From Prophesy to Reality – Gov’t Prediction Of 30 Year Terror Campaign Comes To Life

By Graham Vanbergen: The partial explosion of a homemade bomb on a packed underground commuter train in southwest London on Friday morning has moved a prediction just six months ago by the UK’s government, of a terrorism offensive to match that of the 30 year long IRA campaign that killed and injured thousands – to reality. In the meantime, as one would expect in Britain, another huge police and intelligence operation began and then ended with calls for ever greater losses of civl liberties. 

 

The government called a meeting of its COBRA emergency committee before anything was known about the incident. Later that afternoon Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May announced in a televised statement that the threat level was being raised to critical for an undefined period.

“For this period, military personnel will replace police officers on guard duties at certain protected sites that are not accessible to the public and that the public will see more armed police on the transport network and on our streets” said May.

Although that undefined period has already ended, as is the norm with such incidents, Theresa May took the opportunity to acquire yet more intrusive surveillance powers by declaring -“We are looking very carefully at the powers that our police and security service have to make sure they have the powers they need,” while “working with the Internet companies.”

Regardless of involvement, Islamic State also claimed responsibility for the attack via its news agency. How predictable this is all becoming.

In the meantime, there is no reason to assume that the attack comes as a surprise to the British intelligence agencies, particularly as the security services in the USA seemed, as with the Manchester Arena atrocity, to be well aware of the incident in advance. It appears that the perpetrator had been interviewed by police just two weeks earlier – and released.

For the first time ever, last February the new Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Max Hill QC, the government’s new independent reviewer of terrorism legislation were actually predicting an ISIS led terror campaign to match that of the IRA’s deadly and lengthy campaign that killed thousands.

Hill warned that Islamist extremists were planning “indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians on a scale similar to those staged more than 40 years ago by the IRA.”

One month later, the Westminster attack occurred, followed up with one averaging every five weeks.

Since 2010, there have been nine terror attacks in Britain. However, five of those incidents have occurred in 2017 alone. In total, this year 40 people have been killed and 386 injured. Many have been life changing events.

 

Over the course of a thirty year period from 1971 to 2001, the IRA conducted 89 notable attacks against British assets in what was termed ‘The Troubles”. In total, 3,600 civilians, soldiers and police were killed, a third more than in 9/11, with tens of thousands injured as a direct result of the conflict. Violence on the streets of Northern Ireland was commonplace at the time and spilled over into Britain. The aims of the IRA was to end British rule of Northern Ireland and join the Republic of Ireland to the south.

 

Attacks averaged nearly three per year for the entire period that included extensive property damage and regular disruption to the proper functioning of the state.

All of the terrorist attacks this year, predicted by the Home Office were carried out by individuals who were known to the security services and had been monitored for some time. Most were homegrown, but now refugees are in the terror mix.

According to The Guardian newspaper, Home Secretary Amber Rudd, said it appeared the 18 year old bomber arrested in the departure area of Dover port was not a lone wolf but that it was “too early to reach any final conclusions on that”. That same day, a 21-year-old man was arrested in Hounslow, West London, at about 11.50pm in connection with the explosion at Parsons Green station, the Metropolitan police confirmed.

Across the entire media spectrum; that of the mainstream printed and broadcast television, not a single word has been uttered about the real underlying reasons for this catastrophic loss of life, that the government have themselves confirmed will last for decades.

 

The truth is a rather simple. All of the 2017 attacks have been carried out by the radicalised, with historical and family connections to countries that Britain, in its infinite wisdom, along with other major powers, decided to destroy for geo-political advantage against its perceived (economic or political) enemies.

A recent article by wsws.org highlighted the forecasting abilities of the government – “This is the fourth time that the threat level has been placed at “critical” in the past 11 years. The last occasion was following Manchester attack, amid official warnings that another assault was “imminent.” Nearly 1,000 armed troops were mobilised and put onto the streets, mainly in London, to reinforce counterterrorism officers. The June deployment was in line with Operation Temperer, a covert plan devised by David Cameron’s Conservative government, when May was home secretary.

Temperer followed a series of terror attacks in France by known intelligence assets and informers in 2015. These were seized on by the French state to implement Operation Sentinelle, which deployed 10,000 troops and imposed emergency powers allowing indiscriminate searches and arrests without judicial consent and increased surveillance. Presented as anti-terror measures, the emergency powers are still in effect two years later. Temperer was “accidentally” made public when minutes associated with it were uploaded to the National Police Chiefs’ Council website earlier this year. The minutes revealed plans for up to 5,100 troops to be placed on the streets to “augment armed police officers engaged in protective security duties.”

 

To compliment these predictions, terror-related arrests in Britain have escalated by 68 per cent to a new record high as security services confront an unprecedented threat, new figures reveal. There were 379 arrests for terrorism-related offences in Great Britain in the year ending June 2017, a rate of more than one a day and the highest number in a year since data collection began in 2001. The arrest numbers already eclipse the number of IRA related arrests in any given year period for the 30 years prior to 2001.

 

Home Secretary Amber Rudd said in June that anti-terror police had been over-stretched by the terror attacks. The Telegraph quotes Rudd who said that “over 90 per cent of all offences recorded last year by the official Government statistics were related to Islamic fundamentalism, while the majority of those arrested considered themselves to be British.”

In the meantime, The Independent reports on Sunday 17th September that a British Airways flight was held at Paris airport because of ‘security threat’ where passengers were informed of a “direct threat” to the flight bound for London Heathrow.

French police have issued a confidential note based on an analysis of “jihadist propaganda,” warning of possible lone-wolf attacks causing trains to derail and even food poisoning events, Le Parisien newspaper reports:

 

“Due to recent jihadist propaganda urging plans for train derailment, particular attention should be paid to any reports of intrusion or attempted sabotage on the premises of railways.”  The document warns that terrorists are instructed to make explosives “as shown in tutorials,” conceal their radicalisation, calling on “lone wolves” to cause “train derailments, forest fires or food poisoning” in Europe.”

 

The result of such levels of terror related incidents is that a proposal backed by three other countries, Austria, Denmark and Norway calls for the right to suspend Schengen rules for up to four years instead of two. France and Germany increased border crossings as a result of terrorism and the immigration crisis but leaked documents suggest both are considering extending controls as terrorism turns political again.

The Guardian has just reported that “France’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, said he had raised the issue “some time ago with my German colleague … and from what I heard from the commissioner he indeed wants to make the Schengen code more flexible, to allow us to protect our borders against terrorism.” Such sensitive proposals would not be close to being on the agenda, let alone publicly discussed, if terrorism in Europe was not itself now a serious political crisis.

British security officials have repeatedly said that Isis militants, who are losing ground in Iraq and Syria, will target the UK and this motivated Max Hill to also say that “In terms of the threat that’s represented, I think the intensity and the potential frequency of serious plot planning – with a view to indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians of whatever race or colour in metropolitan areas – represents an enormous ongoing risk that none of us can ignore.” That prophesy has already moved to reality. The question now is, will Britain’s security services be able to keep control.

From what the British government has already stated, supported by a number of other European governments, there is a strong likelihood now that an entire generation of jihadists, emboldened by those that went before them, are preparing for their final journey to take them and and as many of us with them through violence and acts of terrorism to the unknown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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