Patrick Cockburn, Thursday 8 June 2017

The Conservative government largely avoided being blamed during the election campaign for its failure to stop the terrorist attacks. It appealed to British communal solidarity in defiance of those who carried out the atrocities, which was a perfectly reasonable stance, though one that conveniently enables the Conservatives to pillory any critics for dividing the nation at a time of crisis. When Jeremy Corbyn correctly pointed out that the UK policy of regime change in Iraq, Syria and Libya had destroyed state authority and provided sanctuaries for al-Qaeda and ISIS, he was furiously accused of seeking to downplay the culpability of the terrorists. Nobody made the charge stick that it was mistaken British foreign policies that empowered the terrorists by giving them the space in which to operate...

The Government may persuade the gullible that turning everybody working for the state into a potential informant produces lots of useful intelligence. In fact, it serves to clog up the system with useless and misleading information. On the rare occasion it produces a nugget, there is a good chance that it will be overlooked.

The oversupply of information explains why many who say they reported genuinely suspicious behaviour found that they were ignored. Often this action was very blatant and revealing such as the Manchester bomber Salman Abedi shouting down a preacher in a mosque who criticised ISIS. He was also associated with the extreme jihadi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. One of three killers on London Bridge and in Borough Market, Khuram Butt, had even expressed his pro-Isis views on television and another of the three, the Italian-Moroccan Youssef Zaghba, was stopped by Italian police at Bologna Airport on suspicion of trying to go to fight for ISIS or al-Qaeda in Syria. Yet none of these were picked up by the police.

In most cases, potential terrorists do not have to be sniffed out, but have made their ISIS sympathies only too apparent. The government's obsessive belief that terrorists are isolated individuals "radicalised" by the internet without being a member of any network is simply untrue. Dr Peter Neumann of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at Kings College London is quoted as saying that "the number of cases where people have been entirely radicalised by the internet is tiny, tiny, tiny."

Absurdities like the Prevent programme mask the fact that ISIS and al-Qaeda type terrorists are closely interlinked, mostly by participation in or sympathy for the jihadi armed opposition in the Libyan and Syrian wars. "If you start connecting the dots," says Professor Neumann, "a very large number of those in Britain who went to Syria were connected to each other, people who had already known each other." Contrary to conventional and governmental wisdom, terrorist conspiracies have not changed much since Brutus, Cassius and their friends plotted to murder Julius Caesar.

Original source: The Independent