Thinking a bit more about the NR article, I don’t buy it. There is one detail they miss: the train to Kings Cross was late. The specultion is they wanted to hit the rush hour, and it was already subsiding when the explosions occurred since their train arrived twenty minutes late. So it is difficult to see how they could have had so much leeway in the timers. The farther they are out of Kings X the less people, twenty minutes further out in each case and there is virtually no-one.

It doesn’t work.

Nor does their bus bomber theory, at least for me. He didn’t get on the Northern line. We don’t know why, but following the burning cross theory (which comes from the claim) he should have. If he wanted out, he wouldn’t get on a bus with a bomb which might go off, he would just junk it, get as far away from it as possible, not sit on a bus with it pondering. The claustrophobia would ‘do’ you.

Also, I think you need to be careful. I have no prejudice one way or another about whether they are suicides or not. (Had Richard Reid prepared a video BTW?). But my reading of the NR article makes me feel that they may have a prejudice away from the ’suicide theory’. It somehow makes terrorists seem more stupid if they are ‘duped’. I think this may be a dangerous error, underestimating your enemy. The difficulties the British security forces are having getting to the bottom of this suggests to me that this is a well planned op. The Egyptian end seems well calculated too, forcing a diplomatic issue because the guy ’seems harmless’ (which maybe he is, but there is one hell of a lot of circumstancial there).

Also the Palestinian suicides are not Qaeda. How much do we really know about Qaeda? Questions, questions, questions. I think it’s best to keep an open mind at this stage.

In the ‘hope’ thread, you said this:

“The Muslim immigrants of the 50’s and 60’s came from a time of great European influence on Muslim thought, hence their greater willingness to become European.”

Obviously I think there is something in this. This article discusses the evolution of Wahhabism and Salafism is Saudi Arabia. I couldn’t help being struck by the following points:

The official ?Wahhabi? religion of Saudi Arabia has essentially merged with certain segments of Salafism. There is now intense competition between groups and individual scholars over the ‘true’ Salafism, with the scholars who support the Saudi regime attacking groups such as al-Qaeda as ?Qutbists? (following Sayyid Qutb) or takfiris (excommunicators).

The early Salafis admired the technological and social advancement of Europe?s Enlightenment, and tried to reconcile it with the belief that their own society was the heir to a divinely guided Golden Age of Islam that had followed the Prophet Muhammad?s Revelations.

In terms of their respective formation, Wahhabism and Salafism were quite distinct. Wahhabism was a pared-down Islam that rejected modern influences, while Salafism sought to reconcile Islam with modernism. What they had in common is that both rejected traditional teachings on Islam in favor of direct, ?fundamentalist? reinterpretation.

During the late 1950s and the 1960s, the Middle East was gripped by a struggle between the traditional monarchies and the secular pan-Arab radicals, led by Nasser?s Egypt, with the pan-Islamist Salafis an important third force. [3] By embracing pan-Islamism, Faisal countered the idea of pan-Arab loyalty centered on Egypt with a larger transnational loyalty centered on Saudi Arabia. During the 1960s, members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, many of them teachers, were given sanctuary in Saudi Arabia, in a move that undermined Nasser while also relieving the Saudi education crisis.

Saudi Arabia?s foreign policy concerns eased in 1970 with Nasser?s death. But in the 1970s, the Saudi education system was awash with Egyptian Muslim Brothers and other Salafis, much as Berkeley was awash with Marxists. Under King Khaled (r.1975-1982), some of the most important proponents of Qutbist terrorism, including Abdullah Azzam, Omar Abd al-Rahman and Muhammad Qutb, served as academics in the Kingdom. Qutb, an important proponent of his late brother Sayyid?s theory, wrote several texts on tawhid for the Saudi school curriculum.

