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Victims of London bombings cry foul

Hasan Suroor

Laypersons and experts alike have called for an independent inquiry - on the lines of the post-9/11 investigation in America.

HOW MANY blunders does it take to constitute an intelligence failure? Or rather what does it take for an obvious intelligence failure to be officially recognised as one?

Ask the man who lost both his legs in the July 7 London bombings last year and he will say that he was a victim of intelligence failure. Ask the young woman whose face was badly burnt in the bombings and she will say she was a victim of intelligence failure. Ask the couple who lost their daughter that day and they will say she was a victim of intelligence failure.

But the official view is rather different. No wonder, victims of the attacks and their families are furious after a high-level inquiry committee last week cleared Britain's security services of any blame for the atrocity that claimed 52 lives and left hundreds injured and traumatised.

Indeed, the fury is shared by Britons across the country. Almost everyone outside the "sarkari" bubble believes that the report of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is a "whitewash." Laypersons and experts alike have reacted with disappointment to its findings and called for an independent inquiry — on the lines of the post-9/11 investigation in America.

The ISC report is a strange document in that its conclusions are awkwardly at odds with its own analysis of the events leading up to "7/7." For the most part, it reads like a catalogue of intelligence and security lapses but when it comes to holding the security establishment accountable its authors develop cold feet and conclude that neither MI5 not any of the other agencies, who are paid to protect the country, were to blame.

The report deploys some extraordinary euphemisms to avoid calling a spade a spade and, as The Times editorially commented, "beneath the reasonable language ... lies a searing indictment of confusion, poor judgement, missed opportunities and plain ignorance that prevented Britain's security services from carrying out the basic task assigned to them: protecting the nation from its enemies."

Thus, while the committee acknowledges that two of the bombers — Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer — were allowed to slip through the net even though they had been known to the security services, it does not call it a lapse but attributes it to lack of adequate resources, and the "more pressing priorities" that preoccupied them at the time.

Intelligence officials have said that after 9/11 they were concentrating more on external threat to Britain from Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and were taken by surprise when "home-grown" terrorists struck on July 7, 2005. If this is not an admission of intelligence failure what else is it?

By the ISC's own account, ignoring the threat from domestic quarters, especially after Khan and Tanweer's activities had aroused suspicion, was a mistake. It says that security services knew that the two had visited Pakistan and were likely to have made "contact with Al-Qaeda figures," and yet they were not investigated fully.

Intelligence claims that Khan and Tanweer were not seen as a serious threat when they first appeared under the security scanner confirms the failure to assess, accurately, the sources of threat. In fact, it has been alleged that MI5 knew a lot more about the activities of Khan but withheld it from the committee in a bid to "cover up" its failure.

According to a report in The Sunday Times, MI5 had "secret" tape recordings of Khan talking about building an explosive device. "However, despite the recordings MI5 allowed him to escape the net. Transcripts of the tape were never shown to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC)... ," it claimed.

The view that 7/7 was nothing but a huge intelligence failure and that the ISC should have stated this in unambiguous terms is almost unanimous. In an editorial, headlined "Face up to the failures," The Guardian questioned why MI5 did not pursue information about Khan and Tanweer and rejected the committee's conclusion that a lack of sufficient resources may have been a reason.

"It is MI5's job to collate, to sift, to match and to interpret information of this kind. Patently, the service failed to do that in these cases. This seems not to have been purely a matter of inadequate resources. It was also an operational failure, and thus a failure for which management must take responsibility," the newspaper said.

Public confidence in the ISC has never been great because it is not an independent body as its members are appointed by Prime Minister and they directly report to him rather than to Parliament. Its findings have simply confirmed the sceptics in their view that it was a "whitewash" job, and has left many questions unanswered.

`Judge and jury'

Nader Mozakka, whose wife was killed in the attacks, said: "The government seems to be judge and jury in this case. Most families, as far as I'm aware, have been calling for a public inquiry.''

Rachel North, a young woman who suffered serious injuries, said: "I am not surprised that the politicians and security services have examined their work in secret and subsequently found themselves not to blame... I find it staggering that there is no public inquiry," she said. But in the government, they have already moved on to other things. Public inquiry? Into what?

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