I am taking a break from work now for the rest of August. This diary will therefore be on holiday until September 1. I hope everyone has a good summer.

Not for the first time, the Observer provides the clearest, fairest and most authoritative account of the latest instalment of the defence against terror. The accounts in the rest of the media in the past few days about the American warnings and then the arrests in Britain of al Qaeda suspects have been quite bewildering. First, there were the warnings from US Homeland Security about imminent threats to various US landark institutions, round which rings of steel were hastily erected. Almost immediately, the appeaseniks started claiming that the whole thing was a post-Democratic Convention stunt by President Bush -- a riff that went into hyperdrive when some unnamed intelligence operative (again) sniffily dismissed the newly discovered terrorist plans as pre-9/11 antiques. But then the following day the British police executed one of the largest raids on al Qaeda suspects, netting one person in particular described as Osama bin Laden's numero uno in the UK.

So what was this: a Bush stunt; or a genuine anti-terror breakthrough; or a genuine breakthrough which was prematurely hyped by the Americans so that the Brits had to hastily activate a swoop before it was ready? The stunt claim is of course a ripe piece of Michael Mooreite grotesquerie, which says everything about the people making such a claim and nothing about anything or anyone else. The Observer, in a calm, well-informed piece of reporting, indicates that the arrest of Mohammed Khan in Karachi on July 13 was a major breakthrough of the first importance. It uncovered not only a key operative and a huge amount of astonishingly detailed information about US and British targets, but although this research had been conducted in 2000 or 2001, the Pakistanis said that the threat 'was present'. That's why the Americans went into crisis alert mode.

A classic sting was then set up to track down Khan's terrorist contacts before they could activate these plans. Khan was forced to email them, and many duly fell into intelligence and police traps. But according to sniffy British sources, the arrests were the result of a long-standing intelligence operation that began long before the American alerts. Clearly, someone somewhere blew the whistle too early about Khan's capture, precipitating a scramble to arrest suspects before they disappeared. As the Observer soberly concludes, however, whatever the blow dealt by this operation to al Qaeda's plans, it is by no mens the end of the organisation. Bin Laden remains elusive and above all alive. The hydra has many more heads, alas.

What is clear, though, is that it was a major break for the anti-terror agencies, and plans posing a clear and present danger were interrupted. But there is another fact which appears to have escaped attention. The appeaseniks sneer that the reconnaisance of targets was old, pre 9/11 activity. Very well. Yet now look at this:

'According to Pakistani officials, there was also evidence of preparations for an attack on Heathrow by British-based activists. There were photographs of terminal buildings and the refuelling centre, as well as of tunnels used by passengers and freight companies. Precise measurements of roads, buildings and underpasses had been recorded. Intelligence sources elsewhere in the region told The Observer last week that the reports had included surveys of underground parking lots so detailed that the gradient of the ramps had been noted. The same sources said the planning also recorded traffic flows on roads around the airport, as well as details of the sequences of traffic lights around the perimeter'.

It has been a constant appeasenik refrain that Britain would never have become an al Qaeda target had Tony Blair not gone poodling up to President Bush and allied Britain to the defence against terror. Yet it appears that this 'old', pre 9/11 reconnaisance activity included targets in Britain. If this is true, it is the first hard evidence that the targeting of Britain was nothing to do with the reaction to 9/11 -- because it was a target before that event took place.

A Muslim religious thinker, Sheikh Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari who is the former Dean of the Faculty of Sharia at the University of Qatar, has had the courage and intellectual integrity to alert his co-religionists to the lies they have allowed themselves to believe. In an article in the London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat, he refers to the fact that Muslims across the world believe that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by Mossad, or that the American right planned 9/11 as a pretext to invade Afghanistan, or that the Yugoslav Serbs carried out the attacks in revenge for American attacks on them. Any theory, in other words, however irrational and bizarre, to avoid the one truthful conclusion that 9/11 was perpetrated by Muslims.

