History > 2006 > UK > Terrorism (III)

Bin Laden is alive

and hiding in Afghanistan,

insists Musharraf

It's not a hunch. We have got good intelligence,
the Pakistan President tells our correspondent
in New York

September 28, 2006
The Times
By James Bone

PRESIDENT MUSHARRAF, dismissing a French intelligence report that Osama bin Laden had died of typhoid, said yesterday that he believed the al-Qaeda leader to be hiding in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar, possibly with the help of an Afghan warlord.

“It’s not a hunch,” the Pakistani President told The Times. “Kunar province borders on Bajaur Agency. We know there are some pockets of al-Qaeda in Bajaur Agency. We have set a good intelligence organisation. We have moved some army elements. We did strike them twice there. We located and killed a number of them.”

General Musharraf has been in a verbal duel with President Karzai over Pakistan’s role in the War on Terror, with the Afghan leader accusing it of allowing cross-border operations by Taleban from tribal areas. The two leaders held a contentious meeting over dinner hosted by President Bush at the White House last night. They did not shake hands.

Interviewed at his hotel in New York, General Musharraf said he believed that bin Laden was in Afghanistan, and suggested a possible link with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan warlord. Brandishing a UN report highlighted with coloured markers, the President read out its finding that the insurgency in Afghanistan “is being conducted mostly by Afghans operating inside Afghanistan’s borders”.

The report, issued by the Secretary-General this month, identifies five “distinct leadership centres” of the insurgency, which “appear to act in loose co-ordination with each other and a number benefit from financial and operational links with drug-trafficking networks”. It says that Kunar province is the base of operations of Hekmatyar’s wing of the Hezb-i-Islami party.

Hekmatyar and bin Laden fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. In the 1992-96 civil war that followed the Soviet pullout, Hekmatyar, an ethnic Pashtun, who was the Prime Minister, turned his forces against those of President Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik.

When the Taleban came to power in Kabul, Hekmatyar went into exile in Iran while bin Laden found safe haven with the hardline Islamic regime. But Hekmatyar returned to Afghanistan when the Taleban were toppled by the American invasion and has since issued statements urging Afghans to support al-Qaeda and wage jihad against US-led forces.

“In Kunar province it is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who is operating,” General Musharraf said, adding: “There must be some linkages.” He shrugged off a leaked French intelligence report suggesting that bin Laden may have died from typhoid fever sometime between August 23 and September 4 while hiding in Pakistan. “I don’t know. Unless I am sure I never say anything,” he said. “If they have some source they should tell us. At least our intelligence does not know anything.”

General Musharraf, whose memoir, In the Line of Fire, has been serialised in The Times this week, defended Pakistan’s much-criticised intelligence effort to locate al-Qaeda operatives in its autonomous tribal areas along the Afghan border.

“I believe the biggest element of [their] success is the people are abetting and supporting in hiding the terrorists and al- Qaeda. This is what has been happening,” he said. “They have been hiding because some people support them. If they are hiding in a compound with four walls and they are doing everything from within that compound, not moving out, and the people are supporting, how would anyone know?”

He repeated his claim that the US had paid bounties for Pakistan’s capture of wanted al-Qaeda figures. But he said that the money went to individuals. “No money has been given at the government level to the Government of Pakistan. These people carry ‘head money . . .’ ” he said. “This money was given through organisations to the people who were involved.”

General Musharraf acknowledged that Islamic militants of Pakistani descent in Britain might seek the blessing of figures in Pakistan for terrorist attacks. But he said that he did not personally know the detailed movements of the two July 7 London suicide bombers — Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammad Sidique Khan — who visited Pakistan in the months before the attacks.

The general complained that Western countries had sometimes been slow to share intelligence because they “think we are some kind of backward people”. But he said that intelligence sharing was getting better. “You thought everything is happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan. You should not bother. Now, after 7/7, people realise that no, sir, things are happening in your country,” he said.

“We are together to fight extremists and terrorism but . . . if you are in the blame game, that everything is happening in Pakistan, nothing is happening here [in Britain], we will not succeed.”

President pulls off TV comedy encounter

IT IS not every night that the president of an Islamic republic appears on a US comedy show to joke about Osama bin Laden.

President Musharraf of Pakistan did just that on Tuesday, all in the name of book sales, after using a press conference with President Bush last week to plug his memoir.

Looking relaxed and sporting a brown suit and orange tie, General Musharraf proved an unusual hit on the late-night Daily Show with Jon Stewart, managing to get through his 15 minutes of comedy fame without looking too uncomfortable.

Teasing the general over two attempts on his life on the same bridge in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in 2003, Mr Stewart joked: “I’d come up with a new way to go to work.”

The jibes at Mr Bush were not far behind. Mr Stewart asked General Musharraf about his meeting with President Bush in Washington last week. “Does he seem open, or paying attention, or does he, let’s say, have the TV on?”

“He was listening carefully,” the general replied, before being interrupted with: “Because he sleeps with his eyes open.”

In a crowd-pleasing finale, when asked who would win a popular vote in Pakistan, bin Laden or Mr Bush, a chortling General Musharraf replied: “They’d both lose miserably.” (AFP)

    Bin Laden is alive and hiding in Afghanistan, insists Musharraf, Ts, 28.9.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2378688,00.html

Victims of 7/7 bombs

were not given enough help,

ministers admit

· Delay in identifying dead distressed families
· Curbs on mobile phones increased confusion

Saturday September 23, 2006
Guardian
Alan Travis, home affairs editor

The victims of the July bombings in London last year were let down by the authorities, with many left feeling forgotten or unimportant on the day and in the weeks that followed the attacks, ministers admitted yesterday in the official report on the emergency response to 7/7.

The Home Office report, Lessons Learned, based on interviews with 1,500 survivors and bereaved families, says that much more could have been done to help those injured in the bombings.

"There is a clear message that more could have been done to support all those who were caught up in the attacks - in our preparation and response on the day and in the days and weeks that followed," says the joint foreword by the home secretary, John Reid, and the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell. "A crucial lesson we have drawn is that the quality of help received in the first few hours and days can determine for years to come people's reaction to a terrible event of this sort."

Fifty-six people, including the bombers, died in the attacks, with more than 700 injured. The police casualty bureau phone line received more than 43,000 calls an hour and took details of 7,823 people believed missing.

The report's main findings highlight the bravery, humanity and heroism of the emergency services, transport workers, and individual members of the public. But they also identify failings in information sharing, communications, compensation for victims, and the system for caring for the survivors of the blasts.

Rachel North, who was trapped on the Piccadilly line, and set up a survivors' self-help group, said a public inquiry was still needed: "They have missed the opportunity to look at the causes of July 7 and have a more wide-ranging investigation. It is the bare minimum to have the facts of that day independently verified and investigated and they have not done that."

The Home Office report found that:

· The casualty bureau was overwhelmed with calls from people looking for information about loved ones or transport arrangements that it could not provide.

· Reception centres for victims or worried families and friends were not set up in the hours following the attacks. Details were not collected from some of those caught up in the explosions so that they could be put in touch with counselling.

· Many bereaved families reported distress at the length of time it took to identify dead relatives. Survivors found the process of applying for compensation "bureaucratic, slow and distressing".

· The decision to "manage" demand on the mobile phone network led to considerable worry and distress as family and friends had difficulty contacting one another. A City of London police request to deny access to all but privileged users around Aldgate for four hours left the London Ambulance Service with no mobile phone access.

Magda Gluck, whose 29-year-old twin sister, Karolina, was killed at Russell Square, said the aftermath was a "big mess. It took us more than a week to find out that she was killed. It was too long to find out that kind of information." The family received compensation of £11,000.

A second report published yesterday by the London Resilience Forum, representing the emergency authorities, concluded that not a single life was lost because of poor planning. Underground staff had behaved in an exemplary manner and the NHS made sure 1,200 beds were available within three hours.

    Victims of 7/7 bombs were not given enough help, ministers admit, G, 23.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,,1879315,00.html

Home Office says

7/7 victims let down by poor planning

September 22, 2006
Times Online

Victims of the July 7 London bombings were let down by the authorities before, on the day and in the weeks that followed the attacks, a Government inquiry reported today.

The Home Office's Lessons Learned report said that there were flaws in information sharing, communications, the compensation system and the care offered to survivors. Ministers stressed that they were now working to address these shortcomings.

The report praises many aspects of the response by the emergency services, including their bravery and professionalism, but identifies a number of problems in the way the disaster was handled.

It reveals that survivors from the blasts found the process of applying for compensation "bureaucratic, slow and distressing". It also says that communications were a problem, and elderly radio and telecoms systems "probably degraded the emergency services’ command and control capabilities".

Casualty bureau phone lines were swamped by the high volume of calls from worried friends and relatives, while many of the walking wounded had to find their own way home without receiving help or having the chance to give their details to the authorities.

In addition, a police decision to ask for use of mobile phone networks to be restricted to priority users around the Aldgate bomb scene led to the London Ambulance Service losing use of their mobiles, the report finds.

John Reid, the Home Secretary, and Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, said that there was a clear message that more could have been done to support all those who were caught up in the attacks.

The ministers wrote: "A crucial lesson we have drawn is that the quality of help received in the first few hours and days can determine for years to come people’s reaction to a terrible event of this sort."

Ms Jowell added: "I have been humbled by the courage and dignity of the bereaved families and those who survived the attacks. I am very grateful to them for sharing their experiences, and absolutely determined that we will apply the lessons learned so that we can do better in the future."

Mr Reid said: "This report concludes that the response to the bombings was fast, professional and effective. However, where shortcomings have been identified, we have set out the work in hand to address them.

"In times of crisis, information and support must be readily available and easy to access for those who need it. Getting the right help in place is of critical importance and we are working hard to strengthen our emergency response."

The report restates the Government’s opposition to a public inquiry into the 7/7 attacks, which it said would divert manpower away from the police and security agencies at a time when they were both investigating the atrocity and trying to detect and prevent future attacks.

The report, which is based on interviews with survivors and bereaved families, is one of two published today into the July 7 attacks last year on three London Underground trains and a bus that killed 56 people, including the four bombers.

A separate inquiry by the London Resilience Forum said the response by the emergency services was "exemplary" and that not a single life was lost because of poor planning.

The forum was set up in the wake of the September 11 2001 attacks on the US, and includes representatives from emergency services and the London Assembly as well as national government.

Its findings cover issues specifically relating to the capital, while the Home Office report is intended to help prepare the country as a whole for an attack.

The forum recommended that a mobile digital radio infrastructure should be rolled out across the capital. It is estimated that the Airwave system should be fully in place in police services by October 2007, ambulance services by early 2008 and fire services by mid-2009.

"Special link vehicles" will be able to extend the Airwave radio system underground. And better medical supplies will be placed at the major hubs of the transport network after a lack of supplies was apparent on the day.

The Home Office report is the latest official report to be critical of the British authorities. In May, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) disclosed that at least two of the bombers had come to the attention of the security services beforehand.

Its report concluded that extra resources could have prevented the bombings and that there were a number of "lessons to be learned".

Then in June, a damning report by the London Assembly exposed a catalogue of failings in the chaotic aftermath of the attacks.

Massive communication problems, a lack of basic medical supplies and a "completely unacceptable" failure to care properly for thousands of survivors were just some of the serious deficiencies it identified in the rescue operation.

    Home Office says 7/7 victims let down by poor planning, Ts, 22.9.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-2370527,00.html

12.15pm update

July 7 victims let down, report says

Friday September 22, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies


Victims of the July 7 London bombings were let down by inadequate preparations for dealing with a terrorist attack, an official report said today.
The Home Office inquiry highlighted flaws in information sharing, communications, the compensation process and systems for looking after survivors.

The report (pdf), entitled Lessons Learned, said many felt "forgotten or unimportant" because of the failure to set up reception centres near the scenes of the 2005 suicide attacks on three tube trains and a bus.

Victims said only those most badly hurt seemed to receive adequate help. Hundreds of survivors made their own way home without receiving medical care or having their names taken so they could be given information and support.

Some relatives had to suffer the trauma of going from hospital to hospital with photographs of missing people, and the report acknowledged it had taken "too long" to identify victims.

The document said an "overzealous and ... overcautious" approach to rules about the privacy of victims' data had got in the way of communication between emergency agencies, hindering victims' access to help.

