The underlying premise of the story is that the UK has heretofore been successful in combating al-Qa`ida due to racial profiling of what they call Asians. Not true (there are too many Asians in the UK for that to be effective). Al-Qa`ida operatives will engage in a range of behaviors that can be detected and exploited to thwart attacks, and the UK has done about as good a job of that as anyone can reasonably expect. The UK also benefits from the IRA experience (they were white guys too, and also engaged in a broad range of criminal activities).
To the extent that "White al-Qa`ida" are recruited in prison we know a couple of things already:
* We know they are not real bright, or they are at least not real good at being criminals.
* We know their DNA, fingerprints, height, weight, facial appearance, etc.
This is not to say they can't be successful terrorists, but it does give us more to go on than if AQ was focusing on university students, for example. So it could certainly be worse. Also, where you have criminals you have informants, which is always a good thing.
Here in the US most extremist violence has been perpetrated by white folks, whether on the extreme right or the extreme left, and the agents and officers who deal with these issues are well aware of that.
Posted on 13 January 2008 @ 17:55 GMT