It was the Internet that helped the Al Qaeda to contact, recruit, train and equip Nigerian 'underwear' bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab 'within weeks' to try to blow up a United States plane on Christmas Day, a top Pentagon official has said.
This reflects how the extremist groups have been increasingly using Internet as a recruitment tool, which otherwise could have taken months, if not years, to hire and train a terror suspect, said Garry Reid, deputy assistant secretary of defence for special operations and combating terrorism.
Abdulmutallab, 23, had unsuccessfully tried to use a bomb hidden in his underwear to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam on December 25 last year.
"While poverty, repressive regimes and lack of opportunity play a role for some people (to join) violent extremist groups, we must not lose sight of the role of ideology in attracting new recruits -- and we must find appropriate ways to counter the ideology that drives violent extremism," Reid said in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"Enabled by 21st century technology, extremists have optimised the use of Internet chat rooms, websites and e-mail chains to spread their virulent messages and reach a global audience of potential recruits," Reid said.
What was once a lengthy process of establishing contact, exchanging ideas, arranging meetings, providing training and developing attack plans can now be condensed into a much shorter timeline, across multiple international boundaries, and beyond the reach of any single law enforcement agency or military task force, he argued.
"It is this highly evolved radicalisation process that enabled Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to make contact with a wealthy Nigerian student (Abdulmutallab) living in London, recruit, train, and equip him in the remote tribal regions of Yemen, position him in the Netherlands, and ultimately dispatch him on a suicide mission to the United States, all within a period of weeks," Reid told lawmakers.
"By contrast, the 9/11 operation took about two and a half years to develop from the time Osama bin Laden approved it in April 1999. The condensed timeline of the December 25 attempted terrorist attack over the United States underscores the critical need to get in front of the radicalisation cycle sooner, and more effectively, than ever before," he said.
