Dhiren Barot - life sentence for impractical "movie plot" terrorist plans ?
The conviction of Dhiren Barot, leading to a life sentence with a tariff of 40 years before being eligible for parole, is remarkable. He appears to have been an active terrorist plotter, but just how much of a real threat are his alleged , detailed, professional plots ?
From the media reports, none of these alleged plots, appear to as well researched or as detailed, as those in the books and films by authors such as Tom Clancy - should he and his researchers and co-authors also be serving 40 years or more in prison ?
Given that many of the readers of Spy Blog (or of Tom Clancy novels) have at least as much knowledge of potential targets and techniques as Dhiren Barot appears to have had, we are worried about this "thought crime" conviction with no actual evidence of means and capability to put into action any of the "movie plots", which he appears to have been researching. Just because he pleaded guilty, presumably for the purposes of self martyrdom, this is only evidence of evil intent, not of an actual, realistic, threat.
We are sceptical about the practicality of any of the various "movie plots" which the British media and authorities and legal system seem to have taken for granted would inevitably cause "thousands of casualties".
As with all recent terrorism cases, there has been a flurry of "background" information (not actual evidence used in Court) released to the media , after the trial is over, mostly from anonymous and therefore untrustworthy "security sources".
It is noticeable that the supposedly "cooperative" Al Queda "computer and communications" expert, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, whose arrest seems to have triggered that of Dhiren Barot, was not called as a witness from Pakistan, where he may well have been coerced or tortured.
The TV news media showed their weakness for moving images, any scrap of video, no matter how incidental or irrelevant, which they will repeat over and over again, drawing the wrong conclusions from it.
In this case it was a few seconds of an utterly amateur video taken in the deserted streets around the New York Stock Exchange, zooming in ineptly on a CCTV pan tilt zoom camera dome. The footage was obviously taken on foot, from the pavement, with nobody else about, rather than,, say from a vehicle. If this was meant to be "professional terrorist" target reconnaissance, then we have little to fear.
There was also a shot of the World Trade Center towers taken with the camera on its side, and the audio sound of someone saying "boom". There was also a shot of what look like a couple of unpressurised stainless steel liquid nitrogen flasks / gas containers on the pavement.
The impression given by the media was that Barot was somehow planning to blow up and topple the Twin Towers, but it could also have been a reference to the previous 1993 failed attempt, which did cause lots of damage and casualties, but which had no realistic chance of toppling the buildings .
There are no allegations that Dhiren Barot was involved in, or had prior knowledge of, the September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon etc.
The most important feature of this video clip is not the titbit that it was apparently found spliced into a Bruce Willis "Die Hard" video to help conceal it (why was it not encrypted, if this really was such a professional terrorist ?).
The aspect which is studiously not being reported or commented on by the UK media, is that this video "evidence" of a plot, was shot in April 2001, and obtained 3 years later in 2004 in Pakistan.
This "new and unusually specific information" was the basis of the decision by the Tom Ridge, in charge of the US Department of Homeland Security to increase the Terrorist Alert status to "Orange" , around the financial districts of New York, New Jersey and Washington, just after Democratic Party Convention had raised the standing of Senator Kelly in the opinion polls, during the 2004 Presidential Election, and before the Republican Party Convention.
Magically the the terrorist alert status and increased, yet counter-productive, security measures (they created long queues of CitiBank employees which stretched out into the street, thereby increasing their vulnerability to a car bomb or drive by shooting or sniper attack) around these buildings, were relaxed on November 10th 2004, i.e. after the Presidential Election held on 2nd November 2004.
In other words this 3 year old video footage was cynically hyped up for political opinion poll advantage, to pretend that the USA was under a current, imminent, threat to these financial sector buildings even though the alleged terrorist masterminds were in custody in the UK and in Pakistan.
Someone in the UK appears to have released an edited version of what was claimed to be Dhiren Barot's "business case" to his unnamed Al Quaeda superiors of his most advanced idea - the "gas limos" plot to the Press Association
Was this written in English or another language ?
Gas cylinders in a stretched limo (which have a large carrying capacity, but are able to get into an underground car park with height restrictions which would prevent a van or lorry from doing so), with explosives attached, supposedly to create a large gas explosion ?
