Britain faces a new
terrorist Gunpowder
Plot
By Ronan Thomas
LONDON - The resonances are 400 years old. As with the case of Guy Fawkes -
most famous conspirator in the failed Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605 -
Tuesday's conviction of British citizen Dhiren Barot, 34, is but the latest
reminder of the depth and scale of ongoing threats to British interests from
home-grown British Islamic radicals.
Barot, a British Hindu convert to Islam - with identified links to al-Qaeda
groups in Pakistan - received convictions for terrorism and
a life sentence in prison from a London court.
According to prosecutors, Barot - arrested in 2004 and also wanted by the
United States and Yemen - planned to attack British and US targets that year to
cause "indiscriminate carnage, bloodshed and butchery".
The trial judge characterized the interrupted plans as ambitious, sinister and
minutely detailed. Targets were to include luxury hotels in London, the
Prudential and Citigroup buildings in Newark, New Jersey, the New York Stock
Exchange in Manhattan, and the International Monetary Fund's offices in
Washington, DC.
The methods: a blend of ingenuity and horror against "the enemies of Islam".
Stretch limousines packed with explosives and gas cylinders were to be used in
underground parking garages; there were to be fuel-tanker suicide missions; a
dirty bomb in Britain was to be constructed using radioactive isotopes
harvested from thousands of commercially available smoke alarms.
It goes on. Presaging the July 2005 attacks in London, Barot hoped to attack
London's rail infrastructure and bomb a subway train passing under the River
Thames. The court heard that Barot researched, costed and made recommendations
in a corporate-style presentation to al-Qaeda contacts in Pakistan.
The conviction comes hard on the heels of other recent alleged
Islamic-extremist conspiracies in the United Kingdom. Just this August, British
police announced they had foiled a plot to kill thousands of passengers on UK
and US airliners. Twenty-three Muslim suspects were arrested: more than a dozen
British and Pakistani nationals now face trial. British nationals with Islamic
surnames also stand accused of the failed copycat attacks on the London subway
network that took place on July 21, 2005. British intelligence sources now say
that at least four other "significant terrorist plots" in the UK have been
prevented in recent months.
Threat-level assessments for the UK have been at high levels ever since the
London bomb attacks of July 2005. This August, Home Secretary John Reid warned
that Islamic "fascists" acting against Britain will be "unconstrained" either
by capability or moral reservation.
From a non-Muslim perspective, the UK is living once more with uncertainty and
a terrorist risk based on a synthesis of imported religious conviction and
political ideology. Muslims are clearly not being persecuted in the UK, but
there are historical parallels with the resentments of English recusant
Catholics facing the Protestant orthodoxy of the 17th century. And far closer
than any comparison with the last terrorist threat against British state - by
the Provisional Irish Republican Army in its campaign from 1969 to 1998.
From the perspective of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims, the ongoing issue of
Britain's Middle East foreign policy remains the critical issue. With Britain
fully committed to the "war on terror", there is plenty of evidence to suggest
rising British Muslim anger at their country's foreign policies. Muslim
criticism of UK actions abroad has grown markedly since 2003. Summer polls by
the Pew organization revealed that 30% of British Muslims under 24 said they
would prefer to live under the strictures of sharia (Islamic law) rather than
British law, and 30% of the same group said that the July 7, 2005, attacks in
London were "justified". The UK's domestic intelligence agency, the Security
Service, formerly MI5, now views about 1,200 British Muslims as a "serious
security risk". In 2000, British Muslim convert and potential shoe bomber
Richard Reid failed to bring down a US airliner.
A
list of the key grievances by British Muslims is
now well known. UK involvement in Iraq and
Afghanistan; Prime Minister Tony Blair's
preparedness to sanction US flights delivering
munitions to Israel via British airports during
the recent Lebanon conflict; the latest spat
caused last month by former home secretary Jack
Straw's call for Muslim women to discard the full
veil (niqab).
To be clear, only a tiny minority of British Muslims favor extremism. The vast
majority, while unhappy with current foreign policy and a feeling of being
singled out unfairly, will broadly support their government's anti-terrorism
initiatives. Even so, a background of high-profile failures shows that the
quality of intelligence will continue to be all-important to secure UK Muslim
support.
In July 2005, police shot and killed an innocent subway commuter, Brazilian
Jean Charles de Menezes. Muslim voices criticized what they saw as a
shoot-to-kill policy.
In June this year, police wounded a Muslim suspect in a failed anti-terrorist
raid in Forest Gate, East London. The suspects were released after a
predictable media circus and sued.
Meanwhile, the government continues to suffer from infrastructural weakness in
its criminal-justice and immigration systems, hampering the fight against
terrorism. New anti-terrorist legislation is juxtaposed with "progressive"
human-rights provisions pushed through by Tony Blair himself ever since the
election in 1997. British judges have ruled, under 43 such laws, that measures
such as 90-day detention and suspect control orders are illegal - to the
government's evident frustration. And major failures in Britain's
criminal-justice and immigration systems, revealed this summer, have indicted
the government for incompetence at the expense of public safety. Dr John Reid
has been forced to admit his own Home Office is "unfit for purpose".
In 1605, after the failed attempt by a disaffected group of English Catholic
gentlemen to blow up the Protestant court of King James I, the man closest to
the gunpowder barrels was brought before the monarch. When asked why he had
planned such an appalling atrocity, Guy Fawkes answered: "A dangerous disease
requires a desperate remedy."
Without pushing parallels with Stuart England too closely - and while
condemning the latest revelations unreservedly - Tuesday's conviction of Barot
nevertheless gives a close insight into the thinking of a minority of British
Muslim extremists. And it suggests that determined and fanatical opposition to
the British state from within is far from an unfinished story.
