Bush Blair terror scare

(August 2006)


Operation Bojinka:
a previous terror plot thwarted in 1995 (the threat of "liquid bombs" has been known since then)


http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2006/08/truth-about-terror-plot-and-new-pseudo.html

Monday, August 21, 2006
The Truth about the "Terror Plot".... and the new "pseudo-terrorism"

 

http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2006/09/censored-ny-times-terror-plot-expose.html

Friday, September 01, 2006
CENSORED: The NY Times "Terror Plot" Expose They Don't Want You to Read


Blair's ambassador to Uzbekistan says it is propaganda

www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/08/the_uk_terror_p.html

Published on Tuesday, August 15, 2006 by Craig Murray
The UK Terror plot: What's Really Going On?
by Craig Murray

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.
So this, I believe, is the true story.
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.
The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.
For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

Craig Murray was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/world/europe/22cnd-britain.html
The decision to press formal charges followed days of widening public skepticism about the true extent of the suspected plot, first disclosed on Aug. 10, when the police warned that conspirators had planned to commit mass murder on what one officer called an “unimaginable scale.” The information disclosed Monday gave a sense of the scope of the investigation, beginning with months of surveillance that produced “highly significant video and audio recordings” before the Aug. 10 arrests, said Peter Clarke, the head of London’s anti-terrorism police. Since then, he said, the police have searched “69 houses, flats and business premises, vehicles and open spaces” and recovered 400 computers, 200 cellphones and 8,000 data storage devices such as memory sticks and DVD’s.
The aim in offering such detail at the news conference on Monday — at which no questions were permitted — seemed twofold: to give the public a glimpse into the kind of evidence that was being amassed and to offset charges that the police had overreacted to a threat. But the credibility of the allegations will not be tested until the accused are taken before a jury, in a trial that is not expected to begin for at least two years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/business/22road.html
Nobody has ever accused me of being a shill for the airlines or a Pollyanna about air travel. But I have to say that I got from Point A to Point B last week without a hassle. Credit must be paid to the airlines, the security agency and to sensible fellow travelers. Now let’s go back almost two weeks to the scenes of frightened chaos in London, where people once faced down the blitz with aplomb. All of a sudden, Heathrow and other airports seemed to be in pandemonium after the police announced — and the details are still sketchy, if you ask me — that they had thwarted a bombing plot.


 


http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/08/time-bomb.html#comments

Friday, August 11, 2006
Time Bomb


http://carolynbaker.org/archives/critically-thinking-the-latest-terror-frenzy

CRITICALLY THINKING THE LATEST TERROR FRENZY
August 11, 2006


www.uexpress.com/tedrall/

08/22/2006
Ted Rall

Americans Shrug at Phony Binary Explosives Threat

LOS ANGELES--Attention, citizens of the national community: stay tuned for a HomeSec alert! A fiendish plot has been uncovered! Terrorists loyal to the sinister forces of Eastasia have been apprehended! It is another glorious victory for the homeland! All hail Oceania!
It was hard not to suffer a 1984 flashback on August 10th, when UK authorities and their rhetorical American partners claimed to have rounded up more than two dozen British Muslims accused of--or so they claimed--participation in an elaborate plot to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."


www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081806Z.shtml

Letter From Airstrip One: Fear Over Facts
By Chris Floyd - TO Correspondent
t r u t h o u t | Report
Friday 18 August 2006


Crying Wolf: Terror Alerts based on Fabricated Intelligence
by Michel Chossudovsky
August 20, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca


www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14641.htm

Fade to Black: Another Terror Plot Unravels
By Chris Floyd
08/21/06


www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/

Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Published Thursday 17th August 2006 09:42 GMT


www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/10/usa_not_impressed/
Yanks not impressed with UK terror emergency
More red-mercury fantasy, or Katrina-like indifference?
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Published Thursday 10th August 2006 19:29 GMT