It revealed that the police casualty bureau hotline had received an unprecedented level of calls on July 7 and was "overwhelmed" and dogged by technical problems.

The document admitted survivors had found the process of applying for compensation "bureaucratic, slow and distressing".

However, it praised aspects of the response to the blasts, in which 52 commuters died, and said there was "no doubt that lives were saved".

The government hopes the report will help draw a line under the response to the attacks, but has refused continuing demands by some victims for a public inquiry.

Today's document claimed a public inquiry would "divert resources, in terms of personnel, away from the police and security agencies" at a time when they were investigating July 7 and trying to detect and prevent further attacks.

In a foreword, the home secretary, John Reid, and the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, said: "There is a clear message that more could have been done to support all those who were caught up in the attacks - in our preparation and response on the day and in the days and weeks that followed.

"A crucial lesson we have drawn is that the quality of help received in the first few hours and days can determine, for years to come, people's reaction to a terrible event of this sort."

The ministers lauded the emergency workers, transport staff and other people who had helped on what they said was "also a day of heroism".

Ms Jowell admitted the anger felt by victims towards the emergency response was "justified", telling last week's Sunday Telegraph that while failures in such an extreme situation were "understandable", excuses "cut no ice".

Among its other findings, Lessons Learned concluded:

· A police decision to ask for the use of mobile phone networks to be restricted to priority users around the Aldgate bomb scene had led to the London Ambulance Service losing use of their mobiles.

· Survivors who were not from London felt excluded.

· Victims had problems getting specialist psychological help.

The report said the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act - introduced in response to the September 11 attacks on the US - provided "a long-term foundation for building resilience across the UK", and its value had been demonstrated on July 7.

However, it concluded that securing national preparedness for possible future attacks should be a "continuous and essential activity" involving the public, private and voluntary sectors at all levels across the UK, and the community at large.

Ms Reid and Ms Jowell said the report was "not the end of the story", and the government would "go on looking for ways to improve our response".

The Tory home affairs spokesman, David Davis, said there should be a "single, independent inquiry ... so we can truly learn the lessons of this attack and improve our preparedness".

Today's report highlighted the "weaknesses in government planning and co-ordination", he said.

Speaking earlier this week, Rachel North, who was on one of the bombed tube trains, said a broad inquiry was needed. "There has been a series of meetings held and documents produced, none of which can be seen as a single public collation of all matters ... the public were attacked and are still at risk," she added.

Scotland Yard defended its response to the bombings; assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur said: "I believe it is important that we do not lose sight of the truly magnificent response that we delivered on that terrible morning."

A separate inquiry report (pdf) by the London Resilience Forum was also released today.

It described the response to the attacks as "very successful", and said nobody had died because of any failure of planning.

The report said that, on the day of the explosions, 1,200 hospital beds had been ready in three hours, while the initial response by London Underground staff had been "exemplary".

It said digital mobile radio systems would be rolled out across police, fire and ambulance services, and "special link vehicles" would extend communications below ground.

    July 7 victims let down, report says, G, 22.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,,1878644,00.html

12.30pm

At a glance: July 7 report

Friday September 22, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies

The key findings of the Home Office report (pdf) on the July 7 bombings.
· There were flaws in information sharing, communications, the compensation process and the systems for caring for survivors.

· Many survivors were left feeling "forgotten or unimportant" as a result of the failure to set up reception centres near the scenes of the four suicide bombings.

· Victims - many of whom made their own way home and did not receive care or have their names taken so they could get future support - said only the most badly injured seemed to receive adequate help.

· It took "too long" to identify victims. Some relatives had to go from hospital to hospital with photographs of the missing.

· There was "no doubt that lives were saved" by the efforts of emergency services, transport staff and the general public who helped. Ministers said July 7 was also "a day of heroism".

· The police casualty bureau hotline for the public on July 7 received an unprecedented level of calls and was "overwhelmed" and dogged by technical problems.

· A police decision to ask for the use of mobile phone networks to be restricted to priority users around the Aldgate bomb scene led to the London Ambulance Service losing use of their mobiles.

· An "overzealous and ... overcautious" approach to rules on the privacy of victims' data got in the way of communication between emergency agencies and hindered victims' access to support.

· Survivors found the process of applying for compensation "bureaucratic, slow and distressing".

· Victims had problems getting specialist psychological help.

· Survivors from outside London felt excluded.

· The 2004 Civil Contingencies Act, introduced in response to the September 11 attacks on the US, provided "a long-term foundation for building resilience across the UK", and its value was shown on July 7.

· Securing national preparedness for possible future attacks should be a "continuous and essential activity" involving the public, private and voluntary sectors and the community at large.

· A public inquiry into July 7 would "divert resources, in terms of personnel, away from the police and security agencies" at a time when they were investigating the bombings and attempting to prevent future attacks.

A separate report (pdf) by the London Resilience Forum was also released today. It described the response to the attacks as "very successful".

    At a glance: July 7 report, G, 22.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,,1878912,00.html

Shake-up for anti-terror policing

Proposal for one police chief to oversee up to 10 regional squads

Friday September 15, 2006
Guardian
Vikram Dodd

A national terrorism tsar overseeing up to 10 new regional squads is to be created under proposals being drawn up by the government's policing watchdog, the Guardian has learned. The new post is a principal recommendation of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), which is compiling a report on the country's counter-terrorist efforts.

The reform, one of the biggest changes in counter-terrorism policing in a generation, is likely to be adopted because of recognition in the government and police that the system is struggling to cope with the growing threat of jihadi violence.

There has also been tension between Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch and regional forces.

"The way British policing is set up, there's no chief constable to bang heads together," said a source. "In the heat of battle, it's not a very satisfactory way to do things."

The report, which is in a draft stage and could be completed within a month, has been written by Denis O'Connor, a former chief constable of Surrey and assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard. It will say a new post of national counter-terrorism coordinator should be created with power over eight to 10 new regional terrorism squads based in England and Wales.

Some squads may be staffed by between 30 and 50 officers, and be expected to work closely with the domestic intelligence service MI5.

As well as assisting in investigations, the new regional squads would work with local forces to increase the flow of intelligence about extremism gained by community policing. The report will be sent to the home secretary, John Reid.

The current leader of counter-terrorism policing is SO13, the squad of 1,000 officers based at Scotland Yard but with a national responsibility. Outside London only the Greater Manchester force has its own counter-terrorism branch.

Several senior sources told the Guardian the need for restructuring was widely recognised and that there was a greater need for gathering intelligence and for investigations in the regions. Furthermore Scotland Yard repeatedly needs to seek help from other forces, and the arrangements for this process are vague.

"There's a constant dispute about how much each force will contribute," said one officer. "Forces have to juggle this effort with everything else they do." Another, who also asked not to be named, said of the proposed new post: "It's where coordination ends and control begins. Peter Clarke [head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch] does not have control. The way we do things now probably does not make sense. The requirement at any time is beyond the capability of any [one] force.

The new role could go to Andy Hayman, who heads special operations including counter-terrorism for Scotland Yard. But he has also built links across the police service in his role as chair of the terrorism committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers.

The shake-up is being viewed with a degree of nervousness in the Met. One senior source said the force was "wary" because they fear such plans "represent a loss of our influence". The Met had to remain in the lead: because "the majority of the targets and investigation is in London", the source added.

The HMIC review also calls for greater emphasis on community policing, seen as crucial for generating more intelligence about extremism.

    Shake-up for anti-terror policing, G, 15.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1873033,00.html

British defendant in terror plot trial tells of gradual conversion to militant jihadist

· Attitude hardened after visit to training camp
· 'Soft, kind and humble' Taliban impressed him

Friday September 15, 2006
Guardian
David Pallister

A 24-year-old British Muslim told the Old Bailey yesterday about his ideological journey from schoolboy to militant jihadist. Omar Khyam, a defendant in the fertiliser bomb terror trial, described how he became radicalised after a visit to a Pakistani training camp for militants fighting in Kashmir and a trip to Afghanistan to meet the Taliban.

At the time no one around him talked of attacks in Britain, he said. "I was born here and felt allegiance," he said. He supported England at football. But after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, he said that attitudes among some of his friends hardened: "For the first time I began hearing that Britain should be attacked."

Mr Khyam was arrested in 2004 after fertiliser explosive was found in a storage depot in west London. The prosecution allege he was a member of a British terror cell linked to al-Qaida, which discussed bombing nightclubs and other targets in the UK.

Mr Khyam, his brother Shujah Mahmood, 19, Waheed Mahmood, 34, and Jawad Akbar, 23, all from Crawley, West Sussex, Salahuddin Amin, 31, from Luton, Anthony Garcia, 24, of Ilford, east London, and Nabeel Hussain, 21, of Horley, Surrey, deny conspiring to cause explosions likely to endanger life between January 1, 2003 and March 31, 2004.

Mr Khyam, Mr Garcia and Mr Hussain also deny a charge under the Terrorism Act of possessing 600kg (1,300lb) of ammonium nitrate fertiliser for terrorism.

As the defence case began, Mr Khyam told the jury that his grandfather had served in the British army and came to the UK in the 1970s. Many of his family were in the Pakistani military or ISI, the intelligence service. He said he went to a predominantly white school, was captain of the cricket team and did well in his GCSEs.

He became more interested in religion as a teenager at college in Surrey, attending meetings of the radical group al- Muhajiroun, where violent videos of the wars in Chechnya and Bosnia were shown. He also started to learn about fighting in Kashmir between India and Pakistan with the ISI recruiting and training irregular mujahideen.

On a family visit to Pakistan in 1999 he sought out and talked to groups active in Kashmir, he said. Back in Britain, he wanted to dedicate himself "to helping Kashmiri Muslims, and go to Pakistan for military training".

In January 2000, aged 18 and studying for his A-levels, he ran away to Pakistan and joined an ISI-run training camp for militants in the mountains above Rawalpindi. He had told his mother he was going to France to study but arranged for a letter explaining his real movements to be sent home.

"They told me everything I needed to know for fighting guerrilla warfare in Kashmir," he said. This included training with AK47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns as well as reconnaisance and sniper techniques. He left only after his family used their contacts in the ISI to find him and he was summoned from the mountains for an emotional reunion with his grandfather.

Although concerned for his safety, most of his family, except his mother, were happy with his actions.

In June 2001, having enrolled at the Metropolitan University in north London for a computer course, he returned to Pakistan for a friend's wedding. In one of the militant group's offices he saw bags of fertiliser which he took to be part of their "arsenal". He then visited Kabul and was impressed by the Taliban. "They were soft, kind and humble, but harsh with their enemies."

The attacks on the US on September 11 2001 triggered intense discussions among British Muslims. Mr Khyam's reaction was: "I was happy. America was, and still is, the greatest enemy of Islam. They put up puppet regimes in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt ... but obviously 3,000 people died so there were mixed feelings."

The Qur'an forbids the killing of women and children but some eminent Muslim scholars decreed that the attacks were permissible, he said.

After a few months of debate, and seeing the defeat of the Taliban, he said he had come to the conclusion that it had been tactically unwise. "I think we would be working better in our own [Muslim] countries, trying to establish an Islamic state," he said.

Asked about Osama bin Laden, he said. "In Afghanistan he won people's hearts and minds. People love him all over the region. There are pictures of him all over the place in Pakistan."

During 2002 and 2003, Mr Khyam became actively engaged in collecting "money and equipment" in the UK to be sent to Pakistan for the mujahideen. He also made further trips to the country. "I wanted to help out in the cause," he said.

Mr Khyam said he did not think that two men he dealt with in Pakistan were members of al-Qaida, as alleged by the American supergrass Mohammed Junaid Babar. Asked by his counsel, Joel Bennathan, whether one of the men had ever advised him, or told him, to carry out an attack on the UK, Mr Khyam replied: "No".

The hearing continues.

    British defendant in terror plot trial tells of gradual conversion to militant jihadist, G, 15.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1872942,00.html

3.15pm

Terror plot accused was 'happy' about 9/11

Thursday September 14, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies

A man accused of buying fertiliser for an alleged bombing campaign against trains and nightclubs told the Old Bailey today of his conventional British childhood and his pleasure at the September 11 attacks.

