Transnational networks are indeed a function of modern Islamist terrorism, as they are of almost every other aspect of modern life. Just as with cross-border fraud or organised crime, they require an enhanced international response. But they have not been unknown in the past. The Fenian bombing campaign in London of the 1880s depended upon its foreign training camp – the Brooklyn Dynamite School – and the propaganda produced under First Amendment freedoms including that notable New York periodical, “Ireland’s Liberator and Dynamite Monthly”. The identification of religiously-inspired plotters with foreign powers and foreign training goes further back than that: several of the Gunpowder plotters of 1605 were educated by foreign Jesuits; while their explosives expert Guy Fawkes was recruited for the task in Flanders, where he had learned his skills as a mercenary, originally for the same King of Spain – Philip II – who had recently launched the Spanish Armada.
From an article 'Shielding the Compass: How to Fight Terrorism Without Defeating the Law' by David Anderson, a UK lawyer and now the Independent Reviewer of Terrorist Legislation - which I am currently reading:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=2292950

The passage cited illustrates that so much of contemporary terrorism is not new and has some odd historical episodes.