It was unedifying to watch Cameron and Brown at Prime Minster’s questions trading stupidities on security which they hoped would impress the electorate, presumably via the Murdoch press.

Cameron pressed for the banning of Hizb-ut-Tehrir, on the basis of an old quotation allegedly from a Hizb-ut-Tehrir leaflet in Germany, which HuT have always denied. Brown sensibly queried whether this was sufficient evidence.

HuT believe in the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate to unite the Muslim lands. That is a strange thing to believe in, but I can see no reason why the belief should be illegal. Certainly driving them underground would be a great deal more dangerous. HuT arguably function as a safety valve, providing a non-violent outlet for fundamentalist Muslims in the UK. To ban them is tantamount to saying that fundamentalist Muslin belief ought itself to be illegal.

Brown then decided to outdo Cameron in useless but hopefully populist proposals. He regurgitated Blair’s favourite about needing to be able to deport people to countries where they are liable to be tortured or killed (which would involve resiling from Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture). He also proposed identity cards. This time Cameron made the sensible response that compulsory ID cards did not stop the Madrid bombers.

In fact, there is no reason to believe that any of these daft proposals would have had the slightest effect on the events of the last few days. Predictably, nobody suggested that we stop invading other people’s countries and killing their people. Now that might make a difference.

One of the endearing features of the British political system is that a constituent can always turn to their MP for help with any difficulties, particularly involving relationships between the individual and any organ of the State. Perhaps remarkably, in the vast majority of cases the MP does indeed do what they can to help.

Now read this reply which an astonished constituent received from their MP, Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of New Labour:

Dear ….

I am very sorry to hear of the immigration difficulties you have been experiencing . I have today written to the Home Office on your behalf and I will contact you again as soon as I receive a response. I am not prepared to make enquires or representations on behalf of constituents with criminal convictions. I have therefore informed the Home Office that if you do have criminal convictions, my enquiry should be considered withdrawn.

If you have not previously disclosed any criminal convictions on behalf of yourself or other individuals included on the same application, please contact me and let me know.

In the meantime if I can be of any further help or assistance in this or any other matter please do not hesitate to contact me again.

Yours,

Harriet Harman

The constituent in question has no criminal convictions or associations whatsoever, but even if they had, that does not cancel your civil rights for the rest of your life, despite Ms Harman. Has she never heard of rehabilitation? Or of wrongful conviction?

This was in fact the third time this constituent had written to Harman on this issue, and the third time they had received this same standard reply. The promised future contact never happens.

New Labour really cares about individuals.

The link between the Glasgow and London bombs now appears to be fairly convincing, particularly as much of the confirmation is coming out of Scotland rather than from the discredited Met. What we have this time appears not to be home grown discontent, but more direct blowback from our Middle Eastern policy. I make no apologies for having noted at the start of this series of events that, while this was likely to be terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists, there were other possiblities and we should not straightaway jump to that conclusion. Those comments caused outrage among those who like to vilify Muslims at any opportunity, as a kind of sanctioned racism.

Now it does appear that Islamic extremists were indeed responsible for both Glasgow and London.

But my question cui bono? was also helpful in pointing out that these terrorist attacks are not only callous and inhuman, but extraordinarily stupid. Islamic terrorism fills those who hate Muslims with unholy glee. You only have to surf the internet for five minutes to prove that. At the same time it sends those of us who try to improve community relations, and it sends the established Muslim communities in the UK, into deep despair. Those in the security, weapons and mercenary industries who make billions from continued War are rubbing their hands and counting the cash.

How religious faith can lead people into such a mix of depravity and counter-productive stupidity is impossible for the sane to fathom, even acknowledging the depths of despair caused by the carnage our country has caused in Iraq. I can do nothing today but issue the anguished cry of the liberal in a brutal, unlistening World.

The only comfort, and this may be wishful thinking, is that the Brown government seems to be handling this all much more sensibly than Blair and Reid, without pushing the melodrama button or making fatuous comparisons with the Second World War. Which is not to say that we do not face yet another attack on civil liberties, but the attempt to stampede people with the psychology of fear does seem less marked. Or is that a false perception?

The wannabe terrorists in Glasgow, and whatever happened in London, fortunately didn’t kill anyone. But terror is often devastatingly effective, as our leaders are lining up to remind us. Here is a good example of devastating terror which caused appalling death and excrutiating injury to the lucky people we liberated in Afghanistan.