Comment US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff appeared relaxed, even amused, during a Washington press conference where he explained the American response to the UK airport terror emergency.
A few security inconveniences will be put in place until the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) figures out how better to deal with the threat of liquid explosives that the British believe are now in play.
The new measures are confined to preventing US travelers from carrying liquids into the aircraft cabin, with exceptions for common-sense items such as drugs and infant formula. Otherwise, US passengers will be permitted to carry the usual items on board.
The overall terror threat level for airlines has been raised from yellow to orange, except that the level for UK flights bound for the USA has been raised to red. When asked why DHS had made this exception, Chertoff explained that it was meant to harmonize the US assessment with the British assessment: a polite way of saying that, for now, America is willing to humor UK officials.
Chertoff's demeanor and body language belied any notion that there's a serious emergency. This means either that US officials are quite underwhelmed by the UK's evidence of a feasible terrorist plot, or that the US government's casual indifference toward catastrophic loss of life and property, as exhibited when New Orleans was destroyed, is the new American attitude.
In favor of option one, we have a recent history of British eagerness to announce breakthroughs in the struggle against the forces of darkness, with nothing to show for it. We have Jean Charles de Menezes shot to bits at point-blank range for behaving oddly just after the 7/7 atrocity. We have the imaginary ricin plot. We have the imaginary chemical bomb plot. And we have the imaginary red-mercury suitcase nuke plot.
There's been a lot of crying wolf in London, so it should surprise no one to find that the Americans have heard enough of it. (Although, to be fair, Washington has trumpeted its share of counterterrorist breakthroughs involving semi-harmless losers, but that's no reason for them to buy into anyone else's.)
In favor of option two, we have Hurricane Katrina, heckuva-job-Brownie, and government indifference toward mass suffering, death, and property destruction on a scale that makes 9/11 look like a garden party. This suggests that 9/11 served its purpose by leading to endless mass suffering, death, and property destruction in Iraq, which is all it ever was worth to the Bush Administration.
According to this hypothesis, phony agonizing over 9/11 got Junior his longed-for war in Iraq, so there's no further need to shed crocodile tears and whine publicly about the blood of innocents. To a government willing to brush off the destruction of an entire US city, and to preside over the destruction of a foreign nation, a few planes blowing up over the Atlantic is small potatoes.
Whether we're seeing the true Bushie callousness laid bare, or a healthy American skepticism toward HMG's repeated exhibition of a phony terrorist menace as a pretext to introduce the Kafka-esque legislation favored by Tony Blair and John Reid, will be answered by and by. There will be successful prosecutions, or there will be official excuses verging on an apology, but not quite amounting to one.
We will see.


www.ranprieur.com

August 15 [2006]. The recent alleged terror plot was barely in the planning stages, the supposed attackers had not bought airline tickets, the whole thing was totally under surveillance, and the British police wanted to wait longer but were pushed by the Americans to make the arrests sooner, obviously for political effect.
It wouldn't surprise me if these "terrorists" were just dreamers who would not have got half as far in their plot without the police spies pushing them. And it almost doesn't need to be said that this whole spectacle, on a deeper level, is just a big joke to see how much degradation humans will submit to in the name of fear.


www.commondreams.org/views06/0814-23.htm

Published on Monday, August 14, 2006 by the Palm Beach Post (Florida)
When All Else Fails, GOP Dials 9/11
by Randy Schultz

It's an even-numbered year, and we're getting near Labor Day. So, it was predictable that the Bush administration and Republicans would exploit the foiled terrorism plot in the United Kingdom to save their political hides.
The campaign began Wednesday, one day after Sen. Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic primary in Connecticut. Knowing of the upcoming arrests in Britain, Vice President Dick Cheney began the demagoguery. He accused Democrats of wishing for a return to "sort of the pre-9/11 mind-set in terms of how we deal with the world we live in." On Thursday, the Republican leadership in the House began calling the Democrats "Defeatocrats" who want to "stand aside in the Global War on Terror."


www.sploid.com/news/2006/08/terra_terra_ter.php

Terra! Terra! Terra!
The alleged U.K. terror plot has been investigated for months by British intelligence, and the idea that the airliner attacks were planned for today seems to be nothing more than political fabrication and media hysteria.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060810/pl_afp/britainattacksairline_060810185330

Bush seeks political gains from foiled plot
by Olivier Knox Thu Aug 10, 2:53 PM ET


www.commondreams.org/views06/0812-27.htm

Published on Saturday, August 12, 2006 by the Boston Globe
A Convenient Threat
by Robert Kuttner


www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081406C.shtml

Wanted: Terrorists to Resuscitate Republican Party
By Missy Comley Beattie
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 14 August 2006


http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/

Bush's Weapon of Mass Deception
By Larry C. Johnson
Noquarter.typepad.com
Thursday 17 August 2006

It is a week since news broke in London about an alleged plot to blow up nine commercial jetliners, and there are emerging indicators that Bush and Blair exaggerated the truth about the actual readiness of the so-called plot. And yes, I mean so-called plot. Why would Bush and Blair hype a terrorist threat? A very simple answer. The White House was on notice that Seymour Hersh's story in the New Yorker claimed that the Bush administration encouraged Israel to invade Lebanon as part of a broader scheme to set the stage for war with Iran. Tony Blair, Bush's enabler, went along with the ruse.