Omar Khyam, 24, described how he was raised by a secular family and captained the cricket team in his predominantly white school in Crawley, West Sussex before being turned on to radical Islam by the banned group al-Muhajiroun.

He also described running away from home to join a militant training camp in Pakistan in 2000, only to have the experience cut short after his family tracked him down thanks to contacts in Pakistan's military intelligence services.

Mr Khyam and six other suspects deny a range of conspiracy and terrorism charges relating to a police raid in 2004 that uncovered 600kg of ammonium nitrate fertiliser in a storage depot in west London. The fertiliser can be used to build a crude but potentially damaging bomb.

He said that his grandfather had served in the British army and his family had come to the UK in the 1970s. His nominally Muslim family "did not pay much attention to religion", he told the court.

In his teenage years he started attending meetings of al-Muhajiroun, the radical group led by exiled cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad before it was disbanded in 2004.

He met up with groups fighting in Kashmir during a visit to Pakistan in 1999 and returned to a militant training camp in the country the following year, aged just 17, having told his mother that he was going to study French in France.

"They taught me everything for warfare," he said, including practice in firing weapons and reconnaissance.

He was brought back from the camp after three months when he received a radio message telling him to go down from the mountain where the camp was sited. He found his grandfather waiting for him.

"They were very quickly able to find out where I was," he said. "He was pleased but just wanted to tell me where I had gone. They were worried about me being killed."

He said that most of his family had been happy about him joining the training camp, and claimed that he returned the following year and crossed to Afghanistan to meet the Taliban.

Asked what he thought about the September 11 attacks, he replied: "I was happy.

"America was, and still is, the greatest enemy of Islam. They put up puppet regimes in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

"I was happy that America had been hit because of what it represented against the Muslims, but obviously 3,000 people died so there were mixed feelings."

He described Osama Bin Laden as a hero but said that he had later decided the September 11 attacks had been a bad tactical move, and that Islamist efforts were better dedicated to establishing an Islamic state across Muslim countries.

The trial continues.

    Terror plot accused was 'happy' about 9/11, G, 14.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1872548,00.html

3.30pm

Falconer condemns 'shocking' Guantánamo

Wednesday September 13, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
David Fickling

Guantánamo Bay is a "shocking affront to the principles of democracy" and a violation of the rule of law, the lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, said today.

The criticism from the highest-ranking official in the British legal system represents the most direct government attack yet on the US military detention camp.

Despite suggestions in recent months that Guantánamo could be closed soon, the US president, George Bush, last week signalled that the camp, in Cuba, would remain open for the long term.

Mr Bush announced that 14 terror suspects had been transferred to Guantánamo from the CIA's network of secret prisons.

In a speech in Australia, Lord Falconer also attacked the use of torture. The US government has admitted using "alternative techniques" on some terror suspects, although it does not consider its interrogation methods to be torture.

The techniques - described in an ABC news report last November and never denied by the US government - include enforced standing for days at a time, the confinement of naked prisoners in cold and damp cells and simulated drownings.

Lord Falconer said Washington was "deliberately seeking to put the Guantánamo detainees beyond the reach of law" and that "use of torture by a state is contrary to fundamental human rights law".

"Democracies can only survive where judges have the power to protect the rights of the individual," he said.

New laws being put before the US Congress by Mr Bush would ensure Guantánamo inmates are tried in military courts without access to independent judges. There are understood to be around 470 inmates at the camp.

Lord Falconer's speech was revised overnight to include a passage underlining that his criticisms did not change the UK's status as a "close and staunch ally" of Washington.

Members of the British government have previously called for Guantánamo to be closed.

Earlier this year, Lord Falconer gave a speech in which he said the camp was a "recruiting agent" for al-Qaida, but other UK criticisms have been much more guarded than today's. Tony Blair has never gone beyond describing it as an "anomaly".

However, in an interview with the BBC this morning, Lord Falconer refused to give help to at least eight British residents currently imprisoned at Guantánamo.

Appealing for the release of the detainees - who have lived in the UK but are not British citizens - was the responsibility of their respective governments, he said.

Zachary Katznelson, a senior counsel at the prisoners' charity Reprieve, said the detainees would be released as soon as the British government agreed to accept them.

"If the UK government says they will take the men back, they will be straight on a plane," he said. "The US state department says it wants the UK residents to come back to Britain."

    Falconer condemns 'shocking' Guantánamo, G, 13.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,,1871628,00.html

The age of horrorism

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, one of Britain's most celebrated and original writers analyses - and abhors - the rise of extreme Islamism. In a penetrating and wide-ranging essay he offers a trenchant critique of the grotesque creed and questions the West's faltering response to this eruption of evil.

Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer
Martin Amis


It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend - a reporter and political man of letters - approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama's lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.

At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another's apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing a lot more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dancefloors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.

More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan's pious clients and brainchildren, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its rage. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battlecries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires - fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan, camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren, over the border, in exchange for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.

'Why you want these? You like Osama?'

I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given - reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the foetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: 'Well I quite like him, but I think he overdid it a bit in New York.' No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:

'You like Osama?'

'Of course. He is my brother.'

'He is your brother?'

'All men are my brothers.'

All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition. Osama is not my brother.

Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses. This is of course not so in the East, where, we acknowledge, almost every living citizen in many huge and populous countries is intimately defined by religious belief. The excuses, here, are very persuasive; and we duly accept that 'faith' - recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings' - is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor. All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam.

Let us make the position clear. We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad - a unique and luminous historical being. Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, he remains a titanic figure, and, for Muslims, all-answering: a revolutionary, a warrior, and a sovereign, a Christ and a Caesar, 'with a Koran in one hand', as Bagehot imagined him, 'and a sword in the other'. Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived. And always a man, as he always maintained, and not a god. Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta.

Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.

So, to repeat, we respect Islam - the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination. More, we regard the Great Leap Backwards as a tragic development in Islam's story, and now in ours. Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta.

I will soon come to Donald Rumsfeld, the architect and guarantor of the hideous cataclysm in Iraq. But first I must turn from great things to small, for a paragraph, and talk about writing, and the strange thing that happened to me at my desk in this, the Age of Vanished Normalcy.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say. The original idea, the initiating 'throb' (Nabokov), encounters certain 'points of resistance' (Updike); and these points of resistance, on occasion, are simply too obdurate, numerous, and pervasive. You come to write the next page, and it's dead - as if your subconscious, the part of you quietly responsible for so much daily labour, has been neutralised, or switched off. Norman Mailer has said that one of the few real sorrows of 'the spooky art' is that it requires you to spend too many days among dead things. Recently, and for the first time in my life, I abandoned, not a dead thing, but a thriving novella; and I did so for reasons that were wholly extraneous. I am aware that this is hardly a tectonic event; but for me the episode was existential. In the West, writers are acclimatised to freedom - to limitless and gluttonous freedom. And I discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow, in this case, was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer. The novella was a satire called The Unknown Known

Secretary Rumsfeld was unfairly ridiculed, some thought, for his haiku-like taxonomy of the terrorist threat:

'The message is: there are known "knowns". There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.'

Like his habit of talking in 'the third person passive once removed', this is 'very Rumsfeldian'. And Rumsfeld can be even more Rumsfeldian than that. According to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, at a closed-door senatorial briefing in September 2002 (the idea was to sell regime-change in Iraq), Rumsfeld exasperated everyone present with a torrent of Rumsfeldisms, including the following strophe: 'We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don't know we don't know.' Anyway, the three categories remain quite helpful as analytical tools. And they certainly appealed very powerfully to the narrator of The Unknown Known - Ayed, a diminutive Islamist terrorist who plies his trade in Waziristan, the rugged northern borderland where Osama bin Laden is still rumoured to lurk.

Ayed's outfit, which is called 'the "Prism"', used to consist of three sectors named, not very imaginatively, Sector One, Sector Two and Sector Three. But Ayed and his colleagues are attentive readers of the Western press, and the sectors now have new titles. Known Knowns (sector one) concerns itself with daily logistics: bombs, mines, shells, and various improvised explosive devices. The work of Known Unknowns (sector two) is more peripatetic and long-term; it involves, for example, trolling around North Korea in the hope of procuring the fabled 25 kilograms of enriched uranium, or going from factory to factory in Uzbekistan on a quest for better toxins and asphyxiants. In Known Knowns, the brothers are plagued by fires and gas-leaks and almost daily explosions; the brothers in Known Unknowns are racked by headaches and sore throats, and their breath, tellingly, is rich with the aroma of potent coughdrops, moving about as they do among vats of acids and bathtubs of raw pesticides. Everyone wants to work where Ayed works, which is in sector three, or Unknown Unknowns. Sector three is devoted to conceptual breakthroughs - to shifts in the paradigm.

Shifts in the paradigm like the attack of 11 September 2001. Paradigm shifts open a window; and, once opened, the window will close. Ayed observes that 11 September was instantly unrepeatable; indeed, the tactic was obsolete by 10am the same morning. Its efficacy lasted for 71 minutes, from 8.46, when American 11 hit the North Tower, to 9.57, and the start of the rebellion on United 93. On United 93, the passengers were told about the new reality by their mobile phones, and they didn't linger long in the old paradigm - the four-day siege on the equatorial tarmac, the diminishing supplies of food and water, the festering toilets, the conditions and demands, the phased release of the children and the women; then the surrender, or the clambering commandos. No, they knew that they weren't on a commercial aircraft, not any longer; they were on a missile. So they rose up. And at 10.03 United 93 came down on its back at 580mph, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 20 minutes from the Capitol.

I found it reassuringly difficult, dreaming up paradigm shifts. And Ayed and his friends in sector three find it difficult too. Synergy, maximalisation - these are the kinds of concept that are tossed from cushion to floormat in Unknown Unknowns. Here, a comrade argues for the dynamiting of the San Andreas Fault; there, another envisages the large-scale introduction of rabies (admixed with smallpox, methamphetamine and steroids) to the fauna of Central Park. A pensive silence follows. And very often these silences last for days on end. All you can hear, in Unknown Unknowns, is the occasional swatting palm-clap, or the crackle of a beetle being ground underfoot. Ayed feels, or used to feel, superior to his colleagues, because he has already had his eureka moment. He had it in the spring of 2001, and his project - his 'baby', if you will - was launched in the summer of that year, and is still in progress. It has a codename: UU: CRs/G,C.

Ayed's conceptual breakthrough did not go down at all well in Sector Three, as it was then called; in fact, it was widely mocked. But Ayed used a family connection, and gained an audience with Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Islamist cleric who briefly ruled Afghanistan - an imposing figure, in his dishdash and flipflops. Ayed submitted his presentation, and, to his astonishment, Mullah Omar smiled on his plan. This was a necessary condition, because Ayed's paradigm shift could only be realised with the full resources of a nation state. UU: CRs/G,C went ahead. The idea was, as Ayed would say, deceptively simple. The idea was to scour all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country, and then unleash them on Greeley, Colorado.

As the story opens, the CRs have been en route to G,C for almost five years, crossing central Africa, in minibuses and on foot, and suffering many a sanguinary reverse (a host of some 30,000 Janjaweed in Sudan, a 'child militia', armed with pangas, in Congo). On top of all this, as if he didn't have enough to worry about, Ayed is not getting on very well with his wives.

Those who know the field will be undismayed by the singling out of Greeley, Colorado. For it was in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, that Islamism, as we now know it, was decisively shaped. The story is grotesque and incredible - but then so are its consequences. And let us keep on telling ourselves how grotesque and incredible it is, our current reality, so unforeseeable, so altogether unknowable, even from the vantage of the late Nineties. At that time, if you recall, America had so much leisure on its hands, politically and culturally, that it could dedicate an entire year to Monica Lewinsky. Even Monica, it now seems, even Bill, were living in innocent times.

Since then the world has undergone a moral crash - the spiritual equivalent, in its global depth and reach, of the Great Depression of the Thirties. On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse. I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million. And it all goes back to Greeley, Colorado, and to Sayyid Qutb.

