Islamiyah to Australia and my fellow citizens appear to forget that the largest Muslim nation in the world is as close to our northern borders as Cuba to Florida. What a JI operative might be engaged in, up in faraway Tromsø, remains to be seen and I hope my former Swedish colleagues are monitoring his activities with interest. Sleeper agents are not new to Islamic terrorist groups.