As British Muslims reel under another hyped-up siege by Tony Blair’s paranoid security and intelligence agents, the media is agog with extreme new draconian measures impacting on airline passengers.
Between the time news first broke shocking the world about allegations of a Transatlantic terror plot involving young Muslim males about to bomb planes over American cities and their arrest, sceptism is growing that this may yet again blow up in the faces of M16 as another false alarm!
Some sceptics point out that this is merely Blair’s shameful means to deal with his pressing problem of unpopular support for Israel’s massacre of Lebanese civilians. This view is supported by the fact that the Blair regime had been under immense pressure by the British public to intervene in the first few days of the devastation caused by Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. Instead, he piggy-backed George Bush and behaving as the ever faithful poodle, allowed the carnage and plunder by Olmert’s military to continue unabated.
And then there is the Pakistani connection which raises additional serious doubts about the credibility of this so-called “terror plot”. While the Musharraf military dictatorship has been at pains to display its unconditional support for the American led “war on terror”, a senior Pakistani security official has sketched a view which reveals contradictory opinions about the ultimate Pakistani objectives.
This is more to do with the security of Musharraf’s government than the bombing of planes. This explains why British Muslim groups such as Hizbut Tehrir and Muhajiroun –” banned in Pakistan since 9/11 –” have been accused by Pakistani intelligence of plotting to stage a coup to dethrone Musharraf!
Nervous security agencies in Pakistan are anxious to prevent members and sympathisers of these banned groups from operating there. In addition, they have been working hard with their British counterparts to incriminate people associated with Hizbut Tehrir and Muhajiroun as “terrorists”.
Asia Times Online’s Pakistan Bureau Chief, Syed Saleem Shahzad’s recent report on the “terror plot” confirms that Pakistan has been “particularly hard on the group”, most of whose members are British-born Pakistanis sent to work in Pakistan.
But perhaps most ominous of all is the role the current British Home Secretary, John Reid. In a scathing attack on him, a former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray describes Reid as a “hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence."
Reid has been leading the propaganda war surrounding the so-called bomb plot. His highly charged accusations and emotional warnings about “dreadful evil” threatening Britain, are reflective of a policy deeply entrenched in pursuit of America’s “War on Terror."
It’s not surprising to discover that Reid was closely allied to Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who tops The Hague’s International War Crimes Tribunal list of wanted men. Reid has admitted spending time in 1993 at a luxury Geneva lakeside hotel as a guest of Karadzic.
One wonders how an admirer of Karadzic can preside over the fate of plane-bomb plotters, without attracting a fair deal of sceptism?
