I have just been sickened by John Reid putting his new anti-liberty proposals to parliament. “Terrible things are threatening” he gravely warned us “which had not been anticipated or imagined” when our liberties were adopted.

Just what are these “terrible things” that we can’t imagine? Reid’s flight of rhetoric is reminiscent of King Lear:

I will do such things, What they are yet I know not; but they shall be

The terrors of the earth

The point is, of course, that Shakespeare’s Lear was supposed to be illustrating his descent into madness by this crazed rambling: whereas Reid’s daft statement comes from a supposedly rational man, intent on destroying the civil liberties of our country.

What terrorism we have seen to date in this country has been, in execution, not unimaginable or even particularly surprising. This is a tough and resilient country. We saw off Hitler, we saw off the IRA, and we can see this smaller threat off too. But we can do it better without Reid gnawing at our social sinews.

Terrible things have indeed happened in this country which I had neither anticipated nor imagined. In November 2005 the British government fought a case all the way to the House of Lords, to try to reintroduce, after three hundred years, the use in court of evidence obtained under torture. I never imagined or anticipated that would happen in my lifetime.

Nor did I imagine or anticipate that, as a matter of policy, our intelligence services would regularly use intelligence obtained under torture, nor that people would be held for years in British jails without charge or trial, nor that we would introduce house arrest. I never imagined or anticipated it would become illegal to read names of the dead at the cenotaph, nor wave a copy of Vanity Fair outside the gates of Downing St. I never imagined or anticipated that a Brazilian electrician could be executed on the London Underground.

One of the more nauseating scenes in the Commons was the brown-nosing of Reid by the so-called Liberal Democrats. Reid is no fool, and he knows that under Ming Campbell the Lib Dems are New Labour’s patsy party. Ming has dreams of ministerial office in a Lib-Lab coalition after the general election. That is why, for example, New Labour and the Lib-Dems are trying to wreck any chance of Alex Salmond providing stable administration in Scotland.

So Reid buttered up Clegg by cosy ministerial chats beforehand, leading to fulsome Lib Dem support today and the suggestion that he should go further. Why not introdue plea-bargaining, the Lib-Dems suggested, so those on the fringes of terrorist plots can turn others in for a reduced sentence?

The answer to that is simple. Terrorist investigations are already a minefield of intelligence obtained from foreign intelligence agencies, often under torture, and statements by informers many of whom appear to be acting as agents provovateurs. To persuade acknowledged criminals to improve their own lot by concocting statements against others, is something to which the British legal system has always offered resistance. If in the future any of you ends up behind bars because of lies told about you by a crook trying to reduce his sentence, you will have Menzies Campbell and Nick Clegg and the so-called Lib Dems to thank for it.

Bin Laden and most of the 9/11 team came from Saudi Arabia. In response we keep invading other countries by mistake.

The so-called Attorney-General ordered the Serious Fraud Office to stop the investigation into BAE’s maasive bribery payments to Saudi Arabia because of “national security”. By this, he meant that the Saudis might stop giving us “intelligence” from their torture chambers if we persisted.

The Saudis are even allowed to torture British people if they feel like it:

Three Britons and a Canadian have been denied the right to sue Saudi Arabian officials they say tortured them. A Law Lords ruling allowed an appeal by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against a 2004 Court of Appeal decision for the men to be able to sue for damages.

The four had been jailed after being accused of taking part in a bombing campaign in Saudi Arabia six years ago. Saudi Arabia, supported by the British government, argues that its officials are protected by state immunity.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5078118.stm

It was fitting that the first stop on Blair’s World Rour was Libya, where he did deals with Gadaffi for BP and British Aerospace. No Prime Minister ever did more for the oil and defence industries.

But somewhere in the BBC, somebody is redisclvering their nerve. Take advantage of it before they get sacked to watch what looks like an interesting Panorama programme on June 11.

BBC investigation

A Saudi prince who negotiated a ’40bn arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia received secret payments for over a decade, a BBC probe has found. The UK’s biggest arms dealer, BAE Systems, paid hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

The payments were made with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence.

