Former British Ambassador Craig Murray has put together a post that casts further doubts on the viability of the recent British terror plot (via reader RG). Murray writes:
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.
[. . .]
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.
Murray’s post is directly in line with the suspicions I raised in last Sunday’s post about the timing of the arrests. After reading NBC’s report, in which sources claimed that the attacks were not imminent, that the suspects had neither passports nor plane tickets, and that the Bush administration pressured the U.K. government to make the arrests before the investigation was complete, I argued that the entire affair had been politically motivated:
It turns out that it was the other way around: the Bush Administration orchestrated the timing of the arrests to coordinate them with the PR offensive, which attacked Democrats after Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary.
For the GOP, the short term political importance of getting the Lamont victory, and the developing sense that America had fully turned against the Iraq War, off the news was reason enough to disrupt an active terror investigation. The disruption hurt the legal case against the terrorists — it will be much harder to convict them without passports or airline tickets. The GOP was so insistent on the timing that they threatened to “render” the lead suspect if the British did not comply with their wishes.
It’s looking more and more possible that this terror plot was a blatant attempt by the U.S. and U.K. governments to alter the news cycles in their respective countries. It’s long past time for journalists to start investigating these stories more fully before beginning their feeding frenzies.
Or, as Atrios puts it, “It’s increasingly likely that the whole British plot wasn’t much more of a big deal than the idiotic nonsense in Florida awhile back. Certainly as of yet there’s nothing to indicate that FULL PANIC MODE AT THE AIRPORTS and cable news’ return to 24 hour OH MY GOD THEY’RE GOING TO BOMB THE SHOPPING MALLS mode had any justification whatsoever.”
The fact that several hijackers had neither passports nor plane tickets seems to have come as a surprise to Andrew Sullivan, but it’s nothing that readers of this site didn’t already know.
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Having patted myself on the back for one post, I must give myself a demerit for another. My last piece, “Sugarcoating Torture,” which criticized a Malkin guest-blogger for using euphemisms to describe torture, nevertheless accepted too readily the claim that the London arrests challenged the widely held belief that information gleaned from torture cannot be trusted. Having already detailed the ways in which the arrests were politically motivated, I should have put two and two together and realized that if the alleged plot was uncovered using torture, that was all the more reason to doubt it.
Update: Josh Marhsall at TPM:
I’m not ready to say the London bomb plot is another bamboozlement. It at least seems clear the Brits were involved in a serious investigation. But even this case now seems to be turning out to be less than met the eye. And there are real grounds to question whether Bush and Blair jumped the gun for reasons other than counter-terrorism. We’ll see.
One Comment on "More Doubts About the British Terror Plot"
The Heretik:
Terror and Facts…
Clintonian understatement Bill edition: “The Republicans should be very careful in trying to play politics with this London airport thing, because they’re going to have a hard time with the facts.”
The Republicans are taking this ne…
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