Today, a profusion of self-proclaimed Salafi groups exist, each accusing the others of deviating from ‘true’ Salafism. Since the 1970s, the Saudis have wisely stopped funding those Salafis that excommunicate nominally Muslim governments (or at least the Saudi government), condemning al-Qaeda as ?the deviant sect?. The pro-Saudis correctly trace al-Qaeda?s ideological roots to Qutb and al-Banna. Less accurately, they accuse these groups of insidiously ‘entering’ Salafism. In fact, Salafism was imported into Saudi Arabia in its Ikhwani and Qutbist forms.

The Middle East today is clearly in need of alternative models of political change to counter takfiri Salafism. In the West, education has been a major factor in social integration. But as the Saudi case study indicates, we need to be aware of not only the quantity, but also the nature of education. Saudi students in the 1970s learned engineering and administration alongside an ideology of xenophobic alienation. In the long run, the battle against violent Salafism will be fought not only on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in the universities of the Middle East.

Yes, there have been suggestions of this in the British press generally. The Mirror ran the story, and the source is an ‘unnamed’ security op. The evidence cited is the car park tickets, return train tickets, and the fact that there were more, unused explosives in the car.

All of this just tells us how little we know. Whether the 09/11 were all suicides has also long been discussed. It is very effective for someone that the whole trail just ends in dead bodies. As they say, dead men tell no tales.

On the ‘bus’ bomber, understanding what happened to him during that missing hour would presumeably help clarify all this.

“The timing of the blasts suggest timers.”

Initially this was the theory, but then the forensics, you would have thought would answer this. The police did subsequently suggest there were no timers. Did the last bomber have doubts? This certainly happened in the case in Israel which Sadique Kahn is allegedly associated with. It also happened in the case of a person associated with Richard Reid (who would have been a suicide bomber if he hadn’t been stopped).

So the idea that the bus guy backed off from boarding the Northern Line (which was irregular, but wasn’t in fact closed), then found himself in a corner when he saw the others had gone off, boarded a bus and blew himself to paradise, this also is consistent with the facts. All that frantic movement can be to do with connection as well as disconnection I suppose.

Bottomline: we really *know* very little, and maybe many things we will never know. Unfortunately we may be dependent on whether there is another group, and whether they make another attempt. The Luton overnight stop is still an unknown quantity (as P O’neill was suggesting here from the very early days).

Well, nice to see we are finally talking Rupert, which doesn’t mean we have to agree on what we talk about.

He makes some interesting points:

Why did the bomber on the bus, according to eyewitness reports, get frantic and start rummaging through his bag, moments before the bomb went off?

The timing of the blasts suggest timers. When do suicide bombers need timers to set off their blasts?

Up to this point, there has been no video, audio, or documentory evidence of them explaining what they did.

The daily deaths in Iraq are largely caused by one lot muslims murdering another lot of muslims - often while the victims were at prayer.

The hatred between one branch of Islam and another is no less fanatical than between ‘Islam’ and the rest of the world.

Do try to keep things in perspective.

We need to have Tony Blair, George Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and all the other anglo and neocon criminals patrolling the streets of Fallujah and Tikrit.

Hopefully a roadside bomb would then explode in the face of these above mentioned criminals- these lying deceitful political criminals must be punished for the massive mess they have created in Iraq.

Bring the English and American soldiers home and send the English and American politicians and establishment types to Iraq- hopefully the Iraqis would then have the good sense to hang them from some bridge like they did to the other American mercenaries that were torched and hung from the Fallujah bridge.

For Hani al-Sibai, an Egyptian radical Islamist dissident resident in the United Kingdom, the London subway bombings were more particularly focused, and designed rather to steal the thunder from the G8 Conference in Scotland. Speaking during a combative interview with the Qatari satellite channel Al-Jazeera, al-Sibai declared it “a great victory for al-Qaeda; it rubbed the noses of the world’s eight most powerful countries in the mud.”

and

If in further investigations of the British suicide bombers there fails to emerge an identified ?trigger’ for the operation ? which would indicate al-Qaeda methodology ? and it turns out to be an entirely UK-organized operation, the issue of the timing and purpose of the attack will have to be sought in developments indigenous to Britain. Jihadi commentators on the forums have already mused on the bombings coming two days after the commencement of the trial of Abu Hamza on charges including inciting racial hatred and encouraging the murder of non-Muslims. If there is a connection, the question to be resolved is whether the extremist, radical wing of Islamists in exile have come to feel that their unilateral ?compact’ is being eroded and that there is now nothing to lose. Failing that, the possibility always remains that questions of timing are irrelevant, and that the motivation was ongoing jihad against the infidel, pure and simple.