This has been a vain hope of terrorists for years, and is siliar to the foiled attack on the US Embassy in Damascus, Syria involved this September 2006
No terrorist bomb makers, not even sophisticated ones like the IRA, with years of experience and practice of using ammonium nitrate, petrol tankers, gas cylinders etc. have ever managed to transform commercial gas cylinders into the equivalent of military Fuel Air Explosives or Thermobaric weapons, which might have a chance of collapsing a large office building. Getting an fuel aerosol or gas cloud mixed with the right proportion of oxidiser, is not as simple as attaching some explosives to a gas cylinder.
Neither is it as simple as having electronically controlled release valves to produce a gas cloud, with a delayed detonation circuit, as was demonstrated by the recent failed "suitcase bomb" attacks on German railway stations this July 2006.
Why should anyone believe that Dhiren Barot could manage this first time, from a standing start, with no practice ? We note that the "budget" in his "business plan" does not seem to include anything for actual weapons development and testing.
We are extremely sceptical of the other alleged "business cases" for supposed terrorist plots.
Are these in fact deliberate disinformation to let the hysterical media cause panic and terror, by fingering many possible targets, which are impractical to actually attack ?
Or are they just brainstorming ideas, which have been discarded after a bit of detailed investigation as to their practicality and feasibility ?
It is all very well to claim that a Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD) i.e. a "dirty bomb", could be useful to a terrorist in order to cause panic and fear and economic damage, but creating and deploying one is another matter altogether.
Dhiren Barot's apparently favoured source of radioactive material i.e. Americium241 Oxide from domestic smoke detectors is is utterly impractical, given the thousands of such smoke detectors he would have had to purchase or steal, without arousing suspicion. It is all very well for his alleged notes to state the obvious e.g. that a highly radioactive gamma source like Cobalt 60 would make a very effective RDD "dirty bomb", but there is no evidence that he had any realistic prospect of getting access to this, or to the "hot cell" which would be needed to protect anyone trying to construct such a device, without, as he apparently notes, killing even suicide terrorists before they have completed their mission.
If you were a senior Al Quaeda, leader, who did actually have access to some, say, Cobalt 60 radioactive isotopes, would you hand them over to an Indian born convert to Islam, with British citienship, or would your natural caution and racism make you suspect that he could be an Indian or British or other intelligence agent trying to track down any nuclear weapons or radiioactive "dirty bomb" plans and materials you may have ?
The other "movie plot" idea which the UK media seem to have latched on to is the idea of somehow, magically, creating a large enough explosion to breach the London Underground tunnels which go under the River Thames.
This plays on the understandable fears of many people of being trapped in a Tube train with rising flood waters under the Thames (most people do not think of the risk of flooding or tunnel collapse in other parts of the London Underground, e.g. from burst water mains). However, the amount of explosive required, without any drilling to position explosive charges in the tunnel roof, to breach several metres of reinforced concrete, steel casing and bedrock, would be huge, and would require the hijacking of an entire train, and probably of the signalling and electrical power control rooms as well. If you could do that (or have a huge bomb on board a river vessel, or a military aircraft dropped deep penetration "bunker buster" bomb) then, you could easily cause far more casualties or hit more sensitive targets, than by flooding part of the Tube network.
If this plan was seriously being considered, then why was the supposedly meticulous Dhiren Barot not also investigating other underground railways which pass under rivers or the sea e.g. Paris or New York ? Why not the Channel Tunnel ?
Our suspicion that Dhiren Barot was employing disinformation techniques to point the finger at targets which he was not really going after is strengthened by the reports that the Police recovered 600 sets of keys (not cryptographic keys, actual metal keys) and spent lots of time and effort searching 4,000 lockup garages and storage facilities which they might have opened, but have only found 77 of them so far. No weapons or explosives or radioactive sources appear to have been found in any of these.
This case does not prove the case for an even longer period pre-charge detention period than the current 28 days - he was successfully charged and convicted under the previous 14 days regime.
Barot, who has not been shown to have committed any terrorist or other attacks in the UK, whatsoever, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for at least 40 years, without any access to explosives, firearms, chemical , biological or radioactive materials in his possession, or any evidence that his "movie plot" ideas had ever got to the prototype or trial run stage.
So what if there are still unencrypted data files on some computer hard disks, which could possibly lead to further charges, they cannot lead to further criminal penalties !
