Exit, Pursued by a Bear

In the New Republic

A frustrating exercise in missing the point.

Whatever the reason, several European converts to Islam have played a role in Al Qaeda activities. Three of the nine Britons detained in Guantanamo Bay after being captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan are Catholics who converted to Islam. A French convert, David Courtailler, allegedly has ties to a suspect arrested for the March 11 Madrid bombings and is allegedly linked to the Belgian group that procured false passports for the two Tunisians who assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, on September 9, 2001. (The attack appears to have been an attempt to decapitate anti-Taliban forces in anticipation of the U.S. response to September 11.)
To elude post-September 11 roundups of terrorists in Europe, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, bin Laden's now-jailed chief of operations, employed European converts, such as Christian Ganczarski, a Polish-born German. Ganczarski was Mohammed's liaison with Nizar Nawar, who in 2002 suicide-bombed a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, killing 21 people, including several European tourists. Despite monitoring by U.S. spy satellites, Mohammed had avoided detection by using converts like Ganczarski as intermediaries.

The writer presents an unimaginative bureaucratic solution:

We could increase the odds of identifying such terrorists if we placed Homeland Security Department agents at airline check-in counters and sky marshals aboard U.S.-bound flights from Europe.

One thing Western police and intelligence services could generate quite easily, much more easily than instant armies of Pashtun translators, are agents who can play the role of radical Western converts to Islam - endless fake Lindhs. If Al Qaeda is seeking Western-born recruits – getting them, using them, depending on them - it is by far their most interesting security hole. Conversely, it was very foolish of them to start playing this game, whatever short-term tactical successes it might have brought them.