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posted December 13, 2005 at 11:00 a.m.

British antiterror operations 'up 75 percent' since bombings

Senior police chief says three other bombing plots stopped since summer.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

The Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, has told a conference in London that there has been a 75 percent increase in the number of antiterrorism operations carried out by Scotland Yard since the July 7 bombings in London. The Evening Standard reports that British counterterrorism officers are now receiving high-grade intelligence reports daily, rather than monthly, in the wake of the attacks. Mr. Blair said three further "conspiracies" had been stopped since the summer.

Blair portrayed the threat to Britain as a serious one.

"There are people in the UK as we speak who are planning mass atrocities and who will use suicide as a weapon. That is a different place to where we have been in my lifetime and in my service."
[Blair] added: "What matters is that the terrorists are here. They are going to go on trying to kill people like you and people like me. We have to find the right methodology, community relationships and legislative framework to defeat them."

Security officials say that another terror attack on London, involving a cell of four Britons, was thwarted within the past two weeks. But The Guardian reports that some British politicians criticized Blair for making a vague statement at such a sensitive time.

Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "At best, these kind of statements reassure people that the police are pulling out the stops. At worst, they frighten members of the public. We can surely be given a more detailed threat assessment without jeopardizing ongoing operations."

Blair has also been the subject of criticism for the way he and his department handled the immediate aftermath of the July 7 bombings in London and the subsequent police shooting of an innocent person.


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Now The Guardian reports that senior police officers have admitted that it's possible that more innocent people will be shot by the police in antiterror operations. Chris Fox, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said, "We are doing everything we can... but the probability is that there may be mistakes."

Meanwhile, British officials have gathered enough evidence that charges may be laid against the police officers who killed Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes at an underground station in London after the July 7 bombings.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that what is perhaps most surprising in the aftermath of the July 7 bombings is what hasn't happened.

The United States responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks four years ago by enacting sweeping new law enforcement powers and rounding up hundreds of Muslim Americans for indefinite detention, measures imposed with virtually no debate and little dissent.
The London attacks on July 7 were in one respect more startling even than Sept. 11: The four suicide bombers were born and raised in the United Kingdom itself. Yet when British Prime Minister Tony Blair proposed his own sweeping increase in police powers, including the right to detain suspects without charge for as long as 90 days, he suffered his most stinging defeat since taking office eight years ago.

The Post-Dispatch notes that the mood in England is still in favor of a strong crackdown on extremists, and that another terrorist attack may "stiffen spines." But there are also signs of a shift in this mood. The article spotlights the Rev. John Bavington, a priest at St. Clement's Anglican Church in Barkerend, a parish whose population of 10,000 is now 75 percent Muslim.

Father Bavington, who works closely with both religious and nonreligious Muslims in his town, says he wasn't surprised that the House of Commons rejected Prime Minister Tony Blair's call for a crackdown on civil liberties and harsh treatment of Muslim mosques and groups that challenge British policies. He said Britain's experience with imperialism was the reason.

"I think it's a question of history, the United Kingdom's role as world power in the 18th and 19th century, particularly our role in the Asian subcontinent," he said. "I think what the British learned, over a long time, is that you have to rule by consensus."
Bavington said the United States, a superpower only since World War II, had not yet developed that same sensitivity about the use of power – a sensitivity that he said was located at the heart of religious beliefs that Muslims, Christians and Jews all share. "The Old Testament is full of challenges to people in power, to live such that those over whom they have power feel safe and secure," he said. "The relationship between the powerful and the ruled can only be secure when there is justice and human rights."

Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph reports that Britain has secretly bought dozens of Russian surface-to-air missiles, some of which may have fallen into the hands of terrorists, in order to develop measures against them. Security officials are concerned that the weapons will be used against civilian and military aircraft.