Hasan Suroor | The Hindu | May 16, 2006
http://www.hindu.com/2006/05/16/stories/2006051604841100.htm
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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