This is what happens when a crime is redefined as war

The proper investigation of terrorist conspiracy has been wrecked by cynical
politics. Meddling has again made us less safe

Simon Jenkins 
The Guardian, Wednesday September 10 2008 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/10/1

The sun never sets on the war on terror, even as it degenerates into blood
and recrimination. The Woolwich trial of eight members of a supposed
13-member gang all but collapsed on Monday. Despite evidence of intent to
blow up an airliner, the jury convicted three defendants of conspiracy to
commit murder but failed to reach a verdict on the central allegation. 

It has been an open secret in police circles that Operation Overt, the most
complex in counter-terror history, was sabotaged by the American vice
president, Dick Cheney, desperate for a headline boost to the Republicans'
2006 mid-term elections. British intelligence was following trails and
acquiring evidence against 20 suspects. They needed American surveillance
help in Pakistan and shared their information, foolishly it now appears,
with Washington.

The backstory is told in Ron Suskind's new book, The Way of the World. Tony
Blair, bursting with news of the operation, discussed it in July 2006 with
George Bush, who was impatient for action. The argument, says Suskind, was
a classic between American gung ho and British patience.

Nobody was sure if the plot was more than half-baked game-playing and it
would certainly need evidence to stand up in court. The British
were "treating it all as a criminal matter rather than a historic, and
terrorist-glamorising, clash of power and ideology", Suskind writes.

Cheney then privately dispatched the CIA's operations director, Jose
Rodriguez, to Islamabad to secure the arrest of one of the British
suspects, Rashid Rauf, believed to be a possible link with al-Qaida. The
British had been watching him and preparing his extradition. They did not
want him rendered useless through CIA or Pakistani torture. Within days,
news of Rauf's capture reached the British plotters. In a panic, the police
had desperately to round up as many suspects as they could find overnight.
According to Suskind, "top officials in British intelligence cursed, threw
ashtrays and screamed bloody murder".

Months of work, which might have unpicked an entire al-Qaida network back to
the Pakistani training camps, was ruined by "forced, foolish hastiness" -
and all for the mid-term elections. Bush was soon boasting of
having "foiled a plot to blow up passenger planes headed for the United
States".

Two years later, a British jury, having to decide on the basis of evidence
whether it faced another 9/11 or just a bunch of crazies, gave the benefit
of the doubt to the latter. It was clearly fed up with scare stories and
the politics of fear and felt the police had not made a case. Today, many
of the plotters are at large, and Rauf himself has mysteriously escaped
custody.

This is what happens when criminal conspiracy is redefined as an act of war.
It goes political. As a conspiracy to cause mayhem, the suspected airline
plotters merited and were getting thorough detective work in what was
clearly a superb operation. Because it was also a "war", the death-or-glory
boys took over and wrecked it.

Worse than wreck it, they rendered the operation counter-productive. A few
sad, disaffected and clearly dangerous youths were captured, but in such a
way as to induce many more to sympathise and imitate them. They will be
fired by the same resentment at British foreign policy that has turned a
crusade to bring democracy to the heathen into a bloody and drawn-out
meddling in the affairs of foreign states. That meddling is now
overwhelmingly counter-productive, fuelling anti-western insurgency across
an arc from Syria through Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan. Characterised
everywhere as a war on terror, it is further politicised and polarised.

Last week's massive operation by Nato forces to move a dam turbine 100 miles
across Helmand was reportedly brought forward at Washington's insistence to
help John McCain's candidacy. It cost some 300 Afghan lives. Every one of
those lives invites revenge against that dam. Meanwhile, Nato and the
Americans are intensifying their bombing of Afghan and Waziri villages.
Anyone who visits this theatre is briefed with the same mantra: We are
going to stop killing civilians ... Every death is 10 recruits to the
enemy ... We must win on the ground not from the air. Airforces claim they
can kill with "pinpoint accuracy". They claim the new predator drones can
murder a Taliban leader at a mile distant.

They lie. To soldiers on the ground, calling in air power to clear a village
is easier and safer than fighting by hand. As a result, and amid a storm of
mendacious denials, wedding parties are blown to pieces, houses are
crushed, women and children are massacred. To kill a Taliban it is
considered worth wiping out a market. British and American generals in
Kabul have slid into Vietnam mode, using the enemy kill rate as an
indicator of victory. They do not care that one dead Taliban creates 10
live ones.

