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UK > History > 2011 > Terrorism (I)
Bin
Laden was in
on 2005 and 2006 London plots
WASHINGTON
| Wed Jul 13, 2011
1:10am EDT
Reuters
By Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - Osama bin Laden was aware of the plot in which al Qaeda militants
bombed London transport facilities on July 7, 2005, but it was the last
successful operation he played a role in, U.S. government experts have
concluded.
Circumstantial evidence, including information gathered from the Abbotabad,
Pakistan, hide-out where U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden on May 2, also
suggests that bin Laden had advance knowledge of an unsuccessful London-based
2006 plot to simultaneously bomb U.S.-bound transatlantic flights, several U.S.
national security officials said.
"Bin Laden was absolutely a detail guy. We have every reason to believe that he
was aware of al Qaeda's major plots during the planning phase, including the
airline plot in 2006 and the London '7-7' attacks," one of the U.S. officials
told Reuters. This official and others spoke on condition of anonymity to
discuss counter-terrorism matters.
Some of the confidence U.S. officials expressed about bin Laden's involvement in
the London attacks is based on analytical judgment rather than ironclad proof.
Two of the officials said that there was no "smoking gun" evidence proving that
he orchestrated the plots.
However, they and other U.S. officials said there is strong evidence, including
material collected from bin Laden's lair, indicating that, as the London-based
plots unfolded, bin Laden was in close contact with other al Qaeda militants.
One official said bin Laden was "immersed in operational details" of the group's
activities.
"We believe he was aware of these plots ahead of time," one of the officials
said.
Fifty-two civilians, and four suicide bombers, died in the July 7, 2005, attacks
on three London underground trains and a double-decker bus. Hundreds were
injured. It was "the last successful operation Osama bin Laden oversaw," a
second official said.
The latest assessments from U.S. and other Western officials support assertions
by the Obama administration that, despite years of apparent isolation in
Abbotabad, bin Laden still managed to keep in touch with activities -- sometimes
in considerable detail -- of his followers around the world.
NO EVIDENCE
OF NEW PLOTS
By the same token, the cache of evidence found in bin Laden's lair does not
offer new indications about any specific current plots he was involved in
directed at U.S. or other Western targets.
Investigations by British authorities, with support from the United States and
other allies, established some time ago that elements of al Qaeda's core
leadership had played a role in the 2005 London transport attacks.
Investigators found evidence that Mohammad Sidique Khan, leader of the four-man
militant cell who carried out the bombings, and another cell member had traveled
to Pakistan for paramilitary training before the attacks.
Until recently, however, investigators had not linked bin Laden personally to
the July 7, 2005, attacks. Two weeks after those bombings, a cell of militants
attempted a second round of attacks on London transport facilities but their
bombs failed to go off.
A Western official said there was also reason to believe that al Qaeda's core
leadership was involved in orchestrating subsequent failed plots against
European and U.S. targets.
One of the plots that U.S. officials believe bin Laden was at least aware of was
a 2006 plot to bomb multiple U.S.-bound transatlantic airline flights using
home-made liquid explosives.
The plot was disrupted when British authorities launched a major roundup of
suspects. Flights to and from Britain were severely disrupted and tight new
restrictions were placed on passenger carry-on items such as liquids and gels.
U.S. and European officials also believe that al Qaeda "senior leadership"
supervised a 2009 plot, led by an Afghan immigrant, to bomb New York's subway
system. That plot was disrupted when U.S. authorities arrested the alleged
mastermind, Najibullah Zazi, and a handful of associates.
Since bin Laden was killed, evidence has emerged that he was personally involved
in plots against European targets last year, one U.S. official said.
Intelligence about these plots led to the issuing of public travel warnings by
European and U.S. government agencies beginning late September.
Counter-terrorism officials warned at the time that militants might be targeting
cities in European countries, including Germany, France and Britain, for strikes
similar to the commando attacks in Mumbai, India, which a group of
Pakistan-based militants carried out in November 2008.
