Planes bomb alert was more propaganda than plot

I HAVE been reading carefully through all the newspapers to try to find the truth about the so-called planes bomb plot.

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, means they couldn’t be plane bombers for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets and, in many cases, passports, it would be difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that these individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged about in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year — like many British Muslims. And not just Muslims, but many thousands of others as well. Nothing from that surveillance indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up several planes — a plot which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance.

Of course, the Pakistani dictator’s interrogators have their ways of making people sing like canaries. The trouble is this tends to give the interrogators all they want, and more, in a desperate effort on the part of the ‘suspect’ to avoid torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.

In this instance, the man being ‘interrogated’ had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of an uncle. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability.

It might be felt also that factors other than political ones could be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. In fact, this is not too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if such activity is criminal there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.

Then we had the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests.

Why? I think the answer is plain. Both are in desperate domestic political trouble. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a ‘new 9/11’ they could sell to the media which bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they were shovelled.

And there was the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, the British Home Secretary, who warned of the dreadful evil threatening us and complained that some people “don’t get” the need to abandon our traditional liberties. According to his own propaganda machine, he stayed up all night and minutely directed the arrests.

There could be no clearer evidence that the 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. Those arrested included a mother with a six-week-old baby.

We will 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.

As they were all under surveillance, and would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to ‘maturity’ — that is certainly what was 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.

More than 1,000 British Muslims have been arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, but only 12% were ever charged with anything. That is simply harassment on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% were acquitted.

Most of the very few (just over 2% of arrests) who have been convicted were not convicted of anything to do with 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.

Paul Kinsella

Lorcan Grove

Santry

Dublin 9