An Afghan crusade that was possibly winnable in 2001 has been systematically
subverted by those waging it. Attempts to destroy the nation's staple crop,
opium, has alienated almost everyone and driven huge profits into the
pockets of the enemy. It has been unbelievably stupid.

The current use of drones to bomb Pakistani territory, usually on faulty or
devious intelligence, is raising whole tribes to fury. It now risks driving
an unstable Islamabad regime back into covert, if not overt, support for
the Taliban, as in the 1990s. Is this really the intention of Washington
and London?

The war on terror has become an exercise in cynicism, a backdrop to domestic
politics. Terrorists are a menace to certain western cities. A generation
of young Muslims has emerged who see glory in killing civilians for nothing
but publicity. They appear loosely aligned with insurgent forces in
Pakistan and Afghanistan, much as terrorists in the 1970s and 80s allied
themselves with Palestinians. But these terrorists do not constitute a
threat to the security of any western state. Their plots and outrages are
crimes and do not merit the status of war. They have become servants of
political rhetoric. To be tough on terrorism is apparently akin to shooting
a moose.

That Nato soldiers can casually bomb civilians in these distant parts,
knowing it to be counter-productive, shows the half-heartedness of this
so-called war. So does the ease with which politicised intelligence can
undermine a criminal investigation. Both make us less safe, not more.
-- 
Facts are sacred ... but comment is free

"Robin T Cox"  wrote ...

> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/10/1
>
> The sun never sets on the war on terror, even as it degenerates into blood
> and recrimination. The Woolwich trial of eight members of a supposed
> 13-member gang all but collapsed on Monday. Despite evidence of intent to
> blow up an airliner, the jury convicted three defendants of conspiracy to
> commit murder but failed to reach a verdict on the central allegation.
>
> It has been an open secret in police circles that Operation Overt, the
most
> complex in counter-terror history, was sabotaged by the American vice
> president, Dick Cheney, desperate for a headline boost to the Republicans'
> 2006 mid-term elections.

One thing everyone seems to have over-looked in all this is that - beyond
crime and criminal intent which has been admitted to by the defendants - the
allegations may have been complete bullshit.

There's no real indication that this fanciful plot to down planes with
liquid explosives was anything but over-hyped nonsense exagerated by police,
security agencies and government for political intent. The case may have
been laughed out of court whether sabotaged or not. "Evidence of intent"
means nothing, as the jury seems to have decided is the case.

It's notable that the way it's being spun is "there really was a plot, we
just failed to get a conviction". Got to keep the demonisation and
fear-mongering going !

In message <9UNxk.55687$E41.13300@text.news.virginmedia.com>, The Happy 
Hippy  writes
>
>"Robin T Cox"  wrote ...
>
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/10/1
>>
>> The sun never sets on the war on terror, even as it degenerates into blood
>> and recrimination. The Woolwich trial of eight members of a supposed
>> 13-member gang all but collapsed on Monday. Despite evidence of intent to
>> blow up an airliner, the jury convicted three defendants of conspiracy to
>> commit murder but failed to reach a verdict on the central allegation.
>>
>> It has been an open secret in police circles that Operation Overt, the
>most
>> complex in counter-terror history, was sabotaged by the American vice
>> president, Dick Cheney, desperate for a headline boost to the Republicans'
>> 2006 mid-term elections.
>
>One thing everyone seems to have over-looked in all this is that - beyond
>crime and criminal intent which has been admitted to by the defendants - the
>allegations may have been complete bullshit.
>
>There's no real indication that this fanciful plot to down planes with
>liquid explosives was anything but over-hyped nonsense exagerated by police,
>security agencies and government for political intent. The case may have
>been laughed out of court whether sabotaged or not. "Evidence of intent"
>means nothing, as the jury seems to have decided is the case.
>
>It's notable that the way it's being spun is "there really was a plot, we
>just failed to get a conviction". Got to keep the demonisation and
>fear-mongering going !


Isn't this the one the US screwed up?

The UK was still gathering evidence but GWB needed a "mid-term-success" 
and the US "intelligence" services started arrests and doing press 
releases which screwed the whole operation. SO the reason this lot got 
off is at the door of the US..... what a cock up.


-- 
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\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
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