LONDON, 14 September 2005 — Britain faces a terrorist threat for a “considerable time,” according to British Home Secretary Charles Clarke, who yesterday refused to put a timescale on how long the UK would face such a threat. At the same time, hundreds of people in the UK are being kept under surveillance as part of the war against terrorism.
Clarke echoing Prime Minister Tony Blair’s sentiments that hundreds of people are plotting attacks against the UK, confirmed “there are certainly hundreds of individuals who we have been watching very closely and continue to watch extremely closely. The word plotting is an interesting word. There are certainly hundreds of people who we believe need to be very closely surveyed because of the threat they offer.”
Indeed, the Home Office is publishing later this week full details of proposed new laws for tackling terrorism, including a list of unacceptable behaviors by foreign nationals living in the UK. These in turn include the encouragement, promotion and glorification of terrorism.
The Home Secretary, inter alia Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan police commissioner; Ken Livingstone, London mayor; and Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), were yesterday grilled by a special session of the cross-party Home Affairs Committee at the House of Commons (Parliament). This is the first time that British members of Parliament (MPs) have had a chance to question politicians and other leaders about the 7/7 suicide bombings which claimed the lives of 56 people and the failed 21/7 attacks on the London transport system.
Clarke revealed that he has approved control orders, which include house arrest and other restrictions, on four suspects, including one British citizen. But he has also lifted orders on nine other suspects.
The Home Affairs Committee Chairman John Denham, a former Labor government home minister, grilled the home secretary as to why about two months before the bombings, the official terrorism threat level was lowered slightly from “severe general” to “substantial.” The Joint Terrorism Analysis Center had also been wrong when it said there was not a single terrorist group that had both the intent and the capability to mount an attack. This is because intelligence is not an exact science of knowing “what is out there” but instead was an effort to understand what was happening.
The government, he said, has considerably increased the resources of the security services, who were also forging new partnerships with overseas intelligence services. Clarke defended the ‘shoot-to-kill-to-protect’ policy of the Metropolitan Police, but he stressed that “the objective of the policy is not to go around killing people. The objective of the policy is to protect the public against any particular threat of criminality that can arise.”
Livingstone later told the MPs: “Over four years we’ve been incredibly good at actually stopping people getting through and we eventually knew we would fail. I suspect we will catch many others before we fail again.” All London’s buses would have 100 percent closed circuit television coverage by the end of the year, Livingstone promised.
Sir Ian Blair once again apologized for the death of 27-year-old Jean Charles de Menezes, who was mistaken by police for terrorist suspect Osman Hussain, who lived in the same block of flats in Stockwell. De Menezes was mistakenly shot on a tube train in Stockwell station a day after the failed 21/7 attacks. He was shot seven times in the head an died instantly. This lead to an outcry against the so-called ‘shoot-to-kill-to-protect’ policy of the police.
Commissioner Blair however insisted that the policy of shooting suspected suicide bombers was “the least worst option,” but he refused to confirm whether such a policy was in place at the time of de Menezes shooting as there was an ongoing investigation into the killing.
“There is no question that a suicide bomber, deadly and determined, who is intent on murder, is perhaps the highest level of threat that we face and we must have an option to deal with it,” he explained to the MPs.
He did confirm that the policy had been reviewed in the aftermath of the tragic death of de Menezes with some minor administrative changes made to the policy.
These revelations outraged the cousins of de Menezes — Alessandro Pereira, 25, Vivian Figueiredo, 22, and Patricia da Silva Armani, 31 — who were also attending the select committee hearing. They said they were horrified that the policy was still in use and urged that it should be suspended.
They subsequently declined an offer from Sir Ian to speak to them after the hearing so he could apologize personally.
In a statement, the cousins said: “What we have heard here today fails and cannot answer the many urgent questions we, the family, and the British public still have over the death of Jean Charles. Sir Ian Blair and Charles Clarke have many more questions still to answer. We are, however, horrified to know that the shoot-to-kill policy is still in operation today. It remains a secret policy, a policy that nobody knows how it operates, a policy that has never been discussed in Parliament. The death of Jean shows that this policy is a danger to innocent people all across the country. It must be suspended until the investigation is completed.”
