Fighting the terrorists over there so they wouldn't come over here was a popular refrain. Now, the stats tell a totally different story.

Terrorist incidents have increased seven-fold since Saddam was overthrown. Pointing to the increasing use of suicide car and truck and chemical bombs, the National Counter-Terrorism Center said casualties from terrorist strikes rose 40 percent in 2006 compared to 2005.

The NCTC stats also said there had been a 91 percent increase in attacks in the Middle East and South Asia, including the latest terrorist refinement of chlorine bombs.

Five chlorine truck bombs killed scores and injured many more in Iraq after they breathed the toxic fumes. Even more alarming, the U.S. Chlorine Institute, a trade group that represents 200 companies that make and distribute the stuff, alerted the FBI to several thefts and attempted thefts of 150-pound chlorine tanks from water purification treatment plants in California. But then, the FBI says it has no evidence of al-Qaida-type "sleeper cells" in the United States.

Day in and day out, there are new revelations about terrorist sleeper cells in the United Kingdom and other European countries. In Britain, with a population of 1.8 million Muslims, most of the suspects arrested and/or tried had links to Pakistan, where they had undergone terrorist training or visited madrassas, the Koranic schools that fire up the enthusiasm of teenagers for martyrdom.

Admittedly, the U.S. environment is not propitious for recruitment. Most Muslims are integrated in American life at a higher level of society than the one they, or their parents, left in the old country. But then, young terrorist extremists arrested in Europe came from comfortable middle class families. And U.S. intervention in Iraq has been the driver and force multiplier for suicide bombers. It would be a miracle if all young American Muslims had been immunized by their parents against conceding any sympathy for the jihadis.

The Internet's 5,000-plus pro-al-Qaida Web sites operate in the virtual ummah, a global, borderless caliphate in cyberspace where the only law is Sharia, or Islamic law. Some of these sites carry recipes for all manner of explosive cocktails.

The principal reason for the sleeper cells in the United States that are still asleep with "Don't Disturb" signs on their doorknobs is the ongoing acute shortage in the language skills the problem requires -- Urdu, Pashtu and Farsi. There are also inhibitions by Muslims inclined to answer the call to serve lest they become mosque informants for the FBI, or stoolies.

London is a six-hour flight from New York. Last summer, the Brits discovered a terrorist scheme to hijack 10 airliners bound for the United States from London, and arrested 24 suspects. And for the past six years since Sept. 11, South Asian Muslims holding British passports were free to enter the United States without visas. In fact, any Muslim holding a European Union passport enjoyed the same dispensation. In Britain, a joint police-MI5 investigation, code-named Operation Rhyme, uncovered new plots that were directly funded and controlled by al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They involved "dedicated and well-trained" British terrorists.

Last week, MI5's Operation Crevice, begun in 2003, saw the end of a yearlong trial and life sentences for five men accused of conspiring to set off explosions with 1,300 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. It was Britain's largest ever counter-terrorism operation that involved tens of thousands of surveillance hours and a tap on 97 phone lines and cells. But it missed the July 7, 2005, plot that led to the attacks on three London subway trains and one double-decker bus.

One survey among some 800,000 ethnic Pakistani Britons showed roughly 9,000 youngsters nodding approval of the attacks that killed 49 and injured 700. Crevice intercepts traced al-Qaida messages from Pakistan to terrorist cells of Pakistani origin in the Thames Valley, Sussex, Surrey and Bedfordshire.

A star witness for Crevice was Omar Khyam, a former militant jihadist who turned state's evidence. Then suddenly he recused himself, explaining that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency had warned his family to silence him. The trial also established the plan to buy a radio-isotope bomb from the Russian mafia in Belgium. Khyam got 40 years. He had already testified the terrorist group worked for Abdul Hadi, reputedly al-Qaida's current No. 3.

Among those arrested in another recent plot was Dhiren Barot, a Muslim convert sentenced last November for conspiracy to murder in a radioactive "dirty bomb" plot. Former Security Service (as MI5 is officially known) chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said last November her counter-intelligence domestic agency had targeted more than 1,600 individuals actively involved in plotting attacks in the United Kingdom and other countries and that no less than 200 terrorist "networks" were based in Britain.

Similar networks of homegrown terrorists have been uncovered in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain. But so far, not one such network was uncovered in the United States since Sept. 11. (Last year's farcical entrapment of would be al-Qaida jihadi volunteers in Miami's Liberty City does not count.)

Something doesn't quite compute. The law of averages would indicate the near-certainty of terrorist sleeper cells in the United States. The FBI, with 12,000 agents for 300 million people, is roughly comparable to Britain's counter-terrorism MI5 that employs 2,400 agents for 60 million people (scheduled to rise to 3,500 next year). But MI5 has a wider and deeper writ. Admittedly, the FBI's cultural shift has been arduous work. Door-kicking crime investigations that lead to the arrest of bad guys are a different adrenaline rush than the patient and diligent collection of intelligence that may uncover the next 9/11. The new mission also includes what is officially denied: racial and religious profiling. The Brits would be nowhere without it.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate Committee this week, "We are actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting." Former CIA chief George Tenet, promoting his new book "At the Center of the Storm," says al-Qaida's nuclear threat is "real." In the spring of 2003, "senior al-Qaida leaders were negotiating for the purchase of three Russian nuclear devices." And Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted he could not account for all of Moscow's 10,000 nuclear weapons.

