Last Friday, before leaving for his annual summer holiday, Tony Blair unveiled an unexpectedly radical set of measures designed to stamp out Muslim extremism.
He announced that new laws would be introduced to deport extremist Muslim clerics without appeal, close down mosques preaching hate, ban certain Muslim groups and create a new offence of glorifying terrorism in Britain or abroad.
Terrorist control orders, which limit the movements and meetings of suspected terrorists, would also be extended to cover British nationals.
As he did so, senior police and counter-terrorism sources revealed some of the thinking that lay behind this clampdown.
They said they had found no evidence linking the four July 7 London bombers to Al-Qaeda or any other known terrorist organisation. Instead, investigators involved in the painstaking reconstruction of the lives of the men have provisionally concluded they were “unaffiliated terrorists” who were most likely inspired rather than directed by Al-Qaeda.
A Special Branch report circulated to senior police commanders last week is also said to have concluded there was “no control” over the two groups of men from any known terrorist commander.
In stark contrast to initial views that the attacks were centrally organised by the Al-Qaeda leadership under Osama Bin Laden, it now appears that both cells may have been “self-starters”; do-it-yourself groups of radicalised young men who decided to express their faith by plotting to blow themselves up, killing dozens of others in the process.
The conclusion is that the two plots were not linked, but appear to have surfaced almost entirely independently.
As one of the country’s most senior police officers put it last week: “It would seem that these men just appear to have got together by themselves and gone out there to do evil.”
While surprising and still provisional, this assessment of the July attacks is the latest manifestation of an emerging consensus about the new Al-Qaeda threat to Britain.
This has far-reaching implications for the ability of the security services to win the war on terror. In the campaign against the IRA, a key strategy was infiltration of the republican command structure.
If the new terrorist enemy has no such structure, where does the fight begin? Indeed, who and where is the enemy? It is so atomised it is invisible.
The new breed of unaffiliated terrorist is potentially far more dangerous than the IRA or even Al-Qaeda because he is almost impossible to identify.
It also explains why the July 7 and July 21 attacks caught MI5 off guard, with none of the attackers on the intelligence radar. The gap — between what the security services know and what they need to know in order to prevent the next atrocity — has dramatically widened.
Out of this dilemma has arisen the political decision to curtail Britain’s traditions of free speech and to stamp down hard on people accused of inspiring the unaffiliated terrorists.
The prime minister said he was prepared to amend the Human Rights Act, if necessary, so that judges would be unable to overrule the plan to deport extremists. This may involve lengthy wranglings in Europe, which has established a pan-European system of rights.
At a press conference in Downing Street, Blair said: “If people want to come here, either fleeing persecution or seeking a better life, they play by our rules and our way of life. If they don’t, they are going to have to go because they are threatening our people and way of life. Coming to Britain is not a right. And even when people come here, staying here carries with it a duty.”
The proposals sparked predictable condemnation from opposition politicians, Muslim and human rights groups. The consensus between these groups on the response to the July terror attacks is now at risk. Liberty, the human rights group, said that the “fundamental rights of a democracy cannot be changed because we are provoked by terrorists”.
Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said yesterday that “the prime minister talks about how the mood has changed. I think undoubtedly he is correct.
“But you can’t just legislate by mood. Britain is an international signatory to human rights and anti-torture conventions, and its legal system has a good international reputation. Are we going to send people back to countries where they will face torture, imprisonment, death and so on?”
The Conservatives said they broadly supported the thrust of the proposals and would consider their response when the measures were put before parliament in the autumn.
Kennedy’s concerns were echoed by Muslim leaders and groups. Dr Mohammed Naseem, chairman of Birmingham’s central mosque, was the most outspoken, comparing Blair to Adolf Hitler.
“He (Hitler) was democratically elected and gradually created a bogey identity — that is, the Jewish people — and posed to the Germans that they were a threat to the country,” Naseem said.
“On that basis, he started a process of the elimination of Jewish people. I see the similarities. Everything moves step by step. I am saying these are dangerous times and we must take note of this.”
Even moderate Muslim groups that had been liaising closely with the government protested. Inayat Bunglawala, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, described the measures as a “mixed bag, some of which will cause concern and heighten anxiety across the Muslim community. There has been no recognition that his policies have contributed to a radicalisation of the Muslim community; the Iraq war has caused immense damage”.