Things started to go wrong for poor Sayyid during the Atlantic crossing from Alexandria, when, allegedly, 'a drunken, semi-naked woman' tried to storm his cabin. But before we come to that, some background. Sayyid Qutb, in 1949, had just turned 43. His childhood was provincial and devout. When, as a young man, he went to study in Cairo, his leanings became literary and Europhone and even mildly cosmopolitan. Despite an early - and routinely baffling - admiration for naturism, he was already finding Cairene women 'dishonourable', and confessed to unhappiness about 'their current level of freedom'. A short story recorded his first disappointment in matters of the heart; its title, plangently, was Thorns. Well, we've all had that; and most of us then adhere to the arc described in Peter Porter's poem, 'Once Bitten, Twice Bitten'.But Sayyid didn't need much discouragement. Promptly giving up all hope of coming across a woman of 'sufficient' moral cleanliness, he resolved to stick to virginity.

Established in a modest way as a writer, Sayyid took a job at the Ministry of Education. This radicalised him. He felt oppressed by the vestiges of the British protectorate in Egypt, and was alarmist about the growing weight of the Jewish presence in Palestine - another British crime, in Sayyid's view. He became an activist, and ran some risk of imprisonment (at the hands of the saturnalian King Farouk), before the ministry packed him off to America to do a couple of years of educational research. Prison, by the way, would claim him soon after his return. He was one of the dozens of Muslim Brothers jailed (and tortured) after the failed attempt on the life of the moderniser and secularist, Nasser, in October 1954. There was a short reprieve in 1964, but Sayyid was soon rearrested - and retortured. Steelily dismissing a clemency deal brokered by none other than the young Anwar Sadat, he was hanged in August 1966; and this was a strategic martyrdom that now lies deep in the Islamist soul. His most influential book, like the book with which it is often compared, was written behind bars. Milestones is known as the Mein Kampf of Islamism.

Sayyid was presumably still sorely shaken by the birth of Israel (after the defeat of Egypt and five other Arab armies), but at first, on the Atlantic crossing, he felt a spiritual expansion. His encyclopedic commentary, In the Shade of the Koran, would fondly and ramblingly recall the renewal of his sense of purpose and destiny. Early on, he got into a minor sectarian battle with a proselytising Christian; Sayyid retaliated by doing a bit of proselytising himself, and made some progress with a contingent of Nubian sailors. Then came the traumatic incident with the drunken, semi-naked woman. Sayyid thought she was an American agent hired to seduce him, or so he later told his biographer, who wrote that 'the encounter successfully tested his resolve to resist experiences damaging to his identity as an Egyptian and a Muslim'. God knows what the episode actually amounted to. It seems probable that the liquored-up Mata Hari, the dipsomaniacal nudist, was simply a woman in a cocktail dress who, perhaps, had recently drunk a cocktail. Still, we can continue to imagine Sayyid barricading himself into his cabin while, beyond the door, the siren sings her song.

He didn't like New York: materialistic, mechanistic, trivial, idolatrous, wanton, depraved, and so on and so forth. Washington was a little better. But here, sickly Sayyid (lungs) was hospitalised, introducing him to another dire hazard that he wouldn't have faced at home: female nurses. One of them, tricked out with 'thirsty lips, bulging breasts, smooth legs' and a coquettish manner ('the calling eye, the provocative laugh'), regaled him with her wish-list of endowments for the ideal lover. But 'the father of Islamism', as he is often called, remained calm, later developing the incident into a diatribe against Arab men who succumb to the allure of American women. In an extraordinary burst of mendacity or delusion, Sayyid claimed that the medical staff heartlessly exulted at the news of the assassination, back in Egypt, of Hasan al-Banna. We may wonder how likely it is that any American would have heard of al-Banna, or indeed of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he founded. When Sayyid was discharged from George Washington University Hospital, he probably thought the worst was behind him. But now he proceeded to the cauldron - to the pullulating hellhouse - of Greeley, Colorado.

During his six months at the Colorado State College of Education (and thereafter in California), Sayyid's hungry disapproval found a variety of targets. American lawns (a distressing example of selfishness and atomism), American conversation ('money, movie stars and models of cars'), American jazz ('a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies - their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal'), and, of course, American women: here another one pops up, telling Sayyid that sex is merely a physical function, untrammelled by morality. American places of worship he also detests (they are like cinemas or amusement arcades), but by now he is pining for Cairo, and for company, and he does something rash. Qutb joins a club - where an epiphany awaits him. 'The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,' he wrote; 'the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.' You'd think that the father of Islamism had exposed himself to an early version of Studio 54 or even Plato's Retreat. But no: the club he joined was run by the church, and what he is describing, here, is a chapel hop in Greeley, Colorado. And Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, was dry

'And the air is full of lust.' 'Lust' is Bernard Lewis's translation, but several other writers prefer the word 'love'. And while lust has greater immediate impact, love may in the end be more resonant. Why should Qutb mind if the air is full of love? We are forced to wonder whether love can be said to exist, as we understand it, in the ferocious patriarchy of Islamism. If death and hate are the twin opposites of love, then it may not be merely whimsical and mawkish to suggest that the terrorist, the bringer of death and hate, the death-hate cultist, is in essence the enemy of love. Qutb:

'A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh.'

In his excellent book, Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman has many sharp things to say about the corpus of Sayyid Qutb; but he manages to goad himself into receptivity, and ends up, in my view, sounding almost absurdly respectful - 'rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt'. Qutb, who would go on to write a 30-volume gloss on it, spent his childhood memorising the Koran. He was 10 by the time he was done. Now, given that, it seems idle to expect much sense from him; and so it proves. On the last of the 46 pages he devotes to Qutb, Berman wraps things up with a long quotation. This is its repetitive first paragraph:

'The Surah [the sayings of the Prophet] tells the Muslims that, in the fight to uphold God's universal Truth, lives will have to be sacrificed. Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God, are honourable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.'

Savouring that last phrase, we realise that any voyage taken with Sayyid Qutb is doomed to a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonised by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred - the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the 'last' Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.

Still, one way or the other, Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia - barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to 'exterminate' Islam - and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example. As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Crisis of Islam

'This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur'an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, 'the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men' (Qur'an, CXIV, 4, 5).

Lewis might have added that these are the closing words of the Koran. So they echo.

The West isn't being seductive, of course; all the West is being is attractive. But the Islamist's paranoia extends to a kind of thwarted narcissism. We think again of Qutb's buxom, smooth-legged nurse, supposedly smacking her thirsty lips at the news of the death of Hasan al-Banna. Far from wanting or trying to exterminate it, the West had no views whatever about Islam per se before 11 September 2001. Of course, views were then formulated, and very soon the bestseller list was a column of primers on Islam. Some things take longer to sink in than others, true; but now we know. In the West we had brought into being a society whose main purpose, whose raison d'etre, was the tantalisation of good Muslims.

The theme of the 'tempter' can be taken a little further, in the case of Qutb. When the tempter is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humourless civil servant, and turgid anti-semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything that resembled an offer. It is more pitiful than that. Seduction did not come his way, but it was coming the way of others, he sensed, and a part of him wanted it too. That desire made him very afraid, and also shamed him and dishonoured him, and turned his thoughts to murder. Then the thinkers of Islam took his books and did what they did to them; and Sayyid Qutb is now a part of our daily reality. We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.

Qutb has perhaps a single parallel in world history. Another shambling invert, another sexual truant (not a virgin but a career cuckold), another marginal quack and dabbler (talentless but not philistine), he too wrote a book, in prison, that fell into the worst possible hands. His name was Nikolai Chernyshevsky; and his novel (What Is To Be Done?) was read five times by Vladimir Lenin in the course of a single summer. It was Chernyshevsky who determined, not the content, but the emotional dynamic of the Soviet experiment. The centennial of his birth was celebrated with much pomp in the USSR. That was in 1928. But Russia was too sad, and too busy, to do much about the centennial of his death, which passed quietly in 1989.

In The Unknown Known my diminutive terrorist, Ayed, is not a virgin (or a Joseph, as Christians say), unlike Sayyid, on whom he is tangentially based. He is, rather, a polygamist, confining himself to the sanctioned maximum of four. On top of this, he indulges himself, whenever he has enough spare cash, with a succession of 'temporary wives'. The practice is called mutah. In her justly celebrated book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi tells us that a temporary marriage can endure for 99 years; it can also be over in half an hour. The Islamic Republic is very attentive to what it calls 'men's needs'. Before the Revolution, a girl could get married at the age of 18. After 1979 the age requirement was halved.

In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, VS Naipaul looks at some of the social results of polygamy, in Pakistan, and notes that the marriages tend to be serial. The man moves on, 'religiously tomcatting away'; and the consequence is a society of 'half-orphans'. Divorce is in any case unarduous: 'a man who wanted to get rid of his wife could accuse her of adultery and have her imprisoned'. It is difficult to exaggerate the sexualisation of Islamist governance, even among the figures we think of as moderate. Type in 'sex' and 'al-Sistani', and prepare yourself for a cataract of pedantry and smut.

As the narrative opens, Ayed is very concerned about the state of his marriages. But there's a reason for that. When Ayed was a little boy, in the early Eighties, his dad, a talented poppy-farmer, left Waziristan with his family and settled in Greeley, Colorado. This results in a domestic blow to Ayed's self-esteem. Back home in Waziristan, a boy of his age would be feeling a lovely warm glow of pride, around now, as he realises that his sisters, in one important respect, are just like his mother: they can't read or write either. In America, though, the girls are obliged to go to school. Before Ayed knows it, the women have shed their veils, and his sisters are being called on by gum-chewing kaffirs. Now puberty looms.

There is almost an entire literary genre given over to sensibilities such as Sayyid Qutb's. It is the genre of the unreliable narrator - or, more exactly, the transparent narrator, with his helpless giveaways. Typically, a patina of haughty fastidiousness strives confidently but in vain to conceal an underworld of incurable murk. In The Unknown Known I added to this genre, and with enthusiasm. I had Ayed stand for hours in a thicket of nettles and poison ivy, beneath an elevated walkway, so that he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants. I had him go out in all weathers for evening strolls, strolls gruellingly prolonged until, with the help of a buttress or a drainpipe, he comes across a woman 'quite openly' undressing for bed. Meanwhile, his sisters are all dating. The father and the brothers discuss various courses of action, such as killing them all; but America, bereft of any sense of honour, would punish them for that. The family bifurcates; Ayed returns to the rugged borderland, joins 'the "Prism"', and courts his quartet of nine-year-old sweethearts.

As Ayed keeps telling all his temporary wives, 'My wives don't understand me.' And they don't; indeed, they all want divorces, and for the same embarrassing reason. With his paradigm-shift attack on America now in ruins, and facing professional and social disgrace, Ayed suddenly sees how, in one swoop, he can redeem himself - and secure his place in history with an unknown unknown which is sure to succeed. For this he will be needing a belt

Two years ago I came across a striking photograph in a news magazine: it looked like a crudely cross-sectioned watermelon, but you could make out one or two humanoid features half-submerged in the crimson pulp. It was in fact the bravely circularised photograph of the face of a Saudi newscaster who had been beaten by her husband. In an attempted murder, it seems: at the time of his arrest he had her in the trunk of his car, and was evidently taking her into the desert for interment. What had she done to bring this on herself? In the marital home, that night, the telephone rang and the newscaster, a prosperous celebrity in her own right, answered it. She had answered the telephone. Male Westerners will be struck, here, by a dramatic cultural contrast. I know that I, for one, would be far more likely to beat my wife to death if she hadn't answered the telephone. But customs and mores vary from country to country, and you cannot reasonably claim that one ethos is 'better' than any other.

In 1949 Greeley was dry... It has been seriously suggested, by serious commentators, that suicide-mass murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend. It may be, too, that some of them are searching for the simplest means of getting a drink. Although alcohol, like extramarital sex, may be strictly forbidden in life, there is, in death, no shortage of either. As well as the Koranic virgins, 'as chaste', for the time being, 'as the sheltered eggs of ostriches', there is also a 'gushing fountain' of white wine (wine 'that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason'). The suicide-mass murderer can now raise his brimming 'goblet' to an additional reward: he has the power, post mortem, to secure paradisal immortality for a host of relations (the number is a round 70, two fewer, curiously, than the traditional allotment of houris). Nor is this his only service to the clan, which, until recently, could expect an honorarium of $20,000 from Iraq, plus $5,000 from Saudi Arabia - as well as the vast prestige automatically accorded to the family of a martyr. And then there is the enticement, or incitement, of peer-group prestige.

Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion. Paul Berman's best chapter, in Terror and Liberalism, is mildly entitled 'Wishful Thinking' - and Berman is in general a mild-mannered man. But this is a very tough and persistent analysis of our extraordinary uncertainty. It is impossible to read it without cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace. I felt disgrace, during its early pages, because I had done it too, and in print, early on. Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.

After the failure of Oslo, and the attendant consolidation of Hamas, the second intifada ('earthquake') got under way in 2001, not with stonings and stabbings, like the first, but with a steady campaign of suicide-mass murder. 'All over the world,' writes Berman, 'the popularity of the Palestinian cause did not collapse. It increased.' The parallel process was the intensive demonisation of Israel (academic ostracism, and so on); every act of suicide-mass murder 'testified' to the extremity of the oppression, so that 'Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt'. And when Sharon replaced Barak, and the expected crackdown began, and the Israeli army, with 23 casualties of its own, killed 52 Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin, the attack 'was seen as a veritable Holocaust, an Auschwitz, or, in an alternative image, as the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Wehrmacht's assault on the Warsaw Ghetto. These tropes were massively accepted, around the world. Typing in the combined names of "Jenin" and "Auschwitz"... I came up with 2,890 references; and, typing in "Jenin" and "Nazi", I came up with 8,100 references. There were 63,100 references to the combined names of "Sharon" and "Hitler".' Once the redoubled suppression had taken hold, the human bombings decreased; and world opinion quietened down. The Palestinians were now worse off than ever, their societal gains of the Nineties 'flattened by Israeli tanks'. But the protests 'rose and fell in tandem with the suicide bomb attacks, and not in tandem with the suffering of the Palestinian people'.

This was because suicide-mass murder presented the West with a philosophical crisis. The quickest way out of it was to pretend that the tactic was reasonable, indeed logical and even admirable: an extreme case of 'rationalist naivete', in Berman's phrase. Rationalist naivete was easier than the assimilation of the alternative: that is to say, the existence of a pathological cult. Berman assembles many voices. And if we are going to hear the rhetoric of delusion and self-hypnosis, then we might as well hear it from a Stockholm Laureate - the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago. Again erring on the side of indulgence, Berman is unnecessarily daunted by the pedigree of Saramago's prose, which is in fact the purest and snootiest bombast (you might call it Nobelese). Here he focuses his lofty gaze on the phenomenon of suicide-mass murder:

'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'

Palestinian society has channelled a good deal of thought and energy into the solemnisation of suicide-mass murder, a process which begins in kindergarten. Naturally, one would be reluctant to question the cloudless piety of the Palestinian mother who, having raised one suicide-mass murderer, expressed the wish that his younger brother would become a suicide-mass murderer too. But the time has come to cease to respect the quality of her 'rage' - to cease to marvel at the unhingeing rigour of Israeli oppression, and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology, and a cult of death. And if oppression is what we're interested in, then we should think of the oppression, not to mention the life-expectancy (and, God, what a life), of the younger brother. There will be much stopping and starting to do. It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.

Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence. The suicide-mass murderer asks his prospective victims to contemplate their fellow human being with a completely new order of execration. It is not like looking down the barrel of a gun. We can tell this is so, because we see what happens, sometimes, when the suicide-mass murderer isn't even there - as in the amazingly summary injustice meted out to the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in London. An even more startling example was the rumour-ignited bridge stampede in Baghdad (31 August 2005). This is the superterror inspired by suicide-mass murder: just whisper the words, and you fatally trample a thousand people. And it remains an accurate measure of the Islamists' contortion: they hold that an act of lethal self-bespatterment, in the interests of an unachievable 'cause', brings with it the keys to paradise. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, stresses just how thoroughly and expeditiously the suicide-mass murderer is 'saved'. Which would you prefer, given belief?

'... martyrdom is the only way that a Muslim can bypass the painful litigation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to heaven. Rather than spend centuries mouldering in the earth in anticipation of being resurrected and subsequently interrogated by wrathful angels, the martyr is immediately transported to Allah's garden...'

Osama bin Laden's table talk, at Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan, where he trained his operatives before September 2001, must have included many rolling paragraphs on Western vitiation, corruption, perversion, prostitution, and all the rest. And in 1998, as season after season unfolded around the president's weakness for fellatio, he seemed to have good grounds for his most serious miscalculation: the belief that America was a softer antagonist than the USSR (in whose defeat, incidentally, the 'Arab Afghans' played a negligible part). Still, a sympathiser like the famously obtuse 'American Taliban' John Walker Lindh, if he'd been there, and if he'd been a little brighter, might have framed the following argument.

Now would be a good time to strike, John would tell Osama, because the West is enfeebled, not just by sex and alcohol, but also by 30 years of multicultural relativism. They'll think suicide bombing is just an exotic foible, like shame-and-honour killings or female circumcision. Besides, it's religious, and they're always slow to question anything that calls itself that. Within days of our opening outrage, the British royals will go on the road for Islam, and stay on it. And you'll be amazed by how long the word Islamophobia, as an unanswerable indictment, will cover Islamism too. It'll take them years to come up with the word they want - and Islamismophobia clearly isn't any good. Even if the Planes Operation succeeds, and thousands die, the Left will yawn and wonder why we waited so long. Strike now. Their ideology will make them reluctant to see what it is they confront. And it will make them slow learners.

By the summer of 2005, suicide-mass murder had evolved. In Iraq, foreign jihadis, pilgrims of war, were filing across the borders to be strapped up with explosives and nails and nuts and bolts, often by godless Baathists with entirely secular aims - to be primed like pieces of ordnance and then sent out the same day to slaughter their fellow Muslims. Suicide-mass murder, in other words, had passed through a phase of decadence and was now on the point of debauchery. In a single month (May), there were more human bombings in Iraq than during the entire intifada. And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:

'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'

I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms. 'Martyr' means witness. The suicide-mass murderer witnesses nothing - and sacrifices nothing. He dies for vulgar and delusive gain. And on another level, too, the rationale for 'martyrdom operations' is a theological sophistry of the blackest cynicism. Its aim is simply the procurement of delivery systems.

Our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism, weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of perception, and it weakens our moral unity and will. As Harris puts it:

'Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favourite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilisation... Pragmatism, when civilisations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right - about anything - seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".'

The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone; so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se. Prison beatings, too, are evil in themselves, and so is the delegation of torture, and murder, to less high-minded and (it has to be said) less hypocritical regimes. In the kind of war that we are now engaged in, an episode like Abu Ghraib is more than a shameful deviation - it is the equivalent of a lost battle. Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.

There is another symbiotic overlap between Islamist praxis and our own, and it is a strange and pitiable one. I mean the drastic elevation of the nonentity. In our popularity-contest culture, with its VIP ciphers and meteoric mediocrities, we understand the attractions of baseless fame - indeed, of instant and unearned immortality. To feel that you are a geohistorical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity. In its quieter way, this was perhaps the key component of the attraction of Western intellectuals to Soviet Communism: 'join', and you are suddenly a contributor to planetary events. As Muhammad Atta steered the 767 towards its destination, he was confident, at least, that his fellow town-planners, in Aleppo, would remember his name, along with everybody else on earth. Similarly, the ghost of Shehzad Tanweer, as it watched the salvage teams scraping up human remains in the rat-infested crucible beneath the streets of London, could be sure that he had decisively outsoared the fish-and-shop back in Leeds. And that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden - he is ever-living.

In July 2005 I flew from Montevideo to New York - and from winter to summer - with my six-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old sister. I drank a beer as I stood in the check-in queue, a practice not frowned on at Carrasco (though it would certainly raise eyebrows at, say, the dedicated Hajj terminal in Tehran's Mehrabad); then we proceeded to Security. Now I know some six-year-old girls can look pretty suspicious; but my youngest daughter isn't like that. She is a slight little blonde with big brown eyes and a quavery voice. Nevertheless, I stood for half an hour at the counter while the official methodically and solemnly searched her carry-on rucksack - staring shrewdly at each story-tape and crayon, palpating the length of all four limbs of her fluffy duck.

There ought to be a better word than boredom for the trance of inanition that weaved its way through me. I wanted to say something like, 'Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they're from the Middle East.' The revelations of 10 August 2006 were 13 months away. And despite the exposure and prevention of their remarkably ambitious bloodbath of the innocent (the majority of them women and children), the (alleged) Walthamstow jihadis did not quite strive in vain. The failed to promote terror, but they won a great symbolic victory for boredom: the banning of books on the seven-hour flight from England to America.

My daughters and I arrived safely in New York. In New York, at certain subway stations, the police were searching all the passengers, to thwart terrorism - thus obliging any terrorist to walk the couple of blocks to a subway station where the police weren't searching all the passengers. And I couldn't defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al. In the guilty safety of Long Island I watched the TV coverage from my home town, where my other three children live, where I will soon again be living with all five. There were the Londoners, on 8 July, going to work on foot, looking stiff and watchful, and taking no pleasure in anything they saw. Eric Hobsbawm got it right in the mid-Nineties, when he said that terrorism was part of the atmospheric 'pollution' of Western cities. It is a cost-efficient programme. Bomb New York and you pollute Madrid; bomb Madrid and you pollute London; bomb London and you pollute Paris and Rome, and repollute New York. But there was the solace given us by the Mayor. No, we should not be surprised by the use of this sempiternal ruse de guerre. Using their bodies is what people do.

The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to 'a tolerable level' (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven't got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn't feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an 'ism'. It is independence of mind - that's all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.

One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be an unsmiling one, no doubt, with much stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centres, and the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else - a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the only entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma - the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. 'Islam', as he frequently reminds us, 'isn't like that.' Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means 'submission' - the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.

The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.

By the beginning of the 20th century the entire Muslim world, with partial exceptions, had been subjugated by the European empires. And at that point the doors of perception were opened to foreign influence: that of Germany. This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium, the Ottoman, for decades a 'helpless hulk' (Hobsbawm), which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War - a war that was made in Berlin. Undeterred, Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration. When the Nazi experiment ended, in 1945, sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years, but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere. It had no choice; geopolitically, there was nowhere else to turn. And the flame passed from Germany to the USSR.

So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-

liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, but death was still death. For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning. Sam Harris is right:

'Islamism is not merely the latest flavour of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their world has been transfigured by the light of paradise...' Pathological mass movements are sustained by 'dreams of omnipotence and sadism', in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase. That is usually enough. Islamism adds a third inducement to its warriors: a heavenly immortality that begins even before the moment of death.

For close to a millennium, Islam could afford to be autarkic. Its rise is one of the wonders of world history - a chain reaction of conquest and conversion, an amassment not just of territory but of millions of hearts and minds. The vigour of its ideal of justice allowed for levels of tolerance significantly higher than those of the West. Culturally, too, Islam was the more evolved. Its assimilations and its learning potentiated the Renaissance - of which, alas, it did not partake. Throughout its ascendancy, Islam was buoyed by what Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God, calls 'the argument from manifest success'. The fact of expansion underwrote the mandate of heaven. And now, for the past 300 or 400 years, observable reality has propounded a rebuttal: the argument from manifest failure. As one understands it, in the Islamic cosmos there is nothing more painful than the suspicion that something has denatured the covenant with God. This unbearable conclusion must naturally be denied, but it is subliminally present, and accounts, perhaps, for the apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist.

Over the past five years, what we have been witnessing, apart from a moral slump or bust, is a death agony: the death agony of imperial Islam. Islamism is the last wave - the last convulsion. Until 2003, one could take some comfort from the very virulence of the Islamist deformation. Nothing so insanely dionysian, so impossibly poisonous, could expect to hold itself together over time. In the 20th century, outside Africa, the only comparable eruptions of death-hunger, of death-oestrus, were confined to Nazi Germany and Stalinite Kampuchea, the one lasting 12 years, the other three and a half. Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama: such men only ask to be the last to die. But there are some sound reasons for thinking that the confrontation with Islamism will be testingly prolonged.

It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken but also cynical emphasis on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them. The fatal turn was the American President's all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln ('Mission Accomplished') - every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.

