[-]
To this day, it is not widely known that Bakri and his al-Muhajiroun network played a key role in facilitating the recruitment, radicalisation and logistics behind the 7/7 London bombings. The ultimate suppression of crucial evidence of this from government narratives, despite being mandatory reading for all legal counsel during the 7/7 Coroner's Inquest, has granted the group virtual free reign.
Thus, Omar Bakri's acolyte and deputy, Anjem Choudary, led a similarly charmed life.
Days after Choudary's terrorism conviction, a former Scotland Yard counter-terrorism officer who had investigated Choudary revealed that prior to the proceedings, Choudary too had been protected by MI5.
The Telegraph reported that despite being at "the forefront of radical Islam in Britain" for 20 years:
"The security services repeatedly prevented Scotland Yard from pursuing criminal investigations against hate preacher Anjem Choudary... Met counter-terror officers often felt they had enough evidence to build a case against the radicalising cleric, only to be told to hang fire by MI5, because he was crucial to one of their on-going investigations."
It was only in August 2015, after Choudary posted YouTube videos online which openly documented his support for ISIS, that he was eventually prosecuted. Prior to that, the police believed they had a watertight case, but the decision not to prosecute had come from MI5.
The police source himself told the newspaper:
"I am gobsmacked that we allowed him to carry on as long as long as he did. He was up to his neck in it but the police can't do full investigations on people if the security service say they are working on a really big job, because they have the priority. That is what they did constantly. While the police might have had lots of evidence they were pulled back by the security service because he [Choudary] was one of the people they were monitoring. It was very frustrating and did cause some tension but we were told we had to consider the bigger picture."
The bigger picture: war
According to Charles Shoebridge, though — a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer — "nothing was done by UK authorities" to stop UK citizens "joining jihadist groups in Libya and Syria."
This was despite the fact that these Britons "made no secret on social media of the fact, even sometimes posting evidence of their participation in acts of terrorism and war crimes." There was an "obvious risk of terrorism blowback were such trained and experienced extremists to return to Britain."
Shoebridge had pointed out at the time that "this 'turning a blind eye' was actually consistent with the UK govt position of intensive overt and covert support of rebel groups in Libya and Syria in attempting to topple Gaddafi and Assad." Turning a blind eye, he added, was also consistent with "a long record of the UK government allowing, using and facilitating Islamist extremists to destabilise 'enemy' states, from Soviet occupied Afghanistan in the 80s, through Bosnia and Chechnya, to Libya and Syria today...
"It was only in 2013 when groups such as ISIS started to harm US and UK interests in Syria and Iraq, and kill US and UK citizens, that any action at all was taken to stop British jihadists from travelling, or arresting and charging those who returned. At this time it's likely a tipping point was reached in the inherent conflict between MI6 priorities in furthering UK govt policy to overthrow Gaddafi and Assad, and MI5's stated priority of keeping the UK safe from terrorism — indeed, it's likely a tipping point was also reached internally within MI5 itself. In any event, from 2013 action started to be taken, which suggests government policy changed."
The official defence for all this is that before 2013, the legislation necessary to tackle travelling jihadists did not exist. Shoebridge dismisses this as nonsense: "First, it's been illegal to take part in terrorist related activities abroad since 2006 and, second, the new legislation introduced since 2013 has itself barely been used."
In fact, it was only around 2014 that British counter-terrorism officials moved more aggressively to take down al-Muhajiroun.
I asked the Home Office to confirm whether Choudary was indeed an MI5 informant, and whether British authorities were aware of his recruitment of Britons to Syria — including the role of any of the London attackers as 'foreign fighters'.
A spokesperson said: "We are not commenting on the individuals named while that investigation continues or responding to speculation."
But if Geddes and Shoebridge are correct, then when Anjem Choudary — Britain's top ISIS terror recruiter — was dispatching Britons to Syria, he was, in Geddes words, "allowed... to carry on" by Britain's security services.
The decision not to prosecute Choudary was to have fatal consequences. In February, about half of the British fighters who had travelled to Iraq, Syria and Libya returned.
