Norway Attacks Reveal 'Catastrophic Failure'
1:30am UK, Sunday July 24, 2011
Sam Kiley, security editor
If there is a motto common to all intelligence organisations it would be: "only by your failures will you be known".
And the attacks in Norway, carried out by alleged gunman Anders Breivik, let alone the scale, point to a catastrophic failure.
In the world of counter terrorism, hindsight is never forgiving.
We know now, and few would have known before Friday, that police and security services had taken their eye off right-wing Christian fundamentalist violent fringe elements because they had turned their attention to the threat from similarly extremist Islamists.
Until Friday, it was assumed in police circles that the threat of right-wing terror groups, often followers of the White Power Music movement, had been substantially broken up by aggressive policing and intelligence operations after a surge of right-wing threats in 2007.
As investigators churn through Breivik's posts on his website and in chat rooms, they might turn up evidence that he should have been investigated before the murderous rampage.
In 2008, Portugal, Austria, Holland, Sweden, Poland, the Czech Republic and Sweden reported significant growth in violent right-wing extremism.
The European Police Office (Europol) said: "UK authorities reported that the number of incidents involving right-wing extremists linked to explosives, weapons or prohibited items has increased in the last 10 years.
It continued: "In 2007, the UK authorities reported a total of seven right-wing extremists arrested for a range of explosives-related offences.
"During various house searches, police found CS gas canisters and explosive pyrotechnics along with training manuals, a downloaded internet article on the recovery of home-made explosive devices and a recipe for a simple hydrogen peroxide/chapatti flour explosive mixture."
Martyn Gilleard, 31, of Goole, East Yorkshire, was jailed after being caught with nail bombs and other weapons for plotting to cause "havoc" with attacks against mosques in his area.
The Europol report describes such characters as "lone wolves" who share an ideological or philosophical identification with an extremist group but do not communicate with the group they identify with.
Last year there were no significant terrorist attacks conducted by right-wing groups in Europe. The "wolves" appeared to have been scattered.
So far, little that Breivik said on the internet would indicate that he was anything more than a brighter than average fellow traveller among cultural conservatives.
He said he was a Protestant, voted in church elections for conservative priests, and favoured rejoining the Catholic Church.
He wrote of his frustrations at what he saw as Japanese and South Korean government abilities to maintain a "monoculture" and see off pressure for "multikulti", unlike Europe.
He discussed plans to build a media presence of cultural conservatives and set up a Norwegian equivalent of the English Defence League but to avoid being tagged as racist.
"We have selected the Vienna school of thought as the ideological basis. This implies opposition to multiculturalism and Islamisation (on cultural grounds). All ideological arguments based on anti-racism," he allegedly wrote.
Hardly an ultra-violent manifesto.
"There have been growing preparations for a violent attack being made by right-wing groups across Europe," said Michael Whine, a researcher specialising in monitoring anti-Semitic movements.
"They have been having military training, they have sometimes got access to weapons and military explosives, and they operate in a covert fashion."
And last year, Islamic websites produced a 103-page bomber's manual in English.
Whatever we learn, we must now recognise that terrorist wolves of whatever type might hunt alone but they draw their ideological strength from a pack which largely lurks in cyberspace.
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