We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too - with a difference. In 'old' Europe, as Rumsfeld insolently called it, the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances, of psychic surge-breakers, to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains. It was not a matter of mental hygiene; everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten decisions. Blair knew this. He also knew that his trump was not a high one: the need of the American people to hear approval for the war in an English accent. Yet there he was, helplessly caught up in the slipstream turbulence of George Bush. Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. 'Stuff happens,' he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad - the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarised by power. As well as the body language, at this time, there was also the language, the power language, all the way from Bush's 'I want to kick ass' to his 'Bring it on' - a rather blithe incitement, some may now feel, to the armed insurgency.

Contemplating this, one's aversion was very far from being confined to the aesthetic. Much followed from it. And we now know that an atmosphere of boosterist unanimity, of prewar triumphalism, had gathered around the President, an atmosphere in which any counter-argument, any hint of circumspection, was seen as a whimper of weakness or disloyalty. If she were alive, Barbara Tuchman would be chafing to write a long addendum to The March of Folly; but not even she could have foreseen a president who, 'going into this period', 'was praying for strength to do the Lord's will'. A power rush blessed by God - no, not a good ambience for precautions and doubts. At that time, the invasion of Iraq was presented as a 'self-financing' preventive war to enforce disarmament and regime change. Three and a half years later, it is an adventurist and proselytising war, and its remaining goal is the promotion of democracy.

The Iraq project was foredoomed by three intrinsic historical realities. First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule - for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room - did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The 'electoral policy' of the fundamentalists, writes Lewis, 'has been classically summarised as "One man (men only), one vote, once."' Or, in Harris's trope, democracy will be 'little more than a gangplank to theocracy'; and that theocracy will be Islamist. Now the polls have closed, and the results are coming in, region-wide. In Lebanon, gains for Hizbollah; in Egypt, gains for Sayyid Qutb's fraternity, the Muslim Brothers; in Palestine, victory for Hamas; in Iran, victory for the soapbox rabble-rouser and primitive anti-semite, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the Iraqi election, Bush and Blair, pathetically, both 'hoped' for Allawi, whose return was 14 per cent.

Second, Iraq is not a real country. It was cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early Twenties; it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces, Sunni, Shia, Kurd - a disposition which looks set to resume. Among the words not listened to by the US Administration, we can include those of Saddam Hussein. Even with an apparatus of terror as savage as any in history, even with chemical weapons, helicopter gunships, and mass killings, even with a proven readiness to cleanse, to displace, and to destroy whole ecosystems, Hussein modestly conceded that he found Iraq a difficult country to keep in one piece. As a Sunni military man put it, Iraqis hate Iraq - or 'Iraq', a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering. There is no nationalist instinct; the instinct is for atomisation.

Third, only the sack of Mecca or Medina would have caused more pain to the Islamic heart than the taking, and befouling, of the Iraqi capital, the seat of the Caliphate. We have not heard any discussion, at home, about the creedal significance of Baghdad. But we have had some intimations from the jihadis' front line. In pronouncements that vibrate with historic afflatus, they speak of their joyful embrace of the chance to meet the infidel in the Land Between the Rivers. And, of course, beyond - in Madrid, in Bali (again), in London. It may be that the Coalition adventure has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation.

There are vast pluralities all over the West that are thirsting for American failure in Iraq - because they hate George Bush. Perhaps they do not realise that they are co-synchronously thirsting for an Islamist victory that will dramatically worsen the lives of their children. And this may come to pass. Let us look at the war, not through bin Laden's eyes, but through the eyes of the cunning of history. From that perspective, 11 September was a provocation. The 'slam dunk', the 'cakewalk' into Iraq amounted to a feint, and a trap. We now know, from various 500-page bestsellers like Cobra II and Fiasco, that the invasion of Iraq was truly incredibly blithe (there was no plan, no plan at all, for the occupation); still, we should not delude ourselves that the motives behind it were dishonourable. This is a familiar kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a gigantic contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. We must hope that something can be salvaged from it, and that our ethical standing can be reconsolidated. Iraq was a divagation in what is being ominously called the Long War. To our futile losses in blood, treasure and moral prestige, we can add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.

An idea presents itself about a better direction to take. And funnily enough its current champion is the daughter of the dark genius behind the disaster in Iraq: she is called Liz Cheney. Before we come to that, though, we must briefly return to Ayed, and his belt, and to some quiet thoughts about the art of fiction.

The 'belt' ending of The Unknown Known came to me fairly late. But the belt was already there, and prominently. All writers will know exactly what this means. It means that the subconscious had made a polite suggestion, a suggestion that the conscious mind had taken a while to see. Ayed's belt, purchased by mail-order in Greeley, Colorado, is called a 'RodeoMaMa', and consists of a 'weight strap' and the pommel of a saddle. Ayed is of that breed of men which holds that a husband should have sex with his wives every night. And his invariable use of the 'RodeoMaMa' is one of the reasons for the rumble of mutiny in his marriages.

Looking in at the longhouse called Known Knowns, Ayed retools his 'RodeoMaMa'. He goes back to the house and summons his wives - for the last time. Thus Ayed gets his conceptual breakthrough, his unknown unknown: he is the first to bring martyrdom operations into the setting of his own home.

I could write a piece almost as long as this one about why I abandoned The Unknown Known. The confirmatory moment came a few weeks ago: the freshly fortified suspicion that there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder. For quite a time I have felt that Islamism was trying to poison the world. Here was a sign that the poison might take - might mutate, like bird flu. Islam, as I said, is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.

In Twentieth Century the late historian JM Roberts took an unsentimental line on the Chinese Revolution:

'More than 2,000 years of remarkable historical continuities lie behind [it], which, for all its cost and cruelty, was a heroic endeavour, matched in scale only by such gigantic upheavals as the spread of Islam, or Europe's assault on the world in early modern times.'

The cost and cruelty, according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent biography, amounted, perhaps, to 70 million lives in the Mao period alone. Yet this has to be balanced against 'the weight of the past' - nowhere heavier than in China:

'Deliberate attacks on family authority... were not merely attempts by a suspicious regime to encourage informers and delation, but attacks on the most conservative of all Chinese institutions. Similarly, the advancement of women and propaganda to discourage early marriage had dimensions going beyond 'progressive' feminist ideas or population control; they were an assault on the past such as no other revolution had ever made, for in China the past meant a role for women far inferior to those of pre-revolutionary America, France or even Russia.'

There is no momentum, in Islam, for a reformation. And there is no time, now, for a leisurely, slow-lob enlightenment. The necessary upheaval is a revolution - the liberation of women. This will not be the work of a decade or even a generation. Islam is a millennium younger than China. But we should remind ourselves that the Chinese Revolution took half a century to roll through its villages.

In 2002 the aggregate GDP of all the Arab countries was less than the GDP of Spain; and the Islamic states lag behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality. (A recondite example: in terms of the ownership of telephone lines, the leading Islamic nation is the UAE, listed in 33rd place, between Reunion and Macau.) Then, too, there is the matter of tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society. We may wonder how the Islamists feel when they compare India to Pakistan, one a burgeoning democratic superpower, the other barely distinguishable from a failed state. What Went Wrong? asked Bernard Lewis, at book length. The broad answer would be institutionalised irrationalism; and the particular focus would be the obscure logic that denies the Islamic world the talent and energy of half its people. No doubt the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male. But we can dwell on the memory of those images from Afghanistan: the great waves of women hurrying to school.

The connection between manifest failure and the suppression of women is unignorable. And you sometimes feel that the current crux, with its welter of insecurities and nostalgias, is little more than a pre-emptive tantrum - to ward off the evacuation of the last sanctum of power. What would happen if we spent some of the next 300 billion dollars (this is Liz Cheney's thrust) on the raising of consciousness in the Islamic world? The effect would be inherently explosive, because the dominion of the male is Koranic - the unfalsifiable word of God, as dictated to the Prophet:

'Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme' (4:34).

Can we imagine seeing men on the march in defence of their right to beat their wives? And if we do see it, then what? Would that win hearts and minds? The martyrs of this revolution would be sustained by two obvious truths: the binding authority of scripture, all over the world, is very seriously questioned; and women, by definition, are not a minority. They would know, too, that their struggle is a heroic assault on the weight of the past - the alpweight of 14 centuries.

Attentive readers may have asked themselves what it is, this ridiculous category, the unknown known. The unknown known is paradise, scriptural inerrancy, God. The unknown known is religious belief.

All religions are violent; and all ideologies are violent. Even Westernism, so impeccably bland, has violence glinting within it. This is because any belief system involves a degree of illusion, and therefore cannot be defended by mind alone. When challenged, or affronted, the believer's response is hormonal; and the subsequent collision will be one between a brain and a cat's cradle of glands. I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant. I knew then that the phrase 'deeply religious' was a grave abuse of that adverb. Something isn't deep just because it's all that is there; it is more like a varnish on a vacuum. Millennial Islamism is an ideology superimposed upon a religion - illusion upon illusion. It is not merely violent in tendency. Violence is all that is there.

In Philip Larkin's 'Aubade' (1977), the poet, on waking, contemplates 'unresting death, a whole day nearer now':

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die...

Much earlier, in 'Church Going' (1954), examining his habit of visiting country churches and the feelings they arouse in him (chiefly bafflement and boredom), he was able to frame a more expansive response:

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

This is beautifully arrived at. It contains everything that can be decently and rationally said.

We allow that, in the case of religion, or the belief in supernatural beings, the past weighs in, not at 2,000 years, but at approximately five million. Even so, the time has come for a measure of impatience in our dealings with those who would take an innocent personal pronoun, which was just minding its own business, and exalt it with a capital letter. Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally. People of independent mind should now start to claim the spiritual high ground, too. We should be with Joseph Conrad:

'The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

'Whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness.' ('Author's Note' to The Shadow-Line, 1920.)

© Martin Amis

    The age of horrorism, O, 10.9.2006, Part one http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1868732,00.html , Part two http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1868743,00.html , Part three http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1868746,00.html

Midday

US says 9/11 suspect planned Heathrow attack

Thursday September 7, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
James Sturcke and agencies

The terror suspect accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks also planned to crash hijacked airliners into Heathrow airport, according to documents released by the US government.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed conceived a plot to hit Heathrow after the attacks on America five years ago, the documents from the US office of the director of national intelligence said.

Another alleged al-Qaida member Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, described as a "key facilitator" in 9/11, was said to have been a "lead operative" in the UK plan, which the US said was disrupted in 2003.

The details emerged in profiles (pdf) of 14 terror suspects, including Mohammed and Bin al-Shibh, who, the US announced yesterday, have been transferred from secret CIA prisons around the world to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.

During a speech about the CIA programme, the US president, George Bush, said information from those held had "helped stop a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow or the Canary Wharf in London".

Bin al-Shibh was said to have been a would-be 9/11 hijacker who was foiled by his inability to obtain a US visa. He was said to have who fled Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001 and headed to Karachi.

There, he and Mohammed worked on "follow-on plots against the west, particularly the Heathrow plot", the US document said, before his capture in 2002.

The statement continued: "He was tasked by KSM [Mohammed] to recruit operatives in Saudi Arabia for an attack on Heathrow airport, and, as of his capture, Bin al-Shibh had identified four operatives for the operation."

The documents claim Mohammed "is one of history's most infamous terrorists" and that his capture three years ago "deprived al-Qaida of one of its most capable senior operatives".

In another document (pdf), summarising the so-called "High Value Terrorist Detainee Programme", the office of the director of national intelligence says the "Heathrow Airport Plot" was disrupted in 2003 on the basis of information that came from detainees.

"In 2003 the US and several partners - acting on information from several detainees - disrupted a plot to attack Heathrow airport using hijacked commercial airliners," it said. "KSM and his network were behind the planning for this attack."

The US government gave similar information on an alleged Heathrow attack last autumn, but merely said then that the planning had been by "a major 9/11 operational figure". Yemen-born Bin al-Shibh was captured in September 2002 at a house in Karachi, Pakistan after a shootout.

Details emerged in June of a US security report that al-Qaida had planned to hijack aircraft and crash planes into Heathrow and Canary Wharf.

The British landmarks were among a number of targets around the world being considered by terrorist operatives, US television channel ABC News said at the time.

Reports of a possible plot against Canary Wharf also emerged in late 2004, but the details were murky and British officials never confirmed them.

In February 2003, military vehicles were deployed at Heathrow over supposed terrorism fears.

The US documents said Bin al-Shibh had originally been earmarked to be one of the pilots on 9/11, and met Mohammed together with Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the hijackers.

