“Warnings were issued three months ago [in April 2007] about the threat of a terrorist campaign to mark the end of Tony Blair's premiership, security sources have revealed”. Two major agencies, the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure, which reports to MI5, and the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, which reports to chief police officers “warned in April about the possibility of a renewed campaign”. One senior security source told the Guardian: “The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre [JTAC] assessed that a group of individuals, it is not known how many, clearly had the capability and the intent to carry out attacks on the UK. Therefore there was a strong likelihood of further attacks.” But officials insisted that there had been “no specific” information about the events of Friday and Saturday.

Further details came from the Sunday Times which obtained a leaked copy of the JTAC assessment. The newspaper cites Patrick Mercer MP, former homeland security spokesman, asking: “If they had a JTAC document saying there was a high risk of an attack to mark the end of the Blair administration, why didn’t they raise the threat level and why weren’t people warned?”

An alleged al-Qaeda-Taliban video, shot on 9th June in Pakistan by a Pakistani journalist invited for the occasion, was aired by CNN and ABC in that month purportedly displaying a suicide bomber “graduation ceremony”. The video claimed that “suicide bombers were supposedly sent off on their missions in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany.”  The video included

 “… images of Taliban military commander Mansoor Dadullah, his brother was killed last month by US forces. On the tape, the leader of the British team speaking of the mission in broken English said ‘Let me say something about why we are going along with my team to tell a suicide attack in Britain.’ The video at the time sent a chilling note across the security services with warnings that attacks in the UK were more than likely this summer….” 

For those with an eye for detail, the connection between our no doubt utterly justifiable June slaughter of Afghans and this particular warning from Pakistan of an imminent strike on Britain is notable. Yes, it is by no means the whole story, but it is undeniably a significant component. Meanwhile, British officials are falling over themselves to insist that there is no discernable connection to Pakistan – of course our ardent ally in the ‘War on Terror’. Also worth noting is, as the report above continues, the perpetrators of these particular attacks: foreign “trainee doctors are being held as suspects, having passed their security checks and been provided with official approval to practice in the UK.”

Dirty Skins 

They were not clean skins, police officials are happy to admit, noting that MI5 had logged several of them in its surveillance database of “desirable” targets, thus allowing them to be quickly identified and apprehended. What a resounding success. “Several doctors arrested over the London and Glasgow car bomb plot were on the files of MI5”, reported the Telegraph, including one  

“… on a Home Office watch list after being identified by security services - meaning their travel in and out of Britain was monitored by immigration officers. Others were found to be on the MI5 database, which contains an estimated 2,000 suspected jihadists or supporters of terrorism. Whitehall sources said they had not been involved in previous plots, but were ‘people who knew people’ who were under observation… But British security sources insisted there was no intelligence that al-Qa’eda commanders plotted to infiltrate the NHS… Most of the alleged cell members arrived in this country after 2004 to take up NHS jobs.” 

Desirable targets are individuals directly associated with known al-Qaeda operatives actively engaged in terrorist activity, and/or those involved in fundraising for terrorist activity. But there are slight problems here. For one thing, “American intelligence sources suggested yesterday that some cell members were recruited by al-Qa'eda in Iraq up to three years ago. Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, an insurgency leader, was said to have been ordered to find young men to blend into Western society before staging an attack.” So the Americans knew about them. What about the British? In fact, who exactly were these doctors associated with? The Americans had more to tell. The Telegraph noted that:  

“… reports from the US that the three men had been identified and known to be an associate of Dhiren Barot [convicted last year of a transatlantic terror plan involving nightclubs, car bombs, and other plots], a suspected terrorist who had planned to set off bombs across London, were dismissed by government officials.”  

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. They 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. 

And More Warnings 

More embarrassing information from the Americans has continued to appear. A senior US official told ABC News that they had “received intelligence reports two weeks ago which warned of a possible terror attack in Glasgow against ‘airport infrastructure or aircraft’...” This was actionable intelligence, as it did indeed lead to action: except not in Glasgow. The official confirmed that “the intelligence led to the assignment of Federal Air Marshals to flights into and out of both Glasgow and Prague in the Czech Republic.” What did Britain know? “US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declined to comment on the report, but on Monday told ABC News that ‘everything that we get is shared virtually instantaneously with our counterparts in Britain and vice versa’.”

It should not surprise anyone by now that the Brits are once again denying everything. “There was no prior intelligence” about the Glasgow attack, said Strathclyde police chief constable Willie Rae. No of course there wasn’t. American intelligence officials are no doubt hallucinating.  

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