Riddell, though a cheerful and popular figure, has never been known for the kind of forensic investigation and harsh scrutiny this inquiry surely requires.
Many will surmise that this is exactly why he was appointed.
Meanwhile the Times, for which Mr Riddell worked for many years, has given only perfunctory coverage to the numerous revelations about British complicity over the past few years.
Though regarded with amiable fondness by senior Whitehall and intelligence figures, Peter Riddell has not yet demonstrated any of the toughness or readiness to challenge the Whitehall establishment this investigation requires.
The third member of the inquiry panel is Dame Janet Paraskeva, the First Commissioner of the Civil Service.She is also head of several quangos: she is chair of the body that hands out billions of Lottery money to Olympic causes, and also chair of the quango which oversees the Child Support Agency."
Indeed, Gibson has a track record of simply overlooking inconvenient questions when it comes to investigating the intelligence services. As Norton-Tayler points out, under Gordon Brown's appointment, he investigated "how GCHQ intercept intelligence was shared in the case of the Omagh bombing in August 1998. His report focused on whether the bombing could have been stopped, after the BBC disclosed that GCHQ were monitoring mobiles used in the bomb run. Gibson concluded it could not have been stopped, though he did not investigate the BBC's core allegation: why information from the intercepts was not shared with the CID officers trying to identity the bombers."
Hardly inspires confidence. Unless, of course, you're David Cameron, or Nick Clegg, in which case it may very well do so.
So we have a whitewash torture inquiry in the making and a crackdown on the integrity of the 7/7 inquest well underway. What is Whitehall trying to hide?
Part of the answer can be found in a brilliant new book by well-known British dissident historian Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: British Collusion with Radical Islam (London: Serpent's Tail, 2010). The book has been out a week now unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to read it yet but given Curtis' previous efforts, this is likely to be yet another tour de force exposing Anglo-American skulduggery. Whereas Curtis' previous work focused on perusing the declassified official files to explore Britain's role as "junior partner" in US imperial ambitions, his latest work focuses squarely on the menace of our times Islamist terrorism. The gist of his argument, which dovetails with my own work on this issue, is summarised in the opening passage of his Guardian piece published two days ago:
"When the London bombers struck five years ago, many people blamed the invasion of Iraq for inspiring them. But the connection between 7/7 and British foreign policy goes much deeper. The terrorist threat to Britain is partly "blowback', resulting from a web of British covert operations with militant Islamist groups stretching back decades. And while terrorism is held up as the country's biggest security challenge, Whitehall's collusion with radical Islam is continuing... dependence on militant Islamists to achieve foreign policy objectives is an echo of the past, when such collusion was aimed at controlling oil resources and overthrowing nationalist governments."
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