LONDON, 14 August 2006 — British police are currently conducting more than 20 terror investigations involving radical young British-born Muslims across the country, and in the words of Home Secretary John Reid, they have thwarted “at least four major plots” since the July 7 attacks in London last year, which claimed the lives of 56 people. Had the plots been successful, they would have caused a major loss of life, he conceded.
The government, he added, believes the first terror plot planned by Al-Qaeda in the UK was in 2000 in Birmingham, preceding the war to oust Saddam Hussain in Iraq and the 9/11 attacks in the US.
The home secretary, appearing on BBC’s News 24 Sunday show yesterday, refused to confirm the exact number of ongoing terror investigations across Britain, which according to a report in Sunday’s Observer newspaper was “up to two dozen.”
“I’m not going to confirm an exact number but I wouldn’t deny that that would indicate the number of major conspiracies that we are trying to look at. There would be more which are not at the center of our considerations and there may be more that we don’t know about at all,” he explained.
The revelation comes in the wake of last Thursday’s foiling by British police of an alleged terror plot to blow up nine planes departing from UK airports en route to major US cities and using liquid explosives smuggled as separate components on to the planes disguised as soft drinks to be assembled later aboard. The deputy metropolitan police commissioner on Thursday warned that the plotters had intended “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” Some 24 alleged plotters have been detained under the Anti-Terrorism Act following raids at premises in London, Birmingham and High Wycombe in the earlier hours of Thursday. So far only one has been released without any charges.
In fact, the home secretary also hinted yesterday that the government may look at the possibility of extending the period for which police can detain terror suspects, although the current situation was not “a good time” to look at such measures. It is no secret that Reid like his boss Prime Minister Tony Blair believes that police would like this period to be for 90 days instead of the current 28, which is subject to judicial review and oversight. The Blair government had to back down from its original proposals after it became clear that there was a cross-party opposition to the 90-day proposal.
Reid on Saturday came under attack for suggesting that “all the main players (in the alleged terror) plot are accounted for.”
Yesterday, however, he changed his tune, explaining that “we think we have the main suspects in this particular plot. I have to be honest and say on the basis of what we know, there could be others out there...so the threat of a terrorist attack in the UK is still very substantial.”
“We can never guarantee 100 percent success. This has been an ongoing threat. It is highly likely there would be another terrorist attempt and that is one thing of which we can be sure,” he stressed.
The current “critical” level of terror alert would remain as long as it was deemed necessary by the security services, he reiterated, although he agreed that the current security measures at UK airports would be “time limited”.
Politicians from across the political spectrum have also spoken out strongly against a letter written on Saturday by a group of prominent Muslim MPs, peers and community leaders asking Blair to change his foreign policy on the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan because it was fueling extremism and thus in the words of the signatories putting lives at risk both in Britain and abroad.
The letter instead of putting pressure on the British government has united the British political establishment, and brings into question the political and lobbying inexperience and naivety of the Muslim signatories. It also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the political process in the Westminster-type liberal democracy, including the formulation of foreign policy.
Reid and his Conservative Party shadow home secretary David Davis both strongly attacked the letter as a “dreadful misjudgment.”
The backlash has also precipitated the latest version of the “Islam industry” in the media with some right wing newspapers putting the boot in talking about “the enemy within”.
Others conjure the latest additions to the terminology of terror such as “Talebrum” — a merger of the words Taleban and Brummie (the colloquial term for people who hail from Birmingham), as several of the 24 terror suspects detained on Thursday come from Birmingham, which has a large Muslim minority.
The Sunday Times in an editorial yesterday could not have been more to the point: “It is now self-evident that there is an enemy within who wants to destroy our way of life.”
The newspaper concludes that this low-level war will take a huge effort of will and courage, including the possibility of applying seemingly illiberal measures. However, it warns, that the state must exercise massive restraint and not abuse this responsibility.
