Did we really learn the lessons of 7/7

Published in the Evening Standard 11 May 2006

Of course it would be on a Thursday. There was a time last summer, after bombers had struck or tried to strike on two Thursdays in July, when the mere arrival of the fourth weekday was enough to send a shiver through this city. I spoke to commuters who admitted that, come the next Thursday, they would walk, cycle or drive - anything to avoid being on a bus or Tube on that dread day. Thursdays seemed cursed.

So it's grimly fitting that two official reports into the July 7 bombings are published today. Their arrival immediately stirs memories that have hardly gone away. Perhaps they were in a kind of deep freeze for the winter months, when the atmosphere of last July was harder to recapture. But yesterday, with the sun shining again, it was easy to remember how London felt and looked when it was struck on that summer morning. One glimpse of those pictures in yesterday's Standard - the wounded in blankets or wearing oxygen masks, the CCTV images of the killers - and we were back.

After the attempted second wave on July 21 I remember fearing that life in this city would never be the same again, that a pervasive angst would descend on us. I had spent plenty of time in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv - places that, at the height of the intifada in 2001 and 2002, were hit by a July 7 every other week - and I worried that their fate would become ours: that we would never again get on a bus or train without fearing for our lives. If there had been more London bombings, in August and September and October, that is indeed what would have happened to us. Instead London has been able to move on, to put July 2005 behind us. Get on a bus or Tube now and you'll sense most of the angst has drained away.

These two reports might dispel that complacency; they remind us just how easy it was for four young men to wreak havoc in the capital on July 7. The Home Office "narrative" of the events leading up to that day is expected to confirm that the bombers were amateurs. They were not al-Qaeda operatives following instructions from Osama Bin-Laden, but rather four lads who scoured the internet for tips on how to make a homemade bomb. With just a few hundred quid, they bought drain cleaner, bleach and acetone, mixed them in a bathtub, and set about making devices that would claim 52 lives.

In a way, this is much more frightening than if the Home Office or Commons Intelligence and Security Committee had laid the blame on a hardcore al-Qaeda cell. To realise that such devastation could be pulled off by four blokes looking at the web, with less than a month's preparation, reveals the true extent of our vulnerability.

Similarly, there's little comfort in the knowledge that our security services were at least partially aware of these men: MI5 had taped ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan months before the attack, discussing holy war and wondering how to say goodbye to his family. Separately, yesterday's Standard reported that the Aldgate bomber, Shezhad Tanweer, was discovered, probably by a foreign intelligence agency, searching extremist websites for bomb recipes - though British security sources say that information was never passed onto them.

This prompts an obvious tough question. If our security services had vital clues, why did they not act? How could surveillance officers have filmed Khan meeting a group of suspected terrorists a year before the attacks and still not have tailed him? MI5's answer, apparently accepted by the parliamentary committee, is that it had insufficient resources.

I'm not sure that' s good enough. When the 9/11 Commission investigated the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, it concluded that there had been not a failure of intelligence but a "failure of imagination." America's protectors had simply not foreseen that terrorists would use hijacked planes as missiles (even though, in fact, there had been ample warning of just such an attack). Americans accepted that, but Britain's security agencies can hardly plead the same excuse. We had had the warning of 9/11; we all knew that Britain's mass transit system was a target for terror.

Nor is it very reassuring to read that Khan had been dismissed as a mere fund-raiser for terror, rather than a would-be bomber. Again, the 9/11 experience had surely taught the security services that extremists can do extreme things.

The Commons report is expected to say this was not a failure by any single agency, given how badly stretched they all were: at one point just 20 agents had to monitor 400 suspects. But if it's not a failure by the security services, it's certainly a failure by government. As the Home Office narrative apparently admits, despite Tony Blair's absurd insistence to the contrary, the invasion of Iraq did play a part in radicalising British Muslims. Of course it did - just as opponents of the war had insisted it would.

But the greater blame relates to this key question of resources. Of course it takes time to hire and train new recruits, but what lunacy allows a situation in which agents have a man like Khan in their sights - only to let him go because they don't have the manpower to follow him?

The course of action for the new Home Secretary, John Reid, should be clear. Instead of wasting billions on a futile and illiberal wheeze like ID cards - which his predecessor, Charles Clarke, admitted would have done nothing to stop the July 7 bombers - spend the money on simple, direct police and intelligence work. An estimated 400 al-Qaeda suspects are at large in Britain. We need to watch their every move, and those who do the watching on our behalf need all the help they can get. Only then could we feel confident that 7/7 is a memory - and not a warning.

Posted on May 11, 2006 10:48 AM

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