Prince Bandar would not comment on the investigation and BAE Systems said it acted lawfully at all times. The MoD said information about the Al Yamamah deal was confidential.

Private plane

The investigation found that up to ‘120m a year was sent by BAE Systems from the UK into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington. The BBC’s Panorama programme has established that these accounts were actually a conduit to Prince Bandar for his role in the 1985 deal to sell more than 100 warplanes to Saudi Arabia. The purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the expenses of the prince’s private Airbus.

David Caruso, an investigator who worked for the American bank where the accounts were held, said Prince Bandar had been taking money for his own personal use out of accounts that seemed to belong to his government. He said: “There wasn’t a distinction between the accounts of the embassy, or official government accounts as we would call them, and the accounts of the royal family.”

Mr Caruso said he understood this had been going on for “years and years”. “Hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars were involved,” he added.

Investigation stopped

According to Panorama’s sources, the payments were written into the arms deal contract in secret annexes, described as “support services”. They were authorised on a quarterly basis by the MoD.

Prince Bandar was Saudi ambassador to the US for 20 years. It remains unclear whether the payments were actually illegal – a point which depends in part on whether they continued after 2001, when the UK made bribery of foreign officials an offence. The payments were discovered during a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation. The SFO inquiry into the Al Yamamah deal was stopped in December 2006 by attorney general Lord Goldsmith.

Prime Minister Tony Blair declined to comment on the Panorama allegations. But he said that if the SFO investigation into BAE had not been dropped, it would have led to “the complete wreckage of a vital strategic relationship and the loss of thousands of British jobs”.

Prince Bandar, who is the son of the Saudi defence minister, served for 20 years as US ambassador and is now head of the country’s national security council. Panorama reporter Jane Corbin explained that the payments were Saudi public money, channelled through BAE and the MoD, back to the Prince.

The SFO had been trying to establish whether they were illegal when the investigation was stopped, she added. She believed the payments would thrust the issue back into the public domain and raise a number of questions.

‘Bad for business’

Labour MP Roger Berry, head of the House of Commons committee which investigates strategic export controls, told the BBC that the allegations must be properly investigated.

If there was evidence of bribery or corruption in arms deals since 2001 – when the UK signed the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention – then that would be a criminal offence, he said. He added: “It’s bad for British business, apart from anything else, if allegations of bribery popping around aren’t investigated.”

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said that if ministers in either the present or previous governments were involved there should be a “major parliamentary inquiry”. “It seems to me very clear that this issue has got to be re-opened,” Mr Cable told BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight. “It is one thing for a company to have engaged in alleged corruption overseas. It is another thing if British government ministers have approved it.”

Panorama will be broadcast on Monday 11 June 2007 2030 BST

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6728773.stm

Update 08.06.07: The Guardian reveals that Attorney General Goldsmith hid secret money transfers from international anti-corruption organisation

From Stop the War Coalition

STOP THE WAR LOBBY

WEDNESDAY 6 JUNE, 4.45pm

CONGRESS HOUSE

GREAT RUSSELL STREET WC1B 3LS

Nearest tube Tottenham Court Road

Gordon Brown and the six candidates for the Labour deputy leadership are speaking at a hustings meeting in London on Wednesday 6 June. This is the first London hustings meeting and it is essential that there is a large anti-war lobby calling for troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, opposition to any attack on Iran and a break with US foreign policy.

The fascist initiative of the day today is that we should have a national day, to celebrate “Britishness”. We will all be dragooned into displays of spontaneous happiness, and celebrate our great national achievements, like detention without trial, use of intelligence obtained through torture, and illegal invasion of other countries. What fun!!

Personally I don’t feel the need, having Burns Night and St Andrew’s Day already, This idea sounds to me like the millenium dome in its force-fed awfulness. I can imagine Cherie and Tony in the middle of it all with their rictus grins, and Gordon wrapped yet again in a Union Jack, trying to sound cockney and pretend he’s a fun person.

