SENSITIZE ©

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed wrote:How to understand the attempted but largely failed terrorist plots uncovered since last Friday? Police officers on June 29 dismantled two car bombs made from gas canisters, gasoline and nails, parked in central London’s major theatre and shopping districts. A day later, two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee, filled with flammable material, into a terminal entrance at Glasgow airport. The series of attempted attacks follows hot on the heels of an attempted al-Qaeda attack in the United States earlier in June.

The chronology requires further probing, and indeed, preliminary analysis raises some unresolved questions.

Their Terror… And Ours

We will start with the UK. First off, we need to consider the way government, police and security services dealt with events. On Friday, official sources immediately told mainstream media that they had successfully defused highly dangerous explosive devices in the cars. The general picture disseminated by government spokesmen was that the bombs could well have killed hundreds of civilians generating a huge and lethal fireball engulfing the surrounding area.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed wrote:British officials are denying what the Americans are confirming. But the Americans do not merely share all their intelligence with the British as a matter of routine; their intelligence operations are fundamentally inter-coordinated, and have been increasingly so after 9/11. There are more problems. How on earth did foreign trainee doctors logged by MI5 as al-Qaeda associates manage to pass “their security checks” to receive “official approval to practice in the UK”? MI5 already had these individuals logged, yet MI5 did nothing while these individuals predictably applied to join the NHS, the very reason they had arrived in the UK after 2004. The official insistence from British officials that they had no idea these people were trying to infiltrate the NHS is difficult to make sense of. What else would al-Qaeda associates with medical degrees arriving in the UK for the specific purpose of joining the NHS be trying to do?.

[Just on a side note, the 7/7 bombers (at least Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shahzad Tanweer), it has been admitted, were also logged by MI5 as “desirable” targets. Note how in this case police were happy to admit that the MI5 information was specific enough to quickly identify and track the alleged suspects. The 7/7 bombers will have been, similarly, identified along with other relevant background data, as al-Qaeda associates, at the very least. They will have had files open on them, just as with these “desirable” targets.]