We note the claims that Dhiren Barot used several false identities,
Exactly how many of these were false British identities, involving either Passports or Driving Licences, i.e. ones which a perfectly working National Identity Register and ID Card scheme might have had a chance of detecting ?
We suspect that none of them are in this category, and that the Dhiren Barot case cannot be used to justify the claim that somehow the controversial National Identity Register will be of any ise in preventing terrorist attacks.
We noted that fingerprint and DNA analysis was used to check which chemical hazard reference books Dhiren Barot had consulted in various University reference libraries, e.g. at Brunel University.
Does this mean that the fingerprints, DNA and library records of all the students and staff who have also consulted these books are now also on file as "potential terrorists" ? Will Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) websites and legally required health and safety training materials, be censored under the Terrorism Act 2006 or the forthcoming European Commission proposals to censor "bomb making instructional websites" ?
Even if Barot had somehow succeeded in causing hundreds or thousands of casualties, he would still have utterly failed to destroy our Western democratic civilisation.
Comments
Any of you readers is free to go and do some editing on the following article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Financial_buildings_plot
I've seen the articles all over the press. I can't believe how poor our level of journalism is in this country. Maybe it's something to do with the complete lack of interest in science and engineering people have these days that they seem to have no curiousity for these plans.
You can imagine this happening back in the 60's when science was cool, someone would bother to do the back-of-the-envelope calculations, and they'd be reported in the newspapers.
The government simply makes statements that defy the laws of basic physics, and they print it verbatim. This comes on the heels of the plot to blow up 10 airlines this summer where no such chemicals exist with the necessary properties. It's like they're going for a full house, after insulting the field of biology with the no-ricin plot of 2003.
I can't tell if the lack of interest is deliberate, or due to laziness. Suppose a really intricate and practical plot were uncovered which could have actually worked, would the press go into the details it with fascination for the engineering?
It's like everyone knows these are Hollywood movie plots, and you don't bother to question them because you know they are only for the entertainment, and don't really exist. Wouldn't actually viably realistic stunts in the movies be more interesting than this unimaginative made-up stuff?
Imagine if Barot could have got through this childish phase of wanting to commit terrorism and decided to use this material to write a movie script.
I am troubled by the idea of being convicted for a plot that I could have typed up on my computer, and then deleted because I changed my mind and thought it was a bad idea.
I'm all for using information in deleted files to track down the whereabouts of explosives, say. But getting done for "gathering information likely to be useful to terrorism" which you then threw away is a bit much.
Posted by: Julian Todd | November 8, 2006 8:06 PM
Back of an envelope calculations are fun on these occasions as indeed I, an engineer manque, managed to prove in a few minutes with wikipedia and Google's incredibly handy unit conversion function, that the official line is baloney, at least as far as the 'dirty bomb' part is concerned. For an encore I'd like to estimate the explosive power of a 'gas limo' and compare it to the loads on a modern concrete-framed building.
There are only two explanations - Mr. Barot is so dangerous that he set up a highly detailed decoy that a two-year police investigation failed to penetrate and that has fooled the entire press (ok, that bit's easy), or that he's a deluded fantasist. I tend to the latter option.
Thanks to whoever linked this spyblog piece and my Blairwatch one from earlier on wikipedia. Fame at last!
Posted by: Tom.Barry | November 8, 2006 10:36 PM
Just a trivial point worth circulating -- If the plans were complete gibberish, how could they be against the law that "it is an offence to collect information likely to be useful to a terrorist" ?
Whether or not Barot was stupid enough to believe his plans were useful is immaterial, otherwise they're prosecuting him for thought-crime. It's like writing hate letters in your private diary about how much you want to murder your boss, and speculating about how you could get away with it.
Al-Qaeda probably has to deal with fan-letters sent to them by losers from all over the world like this. It's like people sending tapes of their own music to their favourite rock band. Had it not been sent to the double-agent Noor Khan, it would have probably been filed straight in the bin. We've got no evidence that this plot actually went any further.
Say, what happens if I post a letter to "Mr. Laden, Rue de Taliban, Afghanistan". Maybe I get a note back from Santa Claus at the North Pole.
Posted by: Julian Todd | November 9, 2006 12:02 PM
On the subject of Dhiren Barot/Abu Musa al-Hindi (same guy, apparently), see the Kurt Nimmo article Abu Musa al-Hindi: Another Patsy Bites the Dust.
