Whitewash 'unlikely to satisfy'. posted by Richard Seymour

The government's 'July 7' reports have failed to silence demands for a public inquiry, and justly so. We are to be told by one, the parliamentary inquiry, that the attacks were 'not preventable' by intelligence officers because of a lack of resources. They had Mohammed Siddique Khan 'in their sights' as it were, and were simply 'diverted' onto another operation. Could happen. "This guy might want to blow himself up and we better... oh cool, a drugs bust! Let's do that!" We are to be told by the other, the Home Office's 'narrative', that Iraq played a part in the motivation for the bombings, but was not "the key contributory factor". The first is by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which is appointed by the Prime Minister, answers to the Prime Minister and has its reports redacted by the PM's office before being released to parliament and the public. Neither the Home Office nor this appointed committee can inspire confidence.

If it was about resources, then one way to tackle this is to stop wasting money and manpower rounding people up for CIA renditions, ensuring that innocent men are locked up until they agree to become informers. But then, MI5 seem to make a lot of these little mistakes. If only they had been allowed to simply Destroy the Brain Instantly Utterly.

If Iraq wasn't the key factor, then more fool the Joint Intelligence Committee for having warned that the war would greatly increase the threat. More fool the ISC for having publicised this information. In 2004 Michael Jay, head of the foreign office, stated that the 'recurring theme' in motivations for 'extremism among Muslims' was 'the issue of British foreign policy', which was a 'key driver' behind recruitment to 'extremist organizations'. The Foreign Office, as part of Operation Contest, drew up a report with the Home Office report entitled 'Young Muslims and Extremism'. This suggested that the main cause of the anger was oppression of Muslims, either tolerated or actively perpetrated - there was a perception that there had been a shift from passive to active oppression with the 'war on terror'. This was compounded by 'a sense of helplessness' and a 'lack of any real opportunities to vent frustration'. Three weeks before July 7th, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) reported to the government that Iraq was acting as the "motivation and focus" of a range of "terrorist-related activities". Further, MI5 said on their website, Iraq was a "dominant issue" for "a range of extremist groups and individuals" operating in the UK.

If the leaked reports are correct, then the Home Office narrative will say that these guys who are alleged to have carried out the bombings were not connected to 'Al Qaeda', there was no fifth man, and the attacks were carried out using a mixture of easily available substances with bomb-making recipes found on the internet. In short, not - as the Prime Minister once tried to claim - simply an Al Qaeda plot using Iraq as 'an excuse' to recruit people on the basis of a 'perverted version of Islam'. As Milan Rai explains in his account, The London Bombings, Islam & The Iraq War, (which I cribbed for some of the above material), the version of Islam to which these four men adhered and in which they were raised would have militated against their alleged actions. As we already know, suicide attackers have been secular and religious, Marxist and nationalist, adherents to different versions of Islam, (not, for instance, a single 'perverted' version). Islam as a religion definitely poses problems since self-murder is haram. As Stephen Holmes notes, many radicalised young men are attracted to the Islamists simply because they appear to be the ones making a call to arms. Religion is involved, but on two levels that are not really compatible with the PM's 'evil ideology' thesis: on the one hand, it is involved as an identification - one sympathises with the oppressed Ummah; on the other hand, it provides a narrative support to one's actions. But these actions are not fundamentally stimulated by religion, and nor could they be. It is not even "killing people for the sake of it" as the PM also tried to say. It is nothing else but the usual, as explained previously. Suicide attackers most frequently emerge in a struggle over occupation, in situations of highly unequal combat. They are efficient for a weaker side - Robert Pape notes that while suicide attacks amounted to only 3% of terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2001, they accounted for 48% of total casualties from terrorism. Those who carry out the attacks tend to be twenty-something males, psychologically normal, well-educated and with a higher income than the reference population. This is not despair in the sense of deprivation and dysfunctionality. It is despair on behalf of their 'imagined community' the nation, (the Ummah in this case). They tend to act, that is, altruistically, not egoistically. Indeed, part of the message of such acts is that those who commit them are not motivated by pathological concerns.

Every reliable bit of evidence suggests that a mixture of foreign policy and domestic policy (with foreign policy the over-riding concern) is behind this. The Blairite clique, its outriders, and its circles of fawning commentators in the media village, are all in wilful denial about this. They have reached for the favourite therapy of the political class: a heavily controlled inquiry whose conclusions can be determined in advance. The majority of people who find no comfort in shamelessly being lied to by the government, and who oppose the brutal occupation of Iraq and the government's despicable support for Israel, are unlikely to be satisfied by the government's efforts.