LONDON, England – One day after Lord West's ominous warning of one  'great plot' being monitored by UK security forces, there was a reminder today  of the terror threat at the other end of the scale.

 Nicky Reilly, a 22 year-old convert to Islam, admitted launching a failed  suicide bomb attack on a busy family restaurant.

 The attack was carried out not in London, or in any other of the UK's major  cities, but in Exeter, a town of just over 100,000 people in the southwest of  England.

 Reilly had never travelled to Pakistan, for instance, to receive training; his  research was carried out on the Internet. Nor does it appear that he was part of  any cell – though more on that later.

The Old Bailey heard that Nicky Reilly entered the Giraffe restaurant in Exeter on a Thursday in late May carrying six bottle bombs, three containing caustic soda, three containing kerosene. He was also carrying nails packed around the devices to maximize the planned carnage.

CCTV footage shows plenty of people inside the restaurant as Reilly walked in, including a table of two women, one of whom is seen spoon-feeding her baby in a highchair.

Reilly made his way to the toilet cubicle to prepare his devices – which began to explode as he was doing so. He staggered out of the cubicle bearing serious facial injuries and was arrested by police.

Nicky Reilly was a convert to Islam who took the name Mohammad Abdulaziz Rashid Saeed-Alim The court heard he became a Muslim in his mid-teens and that over time he became drawn to violent action and the idea of himself becoming a martyr.

It's well-established that converts are of particular interest to intelligence agencies. Security officials tracking the terror threat say one in ten of those they are concerned with were not born into Muslim families. In Reilly's case, though, it's only part of the story.

That's because, in the words of his defence team, he has "rather simple characteristics." When he was interviewed by police he was treated as a "vulnerable adult." According to his mother he has a mental age of about ten and suffers from Asperger's syndrome.

She believes he had been "brainwashed" into carrying out his attack. Police statements appear to back that up. They say he was "preyed upon, radicalized, and taken advantage of" by extremists in his home town of Plymouth.

Perhaps more worryingly he was also in frequent contact with two individuals over the Internet from whom he received encouragement and information about the attack.

One of the conversations included a discussion about the type of person to be targeted: public servants like the police, or ordinary citizens. In the end, the decision was to target the latter.

Police say they are still trying to trace Reilly's Internet correspondents. It's believed they do not live in Britain.

Reilly will be sentenced next month when the judge will have to weigh the significance of psychological and psychiatric reports promised by the defence. In doing so he will have to decide to what extent violent extremists are now deliberately targeting some of society's most vulnerable individuals to carry out acts of terrorism.

The IntelCenter, an internet monitoring group in the United States, has produced an interesting timeline for the attack on the Danish embassy in Pakistan, which I adapt below.

Blast outside Danish Embassy, Islamabad, June 2, 2008.

Act One – The "Injustice"

This happened on February 13th when a number of Danish newspapers re-printed some of the controversial cartoons of Mohammed.

Act Two – The Warning

A month later, on March 19th, Osama bin Laden mentioned the cartoons in an audio message. He said, "If there is no check on the freedom of your words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions. The answer is what you see, not what you hear."

Act Three – The Attack

A little under eleven weeks later, on June 2nd, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at the gates of the Danish Embassy in Islamabad. Eight people were killed.

Act Four – The Claim of Responsibility

This followed within two days. On June 4th, in a written statement, al-Qaeda leader Mustafa Abu al-Yazid quoted bin Laden's words from March, and said the attack was "in revenge for what Denmark has published: the insulting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed."

Act Five – The Martyrdom Video

Three months later, on September 4th, Al Qaeda's media operation, As Sahab released a video on the internet called, "The Word is the Word of the Swords." A man identified as Saudi is shown next to a car packed with explosives. He tells the camera, "My final message to the worshippers of the cross in Denmark is that, God permitting, this is not the first or the last act of revenge."

It would be unwise to see this as any sort of fixed template for AQ atrocities, but it's a good example of how the group communicates and the tempo at which it operates.

NOTTINGHAM, England – The ripple effect of 9/11 has extended far and wide and even, seven years on, reached right out and overwhelmed Rizwaan Sabir as he worked away on his laptop.

"I felt that I was some big-time nutcase, some terrorist who just planned 9/11 or something, something so bizarre," says Sabir.

Sabir is a 23-year-old graduate student born and bred in Nottingham, central England. He attends his hometown university and is researching extremism for his PhD. But back in May, Sabir says, he was arrested on campus and held for six days as police picked through his life and his family home. Eventually he was released without charge. Watch what happened to Sabir.

What did Sabir do? His homework.

He downloaded a copy of the al Qaeda training manual from The Federation of American Scientists Web site. Its source: the US Department of Justice. And it's a document that is still available to anyone on the Internet.

