Britain: The Frontline is Everywhere

There'll be no shelter here
The frontline is everywhere
--RATM

When I was in Britain a couple of years ago, I noticed that Westminster was looking more like a bomb shelter than a House of Commons. The thinking at the time was that an al-Qaeda suicide carbombing would disable the House.

Seems there is a new twist: A dirty carbomb.:

SCOTLAND YARD believes it has thwarted an Al-Qaeda gas attack aimed at ministers and MPs in parliament. The plot, hatched last year, is understood to have been discovered in coded e-mails on computers seized from terror suspects in Britain and Pakistan.

Police and MI5 then identified an Al-Qaeda cell that had carried out extensive research and video-recorded reconnaissance missions in preparation for the attack.

The encrypted e-mails are said to have been decoded with the help of an Al-Qaeda “supergrass”.
[...]
“They were planning to use chemicals, a dirty bomb and sarin gas. They looked at all sorts of ways of delivering it.”
[...]
The police security memo, drawn up after the July 7 attacks, reveals high-level fears that suicide terrorists could use a black cab or a visit to an exhibition to mark the 400th anniversary of the gunpowder plot.

It's nice to see the Brit authorities are doing something more productive than killing unarmed innocents.

It's interesting that the term "supergrass" is used. Originally, the Supergrass program was a code name for an infiltration operation by MI5 against the IRA in the '70's. The three brigades of the IRA were infiltrated and the IRA almost completely destroyed. The republicans recovered, switching to a cell system to obscure the leadership structure from any one operative. Eventually, any one member (in theory) could only identify a handful of other IRA members, namely their own cell.

From my own reading, etc, it seems that the Islamist International movement is under a pretty loose umbrella. It is known to operate under a cell system similar to the IRA. If there is a wider hierarchy in the British movement, like the old brigade system, there is good chance that a serious infiltration would have a great impact.