MI5 Head Sets Out Anti-Terror Agenda
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[Picture: MI5 Director Jonathan Evans]
WILL WE LISTEN TO THIS MAN?
‘Thousands’ pose UK terror threat’
There are at least 2,000 people in the UK who pose a threat to national security because of their support for terrorism, the head of MI5 has said.
At last! Some authority is not afraid to speak out on the biggest problem by far facing this country and the world. And since Jonathan Evans spoke to that conduit of public information - the press - is there a chance that at last the printed press may lay off attacking our politicians and start to go after the REAL enemy?
Well, we can but hope.
I have pasted the report below as it appeared at the BBC website. If I find the entire speech I will copy it here.
But the online BBC report is missing one VERY IMPORTANT point made by Mr Evans.
He said that this terror threat DID NOT start with 9/11.
Exactly. I’ll repeat, to help compensate for the BBC online report’s omission.
This terror threat DID NOT start with 9/11/
To me that is VERY important. We are constantly told by the Blair blamers that HE personally is responsible for the growing number of radicalised individuals and groups in this country. Add to that his responsibility for all the deaths in Iraq, global warming and presumably every disease known to mankind!
The press’s simplistic analysis is patently WRONG and always has been. In my opinion, our newspapers lost the plot months, if not years ago.
Of course they won their Blair destruction campaign in the end, to the shame of all of us, or at least those of us able to make objective, balanced judgements on the issues in the round. The brainwashing is widespread. I still find that many people I’d normally consider fair, are still of the opinion that Tony Blair is the devil incarnate.
If the opinionated, omniscient and biased press are on the way out, as is the current thinking, it’s not before time. The printed press in this country, even more than the left of Labour, is responsible for us losing a prime minister who understood what was going on. Who recognised the threats and struggled to get support for strengthening the law from within parliament, and even from within his own party.
Remember Blair’s first parliamentary defeat in November 2005, when he tried to bring in a 90 day detention period? The criticism and the quarters from which some of it came, chimes with Evans’ warning over other countries’ agendas.
Watch Blair interview 2005, 90 days defeat - “It’s better to lose doing the right thing than to win doing the wrong thing”. What he said then still applies. “Very odd that MPs ignored police recommendations”. This was “vital … I hope we don’t rue it”.
Watch Charles Clarke, then Home Secretary on 90 day defeat.
But the few, the very few leader writers or columnists who were prepared to think that Blair may have been right, were vastly out-numbered in readership by the tabloid-inclined movers and shakers, who poisoned the well of political debate with their ignorant ‘certainties’!
But as I referred to in yesterday’s post - Blair v Terrorism - Who Won?, the strategy that insurgents, (Al Qaeda and the Taleban), have been USING is clear. It is at least two-fold.
1. For us to be cowed by our own liberal left and the unbelievably pathetic fear of losing human rights and civil liberties permanently!
It seems the human righters want to carry placards saying, “Kill me first and take over my country Mr OBL, before I’ll stop carrying my banner!”
2. For us to be forced to react disproportionately to events, whereupon the huge majority of law-abiding Muslims would be encouraged to civil unrest, encouraged by the civil & human rightists.
And to this end the insurgent terror groups use propaganda and the internet in ways which would turn Alastair Campbell’s cheeks red.
UNBELIEVABLE PRESS BEHAVIOUR!
Have these people NO sense of perspective, priority or balance?
It may now be excruciatingly embarrassing for the British press to find that they have been so neatly taken in by these ‘unsophisticated’ people.
Written between the lines, I’d venture, is that the previous Prime Minister was on the right track in trying to explain to us that the deaths in Iraq and the terror threat was not of “our doing”.
Instead of listening at the time, our oh-so-clever press had to play semantics, e.g. - ‘what does Blair mean “OUR fault” - HE decided, not us!’
WHY? Because they have been so easily taken in by their own agenda, hopes and wishes, and their pandering to the liberal intelligentsia. Anti-Iraq, questioning motives and intelligence sources for war, unhappy with Blair’s closeness to Bush, questions marks over every conspiracy theory, culminating in the honours case where they STILL couldn’t get Blair.
