SUDDENLY IT ALL looks a little clearer to me: we are in a fog. The grandiose promises from politicians, the 12-point plans, the rushed legislation, the last minute U-turns — the reason for all the recent confusion over anti-terror legislation is that the Government is fighting the terror threat in a total fog.
The developing thinking of senior anti-terrorism officers about the menace to Britain from radicalised Muslim youth, as revealed in The Times today, is not reassuring. The good news is that Scotland Yard has admitted its uncertainty about the way in which some young men are becoming radicalised. The bad news is that it is only now even beginning to come to terms with the new threat.
Before July 7, officers had a “threat profile” which suggested that potential terrorists would have some of the following characteristics: they attended mosques, were foreign or had spent significant time abroad, met associates in prison or at university, used internet cafés and Islamic bookshops, and may have been disadvantaged. The suicide bombers of July 7 showed that profile to be out of date. Most importantly, all four were British citizens. Now officers look for meetings in private houses, not mosques, and links to gymnasiums or macho “bonding” activities, such as the whitewater rafting trip taken by the July 7 bombers a month before their suicide mission.
Yet it is hard to match the profile of the July 7 bombers with even the alleged bombers of July 21, let alone with the characters of the suspects arrested and charged in anti-terror raids since then.
The work undertaken in Scotland Yard also shows officers struggling to get to grips with the ideological grooming that takes place once potential recruits have been identified by Islamist extremists, a grooming that links narrow argument with the encouragement of social dependence and religious brainwashing. It can happen relatively quickly — certainly within a couple of years — and it can persuade apparently “normal” British citizens to leave wives and children and inflict mass murder on their countrymen. The grooming has to take place before recruits can be sent to training camps or on bonding outdoor sports trips. The police work, described by one officer as a process of “sitting in a dark room with a towel around my head”, is an unusual combination of evidence-crunching and cod psychological profiling.
And officers are worried that even as they draw up a new profile, it will become out of date, with potential terrorists perhaps being groomed next purely by e-mail, without any need for personal contact or training camps.
Scotland Yard’s anti-terror teams have never been so stretched, with four important terror trials due next year and a blizzard of new terror warnings arriving daily. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said two weeks ago that Scotland Yard was getting high-grade intelligence on potential suspects almost every day, whereas before the London bombings it had received only monthly reports. The intelligence services, under fire for failing to identify the July 7 cell, and for failing to follow up the two members of the cell whom MI5 did briefly scrutinise, are terrified of failing to identify any new potential threat.
Yet too much intelligence is as worthless as too little, for the police cannot follow up all of it. Counter-terrorism officers are fighting the intelligence services for extra money currently on offer from the Government, arguing that many suspects are not being put under surveillance because counter-terrorism teams lack the manpower to cover everybody. And the battle to prevent future atrocities is getting in the way of the fight to identify any so-called mastermind behind the two July attacks, which may or may not have been linked.
Officers admit that they do not know whether there was a mastermind behind the July 7 Tube and bus bombings, unless it was one of the bombers, the eldest, Mohammad Sidique Khan. Nor do the police know whether a rumoured “third cell” exists, and if it does, they have no faith in the intelligence services to uncover it.
If young British terrorists are operating on their own initiative, without being “run” by outsiders then, as one senior officer put it, “We really are in the shit.” For if there is nothing linking them, there is no pattern, and the police work on patterns.
Everyone likes a pattern. Attacks on the intelligence services in the US have focused on their failure to identify a pattern — or “connect the dots”, as the congressional intelligence committees put it — before 9/11. Yet intelligence patterns, as cogently argued by Malcolm Gladwell (www.gladwell.com/2003/2003_03_10_a_dots.html) in the New Yorker, are often clear in retrospect only. A number of dots that might appear linked will lead nowhere in the end. Thousands of other dots will go uninvestigated — or be missing the other dots that would make them tell a story. The post-9/11 congressional intelligence report mentioned that the FBI’s counter-terrorism division had 68,000 outstanding leads dating back to 1995.
And on their own most of them are probably worthless. It was recently revealed, for instance, that British ministers were warned by the security services in April 2003 that al-Qaeda had considered a plan to attack Heathrow and the London Underground. Well of course al-Qaeda had considered it: we’d all guessed that. Without the detail — where? when? — the intelligence was worthless.
The current confusion, combined with unspecific, but dire, warnings from the police of an imminent terror “spectacular”, leaves politicians in a panic. The demand for a 90-day detention that was blocked, the control orders that were watered down, the summary expulsions that didn’t happen, the Britishness test for imams that was dropped, the mosques that weren’t closed . . . this is politics operating in a fog. Just so that they can say: we tried to do everything we could. When Tony Blair refused this month to hold a public inquiry into July 7, critics claimed that he had something to hide. Would that that were true.