Both the FBI and MI5 and allied agencies know they are working against the clock.

earlier related report
Outside View: Blocking terror finances
By Matthew Levitt - UPI Outside View Commentator Washington (UPI) May 3 - Buried deep in the U.S. State Department's 335-page report on terrorism in 2006, released this week, is a brief section on "countering terrorism on the economic front." It offers a comprehensive outline of the government's successful efforts to block funding of terrorists and their supporters but makes no mention of any other tools used to combat terror financing.

The public is left to believe that overt actions like designations are the sum total of U.S. and international efforts to combat terror financing when, in fact, they are only the most visible.

One critical tool that is particularly effective at preventing attacks and identifying previously unknown operatives is collecting financial intelligence. Consider, for instance, the British experience.

Last summer al-Qaida nearly executed what would have been its most devastating terror attack since Sept. 11, 2001. British authorities foiled the liquid explosive aviation plot, thanks in large part to critical financial intelligence, and quickly announced plans to increase the use of financial intelligence tools to disrupt terrorist operations.

"Our aim is simple," Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown asserted. "Just as there be no safe haven for terrorists, so there be no hiding place for those who finance terrorism." Brown described this effort as a "modern 'Bletchley Park' with forensic accounting of such intricacy and sophistication in tracking finance and connections that it can achieve, for our generation, the same results as code breaking at the original Bletchley Park 60 years ago."

Indeed, much as intercepted communications foiled Axis military planning then -- Bletchley Park was an estate near London that served as the secret British code-breaking center during World War II -- tracking terrorists' financial footprints today can thwart attacks, disrupt logistical and financial support networks, and identify unknown operatives. Unlike information derived from human spies or satellite intercepts, which require considerable vetting to determine their authenticity, a financial transfer is a matter of fact. Definitively linking people with numbered accounts is a powerful intelligence tool, often leading authorities to conduits between terrorist organizations and individual cells.

As intelligence agencies build capacity to collect and exploit financial intelligence for pre-emptive action, they are sure to build on the experience of law-enforcement agencies that have long employed financial tools to solve crimes and build prosecutions. With nearly every recent terrorist attack, the post-blast utility of financial investigative tools has been reaffirmed. Financial data provided investigators critical and early leads immediately following the attacks on Sept. 11, as they did following the July 7 attacks in London and the March 11 attacks in Madrid, among others.

But by virtue of their covert nature, financial intelligence operations of a preventive nature are conducted out of the limelight. While understandable, this leaves the public little by which to judge their usefulness beyond general trends and periodic anecdotes hinting of other unspoken successes.

For example, according to Treasury officials, financial intelligence played an important role in the investigation that led to the capture of Hambali, Jemaah Islamiya's operations chief who masterminded the Bali bombings in 2002. Treasury also reported that a financial intelligence collection program supplied a key piece of evidence confirming the identity of a major Iraqi terrorist facilitator and financier.

According to the FBI, investigations into the financial activities of terrorist supporters in the United States helped prevent four different terrorist attacks abroad.

Seizing on the important role financial intelligence played in foiling the liquid bomb plot of August 2006, Her Majesty's Treasury released a new report last month calling for "new steps to make financial tools a 'mainstream' part of the U.K.'s approach to tackling crime and terrorism." In support of its recommendation to increase government's capacity to leverage financial intelligence, an inherently secretive endeavor, the British government published a case study -- in sanitized form, but still the most detailed to be made public to date -- on the role of financial intelligence.

According to British authorities, a suspected al-Qaida associate in the United Kingdom was using multiple identities to finance the purchase and supply of explosives components for use in another country. Forensic financial investigation revealed that this person used multiple accounts to purchase high-resolution maps of a third country over the Internet.

Following the money enabled investigators to track the international travel of the conspirators as well as the delivery by international courier of components for improvised explosives to the same foreign country over several months. Multiple transactions involving accounts controlled by an associate of the original suspect revealed a wider conspiracy. In a joint operation with a foreign law-enforcement agency, the original suspect was tracked to a third country where he was arrested in a makeshift bomb factory.

In institutionalizing financial intelligence, the United Kingdom is following the example of the U.S. Treasury Department, which established the first-ever intelligence shop within a finance ministry. Established in 2004, Treasury's Office of Intelligence and Analysis combines Treasury authorities with intelligence community resources and expertise to identify, disrupt or, sometimes, follow the flow of illicit funds supporting terrorism or other national security threats. In a sign of its demonstrated utility, the Sept. 11 Commission's Public Discourse Project awarded the U.S. government effort to combat terrorist financing its highest grade, taking particular note of "significant strides in using terrorism finance as an intelligence tool."

Traditional efforts to combat terror financing by "seizing and freezing" terrorists' assets are effective counter-terrorism tools. But as terrorist groups continue to evolve, and as additional transnational threats arise, financial intelligence will increasingly be called upon -- Bletchley Park-style -- to connect the dots and prevent attacks.

The public should take comfort knowing both tactics -- seizing funds and following the money trail -- are being pursued, even if only one makes the daily paper.

(Matthew Levitt directs the Stein program on terrorism, intelligence and policy at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and served as deputy assistant secretary of the treasury for intelligence and analysis from 2005 to early 2007. His most recent book is "Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad.")

(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)

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