‘Up to 80 civilians dead’ after US air strikes in Afghanistan

Witnesses claim a village in British-run Helmand was bombed for three hours after the Taliban attempted to ambush a US-Afghan army convoy

Jason Burke

Sunday July 1, 2007

The Observer

Air strikes in the British-controlled Helmand province of Afghanistan may have killed civilians, coalition troops said yesterday as local people claimed that between 50 and 80 people, many of them women and children, had died.

In the latest of a series of attacks causing significant civilian casualties in recent weeks, more than 200 were killed by coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been killed by Taliban militants.

The bombardment, which witnesses said lasted up to three hours, in the Gereshk district late on Friday followed an attempted ambush by the Taliban on a joint US-Afghan military convoy. According to Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief, the militants fled into a nearby village for cover. Planes then targeted the village of Hyderabad. Mohammad Khan, a resident of the village, said seven members of his family, including his brother and five of his brother’s children, were killed.

‘I brought three of my wounded relatives to Gereshk hospital for treatment,’ he told the Associated Press news agency by phone. The villagers were yesterday burying a ‘lot of dead bodies’, Khan said.

He spoke as American forces in Iraq also found themselves heavily criticised over civilian deaths when eight people died, apparently caught in crossfire from a gunfight between insurgents and soldiers in Baghdad’s Sadr City yesterday. But residents, police and hospital officials said eight civilians were killed in their homes and angrily accused US forces of firing blindly on innocent people. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the raids and demanded an explanation for the assault on a district where he has barred American operations in the past.

In Afghanistan, the civilian deaths caused by US and Nato-led troops have infuriated local people and prompted President Hamid Karzai to publicly condemn foreign forces for careless ‘use of extreme force’ and for viewing Afghan lives as ‘cheap’. The increasingly fragile President has urged restraint and better co-ordination of military operations with the Afghan government, while also blaming the Taliban for using civilians as human shields.

Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, raised the issue of civilian casualties on a four-hour visit to Afghanistan on Friday on which he met the senior Nato commander there, the American General Dan McNeill.

Senior British soldiers have previously expressed concerns that McNeill, who took command of the 32,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan only recently, was ‘a fan’ of the massive use of air power to defeat insurgents and that his favoured tactics could be counter-productive.

‘Every civilian dead means five new Taliban,’ said one British officer who has recently returned from Helmand. ‘It’s a tough call when the enemy are hiding in villages, but you have to be very, very careful,’ he added.

The American general has been dubbed ‘Bomber McNeill’ by his critics.

But Nato has ‘never killed and will never intentionally kill innocent civilians’, its secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, told a conference in Macedonia on Friday. ‘The majority of civilian casualties in Afghanistan have been caused by Taliban suicide bombs and roadside bombs.’

US Air Force Major John Thomas said that, after a long skirmish and under constant fire from the Taliban, troops of Isaf (the International Security Assistance Force), called for close air force support during an operation in Helmand, where the Taliban have been resurgent this year.

‘All enemy positions were destroyed, but after friendly forces surveyed the area, there were reports of some possible civilian deaths,’ Thomas said.

‘The remains of some people who appeared to be civilians were found among enemy fighters in a trench line,’ he added. The level of violence has soared in Afghanistan, with more than 2,800 people – mostly Taliban fighters – killed in fighting this year, according to an Associated Press tally of figures issued in the last few days by Western military and Afghan officials.

A count by the United Nations and an umbrella organisation of Afghan and international aid groups shows the number of civilians killed by international forces was slightly greater than the number killed by insurgents in the first half of the year. My emphasis

In Helmand’s Sangin district, Nato-led and Afghan troops clashed with Taliban fighters on Friday, leaving 15 of the militants dead, said Ezatullah Khan, a district chief. Helmand is the primary area of operations for the British troops deployed in Afghanistan.

There were no casualties among Nato and Afghan troops, the official said.

More than 3,000 British troops have been deployed in Helmand to combat both the Taliban and the drugs trade. Also in the south, two suspected Taliban members were killed while trying to place a homemade bomb on the side of a road in Zhari district of Kandahar province on Friday, said Ghulam Rasool, the district’s police chief.

