Cartoonish terror plot gang jailed for being archetypal bogeymen, UK’s security apparatus also clownish

With the usual sort of very convenient timing, ahead of whatever Trump is going to announce about a relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and along with the stories of three days of subsequent Muslim rage that the controlled alternative media is feeding to its audience to heap fuel on the obvious hegelian dialectic dynamic for social change, Britain’s security services have announced (via good old Martin Brunt at SKY) that a plot to attack Theresa May has been foiled.

There’s no detail at the moment, but if such incidents are from the same playbook, then history can be very instructive. Indeed, the very first sentence in the body of the SKY News article suggests the same old story (emphasis added): “Sky’s Crime Correspondent Martin Brunt said: ‘It’s the latest in a number of terror plots that police and MI5 believe they’ve foiled this year.'”

And so, what follows is an article that appeared at Luikkerland in 2012 about another case which we may well discover bears a strong resemblance to the latest. When the time comes, the current case can be examined with, one suspects, pertinent reference back to the historic case.

The title is in the full, and rather too wordy form as given to the article on publication.

In the light of Al-CIAda reality, cartoonish terror plot gang are jailed for being archetypal bogeymen, and Britain’s security apparatus looks equally clownish

First published at Luikkerland, 10 Feb 2012

Yesterday a gang of 9 “Muslim fundamentalists” were jailed for various terrorist offences; there’s a list at the foot of this article stating the names of the men, their sentence, and their “crime”.

To be honest, my first impression of this case is that while there does not seem to be evidence of a handler and FBI-style entrapment, what it does look like is a case of dozy fantasists falling foul of a security apparatus desperate for a terror-plot case to frighten Britons ahead of the Olympics.

I wanted to articulate the reasons for this impression because a case like this one is right at the very heart of an issue about whether or not the State is justified in imprisoning, for criteria that it alone decides upon, otherwise free citizens who, if they are not hurting anyone, should be able to talk about whatever they want, go wherever they want, associate with whomever they want, and read whatever they want. When reporting on this case, the Daily Mail – which I choose to analyse because it is the flagship propaganda outlet of the British Establishment, and the chief means of conditioning British people – spouts all sorts of wild stuff (here and here) about the gang planning to commit a Mumbai-style attack or an Underwear-style bombing and it is supposed to make the suspects look guilty of horrific intent in the eyes of the (heavily propagandised) Daily Mail readership.

However, what the so-called crimes of these nine men really amount to is talking about the wrong things, being in the wrong places, knowing the wrong people, and reading the wrong magazines, and no more than that. No evidence seems to have been produced that any bomb making material was purchased or made, and it seems that it definitely was never planted. The so-called Islamist gang did not even issue threats about future bombings, and so I am struggling to see how anyone has been “terrorised” in their case.

I think that if we let some elaborate fantasists get jailed, then we run the risk of the State, at some point in the future, arbitrarily deciding that the criteria for arresting someone for being a “terrorist” will be whatever we happen to be saying that the State doesn’t like, or whoever we know that the State doesn’t like, or wherever we go that the State doesn’t like us to go to, or whatever we read that the State doesn’t want us knowing about. What happened yesterday was the top of a slippery slope, and it needs to be examined more closely.

Firstly, please notice this very significant piece of information, also from the Daily Mail:

[The nine suspects] had been facing a five-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court and could have expected sentences of 20 years.

But at the 11th hour they decided to plead guilty after a judge indicated they would receive lesser sentences for admitting the plot.

The Crown wanted to avoid both the estimated £2.5million cost of a high-security trial and the possibility of acquittals.

This has to be indication that the Crown Prosecution Service didn’t have a case, and I bet everyone who had anything to do with the defence were put under a lot of pressure to accept the plea bargain offer.

The shortened jail sentences raised a few eyebrows. See this from the same article:

Tory MP Patrick Mercer said a term of five or six years “does not seem particularly serious” for acts of terrorism which could have killed many innocent people.

“I am not convinced in the deterrent effect of such a sentence. These individuals have all pleaded guilty to extremely serious crimes. The point being that part of their sentence will be a deterrent to further terrorism.”

Tory MP Patrick Mercer has a point, doesn’t he? If these men are so dangerous, why the plea bargain option that will lead to comparatively piffling prison terms? The answer, perhaps, is that they are in no way dangerous whatsoever, and they wouldn’t have been jailed at all if the plea bargain wasn’t on the table, therefore their jailing is just pure theatre.

Crucially, all nine denied conspiring to cause an explosion or explosions of a nature likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property. As the BBC coverage summed it up, no explosive materials were bought – and no bombs planted. That particular charge against each man, which will now lie on file, never has to be proved, and I think that the Prosecution is very glad of it. But it really needs to be proved because it is a critical issue in terms of the validity of other charges against them. If you don’t intend to cause explosions that are likely to endanger life, etc, then how do you prepare to commit terrorism?

From the Mail’s reportage, it seems that there is just no substantiation of a fact that the nine had the actual means to carry out a terrorist attack. The propaganda mouthpiece had to resort to insinuation (my emphasis):

The gang soon moved on to testing out bomb recipes, which they referred to as “cooking”, with Miah and Desai apparently causing an explosion in the street at one of their meetings in Wales.

Chowdhury and Shah Rahman are also understood to have started building pipe bombs at Chowdhury’s home in Poplar, east London.

Did you catch that last sentence? I don’t understand because I thought that no material had been purchased that could be made to explode.