Now Sheikh al Ansari says this:

'...one of our religious leaders claims that America is absolutely certain that bin Laden is innocent and he is being blamed because of their Crusader approach that hates Islam and Muslims. Does this sheikh and the others who held these conspiratorial theories and spread them - do they have the courage to apologize for their words, mistakes, and misleading of other people after all the facts have now been clarified, or are they going to continue with their arrogant stubbornness as if this whole matter doesn't relate to them?

'Do we have the courage to criticize ourselves, to admit to our fault, and to apologize as many people do, or is it one of our hidden qualities that we are a people that are incapable of apologizing? Why won't we take the opportunity of the appearance of the 9-11 Commission's report to ponder why destructive violence and a culture of destruction have taken root in our society? Why won't we take this opportunity to reconsider our educational system, our curricula, including the religious, media, and cultural discourse that causes our youth to live in a constant tension with the world?'

Brave man to tell the truth like this. And what he reminds us is that -- terrifyingly -- many, if not most, Muslims firmly believe truly demented conspiracy theories which have been assiduously promoted by their leaders and which have convinced them that they are the victims of attack rather than the co-religionists of its perpetrators. Hence the outraged sense of injustice fuelling a persecution complex; hence the inversion of victim and victimiser, truth and lies, which has so twisted public discourse. Until and unless the falsehoods behind all that are laid to rest, and Muslims come to realise that the west has no quarrel with them other than the attacks perpetrated in their name, this tragic error will continue to deepen, with incalculable consequences for all.

A cry in the wilderness from the legenday ex-head of Mossad, Ephraim Halevi. Having put the recent storms over the use of intelligence into a balanced and reasoned perspective, he concludes with the following sobering observation:

'Rather than seeking long-term overhauling and restructuring of the system, and the creation of new high-level slots, surely this is a moment in history when the body politic should swing behind those who are already in the trenches and give them encouragement and support in this fateful battle that has been thrust upon us.

'In an ideal world, each player performs his part. In reality, personalities often shine way beyond their limited bailiwick. This happens more often than not when others melt into the woodwork under the intense pressures of war. An intelligence chief can never wither in the heat. Let us hope, for the sake of us all, that the inquiry commissions will not create a climate wherein the George Tenets and Richard Dearloves and John Scarletts of this planet will not be able to function. After everything has already been said, let us never forget that there are not all that many of them around.'

Alas, there is every danger at present that the current poisonous climate will prevent them from functioning, just as Halevi fears.

The Wall Street Journal has skewered John Kerry over his crassly opportunistic, morally and intellectually vacuous speech to the Democratic Convention. Having rightly torn into him for facing all ways over both Iraq and any future theatre of engagement in the war against the west -- and having also sharply criticised President Bush for not properly targeting Kerry's key weakness -- the Journal delivers the following devastating put-down:

'Mr. Kerry's votes were consistently dovish and wrong and are thus a harbinger of weakness if elected. While he now praises Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s Mr. Kerry fought every one of the Gipper's successful policies. Mr. Kerry's speech provided new targets too. His main vow was that "I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to." This would have ruled out Kosovo, Bosnia and Haiti--three military actions the Senator endorsed. Not to mention World War I and Korea. This is a repudiation of pre-emption, but worse it sounds like a return to the pre-9/11 policy of waiting until terrorists hit us, rather than taking the war to the terrorists on their turf. This is a debate Mr. Bush should also want to have. How odd, too, that in 46 minutes Mr. Kerry couldn't manage a single line lauding U.S. forces for liberating Afghanistan and Iraq. He devoted paragraphs to praising his comrades from Vietnam (and thus himself), but he couldn't acknowledge just once that our current military sacrifices are for a just cause.'

The Democrats' signature theme is now clear. It is concealment. Both Kerry's speech and the surrounding hoopla were all designed with one overriding aim -- to conceal from the American public the truth about John Kerry: that he is a big-state, UN and Old Europe-loving, politically correct, dhimmified, every-which-way facing appeasenik who would wring his hands but fail to act to prevent the next terrorist atrocity; and such is the contempt the Democrats have for the American people, they believe all that can be concealed by relentless propaganda about a decades-old war record, which in any event was obviated by their candidate's subsequent behaviour as an anti-war campaigner.