Anyway two Labour ministers are promoting it today, backed up by an especially egregious creep called Nick Johnson of the Commission of Racial Equality. Johnson was so obviously a New Labour hack that I decided to google him. Lo and behold, I find that there is a view prevalent on the Web that neither Johnson, nor his partner Kate Davies, Chief Executive of the Notting Hill Housing Association, had a great deal to qualify them for their extremely highly paid Quango jobs other than their impeccable NuLab credentials.

Davies had a sociology degree and a postgraduate housing diploma, but not much practical housing administration experience when she was put in charge of one of Britain’s biggest Housing Associations. But she was a New Labour Special Adviser. What qualified the greasy Johnson I have no clue. But they now live in a very expensive address, in Sussex Gardens, at the end without the prostitutes.

Anyone smart enough to find what these NuLab parasites are paid?

Brown is attempting to establish his hard man credentials by trailing the next bunch of anti-terror laws. The most publicity has been given to the proposal that wiretaps should be available as evidence in court.

I have always favoured this, provided the wiretap is legal; and not just in terrorism cases. I blogged recently that I had never understood the government’s objection, but suspected it was because they did not want juries to be exposed to the extremely tenuous interpretations which the security services often put on communications ‘ which I have personally seen on the inside.

After I posted this, I met with a friend, still in the senior civil service, who filled me in on a fuller picture. I now realise, which I did not at the time, that he or she was telling me this because a move was imminent.

The concern is that intercept evidence might be more helpful to the defence than the prosecution. Where communication intercepts are used, as in the USA, the laws of evidence are that the prosecution must make complete disclosure of all the wiretaps made. The defence can then search this for evidence that points to innocence.

Compare this to the situation that operates with control orders, or indefinite house arrest without trial. Here the prosecution just feeds to the judge (no jury) an isolated snippet of information from ‘intelligence’, reflecting not a whole picture but just the security services’ interpretation. Judges tend to be impressed by this ‘Top Secret’ stuff.

To let the defence at raw intercepts threatens the intelligence services’ greatest lever of power ‘ their monopoly of interpretation of raw data. Even Ministers, or Ambassadors as I was, don’t get the raw data, but a ‘Report’ summarising, interpreting and selectively quoting.

So the proposal being considered by the Home Office is this ‘ that the defence should not be allowed access to all the material from wiretaps of the accused. The prosecution would have to disclose in full only the conversation, or conversations, being directly quoted from. The security services are prepared to go along with that, and the Home Office believe that the public demand for wiretap evidence to be admissible will drown out any protests from lawyers. We will be told the Security Services are not staffed to cope with fuller disclosure.

You read it here first. As my friend put it: “You see, in the minds of the Home Office, justice equals more convictions.”

The other point my friend flagged up was that some in the Home Office are arguing that the classification of many intercepts is such that they could not be available to juries. The demand to bring in intercept evidence might therefore be used to push the case for Diplock Courts in terrorist cases. I should be surprised if we see that kite flown at this stage; the government’s technique so far is to push back liberty by a series of hefty shoves. That is probably next year’s argument. But then I hadn’t realised my friend was warning me about something imminent on Wiretaps, so I could be wrong.

The other proposed Brown measure getting most attention is another call for ninety day internment without charge. But in many ways the most insidious proposal of all is the idea that you should still be subject to questioning after you have been charged.

This is a fundamental rebalancing of our legal system. It means that the police can charge you on spec, and then harass you for a confession when you are banged up in jail on remand and subject to extreme pressure, and all kinds of possibilities of physical abuse from fellow convicts -‘trusties’ working with the police. It removes a fundamental safeguard, that once charged the questioning takes place in open court before a jury. It is a huge change.

This proposal also completely obviates the whole ninety day detention question. At the moment, the police do not charge without a firm case, because then they can no longer question. If this new proposal goes through, then the police can just charge willy-nilly and hold the suspect for the usual remand of two or three years in terror cases.

