The CIA's unofficial guide to stopping suicide terror. posted by Richard Seymour

Robert Baer, an ex-CIA agent whose arguments have been discussed by K-punk before, has a guide for the perplexed today. First of all, stop obsessing over Ayman al-Zawahiri's finger-wagging - this is entirely homegrown:

The youngest 7 July suicide bomber, Hasib Hussain, was just 18 when he blew himself up on the Number 30 bus in Tavistock Square. At 18, Hussain was simply too young to have been indoctrinated in some Al-Qaeda camp in the wilds of Afghanistan or to have met bin Laden - who went on the run in November 2001 as US forces invaded.

The fourth July 7 bomber Germaine Lindsay, again just 19, was not even born Muslim. His family were Jamaican Christians who converted to Islam when he was in his teens.

How long will it be before we see the first white Muslim convert suicide bomber?

Chillingly, both Hussain and Lindsay, British citizens, were indoctrinated into becoming suicide bombers on British soil undoubtedly by another British citizen. Perhaps the oldest bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan. Again, I am not surprised.

You are fighting an enemy within. An enemy that can spring up like a virus from nowhere without reference to any far-flung leader or foreign terrorist organisation.

Next, don't think you can stop the problem by targeting Muslims:

The worst possible mistake the British authorities could make is the one they are making right now; targeting and stopping and searching young Muslim-looking males catching trains or tubes. It is stupid and counterproductive.

Such blanket searches are supposed to intimidate the bombers. But how can you intimidate someone who wants to die?

Finally, drop the idea that you're going to waste a bunch of suicide bombers as they're about to detonate themselves:

As Peri Golan, a major-general in Israel's feared Shin Bet intelligence, told me: 'By the time the suicider has his belt on and is approaching the target, it is already a terrible failure. I have smelt the bodies, the burnt bodies after an attack and it is an awful feeling because I know I have failed.'

To stop suicide bombers you have to intercept them in the planning stage.

There's a bunch of other stuff in there that reeks of mythology - suicide bombing is now a "cult" rather than a tactic of war etc. But this is a former CIA agent after all, and that organisation is known for creating received opinion rather than challenging it...