The bottom line is surely this question. Would America be safe with this man? The answer must be no. The next question is: will it be safe with Bush? And the answer to that is: only if the public urges him to deal firmly -- and pre-emptively -- with Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, and if the militant appeasenik front is defeated. And at present, it would be a rash person who would bet the ranch on that.

Tim Yeo, a member of the Tory Shadow Cabinet, has admitted that the Tories need to raise their game. Let us put to one side the unfortunate fact that Michael Howard has already tried to raise his party's game by sidelining Yeo to the environment portfolio because he was so hopeless fronting health and education. Let us also put aside the even more unfortunate fact that it was Howard who made the error of combining these two important issues in one portfolio and then handing it to the useless Yeo. The malaise afflicting the Tories is far more fundamental. This was unwittingly illustrated by remarks made by Sir Malcolm Rifkind: a former Foreign Secretary and now parliamentary candidate for Kensington and Chelsea, a potential leadership candidate, we are told, if Howard falters -- and, from remarks made in yesterday's Observer, a new candidate for the Kenneth Clarke Memorial Award -- for being wrong about simply everything.

According to Rifkind, the Tories should stand on an anti-war, anti-Bush, pro-UN platform. Tony Blair's promotion of public service choice is apparently such a good idea that it will play to the Tories' advantage because the public will know that only the Tories can deliver it. On Europe, the UK Independence Party has apparently sunk Blair's strategy because it shows that only the Tories are the sensible pragmatists. And finally, the Tories should outflank Labour on civil liberties and stand up for personal freedom against the intolerance of the Home Office.

Ye gods. If the Tories believe this, they really are in deep, systemic trouble. Let's take these points in reverse order. The idea that Britons are somehow unfree is ludicrous. Virtuially all our social ills derive, on the contrary, from a libertine free-for-all: a collapse of social order and all respect for authority. And in any event, the idea that the public, at a time of mass worry over terrorism, are sitting in the Dog and Duck moaning about David Blunkett's attacks on civil liberties is so far from reality that it takes the breath away. If anything, the public is furious at Blunkett for not being heavy enough. That's why he keeps breathing fire and brimstone over everything from yobs to genodical maniacs, even though very little ever comes of it. The proper attack on Blunkett is from precisely the opposite direction.

On Europe, the UKIP is about to split the Tory vote with disastrous effects. The idea that it is doing the Tories a favour is simply extraordinary. On public services, voters view the Tories' pronouncements with at best indifference and at worst contempt. The idea that voters are going to say:' You know this Blair stuff about choice? Well you've gotta hand it to the Tories; they got there first and they're clearly going to do the business' is risible. And as for the war and America, the Tories are already turning into the John Kerry/Michael Moore glee club, an opportunism which will earn them only derision from the voters -- apart from being a fundamentally wrong-headed, spineless and morally repellent position.

The Tories' problem lies far deeper than any of them seems to realise. At this rate, they really do deserve to have no future at all.

The campaign to drive John Scarlett from his new post as head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service continues to gain intensity. In yesterday's Mail on Sunday (and summarised in today's Times), the TV journalist Tom Mangold reported claims -- made by what appeared to be a single disaffected intelligence source -- that Scarlett tried to insert lies into the Iraq Survey Group's report on WMD in Iraq in order to protect Tony Blair from further embarrassment from its conclusions that there were no WMD (sic). He also claims that the British government tried first to block and then to truncate the ISG's report earlier this year, which was eventually published in emasculated form.

