MADRID, Spain — On Feb. 15, three senior judges of Spain’s High Court are to hear opening pleas from 29 individuals charged in connection with the March 2004 Madrid train bombings. Eight or nine long, legally convulsive and controversial months later, the magistrates will deliver the verdicts that Spaniards hope will bring closure to a country still traumatized and bewildered three years after it was targeted for one of Europe’s most savage terror attacks, and justice to those deemed responsible for it. How close they come to achieving that remains to be seen. A not inconsiderable tangle of loose ends, [...]
“Munich to US: ‘Don’t Send Your CIA Thugs out into Europe’s Streets’“. Thus ran the triumphant headline on the Spiegel Online’s English-language site a day after it became know that the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office had issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA employees presumed to have participated in the abduction of German citizen Khaled Al-Masri in early 2004. Just one day later, however, the headline had acquired a certain unintended irony as reports emerged that Masri himself had beaten up a social worker in his hometown of Neu-Ulm, leaving the man hospitalized for three days. The assault occurred on [...]
British Plot Highlights Evolution of Terror Tactics in the West
The revelation late last Wednesday (Jan. 31) that British police and intelligence services had interrupted an imminent kidnapping and execution plot in Birmingham is illuminative of the challenge Britain currently faces in dealing with its internal extremism. But perhaps more importantly, it is indicative of the broader realities of the current state of this global phenomenon. According to media sources, the plot involved the kidnapping of a Muslim British soldier and the group of extremists in question (nine arrests have been made thus far) planned to torture him, force his “apology” for his actions in Iraq and then ultimately decapitate [...]
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