The  global financial crisis has become a topic of feverish debate for al Qaeda sympathisers on militant Internet forums.

According to  the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors  al Qaeda-linked propaganda on the Web and translates it for the benefit of security analysts and counter-terrorism officials, the militant chat rooms have been buzzing for weeks with excited comment.

“Now Sheikh Osama bin Laden has an historic opportunity to crash America completely. Al Qaeda, which has caused America to be ruined economically in Iraq and Afghanistan, has an opportunity to deliver the fatal blow,” wrote a member of a Turkish militant forum recently.  “Al Qaeda could bury America into the landfill of history with an operation similar to or greater than September 11.”

In a discussion on al-Hesbah, a password-protected forum linked to al Qaeda,  one participant gloated that the U.S. economy is “on the precipice”, SITE reported.

He continued: ”Now is a golden opportunity and a gift from Allah that we should not lose. If America is hit now, by Allah, it will never survive, until Allah permits it … I can see that victory is closer than expected.”

Such ”chatter” has attracted the attention of Western intelligence officials. Ernst Uhrlau (pictured), head of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency, told Reuters in an interview this week that the financial crisis had emboldened some Islamist militants but it was too early to say if it would help them attract new recruits.

“We’re hearing some first voices on this. Some see the fact that the United States has been so shattered by the financial crisis, and that its dominant role in the world is shaken, as confirmation the West can be beaten,” Uhrlau said.

Al Qaeda has always placed high value on economic targets. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, razed in the Sept. 11 attacks, were chosen both as an iconic New York landmark and a symbol of U.S. capitalism. It’s a fair bet that the next statement from Osama bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri — perhaps in the  less than two weeks remaining until the U.S. election — will make great play on the current crisis and boast of how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drained the U.S. economy.

But it’s doubtful whether all of this translates into a heightened security threat to America. The official threat level has remained unchanged for more than two years, and the fact is that al Qaeda has failed to land a blow on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.  In the Reuters interview, Uhrlau questioned whether it was capable of staging more attacks on the scale of 9/11. 

For the time being, its sympathisers can only wait, hope — and put forward their own ideas. In another discussion monitored by SITE, one participant suggested a plan for an attack aimed at bankrupting a U.S. bank. Some contributors praised the idea, but one was more sceptical.  “Why bother, their economy is collapsing by itself,” he wrote.

So Prime Minister Gordon Brown has succeeded – by the skin of his teeth — in getting Britain’s House of Commons to approve new police counter-terrorism powers that were condemned by civil liberties groups, a former prime minister, a U.N. human rights investigator and several dozen of Brown’s own Labour MPs. The Guardian newspaper writes about ‘Liberty, security and an anxiety over lost rights’.

And even the government admits the power to hold terrorism suspects for up to 42 days before charging or releasing them has never been needed until now: it wants it as an insurance policy against future attacks or plots in which the police may need more than the 28 days they now have in order to investigate tangled international links, false identities and masses of encrypted computer files.

So what’s going on? The bald figures suggest Britain is way out of step with other democracies. The six weeks allowed under the bill for initial questioning of terrorism suspects compares with one day in Canada, two in the United States, Germany, South Africa and New Zealand, five in Spain and 12 in Australia.

But the bald figures don’t tell the whole story. Police in most European countries, for example, hand cases over to a judge or prosecutor after the first few days and the suspect may wait in jail for months or years while the investigation proceeds. Britain can also plausibly argue, on the basis of the number of plots intercepted in the past few years, that it is more threatened than most countries by al Qaeda-inspired militants.

Opinion polls suggest the public backs Brown on this issue, although his overall popularity rating is dire. And with the House of Lords likely to oppose the bill and send it back for re-consideration by the lower chamber, Brown is far from being out of the woods.

Expect more debate in coming months on possible alternative means of tackling terrorism — particularly on whether to let British police, like their counterparts nearly everywhere else, use evidence from tapping suspects’ phones as ammunition to prosecute them in court.

Despite the embarrassment caused this week when a senior security official left top-secret intelligence documents on a train, the British authorities have a strong record in countering terrorism. Since 2004 the country has seen at least one major plot each year, and many smaller ones. Only one succeeded: the July 2005 London suicide attacks that killed 52 people. So far, 2008 has been a quieter year — but the emergence of any major new threat could once again shift the goalposts in the security debate.