The Times tells us that British contempt of court rules mean that this week’s official reports on the 7/7 bombers have only been able to give us a partial view of the terrorist threat:

The reports could only ever offer a truncated explanation of the events that led to last year’s terrorist outrages. The full story of 7/7 cannot yet be told. Not only do large gaps remain in the authorities’ knowledge, but also the sub judice rule, which prevents public discussion of anything that might impinge upon a current or forthcoming trial, is in force because associates of Khan face terrorism charges. This rule, intended to protect the right of defendants to a fair trial, has the unhappy side-effect of stifling legitimate debate and creates a misleading impression of the threat posed by violent extremists.

The reports by the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Home Office tell us that Khan and Tanweer visited al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan, were under surveillance and were recorded in the company of other terrorist suspects. We are told that those other suspects were regarded as a greater threat and that surveillance of the two men from Leeds was dropped. But the two reports cannot reveal who the other suspects were, who guided them, what they were planning to do or what became of their more dangerous plot. These points are sub-judice. To disclose them would invite prosecution for contempt of court. Senior counter-terrorist investigators have expressed to me their frustration that the sub-judice rule prevents them from keeping the public informed about the terrorist threat to Britain.

The implication is that when it comes to the threat to the UK, we still don’t know the half of it. What we do now know, however, from the report of the Commons Intelligence Select Committee is that alarmingly the British security service, MI5, didn’t know even that.

Not that this report actually says so in terms. Indeed, it is a report whose broad conclusions are simply belied by its more detailed findings. For although it lets MI5 off the hook by sympathising with its lack of resources and acknowledging the dangers of judgments formed with the benefit of hindsight, it also provides a catalogue of astounding incompetence by MI5, matched by its self-serving excuses to get itself off the hook.

Thus we learn that MI5 had come across Khan and Tanweer, two of the 7/7 bombers, on no fewer than five occasions; but because they were thought to be on the periphery of other investigations they were never identified as a terrorist threat. This was even though they had spent time in Pakistan where -- we are now blandly told – it is now assumed they met al Qaeda operatives. In addition, they were actually referred to by terrorist detainees from outside the UK in early 2004, but only by pseudonyms. And so

The Security Service sought at the time to establish the true identities of the men but without success

even though they actually had a photograph of Khan. Had they shown this to those detainees July 7 2005 might well have remained an unexceptional day.

The report says:

The judgement was made (correctly with hindsight) that they [Tanweer and Khan]were peripheral to the main investigation and there was no intelligence to suggest they were interested in planning an attack against the UK. Intelligence at the time suggested that their focus was training and insurgency operations in Pakistan and schemes to defraud financial institutions. As such, there was no reason to divert resources away from other higher priorities, which included investigations into attack planning against the UK.

‘Higher priorities’? What higher priority could there be than preventing the murder of 52 British citizens and the maiming off many more? The only reason why there was ‘no reason’ to divert resources from these important higher priorities was that MI5 had no evidence that the ‘attack planning’ was being conducted by Tanweer and Khan. In other words, this absurd formulation is simply a self-fulfilling excuse.

What is clear from the body of this report, moreover, is that the main problem was the fundamental error made by MI5 that suicide bombings in the UK were highly unlikely.

This in itself was simply astounding. As the report says, MI5 knew that British citizens were planning attacks against Britain. It knew that suicide bomb attacks were a distinct possibility in the UK. It knew that the transport system was a prime target. And yet:

..the JIC [Joint Intelligence Committee] had judged, in March 2005, that such attacks would not become the norm within Europe. A post-July assessment by JTAC explained that extremists in the UK had been thought less likely to carry out suicide attacks because long-term indoctrination in the UK is more difficult than in countries with larger extremist communities and a more pervasive Islamic culture. The fact that there were suicide attacks in the UK on 7 July was clearly unexpected: the Director General of the Security Service said it was a surprise that the first big attack in the UK for ten years was a suicide attack. On the earlier JIC judgement she said: ‘I think it is a reasonable judgement that still stands. I do not think we expect these to be the norm. In our analysis before July of the number of operations and operational planning of which we were aware… only about *** % showed any interest in suicide. The JIC has since revisited suicide attacks and concluded that more might be inspired to conduct suicide attacks following the events of July 2005.

As the report comments:

We are concerned that this judgement could have had an impact on the alertness of the authorities to the kind of threat they were facing and their ability to respond.

To put it mildly! But if the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, still refuses to acknowledge her earlier mistake, how can we have any confidence that she is now getting it right?

Moreover, as the Times reports, the police seemed to understand something which eluded MI5 altogether:

Dame Eliza’s admission that suicide bombs were unlikely “to be the norm” has shocked other counter-terrorist agencies. The Times is aware that the threat of young British Muslims, radicalised by extremist preachers and groomed by hardcore activists, perpetrating a suicide attack was at the forefront of police contingency plans for a terrorist attack several months before 7/7. The ISC said that it was concerned that MI5 had reached such mistaken conclusions.

We also learn from this report that the security world’s understanding of the wellsprings of Islamist radicalisation was completely wrong. Only now does it say that it has realised that this radicalisation can take place much faster than previously thought and that there is no one profile of an Islamic terrorist.

The Head of Specialist Operations at the Metropolitan Police Service said: 'We were working off a script which actually has been completely discounted from what we know as reality.'

The report observes:

...we remain concerned that across the whole of the counter-terrorism community the development of the home-grown threat and the radicalisation of British citizens were not fully understood or applied to strategic thinking. A common and better level of understanding of these things among all those closely involved in identifying and countering the threat against the UK, whether that be the Security Service, or the police, or other parts of Government, is critical in order to be able to counter the threat effectively and prevent attacks.

But are they getting it right now? As I say in my new book Londonistan, which explores precisely such thinking in the British establishment, they are not. On the contrary, the whole political security nexus at the heart of our defence against this threat to our society appears to be in a state of denial about the nature of this threat and in particular its religious character which they are too afraid even to name for fear of being accused of a politically correct thought-crime. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of this report is the robust way in which it uses the term ‘Islamist terrorism’ when the police and security establishment refuse to use that term – a fact to which this report delicately does not allude -- so deeply are they into the policy of appeasing Islamist extremism.

There are now, the report tells us, around 800 suspected terrorists in Britain. 800! And can we be sure that even this figure is correct? In the interests of national security, the case for a through inquiry into the intelligence service is now overwhelming.

Posted by melanie at May 12, 2006