Organised?
Posted: Fri 8 July, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts 14 Comments »As per the comments a couple of posts down , I personally find it very difficult to believe that the London bombs yesterday were the work of Al Qa’eda. Gert pointed out Dustbinman’s “Lone Nutter Theory”, which – for me (and Jann) works a lot better.
Al Qa’eda have suddenly (by which I mean “over the last five years”) become the boogeyman of international terrorism. Anything involving large loss of life, or organisation, and bang, there we go, the name of Al Qa’eda comes up. Sometimes they’re covered by “Islamic Terrorists”, but as one person said in the press conferences yesterday (sorry, I didn’t see who it was who said it, and I’m going to paraphrase anyway)
I don’t want to hear the phrase “Islamic Terrorists”. These people are terrorists. Millions of people follow the Islamic faith, and are just as shocked and disgusted as us. Anyone who calls themselves an Islamic Terrorist is a liar – the two are mutually exclusive.
Yes, of course there will be a search for who set off the bombs. That’s just common sense. But, no matter what the government and media decide, I’m just not convinced of the Al Qa’eda “connection”. It always comes up now, and I don’t personally believe that an organisation can be the size that Al Qa’eda must be to organise global events can exist without more people being aware of it.
Yesterday’s attack was completely under the radar. Investigators will now go back and possibly make a chain of who said what, but I doubt it. If they do, it’ll be too many coincidences, too many chances to “make the facts fit the conclusion”. There’ll be a conspiracy theory for sure, and whoever did do it will be decried as being part of the Al Qa’eda organisation without a doubt.
From the events that have been claimed by Al Qa’eda, the London bombs were remarkably un-showy, and resulted in (in comparison) an amazingly low loss of life. The Madrid train bombs killed hundreds, 9/11 killed hundreds. London killed 38, at last count. I’m not belittling the London bombs at all, nor their effect on the city and country – I just don’t believe it can be attributed to the same organisation as the others.
My personal belief already is that this is more linked to winning the Olympic bid, rather than G8 and the like. I also think that if Paris had won the bid, France would this morning be waking up to the same thoughts and reactions as Britain has had. I don’t mean that this was an international concerted campaign, but that one person could easily travel in the 18 hours between announcement of the bid winner and the relevant city – the only one that couldn’t have been done in such a way was New York, and that was always an outsider in the bids anyway. London, Madrid, Paris, and Moscow could all have been reached in that time though. And the two main competitors were connected by a matter of a three or four hour train journey through Eurostar – never reknowned as the most security conscious terminus anyway.
Again, an Al Qa’eda effort would probably have happened a day earlier, in all five cities, timed to happen either just before or just after the announcement of the winning city. With the events around it, and the countries involved, that would have worked. Or even attacking the various country’s representatives as they were amassed in one place, the Raffles Conference Centre in Singapore.
I believe that the London bombs will turn out to be the work of one person. At most, two or three people, who didn’t need to communicate except by meeting face-to-face. But probably just one person.
I go along with some of what you say but the idea that whoever’s responsible was ready to jump in a cab and peg it to Paris, London or Madrid with a suitcase full of high explosives upon hearing who’d won the right to host a three-week event, seven years away is quite frankly, akin to saying that Lyle doesn’t swear.
Perhaps it was a troup of unhappy buskers?
Nah, Covent Garden will be happy to see the Olympics.
I don’t know, obviously, what the reasoning behind the attack was – I just think that on a publicity scale, the timing of the Olympic stuff in particular was too close to be coincidence.
Oh, and why would an al qaeda effort would have been as well organised and impressive as what you suggest? Al queda doesn’t exist in the same way as ETA, the IRA or the Shining Path does/did. As one of yesterdays TV ‘experts’ put it, its more of a brand-name than anything, wheeled out when anything terrible is done in the name of Al Zaqarwi and his nut-job followers or anything remotely related to seriously wayward Islamic extremists in the same way that the Arab world refers to the ‘Zionist movement of oppression’. I’m struggling to think about any sport-related atricities other than the Munich Olympics and again that was a bunch of deranged arabs baying for the blood of their Israeli demons.
Sorry. That wasn’t meant to sound quite so shouty. It’s been a while since I’ve tried to articulate anything quite so assertively.
How are you, Lyle? Long time, no speak/comment. 🙂
Indeed, Al Qa’eda is a brand-name – and one that’s bandied about at every opportunity.
As for sport-related terrorism, other than Munich I can’t think of any either. Doesn’t mean it’ll never happen, though. Hell, for all I know it could be some nut-job protesting because his house in Stratford’s now going to be CPO’d and demolished in order to put in the finishing line, or something.
Regarding “organised”, however we like it, the main events attributed to A-Q are the co-ordinated attacks of 9/11, and the Madrid trains. Both highly organised/planned, and deeply showy/impressive/world-rocking. London, while making the world media, won’t change the way things happen in general, the way 9/11 seems to have done.