I think that Barot's incarceration for 40 years is to bury any connections to the London July 05 events. It was reported (July 14, 2005, ABC News) that Mohammad Sidique Khan was in contact with the Barot's 'Luton cell' through the shadowy figure of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan.
Oh what a tangled web.........
40 years for thoughcrime.....
Posted by: Jon | November 9, 2006 12:51 PM
@ Julian - read some of the heavily censored "plans" (.pdf) for yourself on the Metropolitan Police's Press page on "Operation Rhyme":
http://www.met.police.uk/pressbureau/rhyme/
They are not complete gibberish, but it is hard to see how they could have caused hundreds or thousands of casualties.
The reconnaissance reports on the Financial Buildings in the USA are relatively detailed, and in a standard format under chapter headings of e.g.:
(i.e. which way is North) (heavily censored, even though the other public information in this list is not)Barot appears to be a diligent observer, but his claims that he has "left no stone unturned" in compiling his detailed reports are obviously false or self delusional.
Although such information might be alluded to in the censored portions of the reports, there are no specific chapter headings for either vulnerable key personnel or the vulnerable telecomms and computer infrastructures without which these Financial Buildings could not operate.
He does not appear to have engaged in much, if any "social engineering" of security or maintenance staff or picked up any gossip from people working in or near the buildings,
It is interesting that the censor chose to leave visible a reference to an anti-corporate protest group who monitor CitiGroup and have held demonstrations at their buildings. The reference to
has not been censored and presumably means that this group will now be under suspicion and surveillance.
Barot does appear to give the option of reduced civilian casualty in some of his vague "plans", and his details of escape routes obviously mean that, in April 2001, he was not considering suicide attacks on these buildings.
How he expected to topple, the CitiCorp plaza building in New York with a vehicle bomb near one of the seven and half metre diameter reinforced concrete piers, is a mystery - blow all the windows out in the entire street, yes, but topple the building - no.
Tellingly, each of the reports ends with:
preceded sometimes with a sentence or paragraph about the risks which he undertook in the reconnaissance, and a line about the "Cover" e.g. student/tourist he used.
This does rather point to a "wannabe secret agent" mentality.
The "Gas Limos" plan rightly mentions details such as the pressure release safety features of commercial gas cylinders, but there is no evidence that he has any practical experience with realistic prototypes or weapons engineering data.
He does make a claim that he participated (with 3 others) in an attack on an army summer fort in Kashmir, using a censored amount of TNT with "programmed time pencil boxes" (i.e. proper commercial or military detonators) augmented by a censored amount of "Propane gas, leaked and ignited", and claims "15 -20 casualties i.e. killed"
Obviously he had no access to any TNT and proper detonators in the UK .
His emphasis on rusty nail shrapnel (influenced by the neo-nazi terrorist David Copeland's attacks with firework sourced gunpowder and shrapnel bombs in Soho and Brixton) shows that cannot have been thinking of Fuel Air Explosives or Thermobaric weapons.
Somehow the censors have not blacked out the sentence:
as part of his argument that if the "Gas Limos" plan could be made to work in London, it could also work anywhere else in the world.
The RDD "dirty bomb" stuff does show that he has been studying past accidents etc. involving radioactive contamination, but his claim that the "nuclear standards agencies" are somehow misrepresenting the level of risk posed by Americium in domestic smoke detectors i.e. that you would need "a million" of them to produce an effective "dirty bomb", so as to discourage wannabe terrorists from trying, does seem peculiar.
Strangely, his alleged document makes two references to the non-existant "Americium-147", rather than isostope Americium-241 which is what is used in smoke detectors, something which rather casts doubt on Barot's knowledge of chemistry.
His stated plan to gather 10,000 domestic smoke detectors in 10 months, should, one feels, have been allowed to proceed, to the point where the terrorist team (does it exist ?) had gathered more smoke detectors than anyone would reasonably need, thereby providing some actual evidence of terrorism, without really endangering the public.
Surely the UK police are capable of tracking down unusual purchases of thousands of smoke detectors ?
Posted by: wtwu | November 9, 2006 1:30 PM
The "plan" to flood the London Underground, which the media seized upon, is no such thing, it just looks like a passing reference in Dhiren Barot's "other ideas" appendix to his "Gas Limos" plan, which has not even been investigated slightly.
