England: Al-Qaeda's next target?

[Ronbo]

A terrorist attack on London is inevitable'

[b]Rosie Cowan, crime correspondent
Wednesday March 17, 2004
The Guardian


A view of London's skyline from Waterloo bridge. Photograph: Martin Godwin


London's police chief warned yesterday of the ever-widening terrorist threat to the capital, stressing that bombers could strike not just on the rail or tube network but virtually anywhere - pubs, nightclubs, buses or roads.
Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner, described the huge security effort, with hundreds of officers working at full stretch to try to prevent an atrocity.

Sir John and the city's mayor, Ken Livingstone, pledged to do everything in their power to protect the public, but they urged Londoners to be on their guard, stressing that community vigilance was the best weapon against terrorism.

Sir John agreed with Mr Livingstone, who said: "It would be miraculous if, with all the terrorist resources arranged against us, terrorists did not get through, and given that some are prepared to give their own lives, it would be inconceivable that someone does not get through to London."

The threat has not worsened since the Madrid bombings - the UK has stepped up security since the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001 and has been on the second highest state of alert, severe general, since November.

The Met has increased its counter-terrorism officers by 680 in the past two years and intends to take on another 100 this year. Sir John said they were working "flat out".

The Spanish atrocity has brought everything into sharp focus. Plain clothes officers are patrolling the tube and other trains. But the commissioner said entertainment venues, buses and roads are all at risk, and people should report any suspicious objects.

"This is not just about the railways, the underground," he said. "It's about buses, roads, pubs, nightclubs and the like. Remember al-Qaida attacked a nightclub in Bali."

All kinds of overt and covert policing operations are being carried out and Sir John also revealed that security had been tightened along the Thames. The river would be another route to terrorist targets such as the Houses of Par liament, where bollards have been put in place and extra police drafted in to deter suicide bombers approaching by road.

The commissioner would not reveal details of specific plots police have foiled in recent months, but said al-Qaida was still active in London and elsewhere in the UK. Police have arrested 520 terrorist suspects since September 11 [2001], of whom half have been charged and 90 are due in court soon.

Sir John and Mr Livingstone claimed London was one of the safest cities in the world and everything possible was being done to ensure it remained so. Mr Livingstone invoked the spirit of the blitz as he insisted the terror threat must not deflect Londoners from going about their everyday business, while Sir John insisted people should "be alert, but not alarmed".

But it is clear both accept the threat is very serious and there can be no guarantee of safety. "There are people out there who want to take lives, in the hundreds and the thousands," said Mr Livingstone. "These are people who celebrate death. We would be fools to assume we will always be able to stop terrorists."

Sir John said: "As the prime minister and the home secretary have said, there is perhaps an inevitability that some attack will get through. It's my duty to make that difficult, if not impossible."

The mayor has allocated an extra £11m this year for equipment to cope with an atrocity, with another £7m in the coming year to pay for 200 more firefighters, and doubling the emergency response fire units, from five to 10.

Sir John said police were drawing up response plans for various catastrophes and would stage more "dress rehearsals" such as September's exercise at Bank tube station.

Intelligence is key in the fight against terrorism; Sir John likened it to a chess game where the security forces must keep several moves ahead. He said public vigilance was vital. "We, the police and security forces, cannot defeat terrorism on our own. The best weapon against terrorism is the community itself. They must be our eyes and ears."

France was on the alert last night after newspapers received a letter from an Islamist group warning that the country would be "plunged into terror" unless a ban on Muslim children wearing veils in schools was withdrawn. It called the ban a "declaration of war to the Muslim world".

A judicial source said the threat from a group named after a Chechen guerrilla would be taken "very seriously".

[voltaire]

Sadly, it's always possible.

All we can really do is be mindful of our security and keep trying to live life to the full.

V

[Last_Knight]

As long as the terrorist attacks here don't turn us into a Socialist run country, I'm not bothered. If we stand strong and don't let them beat us, we will prevail.

[Shevchenko]

...But it's not Blair's Lefty politics that helps terrorists - it's his extreme and irrational cowardice.

