The Great War on Islamist Terror

First this:

The 12 men charged in Friday’s massive police operation range in age from 19 to 43 and are residents of Toronto, Mississauga and Markham, Ont., while the five youths cannot be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act...

Police allege the 17 were involved in a plot to stage a massive terrorist attack by fashioning explosives out of three tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertilizer — three times the quantity used in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995.

The arrests were made after suspects tried to purchase the fertilizer from undercover investigators who were mounting a sting operation, the Toronto Star reported.

Then this:

British anti-terrorist police are hunting for a "dirty" chemical bomb that could be used in an attack in Britain after a major raid failed to uncover a device they believe exists, newspapers reported on Saturday.

More than 250 officers, some wearing chemical, biological and radiological protection suits, shot one man and arrested another during a dawn raid on an east London house on Friday...

Some newspapers, citing unnamed security sources, said police believed suspected militants had made a "dirty" chemical device — a conventional bomb surrounded by toxic material that could be set off by a bomber wearing a suicide jacket.

"We are absolutely certain this device exists and could be used either by a suicide bomber or in a remote-controlled explosion," one source told the Sun newspaper.

Newspapers quoted security chiefs who they said believed an attack was imminent, with possible targets including the underground train network or pubs crowded with fans watching the soccer World Cup tournament which starts next week.

And this:

In a meeting last month with some families of victims of the July 7 attacks, John Reid, the Home Secretary, stunned his audience by telling them that 20 "major conspiracies" had been uncovered.

This was far more than anyone in Whitehall had previously divulged. Understandably, Mr Reid did not go into details but his claim came shortly after MI5 suggested that there were as many as 1,200 terrorist suspects living in Britain.

A report by the Joint Intelligence Committee leaked to a Sunday newspaper last month said that the war in Iraq had made Britain a target for al-Qaeda sympathisers "for many years to come".

This report showed the remarkable rise in suspects that MI5 was attempting to shadow. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, MI5 knew of about 250 "primary investigative targets" inside Britain. By July 7 last year that had risen to 800. Today it is more than 1,000. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had revealed how three attacks had been foiled since July 7 that were likely to have caused many more deaths than the 52 killed in last summer's suicide bombings...

Today's terrorists are suburban men who neighbours invariably describe as "hard-working, respectable and British to the core".

Some people choose to ignore the war. I say we fight it.