Global Insurgency -- the still un-defused time-bomb on which we all continue to sit
Acres of newsprint today are given over to reporting and commenting about yesterday’s guilty verdict of five young British Muslims for conspiracy to make and explode a 600kg bomb somewhere in the Home Counties, either a Kent shopping centre or a London nightclub.
Much of this newspaper copy is devoted to delineating the links that only now can be made known publicly, but which were long known to MI5, between those convicted yesterday and two of the 7/7 London suicide bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. Much editorial comment today debates how culpable MI5 may have been in deciding not to place Khan and Tanweer under 24-hour surveillance after their links to these suspects became known to it, and how far the whole matter should be made the subject of official enquiry.
Important though these issue undoubtedly are, I shall leave it to others to debate them. Hindsight always offers 20/20 vision.
Of far greater potential importance to me than the question of how culpable MI5 may have been for not acting on information it had about the links between Khan and Tanweer and those terror suspects convicted yesterday is a brief report in today’s Times about something else that also entered the public domain only yesterday.