Home >> Europe >> Great Britain

     Email   Print 

British Law Enforcement Missing 9/11-Level Threats?

Glen Jenvey - 9/11/2007

‘Once the child reach ten years old, teach him some kind of thing which is scouting, sleeping rough, sleeping tough, going for training, sweating, getting couple of punches in the face, teach him the reality of life and then show him how to become a good Mujahid.’

- Abu Hamza

Perhaps the most insidious threat we face in the current climate is Subversion (Actions which are intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means). I make this assertion for a number of reasons. The threat from subversion stems not only from FIS or FIS infiltration of legitimate well meaning organizations, but also from members of organizations such as those based on anarchism, religious fanaticism and extreme left- and right-wing ideologies. In 1992 MI5 took the retrograde step of disbanding its anti-subversion unit, which had been engaged in studying communism and, to a lesser extent, neo-Nazi ideology in the UK. With this move MI5 at a stroke removed the wealth of experience and expertise intelligence officers had accrued working on the desk. More importantly, it severely hampered the services ability to spot the early signs of subversives at work within Britain. The intelligence community stance was that countering terrorism was fundamentally the same as countering subversion. Terrorism, they felt, was simply the new word for subversion a view I do not subscribe to. Unfortunately, world events would also prove the security services assertion drastically wide of the mark.
In 1998 MI5 announced that the threat from subversive organizations was “a historical phenomenon,” and that only 0.3% of the Security Services resources were being allocated to the investigation of the activity. I would argue, however, that it is always necessary to ascertain if there is a connection between pressure groups made up from well-intended people and other subversive influences or FIS. After all it was Russian infiltration of the university system that turned 5 students into the most notorious spy ring in the 20th century. In 1996, 4 female members of the Plough-shares movement (named after the item Russia farmers used as weapons during the Russian Revolution) were linked with the charges for doing £1.5 million damage to Hawk fighter aircraft being manufactured by BAE Systems and sold to East Timor. Was there a connection? Did the females concerned start out as members of CND? There are also pressure groups such as Save the Whale and Green Peace and there more militant groups like Animal Liberation, which has also carried out Terrorist activities against various establishments like Huntingdon life sciences. Could there be cross-pollination?

At the end of the Cold War MI5’s F branch was heavily involved in the infiltration of CND. The Tory government of the day set the information requirement as everything to do with CND activists. Michael Heseltine, the Defence Secretary of the time, formed a new unit to be called DS19; its purpose was to counter CND activists. MI5 officers were becoming increasingly concerned that the government was using the service in pursuit of a political bias. Any industrial action immediately became the subject of MI5 scrutiny. The government were keen to know if there was any communist infiltration. Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, both members of the National Council for Civil Liberties, were both the subjects of surveillance operations and routinely had their mail opened. MI5 activities were revealed which resulted in a court case being initiated in the European Court of Human Rights. Anticipating that the court would judge that MI5’s conduct was illegal, the Prime Minister (Mrs Thatcher) passed the 1989 Security Services Act. The issue to be addressed with Subversion is that it is a very grey area. Allegations by Cathy Massiter a former MI5 officer, included “You had to be able to answer questions on the non-subversive elements, and the whole thing began to sort of flow out into a very grey area”. MI5’s reputation was at an all time low.

In 1994, MI5 disbanded G7, the joint MI5-MI6 unit set up to monitor Islamist terrorism. Once again, at a stroke the service lost the years of analytical experience intelligence officers had accrued working on the desk. In 1996, in recognition of the growing waves of Islamic violence, the unit reformed only to discover that vital years of expertise and inertia had been lost from the service and that old skills had to be rapidly re-learned. In more recent years the UK has been the subject of a number of bombing campaigns and daily the press run leaders on radical Islam and its disaffected youth. If it is accepted that people are not born evil and individuals are not predisposed to being terrorists, it must be accepted that organizations or individuals must be subverting them. I would argue that there is little to differentiate between the terrorist/activist and the subversive. A terrorist or activist is someone who has already engaged in violent or militant action and is prepared to break the law in order to achieve his or her aim(s). Subversion or the subversive has to do with preparing the ground. It is the catalyst, the agent-provocateur who recruits or ‘subverts’ individuals to a cause. Therefore terrorism is not another term for subversion. A subversive is not always a terrorist, but a terrorist is always a subversive. It is therefore my contention that the CI should actively target subversives engaged in their acts. Once a subversives are identified it is reasonable easy to discredit them. Their most powerful from of attack is propaganda but, once it is recognized as propaganda and can be discredited, it tends to lose its value. Good oversight prevents more radical influences gaining inertia and hopefully facilitates CI infiltration of terrorist cells. It is plain that all agencies, in particular MI5, must now urgently change its policy if it to rapidly gain ground in this area. Indeed there is some evidence that this already starting to happen.

In May 2003, al-Qaeda announced that their chief recruiter in Britain was an Egyptian named Abu Amr. It went on to say that Abu Amr was an engineer by trade and led the international struggle between belief and disbelief and that the name Abu Amr was a pseudonym to hide his true identity of the individual. In Woolwich Crown Court on the 7th Febuary 2006 Mustafa, otherwise known as Abu Hamza or Abu Hamza al Masri an Egyptian who had trained as an engineer, was convicted on six counts of soliciting to murder, three counts of using threatening abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent, or words likely to stir up racial hatred. One count of processing threatening, abusive or insulting records and one count of possession of a document or record containing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. He was found guilty and sentenced to serve 7 years imprisonment. Since the trial there has been a steady stream of further accounts linking Hamza to terrorist activities in the UK that will be covered later in this dissertation. Accordingly, I see Hamza as the quintessential modern day example of a subversive. During regular public meetings he advocated the murder of Jews and other non-Muslims. Many videotapes and audio tapes of his speeches were made and disseminated by all means possible, including the internet, to the Muslim wider community. In these the cleric told his followers, “to bleed the enemy of Allah anywhere by any means. You can’t do it by nuclear weapons; you have to do it by kitchen knife, no other solution. You can’t do it by chemical weapons, you have to do it by poisons.” And, “the idea is to…. Make the sky very high-risk for anyone who flies.” This was, he claimed, part of the struggle to set up a global Islamic state. In May 2000, James Ujaama, Abu Hamza’s right hand man and creator of the Supporters of Sharia website, was video taped sitting with Hamza at a table in front of an audience. He delivered the following speech, “Sheikh Osama Bin Laden was framed and forced into isolation, having to leave his own lands, his family, then used as a scapegoat to arrest many Muslims who speak out against [wrongdoings] in their lands. Sheikh Abu Hamza: arrested in the middle of the night during a police raid on his home. His family, harassed and oppressed, all because he chose to speak out against the evil rulers living in the Muslim lands and their helpers. Today, the government has still not given him back his passport, and they refuse to hand over his personal belongings. Now he has too be punished to the limit, jailed, convicted in the media and charged with a crime for which they are seeking the death penalty! There is a pattern with all of the attempts to assassinate, to rid the Islamic nation of its leaders, to silence our leaders, as you will soon find out.” The recording of the speech took place some four months prior to 9/11. These three comments throw up an alarming consideration: Did Hamza and Ujaama have prior knowledge that the attack was going to take place?