There is a reference to using gas cylinder bombs on trains e.g. Heathrow Express, despite noting the very short journey time (London Paddington to / from Heathrow in about 20 minutes)
There is also a single uncensored paragraph:
That is it - the whole "movie plot" so called "plan", untainted by any shred of practicality.
How have the media, and even the Police and Prosecution got so hyped up by this alleged threat, unless there is a deliberate hidden agenda ?
Is this deliberate disinformation to waste Police resources, chasing up blind alleys ? Remember that IRA terrorists used to do things like, circling half a dozen names in a copy of "Who's Who", which they would leave behind in their hideouts, forcing Police protection resources to be wasted on protecting VIP targets who were never really the true targets of the terrorists.
Or is it just another brainstorming remark, which has not even been considered in detail, let alone accepted or rejected as a viable threat ?
Posted by: wtwu | November 9, 2006 2:12 PM
The interesting thing about the tube plot is that there isn't an underwater tube line in Greenwich - there's one in 'North Greenwich', between Canary Wharf and the Dome and another between the Dome and Canning Town, on the Jubilee Line Extension.
There is a short tunnel under the Thames at Greenwich for the Docklands Light Railway, which wouldn't flood central London if it was breached, since the line rises out of the tunnel fairly quickly at each end (there's Cutty Sark station box at the southern end, which would probably be mostly underwater, but that's it).
Presuming he picked the Jubilee Line, that's a good long way from the rest of London and it's unlikely a breach there would cause flooding beyond the Jubilee Line heading north and west. After all, I think all tube lines have heavy water doors at Thames crossing points, and there's another one of these between North Greenwich and London. Additionally, the JLE is the most modern tube line on the network and thus presumably the best built with regards to strength and safety, which makes it another odd choice for a terrorist. It's certainly the line with the best escape facilities and the largest, most open stations, which would thus take longer to flood and allow more escape time.
Posted by: Tom.Barry | November 9, 2006 4:45 PM
I'm still taken by how well copy-edited the documents are. Either they were done professionally, or he went over them again and again over months, reading them out loud, and getting ready to make his Powerpoint presentation to Mr Laden in Pakistan and win an essay prize.
So far the entire media has run with this ridiculous story without any mention that it's all quite silly. I've tracked much sillier terrorist plots in America as well, and doubt it's part of a conspiracy.
I think it's to do with the massive over-expansion of the budgets of FBI and MI5 for the GWoT, coupled with the utter desperation of politicians to have some plots to talk about, that makes such low-quality cases a certainty. It must be chaos working in those organizations. I don't understand why the media is covering up for them.
Mind you, there's this from:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/4314087.html
"The Associated Press, The British Broadcasting Corp., and Times Newspapers Ltd. successfully challenged a court ruling that threatened to prevent news media reporting details of Barot's sentencing hearing."
Does anyone have any details? What reporting did they want to prevent? I mean, with all of that evidence posted up on the Met webpage, and the success with a guilty plea and 40 year sentence, what could have possibly been their problem?
Posted by: Julian Todd | November 10, 2006 3:56 PM
I've worked it out:
"Justice Butterfield had ruled that publishing details of the case could prejudice trials of Barot's seven co-defendants, to take place next April."
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20720246-2703,00.html
What's going to take them so long?
Posted by: Julian Todd | November 10, 2006 3:59 PM
@ Julian - one has to ask why so many terrorism cases take so long, at least 2 years, before the Court system can be bothered to deal with them.
What higher priority cases can there possibly be ?
Surely there needs to be an increased investment in the Courts system, commensurate with the increases in expenditure on the Police Counter-Terrorism and Security Services ?
Posted by: wtwu | November 10, 2006 5:23 PM
Well, there's the 400 hard drives to print out, stack into a pile X high and go through manually, as Tony Blair tried to claim a few months back.
Actually, given the workload of high-level courts, it's likely the delay is part-deliberate, to give the impression of a continuous terrorist campaign (this one largely predates 9/11, of course). The prosecution presumably applies for a particular date and the judge grants it. Thus the timing of cases is essentially down to when the police and security services want it to come out. In most cases there aren't any actual victims to go running to newspapers wondering where their justice has gone, of course, which gives them a nice free hand.
