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Sunday 27 May 2012

The airline plot denouement raises yet more questions about Londonistan

According to press reports, yesterday’s convictions of three young British Muslims in the al Qaeda transatlantic airline plot terrorist trial in London have been hailed as a ‘triumph’ and an ‘enormous relief’ by the political and security establishment. Really? They shouldn’t break out the champagne just yet.

For sure, if there had been no convictions it would have been an absolute disaster of the first magnitude. Many in Britain even now remain unwilling to believe the true nature and seriousness of the Islamic terrorist threat to the UK. With the belief that ‘we were taken to war in Iraq on a lie’ having become the received wisdom, warnings by the security world of the grievous threat still posed by al Qaeda and its affiliates, working through an estimated two to four thousand radicalised young British Muslims, are often treated as politicised scare-mongering.

Last year, as the Times reported, the first trial related to the airline plot ended inconclusively, with the jury failing to agree that there had been such a conspiracy at all and acquitting one man portrayed by the prosecution as a significant terrorist. If the second trial which ended yesterday had finished in the same way, the belief that the authorities were hyping up the terrorist threat would have become catastrophically fixed in the public – and especially the British Muslim public – mind.

But it very nearly did go completely pear-shaped again. Of the eight defendants, only three were convicted of conspiring to blow up seven transatlantic airliners in mid-air. Three other defendants who had made suicide videos were cleared of plotting to blow up the airliners, but the jury couldn’t decide if they were guilty of conspiracy to murder. A seventh was found guilty of conspiracy to murder, but the jury couldn’t decide if he was part of the airline plot. The eighth, a convert to Islam, was cleared of terrorism charges.

So how come, after a massive £50 million surveillance and legal operation lasting three years and resulting in not one but two lengthy trials, the most serious charges still failed to be proved against most of the defendants? To ask this question is to provoke a number of other questions.

Was the trial of the plotters so badly undermined so that it could never properly recover because the Bush administration lost its nerve and all but scuppered the entire police and intelligence operation?

The Metropolitan Police’s former head of counter-terrorism Andy Hayman is still spitting tacks at what happened. Panicking at what the Brits were telling them about the airline plotters who were being carefully tracked, the US government is said to have leaned on Pakistan to arrest the conspiracy’s mastermind, Rashid Rauf – an arrest which compromised the surveillance operation and thus forced the British to arrest the suspects before they had amassed all the evidence necessary for a safe prosecution.

The Times reported:

Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute, said he gave ‘great credence’ to the theory that US interference was to blame for Rauf’s arrest. He described how the decision appeared to lead straight back to the White House and to Mr Cheney.

‘We know that Tony Blair briefed George Bush on July 28, that he told them that the plot was hatching, but it wasn’t quite ready yet,’ said Mr Clarke. ‘Mr Bush didn’t seem to commit anything to paper, but Vice-President Cheney despatched a man called Jose Rodriguez to Pakistan in secret. The British didn't know he was there. And after Mr Rodriguez’s arrival in Pakistan, Rashid Rauf was picked up. The British were hopping mad about that, because it meant that on August 10 they had no choice but to move in on this plot before all the evidence was as mature as possible.’

Hayman, however, appears to be saying that, despite the difficulty caused by the Americans the British police managed to get the evidence they believed they required for a successful prosecution – but which nevertheless resulted in that abortive first trial. But is there (as we saw from the controversial proposal to extend the period of pre-charge detention) an intrinsic conflict between the imperative to amass the evidence required to secure a conviction and the imperative to step in fast to thwart a major terrorist atrocity?

And is the objection by the security service to using intercept evidence in court sustainable after this:

The influence of terrorist overlords based in Pakistan was also revealed in e-mail exchanges between Ali and [the cell's quartermaster] Sarwar. The e-mails were monitored by surveillance teams but not introduced in the first trial because of the ban on using intercepted material. But the importance of the second trial made it vital that they be brought forward, and the intercept ban was circumvented by a court order in California requiring Yahoo! to disclose them.

Was the original trial derailed by the poor and highly criticised manner in which the judge handled it? More fundamentally, can this level of terrorist threat be dealt with by a system which is not designed to discover the truth and whose core maxim is that it is better for ten guilty people to go free than one innocent person to be wrongly convicted? Can we defend ourselves against such an unparalleled threat by what is in effect a legal game? Is this not a category error? Do we not need to devise new structures, such as inqusitorial trials, to cope with a phenomenon which fits neither the conventional definitions of terrorism nor war?

Are British juries still so reluctant to acknowledge the true nature and scale of the Islamic terrorist threat that the bar for a guilty verdict in such trials is set unreasonably high?

Why are the British still allowing major terrorism suspects to be at liberty in the UK? The Times also reported:

[Ringleader Abdullah Ahmed Ali] had been under surveillance since late in 2005 when he was identified as a member of a circle of young British radicals gathered around a charismatic East London ‘missionary’, believed to be an al Qaeda recruiter. That man, who has been designated a terrorist by the United Nations but who lives freely in Britain, had connections with terrorist cells, including the group led by Muktar Said Ibrahim that tried to carry out suicide bombings in London on July 21, 2005 (my emphasis).

Why is such a man (known for legal reasons only as ‘Gabs’) ‘living freely in Britain’? The stock answer is that it is more useful to keep such people under surveillance, where they can lead the police to other terrorists, than to take them out of circulation. But while they are under such surveillance they still manage to recruit, train, fund, direct and inspire countless additional terrorists and extremists. As the Guardian reported:

A naturalised British citizen born in Syria, ‘Gabs’ lives in east London. He was tried and acquitted of a terrorist offence in 2004 but is accused by US authorities of a string of terrorism-related offences. They say he provided ‘material and logistical support to al-Qaida and other terrorist organisations’ and facilitated ‘travel for recruits seeking to meet with al-Qaida leaders and take part in terrorist training’.

They also accuse him of having been ‘in regular contact with UK-based Islamist extremists, involved in the radicalising of individuals in the UK through the distribution of extremist media’ and of having trained at jihadi camps run by a militant Kashmiri group.

Have the British authorities really learned nothing since they allowed ‘Londonistan’ to grow under their noses in the 1990s? Don’t all answer at once. Even as the airline plot jury was returning its messy verdicts came further evidence that, while the police struggle to achieve guilty verdicts in terrorist criminal trials, the English judiciary has made it all but impossible to detain foreign terrorist suspects or throw them out of the country.

As the Times has reported, after the release from virtual house arrest of a man regarded as one of Britain’s most dangerous terror suspects to avoid disclosing secret evidence against him, the British government is set to release all such detainees from their detention under ‘control orders’ – which were only introduced because the English courts ruled that it was a breach of their human rights to hold such people in prison pending deportation; which was in turn only introduced because the courts ruled that deporting them to countries with a lower standard of human rights than the UK – ie, the rest of the world – was also a breach of their human rights.

The airline plot was supposed to be only the start of ‘floods of martyr operations’on tourist attractions, nuclear power stations and gas plants. And Whitehall officials have said al Qaeda is likely to try again to use aircraft to attack the West.

But hey -- if you are such a terrorist you know that in Britain you won’t be deported, locked up or, as of now, even placed under house arrest, all on the basis that if there’s any evidence against you there must be a trial; in which as things stand you would have a good chance of walking free – unless of course British intelligence has decided that you are such a great terrorist that you should not be detained or arrested so they can watch you 24/7 as you recruit, train, mastermind and incite others to the cause of jihad.

It’s what’s called in Britain ‘preserving our society’s core values’. Yes, we can all be so proud and relieved that we live in Londonistan.

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