Three children were also killed on Friday and another wounded when an old rocket they were playing with exploded in Zabul province in the south, said General Yaqoub Khan, the provincial police chief.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2115846,00.html

According to Willie Rae, Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police, there are clear links between today’s Glasgow incident and the London car bombs. He declined to expand further, but I presume he meant more than that both events involved cars and petrol. A copycat crime is, in a sense, always linked to the crime it copies. But Willie Rae is not the Metropolitan Police, with its track record of lying to us, so I am prepared to believe that he knows something more substantial.

I still cannot understand why the Met does not release the CCTV footage of the London suspects. As the suspects must realise that they will have been caught on CCTV, I can’t think of a single sensible motive for witholding it.

It is horrible to me to think of the possibility of terrorists coming out of Scotland’s Muslim communities; I find it really perturbing. Scotland does not have the completely isolated Muslim ghettoes that Labour created in Northern England. Of course, the fact the attack happened in Glasgow doesn’t necessarily mean the attackers came from there. But wherever the bombers were from, and however incompetent they were, their attempt to kill and maim innocent people going on holiday is an act of crazed fanaticism.

Thank goodness the only injured in Glasgow were the attackers, and one member of the public, who is not in danger. Fortunately, amateur does not do justice as a description of these attackers – absolute rubbish comes closer to it. It is worth noting that, if the London car bombs had ignited, they would probably have burnt like the Glasgow car, and almost certainly would not have had the kind of explosive force that the media tried to claim. Gas canisters are designed to withstand fire without exploding; they will eventually vent and the gas flare as it comes out. That is what looked on TV like it might have been happening in the back of the car in Glasgow.

Petrol and gas can be a deadly effective component of a bomb, and even a very small quantity of high explosive would have made the London car bombs potentially devastating. But there was no explosive present – I have held back on blogging on this aspect until I could confirm that fact from my own sources.

So this is not al-Qaeda, and we are not dealing with trained bomb-makers. The Glasgow attack looks like a purely home grown reaction to World events and our role in them. Assuming the London incident really is linked, the same applies. This threat will indeed remain with us until we stop being an acolyte for US foreign policy. Nobody is attacking Ireland – if Western hedonism and culture were the target, Ireland should be in big trouble. The answer is not further oppression at home, which will just exacerbate a sense of grievance.

The answer – or at least a large part of it – is to adopt a foreign policy which accords with the wishes of the majority of the British people, irrespective of the existence of terrorism.

It will take a little time to work out what has happened in Glagow. From eyewitness accounts, this does seem like a definite attack, but an eyewitness on BBC News 24 has just described seeing two men get out of the car and try to torch it with bottles of petrol. The BBC also have a photo plainly showing the car well ablaze on the pavement, under the canopy and pointed towards, but not having penetrated, or apparently reached, the airport doors. This would have to have been taken after the occupants got out as it is very well ablaze. This is hard to reconcile with continued journalists’ reports of the car being inside the terminal building.

Anyway, four people have been arrested, so we should get some answers on this one fairly quickly. At least two of the arrested men were Asian. There is no simple equation between Asian and Muslim but in the UK, and particularly in Glasgow, it does increase the likelihood. Fortunately, on the information so far, it seems nobody has been killed.

Thankfully, whatever is happening, we do not appear to be facing a wave of attacks by sophisticated terrorists with good bomb making skills.

Thanks to Blairwatch for this, which falls into the absolutely too wonderful to be true category.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007290466,00.html

It is of course from The Sun, which generally means it is unlikely to be true, except that the Sun do not insult New Labour unless they have to, and go out of their way to limit that aspect of the damage. Epitomises the oozing sleaze that is NuLab. But why pretend they had a title, when they could have just bought one from Lord Levy?

I am increasingly puzzled as to why police haven’t released CCTV footage of the driver of the vehicle fleeing the scene. The whole Piccadilly area is swamped by CCTV coverage. Normally, you would expect this released, so the public can help with the manhunt. That happened with the 21/7 incidents. It did not happen with Jean Charles De Menezes, of course, because the CCTV footage disproved the police story that De Menezes vaulted the barriers and sprinted through the station.

It does now appear that these were indeed not suicide bombs, and were not professionally made.

London is an extraordinary, teeming, multicultural metropolis. It is a great hub of international finance, politics and intrigue. Extraordinary things have happened in London throughout my adult life. Beneath the surface events are bubbling which most Londoners neither know nor understand.