(Editing by
Warren Strobel and Mohammad Zargham)
Bin Laden was in on 2005 and 2006 London plots, R,
13.7.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/13/us-binladen-idUSTRE76C0MQ20110713
Special
report:
Beyond
bin Laden, Britain's fight against jihad
BIRMINGHAM,
England | Tue May 24, 2011
10:42am EDT
By Michael Holden, Stefano Ambrogi and William Maclean
BIRMINGHAM,
England (Reuters) - In a community center in the British Midlands, 12 teenage
boys -- all of south Asian descent -- watch intently as Jahan Mahmood unzips a
canvas bag and pulls out the dark, angular shape of a World War Two machine gun.
He unfolds the tripod, places the unloaded weapon on a table and pulls back the
cocking handle. The boys crane forward.
Mahmood pulls the trigger; a sharp snap rings out.
It's two days since the killing of Osama bin Laden, and Mahmood, a local
historian, is taking his own stand against global militancy. His show comes with
a dose of education: a lesson in how Muslim and British soldiers fought together
to defeat the Nazis. His methods are unconventional, but Mahmood believes they
help address a weakness at the core of British counter-terrorism policy.
The U.S. operation to kill bin Laden may have marked "a strike at the heart" of
international terrorism, as Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron put it, but
in the broader fight against terror, the al Qaeda leader's death was largely
irrelevant.
In deprived British inner-city districts like Alum Rock -- a huddle of redbrick
homes, fabric shops, Urdu-language DVD stores and fruit stalls -- the Saudi-born
militant is almost an afterthought. Young men's beliefs here are driven more by
their own sense of alienation, racial abuse and what they see as a deeply
anti-Muslim foreign policy.
On the frontline of the war against terrorism -- and Britain is undoubtedly a
frontline -- private initiatives like Mahmood's hint at the failure of
state-sponsored efforts to counter jihad. Almost six years on from a massive
coordinated terror attack on London's transport system, the main nationwide
program to deter young men from extremism still hasn't moved past mistrust and
suspicion. The one-year-old Conservative-led government now wants to tweak the
policy. For some Muslims, the question is whether the state should even try.
"There's still a basic inability to get the idea that, actually, as government,
you might not know best," says Rachel Briggs, an analyst at the Royal United
Services Institute and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. "There's a very
difficult balance between where government can be involved, and be effective,
and where actually government involvement negates the whole process."
SHARED
HISTORY
Spend a few hours in Alum Rock, and it soon becomes clear why answers aren't
easy.
For Mahmood's community, the display with the belt-fed MG42 machine gun works.
The fearsome weapon -- its firing pin has been removed but armed it could shoot
1,500 rounds a minute -- was used by Nazi troops to devastating effect: the boys
Mahmood shows it to are not much younger than most of the 87,000 soldiers who
came from what was then Britain's Indian colony to be killed in the war.
"This is what your grandfathers faced collectively so that you could enjoy your
lives in Britain today," he tells them. "This is your country, and with that
comes certain responsibilities toward it."
He also speaks at length about Islamic values and how there are good and bad
people of all faiths. He tells the boys: "Change your thoughts, and you will
change the world."
After the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Britain cracked down on
radical militants among the country's 2 million or so Muslims. Beyond trying to
arrest their way out of the problem, security officials looked for programs to
stop young men from becoming extremist in the first place. The government's
de-radicalization initiative was called Prevent, launched in its current form in
2007 by the former Labour government of Tony Blair.
With a budget in the tens of millions of pounds, the scheme represents a
fraction of Britain's total security and counter-terrorism budget of more than
three billion pounds ($5 billion). The program uses many arms of the state,
including police and local government as well as voluntary groups and youth
activists to help neighborhoods counter al Qaeda's anti-western message. This
can involve helping people find education and a job, theological discussion,
mentoring or counseling.
