Has Europe Escaped a Major Terror Attack?

It seems so, says Judith at the History News Network:

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s terrorism experts note that this is he first time Western intelligence agencies have picked up the trail of an al Qaeda network weeks before it goes into action. And for the first time, they had a chance to get a close look at a complete network and study its methods of operation before it scattered to the four winds after an attack.

The key discovery, which confirms the findings from the March 2004 railway bombings in Madrid and the July 7 London blasts, was that al Qaeda’s rings do not depend on local Muslim radicals but are a calculated mix of local collaborators and Muslim operatives from other countries. They are brought together and remotely controlled by a distant coordinating headquarters.

It also emerged from interrogating the suspects that although active members of the network, they were given only code names for reaching their operational superiors, the faceless operatives who determined targets, supplied weapons, explosives and cash, organized exit points for the mission-bearers and escape routes for accomplices. Therefore, apprehending terrorist network members or even accomplices of the New York, Spain, Istanbul, London and Sharm el-Sheikh attacks led investigations nowhere.

Instead of securing leads to the elusive masterminds of those atrocities, they found themselves clutching at thin air and forced to accept that those men remain out of reach in deep shadow.