LONDON

An Italian banker, custodian of Vatican money and secrets, is found swinging under Blackfriars Bridge. Businessmen purchase seats in the national legislature simply for payments of cash. A Bulgarian dissident is killed with a tiny ricin pellet injected from an umbrella. A Brazilian electrician is executed by police on the London underground. The dismembered torso of a small African child floats down the Thames. The country’s most flamboyant businessman, a lawmaker, steals his workers’ pensions and leaves for a yacht cruise. Muslim lads from Yorkshire kill themselves and 67 people on public transport. Etonian mercenaries plan coups in Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea before finding respectability and the jackpot in Iraq. A Russian defector is poisoned with polonium and dies a slow horrible death. Politicians and civil servants concoct a dossier of lies to provoke a war. A girl is arrested for reading out the names of the dead at the Cenotaph, and a man for carrying Vanity Fair outside Downing St. A small black child bleeds to death in a tenement stairwell. Gays die as a nail bomb rips through a pub. The IRA run a long, slow war of death and attrition. Every year, scores of people simply disappear. Homeless people curl up like bundles in neon-lit doorways.

Two remarkable things happened in the last two days within half a mile of each other, at either end of Piccadilly. One, the car bomb, you have probably heard of. The second you probably haven’t.

This is a straight reproduction of a small article from The Metro newspaper, Friday June 29, 2007

“Mossad Spy” Found Dead

An Egyptian financier accused of spying for Israel has been found dead outside his London home in mysterious circumstances. Ashraf Marwan was alleged to have worked for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad during the 1973 Yom Kippur war with Egypt and Syria. He was accused of tipping Israel off about the war. Police said “He appears to have fallen from a balcony. The death is being treated as unexplained.” The 62 year old son-in-law of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was found on Wednesday in St James’s, Central London.

The fact that these two incidents are less than ten minutes walk apart does not make them connected. They may or may not be. But I note this, and the list above, to help those who have difficulty imagining that there is any need to consider any possibility other than Islamic terrorism to explain the apparent Haymarket car bomb. Astonishing things do happen in London.

A good rule is to look at what did happen, not what might have happened. Consider this:

a) Nobody committed suicide. Rather than follow Scotland Yard’s Peter Clarke and speculate that was because the driver lost his nerve, let us admit that it is at least possible that nobody was intended to commit suicide. If suicide was not part of the modus operandi, that vastly increases the number of groups and individuals who might have been responsible.

b) No bomb exploded and nobody was killed. There seems a general presumption that was because the trigger failed, or was defused in time. That is possible, certainly. It could well be so. But there is another possibility that cannot be ruled out yet – perhaps the thing was not meant to explode, perhaps no-one was meant to be killed. Perhaps it was meant to look like a convincing bomb, even like a convincing failed bomb. If you accept that as a logical possibility, that would bring in even more individuals and organisations who might have been responsible. To be up for a bomb scare is very different to being up for a bomb.

Let me be quite clear again: Islamic extremists may very well be responsible. I am not saying they are not. I am saying nobody knows yet. But let me expand a bit on my Cui Bono theme.

There are plenty of companies – and wealthy individuals – making huge amounts of money from both the War on Terror and its equally ugly sister, the War in Iraq. There has been much speculation that Brown will edge away from both of these. If British troops were to withdraw from Iraq, for example, that could reduce the access currently enjoyed by companies, including Aegis and BAE, to billions of dollars of US government contracts for arms and mercenaries. These companies make money out of killing. Death is their business. Today’s car bomb – and the immediate media presumption it is Islamic terrorism – certainly forces Brown further into the War on Terror. The fact that the Iraq war is the root cause of an upsurge of terror in the UK, strangely does not negate the surge of political support for the War that this sort of incident brings as a reflex reaction from our leaders.

I am not saying it was Aegis or BAE. I am saying don’t be one-eyed about the possibilities. Look at the list of amazing things in London above. Do I really believe that there are wealthy people in London who would stage this sort of thing to protect or further their financial interests? Yes, I do.

It could well be Islamic terrorists. That remains the most probable explanation – but by no means the only possible explanation. It could have been a preparation for an attack on tomorrow’s Gay Pride march. Mossad? Why not? We just don’t know yet. There is also of course the possibility that whoever planted it has tried to make it look like another group, by planted forensic evidence or disguising the driver. Presumably we will see CCTV footage of the driver shortly.