I doubt if anything will ever have the impact of 9/11 (Americans, eh? always got to be bigger and showier…) and I think the comparatively low body count just lends weight to the loner theory (how much c4 can one guy carry?). The first port of call in any murder enquiry is motive. I just can’t see anyone getting that upset over the bid. Although I still delight in the thought of Chirac’s inner torment.
Anyway, speculation aside, I really hope (however in vain) that we can piece it together because it’s important to know the reasons, however fucked, as to who or why anyone would do such a thing.
I have to say, I do know something of the tactics employed by people intent on terror, mainly because my family is from Ulster.
A saudi radical summed up my opinion very nicely on television, essentially radical Islamic policy stems from Wahabbism, a type of Islamic sect, very strict conservative muslims. Al Qa’eda is a loose terror network of people with similar but not exactly the same beliefs, it is not the only network and it certainly isn’t the worst. Unlike the Republican network and other european groups, Al Qa’eda finds it easier to penetrate our way of life in a way that was explained to me by a muslim friend, esentially the reason why they called themselves by that name is due to the fact that all muslims consider themselves brothers and muslims first and foremost before nationality creeps in, and in the extreme case, nationality means nothing to these people, they are bothered only by religion. The mosques are a kind of base for people passing through (I have been privy to Mosque design also) and the apartments that are included for Imams can be used by ‘guests’ whether long or short term. This interlinking allows people to move around literally unobserved, essentially why Finsbury park was such a hotbed, no-one knew what went on inside and no-one was meant to. A security search of a Mosque round here would bring around 100,000 Muslims out onto the street to protest at the desecration of their place of worship…………….anyways I digress, the loose form of the network as seen so far essentially means that the security services cannot have the same success in cracking or containing these groups or even infiltrating these groups as was gained by us against the republican movement. Muslims are unlikely to volunteer to ‘spy’ on their own, ask one and see, therefore the eyes and ears of the security services are partially blinded.
Maybe Lyle has a point, although I must say I am sceptical (but surprisingly relatively open minded), I know how few people it takes to wreak havoc – myself was surprised at how few people actually were involved in the terrorism I am familiar with.
Another point, having an education based on construction, I understood before this happened that the weak spot of the tube was its very self, concrete lined tubes deep underground, an explosion only needs to be slight to cause devastation and I imagine that the tunnels that the explosions happened in will need extensive work. There was nowhere for the blast to go, no expansion space……… intelligent attacks like that make the old IRA tactic of a transit bomb history.
This will continue to be debated and it is important that the Muslim community continue toi realise that they can no longer be introverted, they must do more than condemn.
C’mon Lyle, the obvious answer is often the right answer. It probably wasn’t the Scouts, the Air Cadets, MI5, Amway, The Eukelele Orchestra of Great Britain, the Java Bloggers or the Fat Bloke in the pub… Which bunch of chicken shit murderers has current form for indescriminate slaughter? Erm…
Yeah, got to go with the others on this. Olympics Shlympics! That was a coincedence. Lone nutter? Possible but I suspect that the chances of a single person arranging for four bombs to go off within that short amount of time is unlikely. And Al-Qaeda is a franchise. Someone gets trained in (say) Afghanistan, goes somewhere else, starts a cell, trains them, they go somewhere else, start more cells, train them, they move on and so on. All from the same source, all with same motivation and “beliefs”, all with similar training and methods. But, like any other franchise, they can operate independently. It’s not a numbers game either: the death toll may not have been on par with 9/11, Madrid or Bali but it was still more than the first WTC bomb, Kenya, Saudi, Turkey and Indonesia – all claimed by Al-Qaeda too. The approach – multiple coordinated attacks – is their signature tactic and has been since the early 90s.
Seriously though – why does your comment box keep adding \s to my name?
Honestly? No fucking idea. I suspect it’s due to PHP and it’s “magic_quotes” function, which escapes “dodgy” ASCII characters, such as ‘, which can be used to close an SQL or PHP line, and thus be used by nefarious persons to inject code into a database.
Alternatively, WP just hates the correct use of punctuation, and thus knackers it.
It’s a crack Al Qaieda “\s” adding cell who were activated by yesterday’s coded supension of the Congestion Charge in London.
As stalker-boy says, the obvious answer is probably the right answer. Like it or not, the attack was organised, and fitted the Al-Qaieda MO (see Wikipedia): three bombs almost simultaneous, and the fourth timed to go off after commuters had taken to the buses – that is planned and organised to maximise both damage and publicity. Local Al-Qaieda cells are probably quite small – the whole operation doesn’t have to know about one attack planned on London. And attacking our transport system is a classic way to bring London/England to a halt – just look what happens every time it snows – so massive loss of life may not have been their only goal. The end result was still effective.
I agree it was as comparatively small attack. A co-ordinated attack would have involved multiple bombers in differnt parts of London with larger bombs. That would have been Al-Qaeda’s usual style. I have developed my own theory that it was two bombers on my own site, as per link.