Terrorism Special: Osama bin Laden and the July 2005 London Bombings

News this week seemed to answer an on-going question since the terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005 that killed 52 people in London: according to the story, 7-7 was the late Osama bin Laden’s last successful attack. This judgement was gleaned from documents captured in the raid on the compound in Abbotobad, Pakistan, in which bin Laden was killed.

That’s it then. A definitive conclusion.

Well, not quite. Look closer at the story....

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Terrorism Special: Taking Apart the Myth about the 2005 London Bombing and "Multi-Culturalism"

Kenan Malik's mono-causal explanation in The New York Times for the atrocity of six years ago is simplistic, divorced from history, ignorant of the scholarship on violent extremism, and oblivious to the evidence around the 7-7 bombings, including from the British security service MI5.

Official multiculturalist policies may indeed be a problem for western societies (although it is of interest that Malik omits from his analysis a country, Canada, that is more diverse than the UK and which for decades has embraced multiculturalism as an official aspect of its national identity), but it was not the sole cause of 7-7 or other post-9/11 acts of terrorism.

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Terrorism Weekly: The Problems of Informers --- From Iraq to the London Bombing

Mohammed Junaid BabarTwo stories in the news week point to the importance of human sources in supplying intelligence but also the risks involved.

The first is the well-known story of “Curveball”, an Iraqi named Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi. Under the control of German intelligence, he supplied information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs.His "information" was an important part of the American case for invading Iraq, used by George Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech and by Secretary of State Colin Powell in a February 2003 speech to the United Nations’ Security Council. Although some already had questions about the reliability of the source, it was only after the WMDs didn’t turn up that the inaccuracy was confirmed.

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Terrorism Weekly: A Plot for Christmas

“Yes, Virginia, there is a terrorism threat.”

Whether on the "left" or "right", the British media love a good terrorism plot. The timing of this one, in the notoriously slow period just before Christmas made it even more enthralling --- the same way that the Pakistani student bomb plot during the Easter break of 2009 similarly grabbed the headlines before turning out, for various reasons, to be a damp squib.

So for the last few days we have been treated to repeated stories about the arrest of 12 men for an alleged bomb plot. Note the word “alleged” in the previous sentence, for it is one that does not often appear in the assured British media when it comes to reporting terrorism. In the current example, the news has gone beyond noting g the arrests of the men to listing their alleged targets: from Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to the London Stock Exchange to the American Embassy, from celebrities to pubs and restaurants.

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Terrorism Analysis: Can Al Qa'eda Be Defeated? (No.)

Last weekend, the top British military officer, General Sir David Richards, said publicly what officials have been circulating privately almost since the Bush administration stupidly hit on the slogan “War on Terror” to describe their post-9/11 crusade.

This is not a war that can be won in any conventional sense.

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