But a string of plots have since weakened faith in Britain's ability to calm the
problem. "We remain extremely busy with terrorist casework on a day-to-day
basis," Jonathan Evans, the head of domestic spy agency MI5, said in a September
2010 speech. In December, a fresh wave of unease was unleashed with a suicide
bombing in Stockholm, Sweden, by a man believed to have become radicalized in
the English town of Luton.
What has gone wrong? In places like Alum Rock, Prevent has become ensnared in a
row about British identity, racism, immigration and religious tolerance. So
ingrained are the doubts, even groups who take funding from it tend to be viewed
with suspicion among some Muslim communities.
After Mahmood's lesson with the machine gun, some of the boys stay to talk about
bin Laden, who they say was a bad Muslim. "He is one of those big terrorists in
Pakistan," says Faisal, 15. "He killed his own people. Killing other people is
not part of being a Muslim."
Youth worker Mohamed Safir says this kind of comment shows Mahmood's approach is
working. The boys respect him because he is one of them -- a Muslim Birmingham
local of south Asian ancestry -- and he aims to give a sense of belonging to
them. Even though they are third or fourth generation, the boys say they face
near-daily abuse by white Britons who say they have no place in the country.
Crucially, for the people around Alum Rock, Mahmood takes no public funding for
this part of his work. The fact his initiative lies outside of Prevent gives it
credibility.
CAMERAS FOR
THE COMMUNITY
To understand this community's mistrust of official projects you can start,
literally, on the streets. It was there that local police and government mounted
what must have been one of Europe's clumsiest counter-terrorism operations.
Project Champion was a ring of more than 100 closed-circuit TV and automatic
number-plate recognition cameras erected around the district and neighboring
Sparkhill in the first half of 2010. It was billed as a project to tackle drug
dealing, vehicle crime and antisocial behavior, but later that year the Guardian
newspaper revealed that in reality the cameras were there for counter-terrorism
surveillance.
"Trust evaporated," said a former West Midlands counter-terrorism official,
speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the
media. The disclosure raised a public outcry, undermined local confidence in the
police, and fostered a sense that predominantly Muslim areas were being picked
on.
The authorities started dismantling the spy cameras this month, but their
removal on its own will do little to build confidence.
Prevent was not actually behind this scheme, but it was already tarred with the
same brush. In March 2010, a parliamentary report said the program was failing
because too many Muslims felt it was being used to snoop on them. Government
officials say that fear is overblown: Charles Farr, head of the Office for
Security and Counter-Terrorism, blames the perception on what he calls
misrepresentation in the media. He says Prevent is not aimed at spying.
The criticisms don't stop there. Prevent is derided by many Muslim groups for
relying heavily on the police, for bureaucracy and incompetence, and for being
open to exploitation by cash-hungry groups with questionable claims to community
leadership.
From Luton, a short drive to the north of London where the Stockholm bomber is
believed to have taken up jihad, the secretary of the Islamic Center offers one
of many criticisms of Prevent. Farasat Latif points to a Prevent-backed program
to bring groups of Muslims and non-Muslims together on weekend camps where they
would play football and talk to each other about their cultures.
"No-one who is violently radical would even consider going to such a thing," he
said by telephone. "For a start it's men and women mixing together, which is a
no-no."
MIXED
MOTIVES
Latif says he knew the Stockholm bomber, Taymour Abdulwahab. When Abdulwahab
attended the local mosque he did not advocate violence. Had he done so, he would
have been reported to the police. "I would have no qualms in reporting someone
if I knew they were going to commit terrorist acts -- I would be sinful if I
didn't report them -- it would be a crime against God not to."
Yet his community has refused to go anywhere near Prevent. Like other Muslim
representatives interviewed for this article, he argues that while the state has
a legitimate interest in protecting its own people, it should keep out of the
"hearts and minds" work of de-radicalizing young people.
That, he and others argue, is best served by expert exposition of Islamic
theology -- a job for preachers, not civil servants.
"Prevent was about community cohesion which is a good thing. It was about
preventing violent radicalization, which is also a good thing," he says. "And it
was about intelligence gathering -- which is necessary -- all mixed into one.
