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LONDON, July 19: Pressure on Britain’s intelligence services intensified on Tuesday with the leaking of a memo in which they said just weeks before the London bombings that there was no group with the motive and means to attack.
The threat assessment report from Britain’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), obtained by the New York Times from a foreign intelligence service, also stated that violence in Iraq motivated terrorist-related activity in Britain.
The report concluded: “At present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK.”
The fact the JTAC had downgraded the security threat last month was not new – the government confirmed it in the wake of the July 7 London bombings and said then that there was no evidence a higher threat level would have made any difference.
But the language of the JTAC memo, disclosed for the first time, came as a surprise because it was so direct.
“Speaking as a 30-year intelligence officer, I would be surprised at any intelligence officer who made a categorical statement that there was no one out there with the capability or intent to do something,” said Robert Ayers, associate fellow of London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs.
“I think that statement is of the same character as the ‘dodgy dossier’ statements. It sounds to me like some of the qualifiers and the caveats disappeared from the statement,” said Ayers, a former intelligence specialist in the U.S. Army and Defence Intelligence Agency.
He was referring to a British government dossier released before the Iraq war and based on intelligence that was subsequently discredited, including the claim Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could fire some chemical and biological weapons at just 45 minutes’ notice.
WHEN, NOT IF: The decision to downgrade the threat level from “severe general” to ‘substantial’ was taken after Britain’s general election in May, which authorities had feared could be targeted by militants.
But independent security analysts have questioned the decision to scale down the threat weeks before a summit of the world’s most powerful leaders in Scotland.
It was on the first full day of the Group of Eight summit that suspected Al Qaeda-linked bombers blew up three London underground trains and a bus, killing more than 50 people.
Senior government minister Geoff Hoon would not comment on the New York Times report but said: “We have to make judgments on the best intelligence that is available at the time.
“But obviously we continue to review the sources of information and our assessment of them,” he told reporters.
The government has also rejected suggestions the London bombings were retribution for Britain’s role in Iraq.
But the JTAC report said ‘events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK’.
The JTAC memo also appeared at odds with previous public comments by top police chiefs and government officials that a major attack on Britain was a question of when, not if.
Ayers said lowering the threat level would have had a practical effect in reducing the security presence and level of checks carried out in public places.
“I find it difficult to understand how the government can state that we lowered the threat level but it had no effect on our ability to detect and prevent these attacks,” he said.
—Reuters