I am also saying that I have first hand experience of the fact that governments lie about who plants bombs. See my posting on Lockerbie below. Read pages 325 to 339 of Murder in Samarkand. Or read Darkness at Dawn by David Satter, or The Quiet American by Graham Greene.

Think.

Whoever was behind the apparent car bomb in London, it almost certainly wasn’t the police explosives experts who made it safe, and we should acknowledge the heroism it takes to do that job.

Peter Clarke, the Met’s anti-terrorism point man, gave a press conference claiming he was not going to speculate, but then doing everything he could to indicate it was an Islamic plot. He referred to other recent cases, including the Barot case, in which night clubs were mentioned as targets, and the use of gas canisters in cars discussed. The one bit of modus operandi pointing another way – the fact it wasn’t a suicide bomber – he was at pains to explain away by speculating that the driver had lost his nerve.

Of course the last time a nail bomb was actually exploded among clubbers in Central London, it was by a homophobic fascist. So it is right to keep an open mind. But whoever did this, the only people who can possibly benefit are the vast and ever-burgeoning security industry of all kinds, and those who want discord between the Islamic World and the West. Unfortunately, the extremists on all sides are strengthened by this incident.

Brown had already made plain he supports further anti-civil liberties legislation. This produces just the kind of febrile atmosphere in which that can be done. The television news is already pushing 90 day detention without charge again.

I am adding this para in response to blogs attempting to say that I am claiming the bomb was planted by the State. I have not changed the above, and plainly it does not say that. In fact, I think that is one of the least likely explanations – in terms of the British State, at least. I have no idea who planted it. I am saying we should not leap to the conclusion it was Islamic fundamentalists. It could be, or it could be other extremists, or interests, who benefit from the War on Terror. The Cui Bono test throws up a number of possibilities.

Reading through Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, and accepting his definitions, confirms that I am a Deist rather than a Theist, Atheist or Agnostic. Except I have days when I go agnostic. I will blog about Dawkins another day.

I mention God because I have no way to prove what I am going to tell you now. I would swear any oath to its truth, but that might not convince you. Actually, I have nothing much left to me now but my reputation for honesty, and nothing to gain by sticking my neck into this one.

From late 1989 to 1992 I was the Head of the Maritime Section of the FCO and No 2 in the Aviation and Maritime Department (for those into FCO arcana, the Maritime Section was headed by a Grade 5 First Secretary and the Aviation Section by a Grade 6 First Secretary). This was the period of the invasion of Kuwait and first Gulf War, in which the Maritime Section, including me, mostly got picked up and deposited in an underground bunker as the FCO part of the Embargo Surveillance Centre. We did intelligence analysis on Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement and organised interdiction worldwide.

In this period I mostly lived in my underground bunker, quite literally, and didn’t get back to the FCO much to keep an eye on the rest of my section. On one occasion when I did, I was told something remarkable by a colleague in Aviation section.

At this time we suddenly switched from blaming Iran and Syria for the Lockerbie bombing to blaming Libya. This was part of a diplomatic drive to isolate Iraq from its neighbours in the run-up to the invasion. Aviation section were seeing all the intelligence on Lockerbie, for obvious reasons. A colleague there told me, in a deeply worried way, that he/she had the most extraordinary intelligence report which showed conclusively that it was really Syria, not Libya, that bombed the Pan Am jet, and that the switch was pure expediency.

I asked if I could see the report, and my colleague declined, saying this was too sensitive and dangerous; the report was marked for named eyes only. That in itself was extremely unusual – normally we would pass intelligence reports freely to each other, signing the register for them.

That is all I know. I never saw the report myself, and I do not know what it said, or why it was so conclusive. I am sorry to say it was such an incredibly busy time, we never discussed it again. I do not know, for instance, whether the intelligence contained an actual admission the charge aganst Libya was fake, or merely evidence that proved Syria did it (a communications intercept, for example). I suspect it will never be made public.

But the knowledge has remained with me ever since, and I was extremely sorry at the conviction of al-Magrahi. I do hope his appeal is successful. I am particularly impressed at the upright stand of Dr Swire and other victims’ representatives on this issue.