In November 2014, as Home Secretary, Theresa May said that JTAC, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, had raised the threat level for international terrorism from 'substantial' to 'severe', indicating that an attack on the UK was believed to be "highly likely." May's announcement clarified that the threat level was lifted primarily due to the threat from 500 British nationals who had largely fought with ISIS:
"The decision to change the threat level was based primarily on developments in Syria and Iraq, where the terrorist group ISIL controls swathes of territory. We believe more than 500 British nationals have travelled to Syria and Iraq, many of them to fight... ISIL and its western fighters now represent one of the most serious terrorist threats we face."
Collusion
It was Theresa May's own 'open door' policy toward Britons fighting in foreign theatres which directly facilitated the expansion of this threat.
Under that policy, the chief coordinator of the British-ISIS corridor, Choudary, had active ties to MI5 which prevented counter-terrorism police officers from prosecuting him.
This draws a direct connection between Choudary's impunity in Britain until 2015, and Britain's short-sighted foreign policy goals in Syria.
"When the US and British militaries were working with the Turks to train various Syrian rebel groups, many military officers knew that among those we were training was the next round of jihadists," said Alastair Crooke, a former 30 year senior MI6 officer who dealt with Islamist groups across the Muslim world. "But the CIA was fixated on regime change. We knew that even if at any moment ISIS was eventually defeated, these Islamist groups would move against secular and moderate forces."
This collusion between Western security services and Islamist extremism, Crooke told me, has very long roots in an intelligence culture that went back as far as the 1920s, "when in the attempt to gather control of the Arabian peninsula, King Abdulaziz told us that the key is Wahabism."
This alliance culminated in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which was "the first clear use of fired-up Islamist radicals to provoke Russia into an invasion. This set the scene ever since. From then, our intelligence services have had a deeply entwined history with Islamist groups based on the belief that Saudi Arabia had the power to turn them on and off at will."
Islamist groups have been used by British and American intelligence services, said Crooke, essentially "to control and contain the Middle East" against different forces, Nasserism, nationalists, and more recently Baathists.
Perhaps Crooke's most damning insight was how these operations led to British intelligence becoming heavily dependent on Gulf state intelligence services to conduct regional operations.
"In the 1980s, Saudi began paying for operations with large sums of money — which was considered acceptable in the interests of landing a blow on the USSR's influence in the region. As a result, though, our intelligence services became increasingly dependent on Saudi funding. If they wanted to avoid Congressional or parliamentary oversight, and to continue expanding difficult and sensitive off-the-books operations, they would go instead to their Gulf partners."
The impact of this on the integrity of the US and British intelligence community has been devastating:
"The assumption is that this doesn't affect the integrity of intelligence, but clearly it does. The Gulf states have become paymasters for increasing expenditures on intelligence operations that the security services would prefer not be disclosed."
This "incipient influence directly into the intelligence services", said Crooke, is "supplemented by huge subsidies to think-tanks in Washington and London which create a specific cultural atmosphere. It has led many in the US and Europe to uncritically absorb the Gulf kingdoms' narrative of the region — one in which it is seen as absolutely fine to use fired-up Sunni Islamism to overturn governments like that of Gaddafi or Assad, without any sort of reflection."
For Crooke, this mindset is responsible for the persistence of such failed policies, and explains why in the early days of the 'Arab Spring', Western policymakers believed they could "use Islamists of all sorts as useful tools to bring about change, and that our Gulf allies could control all this."
I asked Crooke what should be done — especially now, in the unprecedented wake of three terrorist attacks in Britain over three months:
"We should start by surfacing these matters into consciousness. Only then can we begin the conversations needed to resolve them. We need to understand that the tension between fighting a 'war on terror' while at the same time in some ways being in bed with terrorists, has produced a disaster."
For Shoebridge, the biggest elephant in the room is intelligence reform: "Repeatedly, MI5 has made decisions not to deploy its substantial physical and electronic surveillance resources against extremists who were well known to it, and who then went on to commit or attempt terrorist attacks — Manchester being a prime example."
One explanation of this, he said, could be that the decision making processes by which MI5 prioritises the deployment of its resources are "defective." Another could be that some extremists "were actually working as informants for MI5, regarded as under control or trustworthy, and therefore not needing to be watched."
How can we really ever know?
"Only a fully empowered and totally independent inquiry could establish the truth of the matter however — and there's no sign that this is likely to happen anytime soon."
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/isis-recruiter-who-radicalised-london-bridge-attackers-was-protected-by-mi5-232998ab6421
