http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HK09Aa01.html Britain faces a new terrorist Gunpowder Plot By Ronan Thomas LONDON - The resonances are 400 years old. As with the case of Guy Fawkes - most famous conspirator in the failed Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605 - Tuesday's conviction of British citizen Dhiren Barot, 34, is but the latest reminder of the depth and scale of ongoing threats to British interests from home-grown British Islamic radicals. Barot, a British Hindu convert to Islam - with identified links to al-Qaeda groups in Pakistan - received convictions for terrorism and a life sentence in prison from a London court. According to prosecutors, Barot - arrested in 2004 and also wanted by the United States and Yemen - planned to attack British and US targets that year to cause "indiscriminate carnage, bloodshed and butchery". The trial judge characterized the interrupted plans as ambitious, sinister and minutely detailed. Targets were to include luxury hotels in London, the Prudential and Citigroup buildings in Newark, New Jersey, the New York Stock Exchange in Manhattan, and the International Monetary Fund's offices in Washington, DC. The methods: a blend of ingenuity and horror against "the enemies of Islam". Stretch limousines packed with explosives and gas cylinders were to be used in underground parking garages; there were to be fuel-tanker suicide missions; a dirty bomb in Britain was to be constructed using radioactive isotopes harvested from thousands of commercially available smoke alarms. It goes on. Presaging the July 2005 attacks in London, Barot hoped to attack London's rail infrastructure and bomb a subway train passing under the River Thames. The court heard that Barot researched, costed and made recommendations in a corporate-style presentation to al-Qaeda contacts in Pakistan. The conviction comes hard on the heels of other recent alleged Islamic-extremist conspiracies in the United Kingdom. Just this August, British police announced they had foiled a plot to kill thousands of passengers on UK and US airliners. Twenty-three Muslim suspects were arrested: more than a dozen British and Pakistani nationals now face trial. British nationals with Islamic surnames also stand accused of the failed copycat attacks on the London subway network that took place on July 21, 2005. British intelligence sources now say that at least four other "significant terrorist plots" in the UK have been prevented in recent months. Threat-level assessments for the UK have been at high levels ever since the London bomb attacks of July 2005. This August, Home Secretary John Reid warned that Islamic "fascists" acting against Britain will be "unconstrained" either by capability or moral reservation. >From a non-Muslim perspective, the UK is living once more with uncertainty and a terrorist risk based on a synthesis of imported religious conviction and political ideology. Muslims are clearly not being persecuted in the UK, but there are historical parallels with the resentments of English recusant Catholics facing the Protestant orthodoxy of the 17th century. And far closer than any comparison with the last terrorist threat against British state - by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in its campaign from 1969 to 1998. >From the perspective of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims, the ongoing issue of Britain's Middle East foreign policy remains the critical issue. With Britain fully committed to the "war on terror", there is plenty of evidence to suggest rising British Muslim anger at their country's foreign policies. Muslim criticism of UK actions abroad has grown markedly since 2003. Summer polls by the Pew organization revealed that 30% of British Muslims under 24 said they would prefer to live under the strictures of sharia (Islamic law) rather than British law, and 30% of the same group said that the July 7, 2005, attacks in London were "justified". The UK's domestic intelligence agency, the Security Service, formerly MI5, now views about 1,200 British Muslims as a "serious security risk". In 2000, British Muslim convert and potential shoe bomber Richard Reid failed to bring down a US airliner. A list of the key grievances by British Muslims is now well known. UK involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan; Prime Minister Tony Blair's preparedness to sanction US flights delivering munitions to Israel via British airports during the recent Lebanon conflict; the latest spat caused last month by former home secretary Jack Straw's call for Muslim women to discard the full veil (niqab). To be clear, only a tiny minority of British Muslims favor extremism. The vast majority, while unhappy with current foreign policy and a feeling of being singled out unfairly, will broadly support their government's anti-terrorism initiatives. Even so, a background of high-profile failures shows that the quality of intelligence will continue to be all-important to secure UK Muslim support. In July 2005, police shot and killed an innocent subway commuter, Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes. Muslim voices criticized what they saw as a shoot-to-kill policy. In June this year, police wounded a Muslim suspect in a failed anti-terrorist raid in Forest Gate, East London. The suspects were released after a predictable media circus and sued. Meanwhile, the government continues to suffer from infrastructural weakness in its criminal-justice and immigration systems, hampering the fight against terrorism. New anti-terrorist legislation is juxtaposed with "progressive" human-rights provisions pushed through by Tony Blair himself ever since the election in 1997. British judges have ruled, under 43 such laws, that measures such as 90-day detention and suspect control orders are illegal - to the government's evident frustration. And major failures in Britain's criminal-justice and immigration systems, revealed this summer, have indicted the government for incompetence at the expense of public safety. Dr John Reid has been forced to admit his own Home Office is "unfit for purpose". In 1605, after the failed attempt by a disaffected group of English Catholic gentlemen to blow up the Protestant court of King James I, the man closest to the gunpowder barrels was brought before the monarch. When asked why he had planned such an appalling atrocity, Guy Fawkes answered: "A dangerous disease requires a desperate remedy." Without pushing parallels with Stuart England too closely - and while condemning the latest revelations unreservedly - Tuesday's conviction of Barot nevertheless gives a close insight into the thinking of a minority of British Muslim extremists. And it suggests that determined and fanatical opposition to the British state from within is far from an unfinished story. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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