Needless to say, the BBC and Sky have been able to find Lord Windbag Carlile, various ‘security experts’ and Gordon Brown himself to explain while all this is necessary. Even Simon Hughes turned up to pledge Lib Dem support for the right to question after charging. Obviously the whole country supports all this, as they have been unable to find anyone to argue against.

A posting on issues which arouse passion and disagreement.

I have been listening this morning to the views of the Scottish cardinal on abortion. You might be surprised I agree with him to a large extent. I think abortion is appalling, an abomination.

Next month the ban on smoking in public places comes into force. I have never smoked and hate smoke; I love pubs, but the stink on my clothes and hair the next morning is horrible.

I dislike fox hunting intensely. To me, it arouses a nasty bloodlust and is just wrong.

What unites these issues in my mind, is that I am very strongly against all of them – abortion, fox-hunting, and smoking in pubs. But I don’t believe that, just because I am against them, they should be illegal. I don’t even think if a majority were against them, they should be illegal. This is an attitude that seems to have gone out of fashion – the idea that you don’t have to impose your views on everybody else by force.

Legislating on taste and personal morality is assumed. Authoritarianism is the default setting. The anti-foxhunters and anti-smokers have got the strength to impose their will, the anti-abortionists not, at least in the UK. But why do we have to seek to impose our will by force, not reason?

We have all been saved again. Another deadly terror plot has been uncovered in its early stages, with plotters planning to blow up airliners/JFK/The NY Subway/Sears Tower (delete as appropriate). Doubtless Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to it already.

Tell you what, you all run around being terrified, I need an afternoon nap. Maybe I’ll wake up to find we’ve invaded another country, or at the very least introduced the State of Emergency in the UK which Blair and Reid have been asking for.

Having learnt how to post photos, I decided yesterday to post one of my time in Uzbekistan. I posted it then immediately thought better of it, so I clicked back to the building screen and scrubbed the entry. It was certainly posted for less than a minute; even, I am pretty sure, substantially less than thirty seconds.

Imagine my astonishment then to be contacted this morning from Uzbekistan by somebody who appeared in the photo. They had been forwarded a copy by the British Embassy in Tashkent, apparently to try to cause trouble between me and them.

The British government capturing and using a page I had up for a few seconds is a bit troubling. There was nothing in the small caption that would be likely to trigger an alert.

I am in general opposed to violence, except as a last resort. And I know that the police are not all fascists. Many policemen don’t like the drive against civil liberties any more than I do. But, even granted that they are only doing their job, I can promise you this. The first policeman who stops me as I am peacefully going about my lawful business, and demands to know who I am and where I am going, will get punched on the nose.

As the government whittles away our basic freedoms, there comes a point where you either resist, physically, or we all lose our liberty. I think Reid and Blair’s new proposal for a police power to “Stop and question” takes us to that point.

Of course, having skin of a regulation Scottish blue colour, I am not likely to be stopped. Jean Charles De Menezes was killed for having a slightly olive complexion and dark hair, and it is people of his hue and darker who will in fact be stopped and questioned.

The proposal is obvious madness – if the government was looking to provoke young British Muslims, no tactic would work better. Which does lead us, quite seriously, to be forced to question whether Reid and Blair are trying deliberately to cause an even further deterioration in community relations. There are two possibilities: either they are trying to provoke more “Islamic” violence, or they are very stupid.

Come to think of it, there is a third possibility. They may be trying to provoke more Islamic violence, and be very stupid.

The Mail on Sunday have published the second half of my Russia piece, which should cause some controversy. They missed my name out on the web version! I look forward to comments.

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk:80/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_article_id=457865&in_page_id=1787&in_a_source

As I have said in comments on threads below, I have little sympathy for the view that George Bush is the only bad man in the World, and that any World leader whose interests differ from Bush’s, eg Putin, is therefore a good leader. In fact, I would view it as a fruitless and difficult exercise to view which of the two is more sinister. I do not give a second’s credence to the view that the attack on Iraq was wrong, but on Chechnya OK. Or that it was dreadfully wrong for Bush to support the despotism of President Karimov of Uzbekistan, but it’s OK now that Putin is doing it.