And that is not going to work and that's why we didn't want to participate."
It's an opinion that illustrates reservations voiced by Briggs, the analyst, who
points out that whatever the religious questions, the national security
establishment -- a sector marked by state dominance, hierarchy and secrecy --
isn't adept at listening to others' views.
"Government traditionally is poor at engaging communities anyway," she says.
"And it's on this very difficult territory where it needs to work in
partnership, but doesn't understand how to do partnership without being in total
control."
COMMON
VALUES
The Conservative-led government is revamping the program and expects to
re-launch it in a month or so. It says Prevent has failed in part because it
tried to fit into Labour's policies of "multi-culturalism", or the embrace of
separate, co-existing communities of ethnic Britons and immigrant stock.
Alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Prime Minister Cameron -- who has
said multiculturalism fails to provide a vision of society to which Muslims
would want to belong -- is shifting the political stance toward encouraging
ethnic minorities to absorb more British ways.
The future shape of Prevent will include promoting "common" values, Pauline
Neville-Jones, who resigned this month after serving a year as Security
Minister, told a U.S. audience in April.
"We know in the U.K. from our own citizenship surveys ... that ... where people
are segregated from the rest of society, they are more likely to accept the
extremist arguments," she said. "This is then liable to become an enabling
context in which the espousal of violence is made easy."
Neville-Jones and Cameron have hinted they will not deal with groups with a
reputation for more hard-line interpretations of "Islamism" -- a term indicating
the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal
life.
"We need to think much harder about who it's in the public interest to work
with," Cameron said in a keynote speech in Munich in February.
That may be easier said than done.
SEARCH FOR
THE MAINSTREAM
Islamists are an immensely varied community and are found in many local Muslim
organizations; such groups were initially welcomed as advisers by the Blair
government after the attacks of 2005. But in recent years some of the groups,
including the high-profile Muslim Council of Britain, have been kept
increasingly at arms' length by policy-makers who appear to believe they do not
represent mainstream British Muslim opinion.
Britain's multitude of Muslim groups have roots in countries across Asia, Africa
and the Arab world. Finding the mainstream is a tall order, especially for a
predominantly secular establishment like Britain's civil service.
Although Muslims all pray in the direction of the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, Saudi
Arabia, the faith does not recognize a theological point of authority in the way
the Pope in Rome has directed global Catholicism for centuries. There are
various schools of Islamic law, which leaves many questions open to dispute and
interpretation.
The Institute of Race Relations, a British educational charity that researches
race relations throughout the world, suggested in a 2009 report that the UK
government was favoring Muslim organizations on theological grounds. Sufis,
members of a contemplative, mystical school of Islam known for its tolerance,
were being preferred because they were viewed as more moderate than Salafis, it
said.
To an outsider, that might seem sensible enough. Salafism is an
ultra-conservative brand of Islam that emphasizes religious purity; its
adherents act out the daily rituals of Islam's earliest followers. They do not
seek overt political influence, partly because their beliefs forbid it, but they
do seek to make society more Islamic.
But the same report went on to chide Prevent for creating an atmosphere where
people who radically criticized government risked losing funding and being
labeled "extremist". To attempt to depoliticize young people and restrict
dissent was counterproductive, it argued: it gave weight to the extremist
argument that democracy was pointless.
In Luton, Latif, for one, echoes this view. He believes Salafis are best placed
to de-radicalize vulnerable youths, since violent jihadists tend to refer to the
same scholars and sources as Salafis to justify their extremist beliefs. "I
don't think the state can do much really, because the whole thing is a
theological issue."
But he goes on to highlight how radicalized youth are driven by broader
concerns, particularly a foreign policy which since the invasion of Iraq in 2003
has been seen by many Muslims as anti-Islamic.
"We believe the onus is on us Muslims to tackle violent radicalization, because
the British government has no credibility whatsoever amongst even fairly
moderate Muslims, because they, like they Americans, are state-sponsors of
terrorism," he says.
