Below is an extract from Open Democracy by Paul Rogers where he questions the british Government’s continual refusal to consider any links between the invasion of Iraq and the terror in London on July 7th.
On 7 July 2005, four suicide-bombers attacked the London transport system, killing fifty-two people and wounding 700 in a series of coordinated bomb blasts – three on underground trains and one on a bus. The attacks were not on the scale of Madrid, Bali, the Mombasa and Dar es Salaam embassy bombings or New York, but they had a considerable effect on public opinion in Britain. At the time the British government denied strongly that there was any connection between the motivation of the bombers and the war in Iraq, and it has maintained this view rigorously ever since.
In the past week, three reports about the attacks have been published. The most substantial was from the intelligence and security committee (ISC), a semi-independent cross-party select committee drawn from both houses of parliament. This was followed almost immediately by a document from the home office on the sequence of events before and after the attacks, coupled with some analysis of the background and motivations of the bombers. Finally, the government published a brief response to the ISC's report.
There are numerous people across the security and intelligence services in Britain who, at least in private, do not share the official line about the irrelevance of Iraq to the London attacks. But as long as the government persists in its refusal to accept any serious criticism of the conduct of the war on terror, it is not possible for government reports to offer realistic assessments of this issue. The home office's response to the ISC report is significant here. It contains a statement on its approaches to Islamic radicalisation, which include a number of programmes: empowering "mainstream Islam" among young British Muslims, engaging more effectively with influential Muslims and the international Islamic media, and undertaking intensive efforts to explain British foreign policy in Britain itself and across the Islamic world. But no consideration is given to the question of whether British foreign policy is even remotely a part of the problem.
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