Peering through the crevice....
Here we have it, the triumphant verdict. Five found guilty of plotting multiple terrorist scenarios "bigger than 9/11."
The trial did bring out a few notable facts about the intimate interconnections between the 7/7 cell and the convicted Bluewater plotters as they've been called. But what has come out in the trial is only the tip of an iceberg.
Part of that iceberg was going to be included in The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006), but was effectively censored under the court order which forbade discussion of anything which might prejudice the crevice trial. However, now that the trial is over, one is permitted to speak somewhat freely about material that had previously been redacted from the text of the book that is publicly available.
The entire approach of the mainstream press and security experts has been to view the Bluewater and 7/7 plots as, perhaps, connected; and that perhaps the police and security services bungled up when they didn't take the connections seriously enough.
Unfortunately, evidence from security sources (much of which is widely available in the public record but oddly ignored even now) suggests slightly more -- that 7/7 was precisely integral to the multiple plots being prepared by a single multi-celled radical network, members of which were apprehended by authorities in Operation Crevice. Not only that, but that MI5 investigators on the ground were screaming at their superiors to prioritize Mohammed Sidique Khan and others on a "higher-level of investigation", but were ignored, consistent with a long-term British policy of protecting certain radical groups operating (freely to this day) under the authority of exiled preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed.
More later.
The trial did bring out a few notable facts about the intimate interconnections between the 7/7 cell and the convicted Bluewater plotters as they've been called. But what has come out in the trial is only the tip of an iceberg.
Part of that iceberg was going to be included in The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006), but was effectively censored under the court order which forbade discussion of anything which might prejudice the crevice trial. However, now that the trial is over, one is permitted to speak somewhat freely about material that had previously been redacted from the text of the book that is publicly available.
The entire approach of the mainstream press and security experts has been to view the Bluewater and 7/7 plots as, perhaps, connected; and that perhaps the police and security services bungled up when they didn't take the connections seriously enough.
Unfortunately, evidence from security sources (much of which is widely available in the public record but oddly ignored even now) suggests slightly more -- that 7/7 was precisely integral to the multiple plots being prepared by a single multi-celled radical network, members of which were apprehended by authorities in Operation Crevice. Not only that, but that MI5 investigators on the ground were screaming at their superiors to prioritize Mohammed Sidique Khan and others on a "higher-level of investigation", but were ignored, consistent with a long-term British policy of protecting certain radical groups operating (freely to this day) under the authority of exiled preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed.
More later.