WikiLeaks: "Jihadi Tourism" Worries U.S., U.K.

CBS/AP

Late last year, British and American counterterrorism officials raised concerns that British Somalis would return to the United Kingdom after participating in "jihadi tourism" in southern Somalia.

The officials at the October 2009 meeting in Ethiopia also worried that terrorists could launch an attack in the U.K. similar to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people, the Guardian newspaper of London reported Monday evening.

CableGate Live Updates
Special Report: WikiLeaks

The disclosure comes from the trove of secret State Department cables released to a number of news outlets by the document-dumping website WikiLeaks.

In a cable sent Dec. 2, 2009, a U.S. diplomat at the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, wrote, "There is believed to be a certain amount of so-called 'jihadi tourism' to southern Somalia by UK citizens of Somali ethnicity. The threat from Somalia is compounded by the fact that within East Africa there is a lack of local government recognition of the terrorist threat."

Cables also released Monday show that U.S. diplomats felt that the British government made "little progress" in reaching out to Muslim communities a year after the July 7, 2005, attacks in London's transit system, known at the 7/7 attacks, the Guardian reported.

That revelation comes as British police spent the weekend searching a home where a suspect in Saturday's Stockholm suicide bombing reportedly lived while studying in the U.K.

Sweden Terror Attack Probe Spreads to England

The 2006 cable showed that the U.S. embassy in London felt that the British government and British Muslims often appeared far apart on cooperating over extremists, the guardian reported. Other cables showed that prominent British Muslims criticized government anti-terror initiatives introduced after the 2005 attacks, the Guardian reported.

More on WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks Supporters Protest Assange Arrest
WikiLeaks: U.S. Concerned Over Swiss Iran Plan
WikiLeaks Backers Building Up Cyber Arsenal
WikiLeaks Cave Looks Like Bond Villain's Lair
Cable: U.S. Sees Cuba as Insolvent within 3 Yrs
WikiLeaks: N. Korea Helping Myanmar's Nuke Sites
WikiLeaks: Pfizer Sought Dirt on Nigerian AG
WikiLeaks Foes Caught in Hackers' Crosshairs

[YrWrongAgain]

We need to be concerned about the lunatic fringe in America.

Aryan Nation's August Kreis re Jihadists: "You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah." "I don't believe that they were the ones that attacked us," Kreis said. "And even if they did, even if you say they did, I don't care!" Kreis wants to make common cause with al Qaeda because, he says, they share the same enemies: Jews and the American government.

My uncle was a medic during D-Day. He wouldn't even talk about it until decades later. More Americans were killed by the Germans at that landing than all the trouble being an ally of Israel has ever caused.

I am very suspicious by the number of so-called Americans who post Jihad sympathies here, yet deny that is what they're doing.