One of ITV News’ talking heads this morning was a security analyst and he talked about a couple of things that I was speaking of with friends yesterday. He says the search for the London bombers will be hampered if the security forces are sent after a highly trained gang affiliated to Al Qu’eda.
The point, he said, is that Al Qu’eda doesn’t exist any more. Its leaders are either dead or living in caves. The link between them and the bombers here is almost certainly non-existent.
Instead, he suggests, the bombers are home-grown, part of a small group of fanatics who woke up one morning and decided to plants some bombs. There would have been few costs involved - bomb-making isn’t, apparently, that expensive - and, if they already lived here, no other overheads. They could fairly easily have made their plans - and executed them - within a the space of a couple of days.
Which makes catching them all the more difficult. If he’s right then the security forces don’t have a large, known organisation into which they might infiltrate their agents, bug the phones, follow their operatives. Instead they have a few people who, almost on a whim, will pick up their bag of explosive and take it to a tube station, there to blow up whoever is unfortunate enough to be around at the time.
What I find remarkable about this bombing is how limited it was. I mean, I am glad it was this limited but it pays to think about the possibilities. Multiple train bombings at all the major stations, on tube trains hemmed in tunnels, on major station concourses like Paddington and Waterloo - and, of course, a nice point made by bombing Westminster station - would have combined to create a proper ’spectacular’ - to coin a phrase from the IRA era. In fact, due to out-standing efforts by the tube and train people and our security and health services the whole shooting match was running the very next day.
Bearing in mind just how easy it would have been to ruin the underground system (there is no security anywhere on the network as far as I am aware) for days or even weeks and also how desirable it would have been to the terrorists to actually achieve that- the fact that they didn’t suggests to me that they couldn’t. And that will have been because there were not enough of them to actually do the job.
Which takes us back to our security chap’s comments about who is behind this. It’s not a large, focussed, professional murder outfit planning large-scale slaughter using skilled operatives and intricate planning. If the man is right, it’s a few disaffected people with violent tendencies who just decided one day to blow up some easy - but effective - targets. Which makes these people extremely scary.
For the record, ITV’s security commentator suggested a means of tracing them. He said that they may not have had financial backing from an organisation but may well have financed their efforts through fraud - particularly credit card fraud. He pointed out that when the police raided the East London mosque a while back they found false credit cards and false cheque books. So rather than look abroad at a group that, he says, doesn’t exist we should look at home for individuals that really do. And their criminal activities prior to the bombings may well lead the police to them..
In a world of gesture politics and superficial soundbites it’s the simplest of things that say so much. At times of adversity it will normally be the ordinary people who make the difference, who really do what needs doing. Our politicians are shown for what they normally are - posturing, bureaucratic, useless.