This sums it up, OK it is from the pinko-bashing Spectator but it is spot on:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Simon Jenkins on Tony Blair
Spectator Cover Story 13 March 2004

Nothing to fear but fear itself

Simon Jenkins says that Tony Blair’s Sedgefield speech was just another attempt by the Prime Minister to scare us into believing that we are all in mortal danger. We are not...

...In his passionate foreign policy apologia in Sedgefield last week, Blair declared Britain to be ‘in mortal danger’, facing threats ‘different from anything the world has faced before’. Mr Blair plainly sees his primary task as no longer to improve Britain’s public services. Mankind is on a path to destruction from which he alone can save it. The Prime Minister is either terrifyingly right, or mad.

I grew up under what I regarded as a real threat to Britain. It was from world communism, backed by real weapons of mass destruction — literally thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at British cities. While the threat was undoubtedly exaggerated by military hawks and ‘reds under the bed’ fanatics, I accepted the need to be vigilant and spend on defence. I was never a pacifist. I trusted my leaders and was right to do so. There are Soviet maps in the British Library marking each London borough in Russian.

I therefore resent Mr Blair, a former member of CND, telling me I am ‘in mortal danger of mistaking the nature of the world’. I have some knowledge of that world. Like many journalists, I have visited Beirut, Palestine and Iraq and know that seething discontent in these places can induce fanatical groups to acts of great cruelty. Mr Blair is doing nothing to reduce that discontent and much to exacerbate it.

The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 apparently came as an epiphany, a ‘revelation’, to Mr Blair. Yet he knew of al-Qa’eda and previous attempts on the same and similar targets. September 11 saw not ‘weapons of mass destruction’ but hijacked planes used as human bombs against buildings alarmingly susceptible to collapse. It was indeed the sort of incident much cited by proponents of Star Wars technology, when ‘it only takes one to get lucky’. But Star Wars was at least meant to protect entire cities from intercontinental nuclear missiles.

The technology of terror has in reality advanced little beyond the 1970s and 1980s. Suicide bombs have been used in the Middle East for two decades. A small industry of consultants, insurers and mercenaries seeks to persuade governments and corporations of the risk of sarin, ricin and radioactive dust in confined spaces. Only one such device has been successfully delivered, nine years ago in Tokyo. It killed 15 people. ‘Weaponising’ and dispersing biological, chemical and nuclear agents remains exceptionally hard, which is why terrorists prefer bombs. Daily life offers many risks, but that from terrorist attack is extremely slight.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, recently demanded new powers to detain would-be suicide bombers whose arrest might not hold up in open court. But a similar judicial predicament faced those fighting the IRA, when it was handled by special courts. The car bomb that went off in the City of London in 1992 could well have been as lethal as 9/11 had the IRA chosen a week day and used a better engineer. Inept Western diplomacy in the Middle East may increase the risk of bombings, but the threat is qualitatively no different from that of paranoid fanatics and anarchists down the ages. Read Conrad.

Sensible British citizens offer the police support in protecting lives and property. Whether this justifies a thousand body-armoured police with automatic weapons in London’s streets I doubt. Bombs kill and panic the panicky. But they do not undermine civilised society unless that society wants to be undermined. The destructive potential of these bombs is not remotely ‘mass’, nor is the threat comparable with that of the Blitz or nuclear weapons. It is astonishing that we have to tell the prime minister of the day that the British state is not in serious risk of being toppled.

So what is Mr Blair on about? During the build-up to the Iraq invasion in the winter of 2002, he told a Mansion House dinner that he ‘did not want to do the terrorists’ job for them’ by exaggerating threats. He promptly did just that. He had to prepare the country to join George Bush’s invasion of Iraq... Between December 2002 and February 2003 Downing Street was issuing ‘threats’ at a rate of one a fortnight, backed by briefings from Sir John Stevens of the Metropolitan Police and Mr Blair’s security official, Sir David Omand.

