23 July, Matthew Parris in The Times:
AT TIMES of national emergency, the habit of the news media to drop a story or a lead in mid-air when it seems to be going nowhere unsettles the public. The media betray a sort of sheepish wish to “move on” from an erroneous report, hoping that their audience will not notice. Rather than acknowledge this, they publish a new report, leaving us to compare it with what had previously been said — and draw our own conclusions. Or they start barking up a different tree, the inference being that the last tree may have been the wrong tree. … the enormous, insidious and mostly unconscious pressure that exists to talk up, rather than talk down, the efficacy of al-Qaeda. When all the pressures are to talk up a lethal characterisation of the forces at work, we need to be supercool in the way we look at these reports.
From today's Independent:
The front page leads with:
The suicide cell that killed 52 people on 7 July is not linked to those alleged to be behind the second London attacks on 21 July, according to the initial findings of the biggest anti-terrorist investigation held in Britain. An investigation into the four suicide bombers from the first attacks and the people alleged to be behind the July 21 plot has found no evidence of any al-Qa'ida "mastermind" or senior organiser. The inquiry involved MI5, MI6, the listening centre at GCHQ, and the police.
The disclosure that the July 7 team were working in isolation - and were radicalised by Mohammad Sidique Khan, the oldest man - has caused concern among anti-terrorist officers. Police and MI5 fear it increases the chance that more "self-sufficient" units similar to the July 7 suicide cell are hiding in Britain. Anti-terrorist officers are worried by the evidence that previously unknown "clean skin" terror cells are forming in Britain with little or no help from abroad. The alleged plotters behind the July 21 bomb incidents in London are thought to have been "copycats", targeting Tube trains and a bus.
The intelligence assessment was made in the past few days. "The key point is that the events are not connected," said one counter-terrorist source. "It appears they were self-contained, rather than being organised by some kind of mastermind. "It is concerning that none were on the intelligence radar. There are quite probably others we do not know about out there. Over the past 10 years, we have been successfully disrupting a number of groups of people who could have carried out bombing attacks similar to those we have seen in the past few weeks. We can't disrupt them all. They only have to be lucky once - and they have been. At some point there will be another suicide or bombing group." …
A police source said: "All the talk about 'Mr Bigs' and al-Qa'ida masterminds looks like something from a film script at the moment. Of course, things could change if new intelligence comes through, but it looks increasingly as if these people were largely working on their own. It is not something we expected." … Senior police sources in West Yorkshire suggest that gyms and boxing clubs in Leeds - rather than mosques - were the key to the development of the young men into bombers.
