« The Fertiliser Bomb Plot - what do the numbers add up to ? | Main | Kazi Nurur Rahman - another case of entrapment ? »

British muslim terrorists - a Royal Commission rather than a Public Inquiry please

The surveillance links between the Fertiliser Bomb Plotters and the July 7th 2005 suicide bombers, and the claims and denials about what surveillance information and intelligence was or was not passed from MI5 the Security Service to West Yorkshire Police, has prompted the Opposition to call for an Independent Inquiry into the whole affair, which has been rejected by the soon to be ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair.

We think that this should be a Royal Commission rather than a Public Inquiry, which would be nobbled under the Inquiries Act 2005.

The Inquiries Act was rushed through by the Labour Government after the Hutton Inquiry (into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly C.M.G) or the Butler Inquiry.(Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction), even though these Inquiries were perceived by the public as letting the Government off the hook with only mild criticisms.

Under the Inquiries Act, a Minister not only chooses the allegedly independent Chairman and panel members, but sets the terms of reference and can censor their final report.

Any such Royal Commission should look at the reasons for the radicalisation of British terrorists, as well as the way in which the intelligence agencies, the Police and the Government's "intelligence machinery has been working, and it should not just focus on the July 7th 2005 attacks, but also the reaction to them and the July 21st failed attacks.

The Intelligence and Security Committee made a censored report (Intelligence and Security Committee Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005 - .pdf), during which, it appears, according to leaks to the BBC, that they were not given the full details of the extent of the surveillance of Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer.

Rt. Hon. Paul Murphy MP, the chairman of this Committee has stated on television that he does not think it likely that his Committee would come to a different conclusion about the the possibly genuine mistake made by the Security Service in not giving a higher investigative priority to these two suspects.

This obviously disqualifies the Intelligence and Security Committee from any role in an independent inquiry, as the conclusions seem to have been already written.
The BBC also reports that

[...]

Calls for a fresh inquiry into the 7/7 attacks grew after it emerged that MPs and peers on the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) were not shown photographs linking Khan to known militants.

Security sources say MI5 said it did not reveal the images to the parliamentary committee because they were taken by police officers not MI5 operatives.

[...]

The ISC committee investigating 7/7 only ever saw one MI5 photograph of Khan. It did not see other photographs obtained by the BBC. A senior Whitehall source has told the BBC that the committee were aware other pictures existed and could have seen them if they had been requested.

[...]

Despite Tony Blair's statements in Parliament today, the Intelligence and Security Committee does not actually have powers to look into the normal policing activities of the West Yorkshire Police e.g fraud investigations, which is outside of their legal remit under the Intelligence Services Act 1994 Section 10.

Neither the ISC report, nor the Home Office's "narrative of events" seems to have investigated the claims by IT technician Martin Gilbertson , who worked in the same Islamic bookshop frequented by the Leeds and Dewsbury based July 7th suicide bombers, who said that he had sent the West Yorkshire police some evidence of his suspicions about them back in 2003.

Posted by on May 3, 2007 12:06 AM |

Comments

The Guardian has even more , obviously Police based information that Khan was under terrorism related investigation
in February 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2071226,00.html

The Guardian has learned that on January 27 2005, police took a statement from the manager of a garage in Leeds which had loaned Khan a courtesy car while his vehicle was being repaired. MI5 had followed Khan and Tanweer as they drove the courtesy car across London in March the previous year. The garage manager told police that the car had been loaned to a "Mr S Khan" who gave his mobile telephone number and an address in Gregory Street, Batley, West Yorkshire.

Khan, the police were told, had asked for his repaired car to be delivered to another address, in nearby Dewsbury, which is now known to be his mother-in-law's home. Almost a year earlier, MI5 officers had followed Khan to the same address after watching him meet a number of suspected terrorists.

That was not the end of police interest in Khan in 2005. On the afternoon of February 3 an officer from Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch carried out inquiries with the company which had insured a car in which Khan was seen driving almost a year earlier. He discovered that Khan had insured a five-door silver Honda Accord saloon, in his own name. Inquiries also showed that the car was registered in the name of Khan's mother-in-law.

Neither the Intelligence and Security Committee nor the Independent Police Complaints Authority are the appropriate bodies to independently investigate possible incompetence or policy failures, across both the secret intelligence agencies and the various regional Police forces, and the spin and misinformation put out by anonymous sources and background briefings.

Unless there is a genuinely independent and powerful inquiry, e.g. a Royal Commission, then the conspiracy theories and the further alienation of otherwise law abiding British citizens, both Islamic and non-Islamic, will continue, with disastrous results.

Posted by: wtwu | May 3, 2007 3:12 PM

Jack Straw yesterday:


The right hon. Lady raised the issue of an inquiry into the Operation Crevice trial and the 7 July bombings. She said that the Intelligence and Security Committee had no investigative powers. I think that what she meant to say was that the ISC had decided of its own volition to do without the services of an investigator. It had an investigator from 1999 to 2004, but decided for its own reasons not to recruit a further individual to the post thereafter. Having had to appear before the ISC over a nine-year period, both as Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, I can assure her that the Committee has substantial investigative powers. In any event, its forensic scrutiny of the intelligence and security services and of Ministers is very detailed. In my view, it has got better and better over the years, working from a high start. She needs to bear in mind that this was a system that her party established by law in 1994, along with the intelligence commissioner and the surveillance commissioner. Those three institutions taken together—the ISC and the two commissioners—operate to provide better scrutiny of the work of the intelligence and security agencies, especially in such acute times as these, than takes place in many other countries that I can think of.

Posted by: ukliberty | May 4, 2007 3:53 PM

Post a comment