In fact I rather despair of the many on the Left who seem to accept Bush and Blair’s risible “With us or against us” logic, and conclude that any opponent of Bush is a good person. Anyone who believes that the Russian oligarchs are not just as evil and machinating as Dick Cheney, has switched off his critical faculties.

And finally the fact that the neo-cons have identified energy security as a problem, does not mean it is not a problem. What the neo-cons have got wrong is the solution, which is not endless wars of resource annexation, but profound measures of energy conservation and re-orientation, and a massive drive to develop carbon friendly alternative energy sources.

I have posted the Guardian’s reply with my original letter below. I have now gone back as follows:

Elizabeth,

Thank you. I am sure you appreciate that the concern of many natural “Guardian readers” over this article is that it reflects longer-felt anxieties about the direction the Guardian is taking. Michael White’s “Comment is Free” piece is another example of how the Guardian’s senior editorial team appear to have swallowed wholesale the authoritarian “War on Terror” agenda.

Of course a newspaper has the right to take what line it wants, although I am not sure the Murdoch/Daily Express world view really needs reinforcing. But, given the Guardian’s history, you cannot expect many loyal readers to be indifferent to the Guardian assisting the spasm of anti-liberalism which has afflicted our society.

I appreciate Mr Rusbridger is probably too busy hobnobbing with his sister-in-law Tessa Jowell and brother-in-law David Mills to respond to my emails. But if you could get past your numerous guards a sentence he will actually see, to the effect that Craig Murray would be grateful if he would at least read my emails, that would be very kind of you.

Craig

In the light of three men under control orders apparently absconding, the right wing media are having a field day.

Michael White, sole living member of the Jack Straw fan club and spiritual leader of the Guardian New Labour hacks, has written a “right-wing bigot in the lounge bar” piece to explain that that this terrorism is all the fault of human rights and judges.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_white/2007/05/losing_control.html

He fails to note that the men have never been convicted of anything. If the evidence is “Solid” that they were plotting acts of terrorism, then charge them.

It is also rather strange to bluster on about the need to be able to deport people, and then complain because they may have left the country. Finally, of course, there is the strange logic that it is fine for British soldiers to invade Iraq and kill people, and it is fine for many thousands of British mercenaries to go to Iraq and kill people, but very wrong for our abscondees to want to go and kill people. A more logical position might be to oppose anybody heading off to Iraq to deal in death. Or put another way, accepting as a hypothesis (with no evidence ever produced) that these men do want to kill British troops in Iraq, there is an unavoidable prior question of what on Earth our troops are doing there in the first place. That question doesn’t seem to occur to Mr White.

Finally, a thought on communications intercepts. The government remain deeply opposed to the use of these in court. I am in favour. If surveillance has been properly and legally carried out, it should be admissible. The truth of the matter is that the Government does not want revealed how weak its so-called intelligence often is.

I can give one example. According to the US intercept agency the NSA, Al-Qaida frequently use the word “Wedding” as code for a suicide bombing. I recall as Ambassador being deluged with intercepts of “suspicious” conversations like “We’re going to a wedding in Bokhara.” Of such flimsy stuff is most of the material. If they keep it from court scrutiny, they can persuade natural authoritarian brown-nosers like Michael White to publish that it is “Solid”.

From BBC Online

Eleven officers involved in the shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes will not face disciplinary action, the police watchdog has said.

They were among 15 Metropolitan Police officers interviewed by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). Decisions have not been made on the four most senior officers investigated.

The family of Mr Menezes – shot eight times at Stockwell Tube station after being mistaken for a suicide bomber – said the decision was “disgraceful”.

With the resignation of Tony Blair expected tomorrow, we link to a tribute to his 10 years in power.

And, if anyone has any old shoes lying around, here is a suggestion.

Via Bloggerheads

I am rather pleased with my Scottish results prediction, and even more pleased with the result.

Even the BBC has stopped parroting the Labour “It wasn’t that bad” spin. So what do I make of the results, for the UK as well as Scotland?