Each was subtly different, issued by Alastair Campbell at weekends when news was light. I noted the following headlines, mostly in the London Evening Standard: ‘Dirty bomb on London Tube’, ‘Killer Bug Threat to London’, ‘Full Smallpox Terror Alert’, ‘Terror Threat to Xmas Shopping’, ‘Muslim Festival Terror Threat’ and ‘SAM Missile Launchers at Heathrow’. The smallpox terror alert involved ‘setting up 12 manned regional smallpox response centres’ with hundreds of key personnel actually vaccinated. This appears to have been complete rubbish. As for the SAM launchers, the Prime Minister was said to have descended to his Cobra bunker and ‘personally ordered’ tanks from barracks near Windsor on to the M4 to ‘secure Heathrow’. The threat, if it existed at all, was later said to have been directed at Gatwick.

If this was a nation in mortal terror, it was largely of the Prime Minister’s own making. As John Kampfner records in Blair’s Wars, Downing Street at the time was ‘in a state of continuous panic’.
------------------------------------------------------------

Any English person who, like Blair goes around scared of terrorists is not only an irrational coward, but an unpatriotic coward.
Terrorists are our enemy, and cowardice in the face of the enemy is treason.

If you hear anyone come out with Blair-type blubbering about the terror threat, the best cure for such traitors is usually acupuncture (with a Machete)

Thank God Blair's Scottish - we can blame them

[voltaire]

Sorry, I know it's a bit of an aside, but by what definition on this earth could Tony Blair be considered a socialist?

Even most of his own party don't believe that

V

[Shevchenko]

Voltaire: "by what definition on this earth could Tony Blair be considered a socialist"

Ermm.. how about taxing working people to the hilt to subsidise the extra 300,000+ pen-pushing civil servants, outreach workers, co-ordinators, awareness-raisers and all the other leeches on society?
Buying votes by expanding the public sector with useless jobs is probably in block capitals in the "Middle-class Socialist Hypocrite's Handbook Vol I".

[voltaire]

Originally posted by Shevchenko
Voltaire: "by what definition on this earth could Tony Blair be considered a socialist"

Ermm.. how about taxing working people to the hilt to subsidise the extra 300,000+ pen-pushing civil servants, outreach workers, co-ordinators, awareness-raisers and all the other leeches on society?
Buying votes by expanding the public sector with useless jobs is probably in block capitals in the "Middle-class Socialist Hypocrite's Handbook Vol I".

Taxing the working class to the hilt whilst not redistributing wealth in any significant manner, not even by a modest rise in the top rate of income tax, is not the act of a socialist. University top-up fees were not the act of a socialist. The abolition of child benefit was not the act of a socialist. And the Iraq war was not the act of a socialist.

Even if those bureaucrats were doing something to promote the welfare of the poor, I'd but that as a valid "he's a socialist" argument. But they're not. And indeed, thousands of them seem to be about to be sacked due to efficiency savings in the last budget.

I could go on and on with further examples. But I'll leave it with this. Whatever way you look at it, Blair ain't no socialist.

V

[Shevchenko]

Originally posted by voltaire
But I'll leave it with this. Whatever way you look at it, Blair ain't no socialist.

V

I agree he is no idealogical Socialist.
Idealogically, Blair is in agreement to whoever is in the room with him, he is a serial bootlicker.
But he is the embodiment of British Socialists - A middle-class pen-pusher with a loathing of the Upper class, contempt for the working class, contempt for freedom, extreme cowardice, a complete lack of patriotism, a hatred of the military and a stunning level of ignorance.

As for terrorists his opinions vary depending on which women and children they kill:
If they kill Americans they should have missiles hurled in their general direction.
If they kill Irish and British they should be given light jail sentences.
If they undertake a campaign of rape, ethnic cleansing, genocide and murder of Serb women and kids they are absolutely gorgeous and he should bomb even more women and kids, from a safe distance, just to lick their boots.

He does get very confused, doesn't he?

[Last_Knight]

A very good description of Tony Blair. I would of to say an almost complete opposite of me. I would try and nominate myself as the leader of the country, but I'd grow power hungry and start killing everyone. Off the subject?

Anyway, he isn't a Socialist but if we ever do get a through and through Socialist in charge of this once great nation then we're screwed.

I already believe Spain becoming Socialist will have a chain reaction. I'm trying to predict German, French and Italian reaction to terrorist bombings.