WIDER
INFLUENCE
People don't have to be part of any group to embrace jihad, of course. The tiny
community of dangerously radicalized British Muslims is also influenced from
abroad, in the privacy of their homes. Counter-terrorism chiefs got an
unpleasant reminder of this in May 2010 when a British woman of south Asian
descent stabbed and wounded senior lawmaker Stephen Timms at his constituency
offices. Prosecutors said she had been radicalized solely online by extremist
propaganda.
"In a matter of months she had turned from this hardworking student into a
potential terrorist murderer," Assistant Commissioner John Yates, the country's
top counter-terrorism officer, told a security conference in April. "This
appalling crime illustrates just how asymmetric the current threat is, how
difficult it is to pre-empt and counter."
The parliamentary committee that criticized Prevent also pointed out that the
issues go far wider than theology. "In our view a persistent preoccupation with
the theological basis of radicalization is misplaced because the evidence
suggests that foreign policy, deprivation and alienation are also important
factors," it said in its March 2010 report, "Preventing Violent Extremism".
Prevent's single focus on Muslims had been unhelpful, it said.
ENTER THE
RADICALISER
Whatever path it takes, the new version of Prevent is unlikely to work with Abu
Izzadeen. Dressed in traditional white Muslim attire with a shaved head and
bushy beard, the Londoner, of Jamaican ancestry, is a self-proclaimed radical
Muslim preacher who spent two and a half years in jail for terrorist
fund-raising and inciting terrorism overseas.
"I'm a radicalizer. I see myself as a radicalizer and I've tried to radicalize
in prison and I've tried to radicalize outside," he tells Reuters. Asked if he
has succeeded, he replies "I believe I have."
Izzadeen dismisses any Muslim who would cooperate with schemes such as Prevent:
"Prevent has been in reality a cache or money bag which has been offered to
those who have a weakness in their belief that they are willing to sell their
own standing, their own place in Islam for a price to, in effect, do the
government's bidding."
Blaming Britain's foreign policy for the rise of extremism, he asks why the
country picks Islamic targets -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- but ignores others.
"Any rational human being will say to himself, 'because there's a connection
with what they're doing on their foreign policy and what we're doing.'"
At the same time, he does not see any problem being a British citizen.
"Britishness -- what does it mean? I have a British passport so on a national
level I have an identity which is a travel document. But if you're talking about
if my allegiance lies to the UK or the Queen or to (her grandchildren) Harry and
William or Kate now, that's completely laughable."
In Alum Rock, the historian Mahmood believes radicals on the Islamist fringe
incite hatred between communities just as white supremacists do.
But even he agrees that Britain's foreign policy hurts its attempts at dealing
with home grown radicals. He also feels that less extreme Islamists, including
Salafists, should have a role in de-radicalization.
It would be a "bad mistake" to try to prevent Islamists from convincing young
men to abjure violence, he argues. "You couldn't get a Protestant head of clergy
to convince a Catholic. It's the same model you would apply here.
"The first rule of negotiations is really about understanding who it is you are
dealing with. If you are talking to someone who is radical and there is nothing
you have in common with them, then the chances of you overcoming their view and
interpretation is very slim."
Still, he believes the state has a role to play in dealing with radicalized
youths.
"If everything is entirely left to the community, what about the
intelligence-gathering?" he says. "How are community members going to know if
someone is at the point of carrying out an attack? If something goes boom, and
you hadn't informed them, the authorities are going to hit you from every angle.
They are going to ask, 'What makes you think you have all the correct skills to
deal with this? Why didn't you alert us?'
"That's what's going to happen."
(Michael Holden and Stefan Ambrogi reported from London,
William Maclean
reported from Birmingham;
Editing by Sara Ledwith and Simon Robinson)
Special report: Beyond bin Laden, Britain's fight against
jihad, R, 24.52011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/24/
us-britain-muslims-radicals-idUSTRE74N11220110524
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