I'm still waiting to find out what the 21/7 guys had in their backpacks - when's that likely to come to trial? I'd originally heard October. There's the fertiliser-in-warehouse case, too, which is still ongoing. Careful timing could keep some Bad Guy in court for as long as Eliza Bullying-Manner wants.
Posted by: Tom.Barry | November 10, 2006 9:34 PM
You're idiots to defend a man who would actively admit to wanting to kill that many people.
If the intention is there, it's a crime.
To defend impulses to cause mass death and grief (that your article claims are commonplace), is to unknowlingly speak of your own maladjustment. If you had a life of your own that you actually found worth living - which is your task, and know one elses - then you wouldn't find your mind wandering through what you call 'movie plots'. Another term for 'movie plot', is a pathetic desire to lash out at innocent people, to make yourself feel stronger.
Why don't you read something more intelligent than Tom Clancy novels, as a start?
Posted by: John | November 10, 2006 11:29 PM
@ John - nobody is defending Barot
It is only a "thought crime", and without the means or even the technical knowledge, which appears to be lacking in this case, that does not constitute a major terrorist threat which would kill "hundreds or thousands" of people, as has been hyped up in the press.
The danger with convicting people of "thought crimes", without any hard evidence of access to weapons or explosives or radioactive isotopes etc. is that once the bureaucrats and politicians get a taste for it, then any political opponents can be persecuted as "enemies of the state", and the terrorists will have won.
Which part of Barot's "10,000 smoke detectors" plot or the non-existent Tube flooding plan do you find credible ?
Why don't you read something more accurate than tabloid newspapers ?
Posted by: wtwu | November 11, 2006 2:48 AM
yeah, I don't think anyone on here is defending terrorists. It seems like your having a go at people for questioning the way things are developing. Its more important than ever that intelligent people do exactly that.
'To defend impulses to cause mass death and grief (that your article claims are commonplace), is to unknowlingly speak of your own maladjustment.'
Do you defend your own government that have actually had a hand in killing perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Their only crime, it seems was to live in a country run by another killer. They now seek to tell us that this has had NOTHING to do with the current terrorist threat against us, but by the way, there IS a devil around every corner waiting to kill us. The whole thing stinks.
Posted by: eyes | November 11, 2006 6:52 AM
It seems that we are told (scary) details of terrorist trials when it suits them (e.g. Ricin Plot - & that trial collapsed!).
With respect to the Operation Crevice (Regina v Omar Khayam etc.) trial (reporting of which has gone very quiet, how many people are aware of this report in the UK Times Family claims MI5 ordered teenagers to go to Pakistan, two days after the arrest of the 'Operation Crevice' suspects in March 2004.
The July 21st non-bombs trial which was intended to commence on 9/10/06, has now been delayed until 11/1/07).
Posted by: Jon | November 13, 2006 10:49 AM
If the intention is there, it's a crime.
Not all crimes are equal, and my interest in this case is rather because the man got life with forty years before parole for a crime with no victims. Considering that the worst serial killers tend to get this or less and that the Lockerbie bomber (leaving aside questions of how safe the conviction is) got life with a minimum of 27 for actually being found guilty of one of the worst terrorist crimes ever I'm interested to know exactly how dangerous Mr. Barot was. The answer I come up with (with no reliance of Tom Clancy, whom I've never read, but a certain amount on chemistry textbooks, which I have) is 'not very'.
Conspiracy to murder doesn't require that the crime conspired towards is actually possible, but elevating Mr. Barot to the level of 'terrorist' on the basis of this case seems a bit specious at best. My doubts are not so much over the guilt or innocence of Mr. Barot but with the accuracy and amount of coverage in the press and the pronouncements of public figures (police, politicians, prosecution and judge), which when read in conjunction with the known facts of the case and of physics, rather expose themselves as bollocks.
Posted by: Tom.Barry | November 13, 2006 3:37 PM
Another very valid point of view is that we are only served by security services who do their officially designated job well, and don't just generate useless (to our personal safety interests) propaganda.
This requires people to hold them to the highest possible standards, and not swallow any old shit that they choose to feed us. Otherwise we will get what we deserve, and actually be -- avoidably -- blown up by terrorists while the government keeps us entertained with fairy-tales.
Posted by: Julian Todd | November 13, 2006 7:26 PM
I'm quite happy that this fellow is behind bars. Admittedly he didn't have the means, and the smoke alarms thing is especially ridiculous, but he certainly seems to have had the motivation. Anyone who seriously intends to cause death on any scale and takes some steps to try to carry out their plan, however ineptly, is a potential menace to society.
