Getting inside the head of al Qaeda

Strategy Page:

After seven years of intense effort, Western counter-terror organizations appear to have developed a growing network of spies within al Qaeda, and other Islamic terrorist organizations. There are two primary reasons for this (aside from persistence). First, there was the defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq. The 2004 al Qaeda decision to undertake a massive terror campaign in Iraq did much to reduce al Qaeda's stature throughout the Arab world. Many al Qaeda members, and supporters became demoralized at the slaughter of so many Moslems, and the inability to kill many infidels (non-Moslems). Opinion surveys throughout the Moslem world clearly show al Qaeda popularity declining as the number of Moslem terror victims in Iraq increased. The same pattern could be seen on pro-al Qaeda web sites. Much of this chatter never got much exposure in the West, because most of it was in Arabic, and rarely monitored and translated by news organizations. But the number of Islamic radicals, unhappy with how Islamic terrorists have been operating, just keeps growing. This provided opportunities for Western intel agencies to get inside the terror networks.

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I am sure al Qaeda would be unhappy to learn that Israel has shown the way in this type of infiltration.

The real shocker for much of the media and the liberals is that the war is creating so many anti terrorist. Many of them are still in the old mantra that the war in Iraq was creating terrorist. It turns out that the terrorist have turned the stomachs of many in the Muslim world resulting in greater access to the enemy operations. Perhaps that is why we are see so many effective strikes on enemy leadership meetings in Pakistan.