Plainly, the Conservatives did very well indeed and David Cameron’s more liberal rhetoric, genuine or not, is a huge threat to the Lib Dems in the South of England. In these multi-party days, we saw in 2005 Labour get an overall general election majority with just 37%, so even allowing for mid-term protest gains the Tories should be very happy with 40%, a 13% lead over Labour and an 800 seat gain.

For Labour, perhaps the most disastrous thing is the loss of five hundred councillors from their already shattered activist base. Added to the disappearance of their dominance in Wales and Scotland, it is the blow to the morale of their troops, already shrivelled by Iraq, that is so dangerous. Labour now consists of an extraordinary mixture of trade unionists, ageing loyal but unhappy socialists, and aggressive young neo-conservatives. Look to see the latter leaving the sinking ship for the Tories in the next year or two.

The result is a real disaster for the Lib Dems. Menzies Campbell is very plainly not up to the job. I dislike the ageism being hawked around on this subject. There are plenty of dynamic, energetic, incisive people in their sixties. Campbell just isn’t one of them. He was lacklustre in his forties; it has nothing to do with age. A perfectly worthy MP, he just isn’t star material.

The Scot Nats, and Plaid Cymru, are the big winners. They are also the parties which campaigned most openly against Trident and the war in Iraq, which the Lib Dems downplayed. The Scot Nats need not push too hard for a referendum on independence; a compromise like a free vote in parliament on the referendum would be sensible. A SNP-led coalition in Holyrood, with a Conservative government in Westminster, will bring independence eventually. Alex Salmond needs a little patience.

Nicol Stephen, the Scottish Liberal leader, has about as much charisma as Menzies Campbell. His instincts are to keep the coalition with New Labour going at Holyrood. He is extremely comfortable with New Labour managerialism, and the Lib Dem campaign was marred by visceral hatred of the SNP and an irrational rejection of the very notion of an Independence referendum. I don’t rule out McConnell and Stephen arrogantly carrying on as though nothing had happened. That would lead to a massacre of the Scottish Lib Dems in the medium term.

The Greens were sadly squeezed in Scotland, while the socialist parties were victims of quite incredible levels of personal arrogance and idiocy. A shame that flawed personalities and in-fighting destroyed some of the more interesting diversity in British politics.

Finally, I tend to cock-up not conspiracy on the spoilt ballots debacle. The Labour Party probably suffered worse as their supporters are by definition more stupid. Indeed many of them apparently need someone else to fill in their postal ballots!

Hugely happy that Labour has lost Dundee West, the constituency of our University, and has almost certainly lost power in Dundee City Council for the first time in my lifetime. Perhaps every time I go to Dundee now I will no longer have taxi drivers telling me of examples of Council corruption.

Most amused by the Labour Party telling us all that this loss of many hundreds of councillors, dozens of councils and the nations of Scotland and Wales is “Not as bad as expected”.

I have been carefully through those results yet to declare. The regional list system makes prediction difficult, but I have been painstakingly through those too and I am going to stick my neck out and say that it looks to me the SNP will have two more seats than Labour.

Labour has also lost control of Blackburn with Darwen, where I stood as an independent against Jack Straw at the last election. Wonderful!!

Twenty-five years ago today an Argentinean warship, the General Belgrano, was sunk by a British submarine during the Falklands war. Three hundred and twenty two people were killed and the Sun newspaper celebrated with its infamous GOTCHA headline. Although much debate was held over the military necessity or otherwise of the sinking, it become clear that the warship was outside the exclusion zone imposed by the British and, at the time of the attack, was heading away back towards the Argentinean mainland. However, the British Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, attempted to mislead MPs about the ships location and course.

Clive Ponting was a senior civil servant who had the job of drafting replies and answers on the sinking of the warship Belgrano. Believing that the Government was deliberately misleading the House of Commons, a select committee and the public, he blew the whistle and sent two documents to Tam Dalyell MP. The documents were somehow passed to the Chairman of the select committee on Foreign Affairs, who, in turn, gave them back to the Secretary of State at the MoD. Ponting was then prosecuted for breach of the Official Secrets Act.