This guy may have been the Mr Bean or the terrorist world, taking videos of buildings and making silly explosive noises, but who is to say that sooner of later he might have accidented upon a plan which might actually have worked.
Posted by: Bob Mottram | November 13, 2006 10:54 PM
@ Bob - on Wednesday, the Queen's Speech will no doubt announce Yet More Repressive Legislation, and there will be media spin using this case to somehow "justify" a further loss of privacy. liberty, freedom and ultimately security, not of guilty terrorist criminals, but of the innocent majority of people in the UK.
Barot should certainly be in prison for plotting to kill and injure innocent people, but is a life sentence with a 40 year tariff before parole can be considered, really justified ?
That is 10 years more than the Kray twins, and, as has already been pointed out, more than Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of killing 270 people in the Lockerbie Pan Am flight 103 bomb disaster, who only got a 27 year tariff to his life sentence.
Meanwhile, British computer hacker and UFO fan Gary McKinnon, is facing extradition to the USA and a possible sentence of at least 60 years in prison.
Posted by: wtwu | November 13, 2006 11:44 PM
Barot claims to have carried out a lot of detailed research but a lot of what he wrote in his "reports" was just plaigiarized from internet sources.
Take the Radiation Dispersal Device Report. You can download a copy here...
http://www.met.police.uk/pressbureau/rhyme/index.htm
His "months of research" consisted of copying a load of tables and
information from the following report....
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/opapers/op11/
Section from the Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security
Risks. Charles D. Ferguson, Tahseen Kazi, and Judith Perera. January
2003. Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
The odd thing is the police have censored information from the Barot report - even thought it's in the public domain in the Center for Nonproliferation Studies report.
Posted by: Reporter | November 14, 2006 12:21 AM
@ Reporter - The censorship of the documents which Barot has admitted to having written, does seem peculiar - it is not the case , for example, that every numerical figure or quantity has been systematically censored.
A large section of Barot's "dirty bomb" document has been cribbed from the public domain paper,
This paper does not provide a "teerorist cookbook recipe" for a "dirty bomb".
Posted by: wtwu | November 14, 2006 12:51 AM
I've just discovered this site. At last, objective intelligent views.
Re Barot, I read somewhere that the prosecution acknowledged he hadn't recieved any funding from al qaeda.
If true, it speaks for itself.
Posted by: Steve Morley | November 14, 2006 4:42 PM
Barot's sentence has been reduced somewhat on appeal
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6661371.stm
He is still imprisoned for life, but now with a 30 year tariff instead of 40 years.
Posted by: wtwu | May 19, 2007 11:12 AM
Well now someone has just attempted to set off a gas cylinder bomb in London. Two in fact. They did not work. Not surprising thank heavens. Propane is heavier than air. It would sink to the floor. Propane/air mix has to be between two limits to explode. These bombers look to be lemon heads not realising these basic facts. Probably English educated by the secondary school system that does not promote students actually listening to the teacher. My guess is that with one hot filament on the seat of a car it might take at least 100 goes before a propane explosion occurs. Let's hope so anyway.
Posted by: harpmandoodle | June 30, 2007 10:39 AM
The following quote is from Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's paper 'Inside the Crevice (containing sections originally redacted in his 2006 book 'The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry [2006] - unredacted sections & further commentary published in September 2007 as a briefing report primarily for key UK parliamentary committees, especially the Intelligence & Security Committee, Home Affairs Committee, Defence Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee, and Communities & Local Government Committee).
The briefing paper suggests that one of those associated with the Dhiren Barot gang [8 out of 13 arrested] who was allowed to escapewas Mohammad Sidique Khan.
Indeed, by August 2004, another 13 young Britons of Pakistani origin were identified as terrorist suspects in Luton. Eight were arrested in an attempt to foil a terrorist plot discovered on the laptop computer of Naeem Noor Khan, a captured al-Qaeda leader in Lahore, Pakistan. Once again, five unidentified individuals evaded arrest: among them was Mohammad Sidique Khan. This was the notorious multi-targeted plot led by convicted al-Qaeda terrorist Dhiren Barot, aimed at financial buildings in New York and Washington...
Posted by: Sinclair | September 20, 2007 10:15 AM