"More propaganda than plot"

That's Craig Murray's take on the alleged li Quida plot to blow up airplanes. The former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, has reviewed the press reports on the "plot," and gives us his conclusions. Excerpts:

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year--like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes--which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.
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We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
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We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect--a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity--that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few--just over two per cent of arrests--who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.

Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

Speaking of harrassment of Muslims--you may recall that several years ago, December 14, 2001 to be exact, Muslim cleric Rabih Haddad was arrested by John Ashcroft's goons in his Ann Arbor home. Originally, no charges were made, although eventually the government accused Haddad of a visa violation, something he had taken steps to rectify months earlier (that it wasn't fully rectified by December 14 was due to bureaucratic delay, not due to any fault of Haddad's). The feds moved Haddad around, frequently out of contact with his family, and held him for over a year and a half before finally deciding they had nothing to accuse him of. Nevertheless, in July 2003 they deported him.

To Lebanon.

Initial reports were that Haddad had been joined by his family in Beirut, where they were living happily. That, obviously, has changed. According to Phillis Englebert, director of Michigan Peaceworks, Haddad and his family fled Lebanon for Syria two weeks after the Israeli blitzkrieg started.

Just a few of the millions of lives damaged or destroyed by the neonuts in Washington, London and Jerusalem. So far.