Tahir Butt, spokesman for the Muslim Safety Forum which liaises with the police, said: “This is where the government has been heading all along: Al-Qaeda claims responsibility for the attacks and Blair targets British Muslims.”
Legal experts have also questioned the viability of the proposals.
Alex Bailin, a barrister specialising in human rights law at Matrix Chambers, which has represented suspected foreign terrorists, said: “It is not possible to derogate from it (the Human Rights Act), even in a public emergency threatening the life of the nation. The only legal option, theoretically, would be for the UK to deratify the whole convention. That would involve us legally withdrawing from Europe, as respect for the convention is a condition of membership of the Council of Europe.”
He added that the courts would be unlikely to accept assurances that deportees would not be tortured.
As the lawyers and politicians argue, the hunt for the scattered terrorist cells goes on. In the operations room at Thames House, the MI5 headquarters, more than 500 intelligence officers have spent the past month working round the clock to unpick the clues that led to July 7.
They are poring over the minutiae of the lives of Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Mir Hussain and Germaine Lindsay, who blew themselves up on three Tube trains and a bus in London, murdering 52 people and injuring 700 others.
By far the biggest intelligence inquiry of its kind, its job has been to draw up “concentric circles” around their lives to try to reconstruct the nexus of associations they built up before the attack.
Their inquiries are hampered by the discovery that the men and their associates lived in a milieu of multiple aliases and addresses, false asylum claims and benefit frauds. One report yesterday said police were investigating claims that the suspected July 21 attackers allegedly collected more than £500,000 in benefits.
In Rome, investigators looking into the role of Hamdi Isaac, also known as Hussain Osman, one of the key suspects in the July 21 attacks who was arrested after he fled, have reached the conclusion that these attacks were probably unconnected to any larger terrorism network.
Their findings appear to confirm a new analysis of the threat from Al-Qaeda that has emerged in the past two years. On this view the senior leadership group around Osama Bin Laden has been isolated and disrupted by successes in the West’s war on terror. This has undermined its ability to have operational control over individuals and attack planning.
Instead Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his so-called “deputy”, have become propagandists rather than operational leaders for the proliferating Islamist terror cells now emerging in the West.
Officials and experts say their analysis is supported by the release last Thursday of a chilling video in which al-Zawahiri warned that Blair’s involvement in the war in Iraq “brought you destruction in central London and will bring you more destruction”.
Commentators note that al-Zawahiri did not claim direct credit for ordering the attacks. “I tend to think that it’s not Al-Qaeda linked but Al-Qaeda inspired,” said Rime Allaf, a Middle East expert at Chatham House, the foreign affairs think tank.
Explaining the shift to a new type of Al-Qaeda threat, officials refer to the way MI5 has reclassified Al-Qaeda-related terrorism into three categories. The first is the “Al-Qaeda core”: Bin Laden and his chiefs who directly commanded attacks such as the September 11, 2001, bombings in America.
The second tier involves “Al-Qaeda affiliates”: locally run groups such as those led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq or the Moroccan Combat Group, which was behind the Casablanca suicide attacks in 2003.
These are structured terrorist organisations that work as local “franchises” — sub-contractors — to Al-Qaeda.
Beneath them is a third tier of Al-Qaeda “followers” who are not affiliated to any group. These can be loners or they could be larger groups that appear to have goaded themselves into action.
The provisional assessment now circulating in Whitehall is that the two alleged cells behind the July 7 and 21 attacks appear to belong to this third level.
“The killer evidence that points to a known Al-Qaeda operative or any operational command from Al-Qaeda is just not there,” a senior intelligence official said. “We want to keep an open mind, but at this stage it looks like they may have been unaffiliated.”
Not all analysts agree that the July 7 bombers were unaffiliated.
M J Gohel, a leading expert on Islamist terrorism, believes that while individuals can be inspired by the message of the global jihad — or holy war — cells of four, five or six individuals do not spontaneously come together without any kind of “guiding hand”.
He believes the two cells must have been drawn together by an Al-Qaeda recruiting agent.
Nonetheless, he is clear that a defining characteristic of the new threat, the growth of potentially dozens of home-grown cells throughout the West, presents a real escalation in the nature of the terrorist threat. “Al-Qaeda and its global jihadi friends have been one step ahead of us . . . While we are watching and sealing our borders, Al-Qaeda and the global jihadi movement has penetrated into western society . . . We are into a new dimension,” he said.
BLAIR'S TERROR CRACKDOWN