What are we to make of all this? The first thing to say is that the knives are clearly out for Scarlett within the intelligence community. There are officers who believe he allowed intelligence to become politicised. There are officers who have a strong anti-war agenda themselves. There are clearly ISG officers who think their new head, Charles Duelfer, is a CIA stooge and who are accordingly running a campaign against him, too. And there are also running battles among the spooks about what bits of intelligence about Iraq were right or wrong. It is possible, after all, that Scarlett tried to offer his ten 'golden nuggets' of intelligence to the ISG because he genuinely believed them to be true, even though other officers believed them to be groundless. None of us can judge where the truth in all this lies. All we can do is assess the evidence that is in the public domain. And this is where doubts about this story principally lie.

For even if we accept that Scarlett and HMG did all the devious, mendacious and disreputable things that are being alleged, there are more fundamental assumptions running through this story which are not supported by the facts. In the original story, Mangold's ISG source told him:

'There had been numerous claims and allegations of WMDs, but we were able to show through really careful analysis that the stuff did not and could not exist [my emphasis]. It was as simple as that.'

Elsewhere, Mangold refers to David Kay, the former ISG head, telling the US Congress that 'he no longer believed the weapons were there'. And Mangold claims that that the ISG's 'conclusive' statement that 'the chemical bombs and nuclear plants famously referred to by Blair and President Bush during the long run-up to war just did not exist' was catastrophic for Blair because 'it had been the government that relied on the claims to justify invasion'.

Now, all these statements are either misleading or plain wrong. The most fundamental error is the premise that Blair made the case for war on the claim of WMD stockpiles. He did not. If you read his actual speeches and written statements, you see that the stockpiles were not the main point. The overwhelming emphasis was instead on Saddam's refusal to obey the binding UN resolutions, his resulting failure to prove that he had destroyed his WMD programmes and renounced his intention to continue developing WMD, and the unconscionable dangers posed by the axis of rogue states, WMD and terrorism. Sure, the existence of the stockpiles was inferred from the fact that the weapons inspectors had repeatedly itemised all the WMD that Saddam was known to have had and which was still unaccounted for. But those stockpiles were not the reason for war. It was rather that Saddam had failed to show he had renounced being an active player in the WMD business.

The second fundamental mistake is the statement that the ISG has showed that WMD 'did not and could not exist in Iraq'. Yes, Kay did say he thought the weapons were no longer there. But he also told Mangold that the ISG's (truncated) report earlier this year was 'a misleading and anodyne document'. What Mangold omitted to mention was what Kay himself said about the ISG's interim findings in his evidence to the Senate last January:

'We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:

'Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.'

He also said search efforts were being hindered by six factors:

'From birth all of Iraq's WMD activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program;

'The environment in Iraq remains far from permissive for our activities, with many Iraqis that we talk to reporting threats and overt acts of intimidation and our own personnel being the subject of threats and attacks. In September alone we have had three attacks on ISG facilities or teams: The ISG base in Irbil was bombed and four staff injured, two very seriously; a two person team had their vehicle blocked by gunmen and only escaped by firing back through their own windshield; and on Wednesday, 24 September, the ISG Headquarters in Baghdad again was subject to mortar attack.'

Let's recap on a couple of points there; the Iraqis had systematically destroyed evidence of their WMD programme to conceal it from the Americans, and some WMD may have been transported abroad; even so, dozens of clandestine WMD-related programmes had been found. That's what Kay said.

Now how does that square with the anonymous ISG officer's claim that the ISG had shown WMD 'did not and could not exist?' It is a complete contradiction. Mangold complains that the ISG's truncated report made 'virtually no impact' when it was published. Why didn't he include the facts above in his own story? Why have they received virtually no attention here in Britain? Just who is being selective here? In an interview on October 6 last year, Kay said this:

'Well, we certainly found that — have not yet found illicit arms. But that's not the only thing the report says. In fact, I'm sort of amazed at what was powerful information about both their intent and their actual activities that were not known and were hidden from UN inspectors seems not to have made it to the press. This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news.'

The reason that it was not and is not news at all, and that instead history is being systematically rewritten by one selective and misleading news report after another, is because both the British and US media and politcal/intellectual establishment have been consumed by a cult of irrationality, prejudice and hatred that has simply driven the truth out of public discourse altogether.