Our naive, self-satisfied liberal leftism has colluded in various forms to rid us of one of the world’s most powerful politicians and one of the handful willing to stand against terrorism in ALL its forms.
That is unforgivable.
Tomorrow, in the first of this government’s Queen’s Speeches without Tony Blair, the present prime minister may announce a desire to extend the detention time for questioning terror suspects to 56 days. He may get an easier hearing after Mr Evans’ call. Fifty six days WILL be an improvement from the present 28 and will help in the examination of computer and other communication resources . It will likely prove insufficient, and in time, Blair’s 90 day recommendation may be re-visited.
In that event I WILL say “I told you so”. But I wasn’t the one who told you first.
Remember, please, who was.
JONATHAN EVANS REPORTArticle continued from top …Jonathan Evans said there had been a rise of 400 since November 2006.He said children as young as 15 were being recruited for terrorist-related activity by al-Qaeda. Resources that could be devoted to counter-terrorism were instead being used to protect the UK against spying by Russia, China and others, he added. There had been “no decrease” in the number of Russian covert intelligence officers operating in the UK since the end of the Cold War, Mr Evans said in a speech in Manchester. “A number of countries continue to devote considerable time and energy trying to steal our sensitive technology on civilian and military projects, and trying to obtain political and economic intelligence at our expense.” It was “a matter of some disappointment”, he said, that this ongoing threat continued to take up significant amounts of equipment, money and staff. ‘Deliberate campaign’ Mr Evans took over as director general of MI5 in April from Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. Speaking on Monday at the Society of Editors’ annual conference, he said the number of individuals in the UK causing concern had risen in part due to better intelligence gathering in “extremist communities”.
“But it is also because there remains a steady flow of new recruits to the extremist cause.”
In order to gather recruits, Mr Evans said, extremists were methodically and intentionally targeting vulnerable young people and children.
The UK had to do more to protect these young people, he added.
Mr Evans said attacks on the UK were “not simply random plots by disparate and fragmented groups”, but part of a “deliberate campaign” by al-Qaeda.
In the past 12 months, MI5 had found links between an increasing range of countries and terror plots in the UK, he said.
In Iraq, Algeria and parts of East Africa, especially Somalia, he said, the “al-Qaeda brand” had expanded and now posed a threat to the UK.
‘Root causes’
Mr Evans said he did not think the level of terror threat against the UK had “reached its peak”.
“We will do our utmost to hold back the physical threat of attacks, but alone, this is merely containment.
“Long-term resolution requires identifying and addressing the root causes of the problem.”
He said it was “inevitable” there would be individuals who came to police or security service attention, but were still able to go on to carry out acts of terrorism.
“Every decision by the security service to investigate someone entails a decision not to investigate someone else. Knowing of somebody is not the same as knowing all about somebody.”
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said the speech contained the message that MI5 needed the public’s help.
“It’s about tackling the ideology at grass roots. They can only really tackle the symptoms. They can’t go up to people and say, ‘Do you follow al-Qaeda?’”
Shiraz Maher, a former member of radical Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir, said the recruitment of young people by militant groups was a reality.
Youth initiatives, including football training and anti-drugs schemes, were being used to groom “impressionable and idealistic” young people, he told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One programme.
Foreign policy
But the Ramadhan Foundation said it was concerned Mr Evans had not stressed the 2,000 people suspected of involvement in extremist activity made up only a small proportion of the 1.6 million Muslim population.
Mohammed Shafiq, a spokesman for the Muslim youth organisation, said the language was inflammatory and called for responsible dialogue.
He said the group was prepared to talk to the police and security services, but in order to defeat terrorism it was important to acknowledge the threat existed mainly due to foreign policy.
During his speech, Mr Evans also announced that MI5’s new Northern Ireland headquarters would soon be formally opened and said that by 2011 25% of the service’s staff would be based outside London.
Tags: MI5 jonathan evans, mosques, radicalisation, Terrorism, threats growing, youth