"This is not the way to fight the war on terror, by locking away innocent people," Sabir said. "You are radicalizing more people and you are ostracizing more people and you're breeding discontent and disenchantment. It might just drive them over the edge and before you know it, you've given birth to 1,000 Osama bin Ladens."

Sabir was arrested as a result of a tipoff from Nottingham University, where he studied. Neither the university nor British police would comment. All charges were dropped and Sabir continues as a student at the same institution.

But it is difficult to separate the legacy of 9/11 and what happened to Sabir. The Bush administration is categorical that there will be casualties of war. And U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has always said vigilance will be important because 9/11 changed the global security landscape forever.

"As September 11th recedes into the past, there are some people who've to come to think of it as a kind of singular event and of there being nothing else out there... we are the victims of our own success... that another attack has been prevented." Mukasey said in July.

But Sabir points out that al Qaeda is an ideology - not a country, not an army, not a singular enemy that can be bombed into defeat.

" I want to quash them as much as anybody," he says, "but by the government and police services arresting people like me, they're not helping anybody apart from the real terrorist and that's the truth and it will bite them again, and again and again" he warns.

Sabir says he's much more guarded on the computer now, believing that everything he looks at or downloads could possibly be mistaken as a weapon of war.

There's an interesting post on the AQ-allied website, al-Ekhlaas.

It's addressed to English translators.

"Besides our fighters and commanders," it says, "we have our scholars, preachers, hackers, programmers, analysts, writers, audio/visual experts, uploaders and so on. But you, my dear brothers/sisters also play a major role in this battle and that is in the role of translations."

The post acknowledges sterling work being done getting the writings of "Scholars and Jihadi leaders" into English, as well as "the latest videos of the Mujaahideen."

However...

"The percentage of Jihadi magazines [my emphasis] translated into the English language is way below 5% ... this is not a good percentage."

Time to get to work. 

"A detailed translation would be very nice to have, but a summary is also acceptable."

LONDON, England – Last Friday saw three men appear at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in London charged in connection with an alleged threat against the British Prime Minister.

One of the men, Ishaq Kanmi, is accused of being a member of al Qaeda and of seeking the "elimination" of Gordon Brown and his predecessor Tony Blair. The alleged threat was made on the Internet in a posting in January this year.

It's the latest terrorism case in Europe that has originated from individuals posting stuff on the Web. In March, an Austrian man and his wife were given prison sentences for making a video threatening attacks on Austria and Germany. It was uploaded onto a well-known extremist Web site.

Coincidentally, we learned last week that this case will be re-tried after Austria's highest court ruled the convictions were unsafe. It said the jury had not been presented with enough information to properly consider the charges.

That's a matter for the Austrians to work out, just as it remains to be seen what will become of the three British men who appeared in court on Friday. Any trial will likely take place next year.

But there's a bigger issue here. If prosecutors in several countries are finding material on Web sites they don't like, and feel confident enough to bring charges against the alleged perpetrators, then why don't they move to have the Web sites themselves shut down?

Earlier this year, Britain's Home Secretary appeared to signal a new tougher stance. "The internet is not a no-go area for Government," Jacqui Smith told a conference in London. "Where there is illegal material on the net I want it removed," she said.

So what's the problem? Why aren't these Web sites being pulled?

For three good reasons, says Gabriel Weimann, a professor at Haifa University and author of "Terror on the Internet."

Firstly, if you close a site down it will just spring back at another address, often within hours. The hosting companies that store a Web site's information and facilitate traffic in and out of it number in the hundreds. There's always somewhere else to go.

Secondly, extremist Web sites are popular with spooks. They provide useful information about terrorist motives, about the weapons with which they're training, and about the target groups for propaganda. They also offer the opportunity to disrupt and "drive wedges" between the ideologues. It's not hard to gain access to these sites, pass oneself off as a fellow traveler and start asking questions and posting material.

Finally, there are civil liberty concerns. Look at the way Chinese officials routinely brand Web sites as "terrorist" and close them down, says Weimann. Western democracies just can't operate in so heavy-handed a manner.

So, that's it then. It can't be done and it shouldn't be done.

Well, Glen Jenvey for one strongly disagrees. He's one of a number of people who have been tracking extremists on the Net for years. For him, it's a moral issue.

He points out that most of these Web sites are hosted by American companies. How can it be right, he asks, that these same companies are making money from Web sites that post videos showing U.S. soldiers getting blown up in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Jenvey believes these companies are as guilty as the people who post the videos and should be penalised. Faced with the threat of a $50,000 fine, he says, those companies would soon start to police themselves more carefully and refuse to host extremist Web sites.