"Canon Andrew White, a British cleric working in Baghdad, claimed that he met an al-Qa’ida leader in Amman who had warned him about the imminent attack, saying ‘those who cure you will kill you’. Canon White said he passed the message to the Foreign Office. However a Foreign Office spokesman said there is no record of such a warning being given.”

In any case, White points out that he did not mention the medical angle. But it looks like the Foreign Office has got itself into a bit of a tiz. Although issuing repeated denials to various foreign press, insisting that no record of the warning existed and that no recollection of the conversation could be unearthed, Bloomberg was able to report an admission:

“The Foreign Office today acknowledged receiving information from White about the Amman meeting, adding that it was considered at the time to be too vague to merit further analysis. White’s information has since been passed on to police investigating the Glasgow and London incidents, a Foreign Office spokesman said.”

Ah yes, too vague, although it cohered with all the other intelligence of plans to strike the UK being received just around that time. It certainly also cohered with the previous evidence of an origin for the attacks in al-Qaeda in Iraq; as well as in Pakistan.

The official British government position is not tenable. Credible sources confirm that multiple warnings were indeed received. Repeated official denials contradict the evidence and are internally-inconsistent. In this context, the response of the authorities is telling. The denials eclipse the connections of this obviously untrained group of amateurs to an international al-Qaeda-affiliated network in Iraq and Pakistan.

The “al-Qaeda or not” question, however, is not a black or white case. The pattern of terror plots particularly in the UK over the last few years since after 7/7 has invariably involved rather inept cells with quite questionable expertise in explosives and other terrorist techniques. Many of these cells while purportedly ‘home-grown’, are nevertheless associated with international networks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, where reside senior al-Qaeda operatives with real terrorist expertise. In the UK, USA and Western Europe, one group responsible for mediating communication and movement between these two domestic and international arenas is formerly known as al-Muhajiroun, purportedly banned by the British government, but still intact and still run by self-described cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed from Lebanon, where he was exiled by the British government. It is this that appears to produce a mismatch of actual expertise.

Omar Bakri’s protégé, Anjem Choudray, continues to run around the UK on Omar Bakri’s behalf (and with his regular guidance) attempting to mentor a new generation of Islamist extremists. It was former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus who confirmed that Omar Bakri and his al-Muhajiroun network had been first hired by MI6 in the late 1990s to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. His UK underlings even continue to maintain a website for him which curiously remains devoid of his hundreds of most inflammatory statements supporting al-Qaeda terrorism. Despite exiling him to Britain, authorities have done nothing to curb his ongoing influence over his UK network, except to protect him from official investigation in connection with the radicalization of that very network. Al-Muhajiroun incubated those involved with Dhiren Barot’s grand plan to bomb targets in the US and Britain, with which the fertilizer and 7/7 plotters were also intimately linked.

Further questions arise when we probe the plausible al-Qaeda connections to these incidents from Iraq and Pakistan. We may remind ourselves that the alleged perpetrators of the latest crimes are mostly of Middle Eastern origin. In September 2005, I had already documented  evidence from a number of credible sources suggesting that the United States was covertly supplying arms to Iraqi insurgents described as “former Ba’ath party” loyalists now joining with “al-Qaeda in Iraq”. The proxy for this funnel of weaponry was Pakistani military intelligence, according to a Pakistani defence source cited by the Asia Times. The next year, an outraged British colonel complained that Pakistan was sheltering al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But nevermind him, Bush says Pakistan’s our “major non-NATO ally.”

This strategy of tension in Iraq was, it appears, extended to other key states in the region, namely Lebanon, by late 2006. On CNN, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh summarized his latest exclusive. Hersh’s absolutely critical discovery was that the Bush administration is actively sponsoring al-Qaeda affiliated groups across the entire Middle East, with a focus on Lebanon, to counter regional Shi’ite Iranian influence. Moreover, much of the finances for these covert operations are being funnelled by Saudi Arabia through Iraq:

Déjà vu? An unholy triangle, the US at the helm, Saudi Arabia providing the funds, Pakistan providing military intelligence support, but this time not into Afghanistan as during the Cold War, but into Iraq and thereby throughout the Middle East. It seems, al-Qaeda is still a useful mercenary outfit for our covert regional geostrategy.

In March 2007, Hersh firmed up this conclusion in the New Yorker magazine, citing White House insiders and other US government officials, all confirming in perhaps the clearest terms that the US was deliberately attempting to control al-Qaeda terrorist activity through Saudi Arabia (among others) to be re-directed against Iran:

So, we know the al-Qaeda salafis will throw bombs. But apart from trying to blow up American, British and other civilians (and perhaps themselves if they’ve got that vibe), funnelling them arms, funds and logistical assistance will allow us to “control” them sufficiently to make life difficult for the Iranians (or even the Palestinians), perhaps even provoke them into a response that will legitimize an Anglo-American “strike at them.” Notice that national security, I mean real national security in terms of the protection of the lives of the Western publics, is not an operative factor calculated into this strategy.

Whose bombs indeed. There is a term for this kind of covert sponsorship of terror networks. It’s called “complicity,” if the Modern Law Review is anything to go by. Thus, by law, the Bush administration, and perhaps now Brown’s also, is aiding and abetting al-Qaeda. They cannot be absolved of culpability in the fall-out.

So why Iran and why now?

Bush administration officials have long been aware of the impending oil crisis. Indeed, it was a key factor in Vice-President Dick Cheney’s formulation of the strategy in Iraq only five months prior to 9/11. Reports like that of BP are designed to misinform, steering public attention away from the real cause of the problem.

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