[Shevchenko]

Originally posted by Last_Knight
A very good description of Tony Blair. I would of to say an almost complete opposite of me.

S'good enough OK I'll vote for ya!

[Last_Knight]

That's one vote my way, that's one more than Charles Kennedy. Hahah.

[Ronbo]

Originally posted by Shevchenko
...But it's not Blair's Lefty politics that helps terrorists - it's his extreme and irrational cowardice.

This sums it up, OK it is from the pinko-bashing Spectator but it is spot on:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Simon Jenkins on Tony Blair
Spectator Cover Story 13 March 2004

Nothing to fear but fear itself

Simon Jenkins says that Tony Blair’s Sedgefield speech was just another attempt by the Prime Minister to scare us into believing that we are all in mortal danger. We are not...

...In his passionate foreign policy apologia in Sedgefield last week, Blair declared Britain to be ‘in mortal danger’, facing threats ‘different from anything the world has faced before’. Mr Blair plainly sees his primary task as no longer to improve Britain’s public services. Mankind is on a path to destruction from which he alone can save it. The Prime Minister is either terrifyingly right, or mad.

I grew up under what I regarded as a real threat to Britain. It was from world communism, backed by real weapons of mass destruction — literally thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at British cities. While the threat was undoubtedly exaggerated by military hawks and ‘reds under the bed’ fanatics, I accepted the need to be vigilant and spend on defence. I was never a pacifist. I trusted my leaders and was right to do so. There are Soviet maps in the British Library marking each London borough in Russian.

I therefore resent Mr Blair, a former member of CND, telling me I am ‘in mortal danger of mistaking the nature of the world’. I have some knowledge of that world. Like many journalists, I have visited Beirut, Palestine and Iraq and know that seething discontent in these places can induce fanatical groups to acts of great cruelty. Mr Blair is doing nothing to reduce that discontent and much to exacerbate it.

The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 apparently came as an epiphany, a ‘revelation’, to Mr Blair. Yet he knew of al-Qa’eda and previous attempts on the same and similar targets. September 11 saw not ‘weapons of mass destruction’ but hijacked planes used as human bombs against buildings alarmingly susceptible to collapse. It was indeed the sort of incident much cited by proponents of Star Wars technology, when ‘it only takes one to get lucky’. But Star Wars was at least meant to protect entire cities from intercontinental nuclear missiles.

The technology of terror has in reality advanced little beyond the 1970s and 1980s. Suicide bombs have been used in the Middle East for two decades. A small industry of consultants, insurers and mercenaries seeks to persuade governments and corporations of the risk of sarin, ricin and radioactive dust in confined spaces. Only one such device has been successfully delivered, nine years ago in Tokyo. It killed 15 people. ‘Weaponising’ and dispersing biological, chemical and nuclear agents remains exceptionally hard, which is why terrorists prefer bombs. Daily life offers many risks, but that from terrorist attack is extremely slight.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, recently demanded new powers to detain would-be suicide bombers whose arrest might not hold up in open court. But a similar judicial predicament faced those fighting the IRA, when it was handled by special courts. The car bomb that went off in the City of London in 1992 could well have been as lethal as 9/11 had the IRA chosen a week day and used a better engineer. Inept Western diplomacy in the Middle East may increase the risk of bombings, but the threat is qualitatively no different from that of paranoid fanatics and anarchists down the ages. Read Conrad.

Sensible British citizens offer the police support in protecting lives and property. Whether this justifies a thousand body-armoured police with automatic weapons in London’s streets I doubt. Bombs kill and panic the panicky. But they do not undermine civilised society unless that society wants to be undermined. The destructive potential of these bombs is not remotely ‘mass’, nor is the threat comparable with that of the Blitz or nuclear weapons. It is astonishing that we have to tell the prime minister of the day that the British state is not in serious risk of being toppled.

So what is Mr Blair on about? During the build-up to the Iraq invasion in the winter of 2002, he told a Mansion House dinner that he ‘did not want to do the terrorists’ job for them’ by exaggerating threats. He promptly did just that. He had to prepare the country to join George Bush’s invasion of Iraq... Between December 2002 and February 2003 Downing Street was issuing ‘threats’ at a rate of one a fortnight, backed by briefings from Sir John Stevens of the Metropolitan Police and Mr Blair’s security official, Sir David Omand.