I don’t agree with this, but I do agree with this:

“Listen carefully and in the distance, I think you can just hear the quiet, steady tramp of the chickens marching home to roost.”

I don’t know whether the war in Iraq was legal or not. There are conflicting opinions, and I’m not a lawyer. What I do know is that had there been WMD’s and had Saddam been in the process of facilitating access to these to terrorists, I would still have supported the war. We now know that there weren’t. So how was it that we went to war? This is what I would like Bush and Blair investigated for, and if necessary charged accordingly.This is unlikely to be initiated in the UK, but who knows what is going to happen in the future in the US.

This puts us in a quandry, since if Blair were to be pushed this far then the EU would be pushed even further into crisis in the wake, so there are once more, no free lunches.

Incidentally, on WMD’s, recent reports suggest that the ex-USSR may be a much more important ‘murky area’ than Iraq ever was.

On the question of whether Iraq was a ‘factor’ in the July 7 bombings, I again feel a bit in the situation of being shot at by both sides. Blair’s denial that it has anything to do with what happened is hardly credible, but equally, those like Clair Short who want to push the issue tend to say things like ‘involvement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan’ which really goes to another extreme, since while I have my doubts about the war in Iraq, I don’t about Afghanistan. Too many people are too busy trying to score political points, and insufficiently focused on the matter in hand, which is putting a stop to Al-qaeda.

There is a second, if little explored area, which is highlighted by the election of Gallagher (who I certainly wouldn’t put my hand in the fire for) and this would be: with a large muslim minority still to be adequately integrated in UK society, was Britain in any position to take a leading role in the Iraq war? Here Blair is certainly more vulnerable for those who would go after him.

So was Iraq a prime mover in the case of the London bombings? I think we need to wait for the investigation to reach some sort of provisional conclusion, and for the findings of the Royal Commission or equivalent which I most enthusiastically think there ought to be. Given the ‘roads to Pakistan’ connection, it would seem that Afghanistan is an equal contender, with of course Bosnia, Chechnia, Israel/Palestine in hot pursuit. Does Iraq form part of the ‘environment’ for the attack, of course it does.

On your Yorkshire material, This article seems to provide some useful background on life in Beeston. If we are going to tackle seriously tackle this problem, it will be important to try and understand all the dynamics. Yet again, I think this is an ideal problem for some sort of ’systems’ approach.

“A controversial fly-on-the wall account of the Iraq war by one of Britain’s most senior former diplomats has been blocked by Downing Street and the Foreign Office. Publication of The Costs of War by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN during the build-up to the 2003 war and the Prime Minister’s special envoy to Iraq in its aftermath, has been halted. In an extract seen by The Observer, Greenstock describes the American decision to go to war as ‘politically illegitimate’ and says that UN negotiations ‘never rose over the level of awkward diversion for the US administration’. Although he admits that ‘honourable decisions’ were made to remove the threat of Saddam, the opportunities of the post-conflict period were ‘dissipated in poor policy analysis and narrow-minded execution’.

“Regarded as a career diplomat of impeccable integrity, during his time in post-invasion Iraq, Greenstock became disillusioned with the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Paul Bremer. Their relationship had deteriorated by the time Greenstock returned to Britain. . ”
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5241143-111381,00.html

Listen carefully and in the distance, I think you can just hear the quiet, steady tramp of the chickens marching home to roost.