Wednesday - September 10, 2008

What hope is there if we can’t bring to justice those accused of wanting to destroy us.

What hope is there if we can’t bring to justice those accused of wanting to destroy us
By Max Hastings
Last updated at 2:10 AM on 10th September 2008

If you or I were arrested tomorrow, in possession of a video in which we announced an intention to kill for Jesus and with a bomb-making kit in the living room at home, we would not expect to fare well in the dock by shrugging that we were not really serious.

Yet the jury at Woolwich Crown Court on Monday failed to convict eight defendants of charges against them of conspiring to blow up airliners.

Despite the discovery of seven ‘martyrdom videos’, a bomb-making factory and detailed airline flight lists, the jury found only three men guilty of conspiracy to murder, and failed to agree on charges of conspiracy to detonate explosives on aircraft against any of those accused.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali

Rant: Abdulla Ahmed Ali pledged ‘revenge’ on the British people in a video found by police.

Yesterday, the police and security authorities were stunned by the half-cock outcome of a prosecution for which they believed the evidence was overwhelming.

It has important implications for the struggle against terrorism; for the credibility of Britain’s anti-terrorist operations; for airline security; and maybe also for our faith in the jury system.

We must say ‘maybe’ about juries, because unless one was present in court, heard every scrap of evidence and saw what sort of people were sitting in the jury box, it is impossible to be certain about the justice of the findings.

But what is plain is that at least some of the 12 men and women rejected the judgments of the police and Security Service about the threat which the defendants posed to public safety.

Since the issue at stake was one of life and death, this is frightening.

The verdicts may leave us to assume either that those responsible for protecting us do not know what they are doing; or that some jury members are stunningly indifferent to the activities of allegedly would-be mass-murderers.

Recent controversy about anti-terrorist legislation, criticism of allegedly intrusive surveillance methods, and attacks on the credibility of police evidence, have damaged the image of the security authorities.

More than a few British Muslims believe the police to be prejudiced against them. Polls show that hundreds of thousands publicly or privately sympathise with young jihadis who want to wage war on the West.

It is three years since the London bombings which caused 52 deaths. Some otherwise sensible people would like to believe that the terrorist threat is not now so grave; that some of the young Muslims scrutinised by the police and MI5 are not really serious about their plots.

However, the truth is that the Security Service believes there are more young jihadis in Britain than ever before. Many are committed to killing innocent people in the name of their religion, using airliners if they can, because 9/11 showed these to be the most effective weapons.

Read a book like Ed Husain’s The Islamist, a memoir by someone reared in Britain who became an Islamic fundamentalist and which tells of the murderous groups he met during his years of commitment.

Ed Husain recanted. Today, he cannot understand why the British government and people are so absurdly laid-back about militants who preach hate and death in British cities.

Husain writes that he still cannot understand why the Government gave a knighthood to Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, who applauded the 1989 Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie, and refused to renege on his view in 2006.

Husain writes that he still cannot understand why the Government gave a knighthood to Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, who applauded the 1989 Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie, and refused to renege on his view in 2006.

Listen to any policeman involved in monitoring the traffic of young men between Britain and Pakistan. Hear accounts, supported by first-hand evidence, about the training camps and indoctrination sessions which recruits attend, the murderous ambitions they bring back to London.

Intelligence officers acknowledge that there have always been wild young zealots out there, of all races and promoting many causes, who wanted to vent their rage upon society.

In the past, however, such people lacked means. Even getting a gun was hard, because they seldom lived among criminals.

Today, by contrast, the internet empowers fanatics. Information is out there, and can never be suppressed, to show men like those in court at Woolwich how to build almost undetectable bombs. Liquid explosives remain a threat — and thus restrictions will continue upon millions of airline passengers.

Of course, the airport security process exasperates us all. My stepdaughter left her baby’s suncream in his pushchair as she boarded the plane for a summer holiday. It went smartly into the trash can, as do tens of thousands of such items every day. This is the way things are going to stay.

The experts say neither scanners nor passenger ‘profiling’ are discerning enough to offer any option. Airport screening is the relatively easy part. It is much harder to sustain surveillance of embittered young Muslims who wish us harm, some of them born and brought up in Britain.

The confusion of their objectives would invite mockery, if their purposes were not so terrible. Some attend training camps run by Kashmiri separatists, who are waging a war against India which they are happy to promote by killing British people.

Abdulla Ahmed Ali, one of the men convicted on Monday, accused the British people in his suicide video of caring more about foxes than Muslims, because they attend anti-hunting demonstrations.

Optimists say that many Muslim militants eventually come to their senses, grow out of their rage, as did Ed Husain. They discover better purposes in life. They decide that, perhaps, Britain and the West are not quite as evil and decadent as they were led to suppose.

But what happens meanwhile? What is to be done about the alarmingly large number of twenty-something-year-old would-be martyrs who want to kill us in the name of Allah?

The only possible answer is that they must be identified, arrested, charged — and convicted. If they are not, if British society shows itself incapable of defending itself against mass killers, however half-baked their ideas and methods, then we are all at risk. The Woolwich verdicts, or rather lack of them, suggest that something is badly wrong somewhere.

Some claim that premature American-inspired action in Pakistan, to arrest a local militant involved in the London plot, forced the hand of British anti-terrorist forces before their evidence against the Walthamstow group was complete.

Whatever the case, it is plain that public confidence in the Government’s judgment — for instance, about the need for 28-day detention of terror suspects and ID cards — and in police evidence is badly shaken.

We live in a world in which many people, especially the young, are reluctant to believe what they are told by anyone in authority. They are unconvinced that anything, save perhaps climate change, is really serious.

They half-expect jihadis staring madly out of police identification photographs to turn out to be Rory Bremner or John Fortune doing a turn for a comedy programme. Maybe there were some people who think like that among the Woolwich jury.

No responsible person wants innocents convicted of terrible crimes, nor an exaggerated climate of public fear. But if half the evidence produced against the defendants in the Walthamstow bomb plot was true, then we have reason to be deeply dismayed by the inconclusive outcome.

The prosecuting authorities must demand a retrial. We have got to do better than this, if we are to protect ourselves from the real and present danger of Islamic terror.

http://tinyurl.com/57f26u

Posted by Drew458     on 09/10/2008 at 12:30 PM   
Filed Under: • RoPMA • Terrorists • UK • War On Terror •  
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