Each was subtly different, issued by Alastair Campbell at weekends when news was light. I noted the following headlines, mostly in the London Evening Standard: ‘Dirty bomb on London Tube’, ‘Killer Bug Threat to London’, ‘Full Smallpox Terror Alert’, ‘Terror Threat to Xmas Shopping’, ‘Muslim Festival Terror Threat’ and ‘SAM Missile Launchers at Heathrow’. The smallpox terror alert involved ‘setting up 12 manned regional smallpox response centres’ with hundreds of key personnel actually vaccinated. This appears to have been complete rubbish. As for the SAM launchers, the Prime Minister was said to have descended to his Cobra bunker and ‘personally ordered’ tanks from barracks near Windsor on to the M4 to ‘secure Heathrow’. The threat, if it existed at all, was later said to have been directed at Gatwick.

If this was a nation in mortal terror, it was largely of the Prime Minister’s own making. As John Kampfner records in Blair’s Wars, Downing Street at the time was ‘in a state of continuous panic’.
------------------------------------------------------------

Any English person who, like Blair goes around scared of terrorists is not only an irrational coward, but an unpatriotic coward.
Terrorists are our enemy, and cowardice in the face of the enemy is treason.

If you hear anyone come out with Blair-type blubbering about the terror threat, the best cure for such traitors is usually acupuncture (with a Machete)

Thank God Blair's Scottish - we can blame them

Huh?

So he should ignore the terrorist threat and hope it will go away?

I'd say the man is a realist and a fighter in the Churchill mold!

BTW, the Clinton Administration tried for eight long years to more or less ignore the threat from al-Qaeda --- and the result was 9/11.

[Ronbo]

Originally posted by Last_Knight
A very good description of Tony Blair. I would of to say an almost complete opposite of me. I would try and nominate myself as the leader of the country, but I'd grow power hungry and start killing everyone. Off the subject?

Anyway, he isn't a Socialist but if we ever do get a through and through Socialist in charge of this once great nation then we're screwed.

I already believe Spain becoming Socialist will have a chain reaction. I'm trying to predict German, French and Italian reaction to terrorist bombings.

I like Blair's stand against the terrorists, however, the man is leader of the British Labour party which is socialist and whose members until recently addressed one another as "Comrade."

[voltaire]

Originally posted by Ronbo

Huh?

So he should ignore the terrorist threat and hope it will go away?

I'd say the man is a realist and a fighter in the Churchill mold!

BTW, the Clinton Administration tried for eight long years to more or less ignore the threat from al-Qaeda --- and the result was 9/11.

Actually, that isn't true. Clinton spent a lot of his administration fighting for greater counter-terrorism spending, often in the teeth of opposition from Congressional Republicans.

After the attack on the USS Cole on 12 Oct 2000, Clinton resolved to destroy Al Qaeda. Richard Clarke was commissioned to write a strategy for doing just this, which involved breaking up Al-Qaeda's cells, freezing its assets, stopping funding channels for it, helping governments that were fighting it, arresting its personnel, and, finally, taking up covert ops in Afghanistan to get OBL himself.

George W Bush inherited this plan... he and members of his administration variously stalled and ignored it until 9/11 forced their hands. Woo Hoo Go Dubya.

V

[Shevchenko]

Churchill was no coward, and he would have had Blair (and Clinton) shot for their cowardice, treason and licking the boots of terrorists.
Churchill was also highly intelligent, and not even Blair's best friends would claim he is exactly the sharpest stick in the bundle.

Voltaire - Reagan, Bush snr and Clinton are primarily responsible for the perception of the US as weak and cowardly, and therefore ripe for a terrorist attack.
Clinton's feeble attempts on bin Laden's life sums it up - fire a missile from a safe distance at a spot he'd left hours ago - pathetic.

George W Bush is an isolationist and cannot be blamed for the mistakes of the previous Presidents, or the incompetence of the Pentagon or Langley.
His country was attacked because of the weakness he inherited, he had only just become President.