Ponting was subsequently acquitted after a high profile trial that, in turn, led to a tightening of the Official Secrets Act to remove the defence of public interest. Ponting went on to work as a Reader in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Wales, Swansea until his retirement in 2004.

In our current time the names of Katherine Gunn, David Kelly, Brian Jones, Craig Murray and others will be added to the list of whistle blowers. Its a fine tradition, essential to reigning in the excesses of the state. Long may it continue.

I have now returned from Russia to Shepherd’s Bush.

This post started as a response to a comment by Bridget Dunne on the post below, who was concerned there may have been a miscarriage of justice in the fertiliser bomb case. My own view is that the fertilser bomb, 7/7 and 21/7 cases deserve to be discussed in a much more penetrative and complex way than is being done at present. I have a strong feeling that few on any side will agree with this posting, which is probably why I need to make it.

Bridget has a good point in that certainly the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four should make us very wary. I can now reveal that I went to the Old Bailey at the request of the defence to discuss giving expert evidence in the fertiliser bomb plot case.

In closed session, a representative of the security services had given evidence that, in no circumstances would we accept intelligence from the Pakistanti secret services if we thought it was obtained by torture. He was simply lying, which may be a point of appeal. In the event the defence did not call me.

My own view is that there was indeed a bomb plot here, but whether all five defendants were involved is another matter. I fear some might have been unfairly dragged into the net. There are also questions to be asked about apparent agent provocateur activity by the Pakistani ISI, a deeply complex organisation which contains its own jihadists, and its own anti-jihadists, either of which factions might have felt their interests served if an actual bomb had gone off in London.

But we should be wary of the attitude that there is no such thing as Islamic terrorism and that those convicted are always innocent. I think at least some of these were guilty, and MI5 and the police do indeed deserve a measure of congratulation.

I also accept that there is a great deal of truth in MI5’s defence on 7/7, that you simply can’t follow up on every lead. Bluntly, I would not want to live in the kind of Police State that could, and the logic of many of those posting on 7/7 failure would tend to lead us towards the kind of massive surveillance and intrusion of Karimov’s Uzbekistan. I have seen that, and believe me, we do not want more of it here.

The truth is also that it would require levels of pressure on the Muslim population that would lead to a still greater and justified feeling of oppression, and engender more terrorism in reaction. Let’s not head for vicious spiral country. On balance, MI5 and the police do a good job despite constant political spin, pressure and interference in their work. Hindsight is a wonderful thing; identifying cause is so much simpler once you actually have an effect.

But where the security services and police did go wrong was after 7/7, in repeated lies to the public, the media and parliament over how much they did know. It turns out not to have been true that these bombers “Came out of nowhere” and “Had not crossed the radar screen before”. This overly defensive reaction was perhaps understandable as a first instinct before all information could be collated from the files, but maintained far too long. Why? And how involved were the spin doctors?

There is material here which indeed needs public inquiry. But let it not be based on the notion that security must never “fail”. That is a false direction. Much more important is how to reduce the despair that drives young British people to contemplate desperate acts of violence. As has frequently been proven, the most important step that can be taken is to stop our blind support for the appalling Bush policy of aggression in the Middle East. In the bigger picture, the dead, maimed and bereaved of 7/7 should count as part of the Blair legacy.

Five men have today been convicted of a bomb plot, linked to al-Qaeda, that could have killed hundreds of people in Britain. However, the failure of MI5 to follow-up on two suspects associated with the plot is also making the headlines. The reason is that these two men went on to commit an actual attack in London – on July 7th 2005.

This revelation has renewed calls for a public enquiry in to 7/7 with relatives of the dead saying that only the tip of the iceburg is currently in the public domain. Rachel from North London flagged up these developments some weeks ago and a petition calling for “full public inquiry into the London bombings of July 7 2005” is open on the Downing Street www site.

MI5 is obviously concerned about the PR implications of these revalations. Today they posted information on the links between those convicted and the 7 July bombers on their web site, together with a personal statement by the Director General, Jonathan Evans.

Via Obsolete