Sept 2014.
http://20committee.com/2014/09/09/paris ... di-threat/This dire situation is clarified in a new interview in the Parisian daily L’Opinion with Marc Trévidic, a counterterrorism magistrate with long experience in dealing with jihadists. Known for his frank talk about terrorism, Trévidic minces no words, portraying French intelligence, police, and courts as “disarmed” in the face of a new and more dangerous domestic extremism scene that is now directly tied to Syria and Iraq, as well as the Islamic State. His recent words to the media paint a disturbing portrait:
Everything is different these days! Before, would-be jihadis had a smattering of instruction. There is no religious background now; it is the image that wins them over. The appeal is to their feelings, not to their intellect. The explosion is due to the Internet. The youngsters we have to deal with are overexcited, not intellectually radicalized … The profiles are completely disparate. Some are impossible to check out. Never before have we come up against women and minors! Before long, the only age group missing will be the very old…
Neither is Paris equipped, legally or operationally, to deal with the hundreds of jihadists, seasoned in battle, who are returning home:
We can no longer sift them or monitor them as before to find out what their intentions are. We are forced to arrest them as soon as they set foot in the country. We need to know what they have been through. On the whole, they have been through horrendous experiences. We lack the evidence needed to probe them properly. However, some of them are potentially dangerous, all the more so in that they are forced into waging an individual jihad in the attempt to escape detection.
“We lack teeth,” explained the frustrated judge, as the legal system is simply not equipped to handle so many extremists, including large numbers of teenagers without prior criminal history. Trévidic leaves little doubt that France is facing a terrorism threat without precedent in its history, with hundreds — and soon thousands — of radicals that intelligence has difficulty tracking and the police and courts have difficulty arresting and keeping in custody before they kill innocents, as happened in the Merah and Nemmouche cases. The threat is the same in most of Western Europe, and most of those countries are even less equipped to deal with it than France is.
Jaanuar 2015.
http://20committee.com/2015/01/13/after ... xtremists/Berlin authorities believe that some 200 jihadists, like Nils B., have returned from Syria or Iraq already, and they represent a huge challenge for police and intelligence services. After the Paris attacks, the BKA has put in place special measures to prevent terrorism, but the numbers facing German cops and spooks are daunting. Maintaining 24/7 real-time surveillance on any target, with both HUMINT and SIGINT, requires two dozen watchers, and German authorities have nowhere near enough personnel to properly watch the hundreds of potential terrorists in the country who need watching.
The problem is not just about inadequate numbers, but deficient laws too. German officials complain that they lack the legal means to prevent terrorism. They regularly watch potential terrorists, for instance, get on trains carrying suspicious-looking backpacks, “but unless we’re absolutely sure he has a bomb in the bag,” there’s nothing to be done under the law, rued one security official.