Scotland Yard said last night that it was "not prepared to discuss" Mr Bush's comments.

    US says 9/11 suspect planned Heathrow attack, G, 7.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1866809,00.html

1.30pm

Suspects remanded over alleged terror plot

Monday September 4, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies

Eight men were remanded in custody today, when they appeared at the Old Bailey in connection with an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners.

The men, aged between 19 and 28, appeared before Mrs Justice Rafferty by video link from Belmarsh prison, in south-east London, charged with conspiracy to murder and preparing an act of terrorism.

The men - Tanvir Hussain, 25, of no fixed address; Umar Islam, 28, of east London; Arafat Waheed Khan, 25, of Walthamstow, east London; Ahmed Abdullah Ali, 25, of Walthamstow; Ibrahim Savant, 25, of north London; Waheed Zaman, 22, of Walthamstow; Assad Ali Sarwar, 26, of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire; and 19-year-old Adam Khatib, of Walthamstow - were all remanded in custody for two weeks.

No applications for bail were made and defence barristers expressed their concerns about the length of time the men were likely to spend on remand. The court was told that the case would not come to trial before January 2008 and possibly not until Easter 2008.

They are each charged with one offence of conspiracy to murder contrary to section 1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977.

The second charge is a new offence contrary to Section 5(1) of the Terrorism Act 2006, alleging that they were preparing to smuggle the component parts of improvised explosive devices on to aircraft and assemble and detonate them on board.

A total of 24 people were arrested as part of an operation launched overnight on August 9 and 10. Of these, 14 have been charged in relation to the alleged plot to blow up the planes. Four people have so far been released without charge.

One individual, a 17-year-old youth who cannot be identified for legal reasons, is accused of an offence under Section 58(1)(b) of the Terrorism Act 2000. It is a stand-alone charge, which does not relate to the alleged conspiracy.

Five others are still being questioned by police about the alleged plot.

    Suspects remanded over alleged terror plot, G, 4.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1864668,00.html

New terror laws used to arrest men 'recruiting suicide cell'

September 04, 2006
The Times
By Sean O'Neill

NEW powers to clamp down on the “glorification” of terrorism have been used to smash a suspected attempt to recruit and brainwash a cell of British suicide bombers.

Some of the 14 men arrested in London at the weekend — including a group detained while dining in a Chinese restaurant — could become the first to be charged with offences of encouraging terrorism and giving or receiving terrorist training.

Police were last night given extra time to question the suspects, and an extensive search was continuing in the 54-acre grounds of Jameah Islamiyah school near Crowborough, East Sussex, where the suspects regularly attended weekend camps.

Counter-terrorist sources told The Times that those detained included suspected ringleaders and young men who were being groomed as potential recruits to the jihad.

The group had been under surveillance by intelligence agencies for several months.

It used the school grounds, which include a lake and an area of woodland, for survivalist exercises. Young recruits had to listen to extremist lectures on religion and politics.

Police are believed to have intervened after intelligence reports indicated a discernible change in the nature of the rhetoric and language of the alleged recruiters.

Detectives believe that while the group was still being radicalised, no targets had been identified and any possible terrorist attack was a long way off.

One source said: “This is not a case of disrupting an imminent attack. What we are looking at is training and recruitment and encouraging others to take part.

“This operation was aimed at the process of radicalisation, at using the new powers we have to tackle glorification of terror and indoctrination of young people.”

Since the July 7 bombings in London last year, senior Scotland Yard officers have been studying the process by which young British Muslims can be radicalised. They have identified several factors, including religious indoctrination, propaganda, outdoor “bonding” activities and the influence of preachers.

Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have been criticised in the past for not acting against “preachers of hate” such as Abu Hamza al-Masri, the jailed former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque — who in February this year was convicted of inciting murder — and Omar Bakri Mohammed, who went into exile in Lebanon.

But the powers to act against extremist speakers and terrorist recruiters were significantly strengthened by the Terrorism Act 2006, which received Royal Assent in March.

Counter-terrorist agencies believe that they now have the power to thwart the radicalisation process before there is any threat to public safety.

Scotland Yard said that the arrests in London were not connected to the ongoing inquiry into July 7 or to the arrests last month of 24 people in connection with the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners.

Most of those held in the latest raids are believed to be British-born men of Pakistani origin, although one is reported to be a young black man who recently converted to Islam.

No arrests have been made at the Islamic school.

In a separate operation, police in Manchester arrested two men under anti-terrorist legislation and searched a number of properties in the Cheetham Hill area.

    New terror laws used to arrest men 'recruiting suicide cell', Ts, 4.9.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2341858,00.html

Abu Hamza's successor among suspects

September 04, 2006
The Times
By Sean O'Neill

A FORMER henchman of Abu Hamza al-Masri is among the 14 men arrested in London on suspicion of involvement in terrorist recruiting.

Abu Abdullah, 42, assumed the leadership of the Supporters of Shariah group when Abu Hamza, the former imam of Finsbury Park mosque, was arrested in May 2004.

He is banned from almost every mosque in Britain but continues to preach an inflammatory message in private “study circles” and has attended camps in the grounds of the Jameah Islamiyah school.

Mr Abdullah, a father of four who is from a Turkish Cypriot family but was born in Britain, is a former youth football coach. He was often seen by Abu Hamza’s side when the cleric preached on the streets of Finsbury Park. Last month The Sunday Times reported comments by Mr Abdullah in which he described the July 7 bombers as “my honourable brothers in Islam” and said that suicide bombing was “halal”, meaning permissible under Islamic law.

He added: “The martyr that goes about his enemies is going to shield his people. He doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction, he only has household chemicals . . . The West is escalating their killing of Muslims. We have a right to defend ourselves. If I had the means to go back there [Afghanistan] and kill an American or British soldier I would love to do so.”

Mr Abdullah’s home in Bromley, South London, is among 17 addresses being searched by police.

    Abu Hamza's successor among suspects, Ts, 4.9.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2341859,00.html

Common sense, stupid

September 04, 2006
The Times 
by Stephen Pollard

I’M FED UP with the way that politicians ignore the obvious. Why won’t those dunderheads use common sense?

Take crime. I don’t know the precise facts, but I know what’s common sense: many hardened criminals are brought up in families of other hardened criminals. Their bad habits are passed down through the generations. So abolish the family and the problem is dealt with.

Bring on the common sense revolution. Since so many patients acquire MRSA in hospital, the solution is equally obvious: abolish hospitals.

Then there’s that Muslim school — Jameah Islamiyah, in East Sussex. You know, the one whose grounds the police are now crawling all over, after arresting 14 people last week. Well, it’s obvious. If it wasn’t for faith schools, the extremists wouldn’t have a captive audience and there’d be no British Muslim suicide bombers. Abolish faith schools.

More often than not, two other words would better replace “common sense”: non and sequitur.

The regularly deployed arguments against Muslim faith schools are a perfect example. The schools are, apparently, a breeding ground for extremism and, indeed, for terrorism. Does the fact that no Jewish school has produced a Jewish terrorist not point to a flaw in that argument?

Since when has the religion of one’s maths teacher been a cause of terrorism? What matters is not religion, but the content of the teaching and the school’s atmosphere. If there is extremism in a particular school, the problem lies not with the school being Muslim, but with its governance.

When bad chemistry teaching is discovered in a secular school, it does not lead to calls for the abolition of chemistry teaching. It leads to action being taken to make sure that chemistry is properly taught in the school where it hasn’t been.

It is legitimate — albeit wrong — to argue that all schools should be secular, that no parents should have the right to educate their children in a manner fitting their religion and that pupils should be bussed to schools to create a social mix.

It is, however, wholly illegitimate to extrapolate from the existence of a Muslim school that may be breeding extremism the idea that all faith schools are a threat to the cohesion of society. That is not merely a non sequitur, it is also stupidity.

    Common sense, stupid, Ts, 4.9.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2341665,00.html

Training camps link to anti-terror arrests

Monday September 4, 2006
Guardian
Sandra Laville and Richard Norton-Taylor

A group of men arrested in south London by anti-terrorist police had been under surveillance for months at alleged training camps across the country, the Guardian has learned. One of the alleged camps is understood to have been a site in the Lake District.

The men were among 14 arrested last Friday as part of an investigation into an alleged network of terror training camps in Britain that includes the lakeland spot and the grounds of the Jameah Islamiyah school in East Sussex. They are being questioned under controversial laws that came in this year banning glorification of acts of terrorism, amid suspicion that among the 14 there is a mentor figure who is training young men in preparation for terrorist acts.

The Guardian revealed last month that the security services were monitoring up to 20 suspects, some with known terrorist connections, taking part in outdoor training in the Lake District and elsewhere. Some of the 14 men arrested last Friday are understood to have been part of this group and, it is claimed, were using the vast grounds of the Jameah Islamiyah school in the village of Mark Cross, near Crowborough, for radicalisation and training activities.

The independent school, which sits in 54 acres and, according to its last Ofsted report, has only nine pupils, advertises in mosques around the country, saying its grounds can be hired for camping trips offering a refuge from city life for young Muslims. It is a registered charity and charges up to £900 a week for groups.

Counter-terrorism sources indicated that it was not the activities of the school itself but what might have gone on in its grounds that was the subject of the investigation.

Ahmed Muhammad Hakim, one of the school trustees, would make no comment yesterday about the raids.

It is known that Abu Hamza, the former imam of Finsbury Park mosque, who is serving seven years for incitement to murder, had set up a camp in the grounds. But he was asked to leave, according to Bilal Patel, the principal.

One of Hamza's associates, Abu Abdullah, was among those arrested last Friday night when his house in south London was one of 17 homes raided. Abdullah, who acted as Abu Hamza's spokesman and now heads Hamza's organisation, Supporters of Sharia, has stated publicly that the 9/11 attacks were a "deserved punch in the nose" for America, and that "Tony Blair, the army and the police" are targets.

He ran the Finsbury Park mosque for a short period after Hamza's arrest, but is now banned from preaching in most UK mosques.

Several of the men were arrested while dining in the Bridge to China restaurant in south London, but the restaurant has now been handed back to its owner and is not the subject of any further investigation.

A search at the Jameah school was, however, continuing yesterday and Sussex police said it could last for days, if not weeks.

The independent school, which is run on donations from Muslims around the country, was due to open for a new term this week. It provides education for a fee of £1,000 a year, but was heavily criticised by the Ofsted inspectors. They reported that it failed to provide a satisfactory education for its pupils and had significant weaknesses. "Provision for welfare, health and safety" was "unsatisfactory" and it failed to provide a "safe environment" for students.

Counter-terrorism sources indicated that the operation last Friday had not been carried out to thwart any alleged bomb plot, but because of suspicions that the suspects were running training weekends to radicalise young men. Last night police were given warrants to hold three of the suspects until Wednesday and the other 11 until Friday.

A spokeswoman for the home secretary, John Reid, said he had been "kept fully informed of the developments.

Peter Clarke, head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, said this weekend that the police were trying to keep tabs on "thousands" of people directly or indirectly involved in terrorism in the UK.

About 70 counter-terrorism investigations are ongoing.

    Training camps link to anti-terror arrests, G, 4.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1864326,00.html

Young Muslims held in terror camp crackdown

Sunday September 3, 2006
The Observer
Jamie Doward, Antony Barnett, Mark Townsend and Urmee Khan

Police are investigating a network of terror training camps across Britain which they fear are nurturing a new wave of home-grown Islamic extremists. The investigation is linked to raids late on Friday in which anti-terrorism officers arrested 14 people.

Yesterday police also sealed off a school in East Sussex run by an Islamic charity, Jameah Islamiyah, in the grounds of which The Observer understands the jailed cleric Abu Hamza secretly ran terror camps, training young militant Muslim men to use firearms.

No one at Jameah Islamiyah has been arrested and police stressed that its staff had been fully cooperative in the investigation, which has seen the creation of an exclusion area around the school as police comb its premises. A Sussex Police spokeswoman said the searches could take 'days, possibly weeks'. The 14 men arrested are thought to be mainly young British Muslims of Pakistani origin. They were arrested after a lengthy surveillance operation involving Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch and MI5. The men are now in custody at Paddington Green high-security police station.

