Today a group of would-be Islamic terrorists were jailed at the Old Bailey, continuing the authorities' run of success in dealing with such aspiring murderers. Of course there is nothing to say that they may not succeed one day: as one who lived through the IRA campaign from 1969, I well remember the phrase "We only have to get lucky once, you have to get lucky all the time".
This latest gang were careless to use an uninsured car, and to turn up, absurdly, after their targets had gone home for the day. The police were lucky to seize the car that was later discovered to be loaded with weapons and explosives. Finally, having lost the incriminating car and been sent on their way, the men missed a priceless opportunity to get out of the UK before the car was searched.
They now have a very long time to contemplate what went wrong for them.
A rare example of the collision of the 'cock-up' and 'conspiracy' theories.
ReplyDeleteA cocked-up conspiracy?
ReplyDeleteEven more organised groups are prone to making elementary mistakes. In 1991 a minister (after the Downing Street mortar incident) said the IRA planned their operations meticulously but the execution was badly flawed.
ReplyDeleteOf course, if GCHQ was allowed to monitor the Internet, they would have been caught earlier.
ReplyDeleteOh...
Very surprised that no one has criticised the police for not discovering the arms earlier.
ReplyDeleteThe car wasn't uninsured - there was a one digit error in the MIB database entry so it showed up as uninsured on ANPR. Hence the police impounded it on the motorway and (eventually) discovered various bladed articles, shotguns and a nail bomb.
ReplyDeleteThe would-be terrorists got rather unlucky. By rights they should have got home unchallenged and remained at liberty to try again another time. (And of course this may not have been their first outing. I doubt they would have declared previous attempts as TICs.)
But was it really bad luck? Our intelligence services are masters of the dark arts of "coincidence" and I cannot help but suspect that a "one digit error" would be easy for them to manufacture, thus allowing the perps to be be apprehended without exposing any spooky sources or methods.
Nationalist, this seems a slightly slanted depiction of the data error. There was a one digit error in the number entered - but that mistake was clearly made by one of the defendants when he went online to insure the newly bought (but elderly) vehicle.
DeleteIf our security services were so concerned about their activities as to feel it necessary to manufacture such a coincidental error, they would not just have allowed the vehicle to sit there in the pound with the weaponry cached in the boot!
Kate Caveat
Being ex-Military Intelligence, the greatest problem is not with these organisations, it's with their setup.
DeleteGoing back 30 years, the biggest threats were the IRA and the KGB. Both had numerous operatives and so it was possible to infiltrate them.
Today terrorist groups consist of a few radicalised individuals who have only one connection to a contact who supplies the necessary materials and training for an attack.
When they go to Pakistan for their indoctrination, the living conditions are harsh. They live and sleep rough, live on basic meals and the training and teaching is intense. Most drop out because they cannot take all this treatment. It is only the hardy dedicated few that survive to become bombers. The conditions at these camps are deliberately intended to be horrendous to weed out the true individuals who can be relied upon to complete their tasks.
Anonymous @ 1715 that would be illegal, and I'm not sure our intelligence services are rotten enough or brazen enough to do it. In any case, an EDL march is an excellent excuse for a s. 60 authorisation, which can serve the same purpose as s. 44 TA did before they stretched it to breaking point.
DeleteAnonymous @ 1852 is bang on.
And that's why the Government allows so many illegals - including potential terrorists - into the country...AND cuts the UKBA employee numbers by thousands; the true enemy within.
ReplyDeleteI've said for a while the response to stuff like this is to mock terrorists. Most of them aren't very good at it. Even the Woolwich murderers (subject of course to the proviso that this is speculative and may not born out at trial) only managed to kill one person with two murderers, a car, knives and a gun, which is a pretty pathetic attempt at terrorising people.
ReplyDeleteI think that had I been there going about my daily routine, I would have been pretty terrified.
DeleteThere's a saying in the news media. 'A thousand deaths is a catastrophe, one death a news story.' By targeting the individual, especially someone whose profession can put them on the front line on a daily basis, they have sparked public human interest and induced a great amount of news coverage. If they had killed/injured multiple victims it would still have been a horrendous story, but would have lacked the impact that one death can have on the public.
DeleteBy waiting and making political statements until the police to arrived they have given greater emphasis to their cause. They would also have wanted to die in a hail of bullets as this is the greatest sacrifice they can make in the name of Islam.