In other places, the Mail reportage just encourages confusion:

Police decided to arrest them a day after Chowdhury and Shah Rahman started researching making a pipe bomb.

Did they build a bomb, or just research how to make one? Actually, it looks very much that there were no bombs, only, possibly, research into making them (which could just mean ownership of Inspire Magazine – see below); and yet, we are fed this information:

Police arrested the Al Qaeda-inspired radicals on December 20, 2010, four days before they planned to plant their first bomb in the toilets of the London Stock Exchange.

The whole issue of when the police arrested the gang is completely strange. If they knew a bomb was going to be made and placed, why not wait until it had been constructed to get a conviction for the more serious crime of conspiring to cause an explosion and dispel any doubt (because if there’s doubt, then the suspect is always innocent)? I think that the police stepped in when they did because they realised that the plot was not going to go anywhere that was dangerous.

Indeed, even the judge in the case, Mr Justice Wilkie, didn’t seem to think the gang had a coherent plan. Explaining the rationale for the plea bargain offer, he said – and this is how the Mail reports him saying it – that “the case did not merit an indefinite imprisonment for public protection because their plans were not developed.”

Here we get to the evidence that these nine were indeed fantasists who weren’t capable of carrying out the things that they might even have spent hours being tape-recorded by MI5 talking about. In other BBC coverage of the trial, in snippets, we can get an idea of the gang’s aimlessness.

Rajiv Menon QC, mitigating for Desai, said it was a “poorly thought through and unsophisticated” plot… Mr Menon told the court: “It is more likely than not that there would never have been any detonation of any explosive device at the London Stock Exchange.”

…The prosecution has outlined how a separate branch of the extremist group based in Stoke-on-Trent plotted to raise funds for a terrorist training camp in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir for British radicals to attend.

But Joel Bennathan QC, for Usman Khan, 20, said it was “highly unlikely” that that would have happened.

Mr Bennathan said only a few thousand pounds had been raised before Khan and others were arrested…

Andrew Hall QC, the barrister of Mohammed Shahjahan, 27, said the training camp plan would “inevitably” have come to light because three “deluded young men” were well known to the UK authorities and had been placed under MI5 surveillance.

They ran stalls promoting their views about Islam in Stoke-on-Trent’s High Street every week… Father-of-two Shahjahan had the highest profile of the group and had given a number of media interviews.

He appeared on a BBC documentary, called My Name is Mohammed, on which he talked about bringing Sharia law to the UK.

Finally this, with emphasis added:

In court Chowdhury was described as the “lynchpin” of the group.

He discussed carrying out a “Mumbai-style” attack on Parliament or the London Eye, but the prosecution said: “There is no evidence at all that this group had the physical capability to carry out a Mumbai-style attack.”

When I read that extract about My Name is Mohammed, I had to laugh because it occurred to me that MI5 would have to be particularly thick as the proverbial planks not to pick up on intelligence about the political leanings of Shahjahan. Indeed, it occurred to me that this case is the film Four Lions without the explosions, or, in fact, the inclination or know-how to make them.

To cap all the comedy, in his summing up, the judge had the following to say, with my interuptions:

About a year or more before the offences the offenders became actively engaged in the Muslim faith. They were attracted to and espoused a radical version of Islam that is rejected by most Muslims in the UK as illegitimate and a perversion of the faith.

Oh I see. The old “special sort of particularly enraged Muslim” device where great care is taken not to demonise other Muslims because we don’t want to let our liberal facade slip. Exactly what sect of Islam are you talking about then, Your Honour?

They became attracted to the influence of radical clerics who preached the obligation to become involved in a struggle not only to fight occupiers in Muslim lands but to attack non-Muslims in the UK.

Oh yes, the clerics that the government lets stay in the UK to radicalise British youth, and the sort that might be in the prison where these nine lads are going. But you still haven’t mentioned what sect of Islam.

These views were associated with the radical cleric known as Anwar Al Awlaki, whose message included attacking Western countries by any means necessary.

Oh, that sort of Islam where you blow things up because the Americans give you drugs. You do know that he is also known as Anwar “hanging out at the Pentagon” Al Awlaki, don’t you?

Great praise is due to the security services both for the thoroughness and sophistication of their monitoring of these defendants and their ultimate intervention before any harm could be done.

That’s right, Mr Justice Wilkie, because nine dimwits who don’t understand that Anwar Al Awlaki is a CIA operative (he might not yet be dead), and who got caught with the Inspire Magazine – which is meant to incriminate anyone who owns it (don’t download it, you might get arrested) – because they don’t understand that it is written by the CIA, or “apostate hypocrit dogs” (sic), as claimed on Jihadi forums (as well as by the Iranian government), and who let it all out on BBC TV to announce that Britain should have Sharia Law, present such a stern challenge for the professional and upstanding British security services to winkle out and bring to justice.

Bristling with pride and all puffed up by his considerable success at putting some mentally ill people in jail, DAC Stuart Osborne, senior national coordinator of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism team, said this, again with my one interruption:

We welcome the guilty pleas entered by all nine defendants today, following what was the largest counter terrorism operation of 2010.

I bet you really do.

Our priority is, and always will be, the protection of the public.

No it isn’t. Your priority is to scare the public through elaborate theatre so that they will accept your criminality.

Mohammed Chowdhury – extended sentence of 18 years and 8 months with a custodial element of 13 years and eight months.