Security sources said there was no evidence that any kind of terror attack was imminent, although police have not disclosed what triggered their actions. It is understood the raids were not linked to either the alleged plot to bring down transatlantic aircraft or the 7/7 bombings.

A counter-terrorism official described the arrests as part of a 'new plank' of attack against Islamic terrorists in Britain, one that targets their 'upstream' activities. 'It is not just about disrupting specific plots,' the source said. 'It is about closing down their opportunities to plan these attacks. Those that set up terror training camps are very much in our sights.'

The source said they were not just talking about military-style camps, but bases where religious extremists 'bonded' and indoctrination took place preparing young extremists to become suicide bombers.

The source refused to quantify the number of camps they were investigating, but confirmed there were likely to be several around the UK, both in metropolitan areas and remote rural regions.

The Observer understands camps have operated in some of Britain's most isolated areas including Scotland, Wales and the Lake District. There has long been speculation that Abu Hamza operated a training camp in the Brecon Beacons in Wales and an unknown location in Scotland. At least two of the 7/7 bombers were known to have gone on white water trips in North Wales before their lethal attacks in London, and the use of activity-based training camps are suspected of playing a pivotal role in preparing young extremists.

A spokeswoman for Home Secretary John Reid said he had been 'kept fully informed of the developments about the counter-terror operation'.

Mehdi Belyani, the owner and manager of the Bridge to China restaurant where three of the men were arrested, said a group of about 15 men and two small boys had come in for dinner at around 9pm on Friday. The men were aged between 25 and 35 and some were wearing Islamic dress.

An hour later more than 50 police officers entered the restaurant and kept the suspects and all the other customers inside. 'The police stayed for more than two hours talking to the group,' Belyani said. 'The men were very calm.'

In a separate development, two men were arrested in anti-terror raids in Manchester yesterday.

    Young Muslims held in terror camp crackdown, O, 3.9.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1863820,00.html

The Islamic school that played host to Hamza

The jailed cleric attended camps in the grounds of an Islamic school in East Sussex searched by police in the wake of Friday night's terror arrests

Sunday September 3, 2006
The Observer
Jamie Doward, Nick Greenslade and Antony Barnett

For years people living near the former 100-room convent in the quiet village of Mark Cross in East Sussex have wondered what goes on behind the walls of the strange, Gothic building that was falling into disrepair.

Since 1992 it has been owned by a Muslim charity, Jameah Islamiyah, which in 2003 turned part of the building into an independent Muslim school for boys that did little to integrate itself with the villagers. Amid the secrecy, wild stories among the residents of the area quickly spread, stories likely to become ever more febrile following police searches at the school that began at 6am yesterday and came in the wake of a series of terror raids late on Friday night that resulted in 14 arrests in London.

Sam Hardy, 26, an assistant manager at the nearby Mark Cross Inn, said: 'There have always been rumours about extremism at the school in the village and when I heard about the police operation on the radio this morning I put two and two together.'

A recent report by Ofsted inspectors sheds little light on the school, which is set within 54 acres of countryside. They found it had only nine pupils and that it was lacking in a number of areas. 'Jameah Islamiyah School does not provide a satisfactory education for its pupils,' the report stated. 'It has not made sufficient progress towards fulfilling its aims since it was established ... The curriculum is not broad and balanced.'

According to its deeds, filed with the Charity Commission, the school's aim is to train students in higher Islamic studies and to spread the Islamic faith. Yesterday police stressed that there had been no arrests at the school and that those who ran it had been fully cooperative with the investigation.

But it is clear the school's grounds have been on the intelligence services' radar for years. Buried in the pages of testimonies given by al-Qaeda suspects held at Guantanamo Bay are references to terror training camps held within the school's grounds between 1997 and 1998. The camps were advertised at Finsbury Park mosque and attended by Abu Hamza, the radical imam who was jailed for seven years earlier this year for incitement to murder.

Last week the school's imam, Bilal Patel, confirmed Hamza had been a visitor to the site, which also provides 'accommodation for singles wishing to live in a strict Islamic environment at a nominal fee'. 'When [Hamza] arrived we were immediately concerned about his strange behaviour,' Patel said. 'He and his followers set up camp in the grounds and they kept themselves to themselves. We had no idea what they were doing, but we were not happy about it.'

According to the Guantanamo testimonies, which have been read to The Observer, groups of around 30 of Hamza's followers were taught to use AK47 rifles and handguns at the camp. On one occasion they were trained to use a mock rocket launcher.

The testimonies also detail how Hamza ran similar training camps in the Brecon Beacons and in Scotland. In addition to weapons training, followers, usually young Muslim men, attended debates on jihad and met for prayers. Police and intelligence services have become increasingly worried about the prevalence of such camps in recent months. Earlier this year Colin Cramphorn, chief constable of West Yorkshire, said he was aware of camps in the Yorkshire Dales, the Western Highlands and the Lakes. 'They're actually pure indoctrination camps,' Cramphorn said in comments that were later clarified. 'He was not talking about camps as physical locations,' a spokesman for the Yorkshire force said. Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were photographed attending a rafting trip in Bala in north Wales with a number of other young men shortly before they carried out the 7 July London bombings.

It is not just the remote parts of Britain that are becoming training grounds for home-grown terrorists. A US indictment filed in 2004 accused Hamza of attempting to set up a terror training camp in Oregon between 1999 and 2000 to 'fight jihad' in Afghanistan. The cleric will be extradited to the US after he has served his UK prison term for inciting murder and race hate.

Many of those attending the camps are thought to belong to radical Muslim societies based on university campuses. Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker who was jailed in the US for his membership of the terror cell that carried out the 9/11 atrocities, attended London's South Bank University. Three of those who were arrested yesterday were dining at a Chinese restaurant popular with students from the university. It is thought several students from the university made regular trips to Jameah Islamiyah to carry out renovations on the decrepit building as part of a group bonding exercise.

    The Islamic school that played host to Hamza, O, 3.9.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1863813,00.html

British police arrest 16 in anti-terrorism raids

Sat Sep 2, 2006 12:21 PM ET
Reuters
By Adrian Croft

LONDON (Reuters) - British police said on Saturday they had arrested 16 men in two separate anti-terrorism operations just three weeks after uncovering a suspected plot to bring down U.S.-bound airliners over the Atlantic.

Fourteen of the men were held in London in an overnight operation that a police source said focused on suspected training and recruitment of terrorists.

Anti-terrorist police in Manchester arrested two men early on Saturday and were carrying out three searches but this was not linked to the London arrests, police there said.

The arrests came after the head of London police's anti-terrorist branch, Peter Clarke, said on Friday that police were keeping tabs on thousands of British Muslims who they suspect may be involved in or support terrorism -- higher than previous official estimates.

The BBC said 12 arrests were made at a Chinese restaurant in south London that police in riot gear raided on Friday night. It said the probe may be linked to alleged terrorist training camps in Britain.

Police said in February they had uncovered evidence of such camps while other reports have spoken of militants going for adventure training to forge closer ties.

Two of the four Muslim suicide bombers who killed 52 people on London transport in July last year are believed to have gone on a team-building white-water rafting holiday in Wales weeks before the attacks.

SCHOOL SEARCH

Police said they were searching a school in East Sussex, southern England, in connection with the London arrests. The rambling independent school for Muslim boys, once a Victorian orphanage, is set in extensive grounds surrounded by woodland.

A report by government school inspectors last December said the school, which had nine pupils at the time, did not provide a satisfactory education.

Police said the 14 men held in London overnight were arrested in a "pre-planned, intelligence-led operation" that followed months of surveillance by police and security services.

The men, suspected of "the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism", were being held at a central London police station, they said.

They said the operation was not related to the arrests of more than 20 people on August 9-10 over an alleged plot by a group of British Muslims to blow up U.S.-bound airliners using liquid explosives. Nor were they related to last year's London attacks.

The BBC said the Chinese restaurant was full of people, including children, when police arrived on Friday night.

The restaurant's owner, Madi Blyani, told the BBC up to 60 officers entered the restaurant, which is popular with Muslims.

"They suddenly came inside because they were suspicious of some of the customers. ... They talked to them (for) more than one hour, two hours, and they arrested some of them. So it was obviously surprising for me, my staff, for everyone," he said.

Eleven British Muslims have been charged with conspiracy to murder over the suspected plot to blow up airliners.

Four people are accused of lesser offences and five others are still being questioned but have not been charged.

(Additional reporting by Peter Griffiths)

    British police arrest 16 in anti-terrorism raids, R, 2.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-09-02T162054Z_01_L01103315_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-BRITAIN.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-worldNews-2

Yard is watching thousands of terror suspects

Filed: 02/09/2006
The Daily Telegraph
By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor

Thousands of British Muslims are being watched by police and MI5 under suspicion of possible terrorist involvement, a Scotland Yard chief has disclosed.

Peter Clarke, the head of the Metropolitan Police anti-terrorist branch, said they were being looked at in the belief that they might be involved directly or indirectly in supporting terrorism.

His estimate was given in an interview for a BBC2 documentary, al-Qa'eda: Time to Talk, which investigates British Muslim connections with the terrorist network and will to be shown tomorrow.

advertisementMr Clarke said: "What we've learnt since 9/11 is that the threat is not something that's simply coming from overseas into the United Kingdom. What we've learnt, and what we've seen all too graphically and all too murderously, is that we have a threat which is being generated here within the United Kingdom."

When asked roughly how many Muslims were being looked at, Mr Clarke said: "I don't want to go down the numbers game, I don't think it's helpful … all I can say is that our knowledge is increasing and certainly in terms of broad description, the numbers of people who we have to be interested in, are into the thousands."

He added: ''That includes a whole range of people, not just terrorists, not just attackers, but the people who might be tempted to support or encourage or to assist."

The counter-terrorist agencies are especially concerned about the links being forged between British citizens of Pakistani descent and al-Qa'eda militants in the land of their parents or grandparents.

Many young Britons with Pakistani backgrounds travel to Pakistan to visit relatives or to attend religious ''camps", where they may be targeted and recruited by jihadists.

Two of the London suicide bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shezad Tanweer, visited camps in Pakistan where they are believed to have come into contact with al-Qa'eda activists.

After initial scepticism, MI5 is now increasingly convinced that most of the plots hatched in Britain have been run by al-Qa'eda from Pakistan.

The security service had kept an open mind about al-Qa'eda involvement in activity largely being carried out by "home grown" fanatics.

But the sophistication of the alleged conspiracy to destroy airliners over the Atlantic has persuaded intelligence officers that Osama bin Laden's organisation was directly implicated in both this and probably in the July 7 outrage in London that killed 52 commuters and four suicide bombers.

The investigators also uncovered a route for suicide bombers from Britain to Iraq. They followed the trail of a French Algerian jihadist, Idris Bazis, who lived in Manchester and is believed to have died in a suicide attack in Iraq.

Asked if there was a ''pipeline" to carry young British Muslims into Iraq, Mr Clarke said: "What we do see is individuals who, with connections, managed to facilitate people's travel.

There's probably a collection of individuals who are happy to try to organise the travel of others." He added: "We know who some of them are. We investigate, we carry out surveillance on a lot of people, but I'm not going to say exactly who."

Mr Clarke's figure of "thousands" of British Muslims either under surveillance, or at least causing concern, is certain to reignite indignation in the Islamic community about what they consider to be unfair targeting.

This was especially pronounced after the raid in Forest Gate, east London, in which a Muslim man was shot but no charges were brought.

However, there has been less hostility since charges were brought over the alleged plot to blow up airliners and the counter-terrorist agencies have been unapologetic about acting on intelligence, pointing to possible conspiracies that threaten the public.

Of the 24 people arrested, 15 have been charged and remanded in custody, five are being questioned and four have been released without charge. Since the alleged plot was smashed, MI5 has investigated other suspected plots, many just as alarming.

The counter-terrorist effort now under way, with some 70 investigations against suspected Islamic extremists, is unprecedented and unmatched even at the height of the IRA's mainland campaign.

Last month, John Reid, the Home Secretary, said the police and security services were aware of about 24 "major conspiracies", with another 50 peripheral inquiries also being conducted relating to fundraising.

A significant focus of the surveillance involves internet communication between groups, often Muslim men at colleges and universities.

    Yard is watching thousands of terror suspects, DTel, 2.9.2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=KEXEXHCKILGLTQFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2006/09/02/nterr02.xml