For ten years Western Intelligence has fought a secret war against al Qaeda, the most deadly and sophisticated terrorist organisation the world has ever faced. Peter Taylor, The Secret War on Terror I, BBC 2011
We investigate whether this secret war has made us all safer. ibid.
How far should the American government go to get Intelligence to save lives? ibid.
So why hasn’t bin Laden been captured or killed? ibid.
Under previous president George W Bush the CIA and the military had been given free rein to wage a secret war against the terrorists using abduction, secret interrogation black sites, and torture. ibid.
America first deployed its new secret weapon under George W but now Obama decided to ratchet up the use of these pilotless aircraft. ibid.
President Obama has authorised more than a hundred and sixty drone strikes ... But there’s a down-side to drone attacks: hundreds of civilians have been killed. ibid.
Al Qaeda is now global, resilient, adaptable and inventive. The American base at Guantanamo Bay is a stubborn reminder of how difficult and controversial the war has been. ibid.
Under increasing pressure Al Qaeda has found ways to adapt and strike back to deadly effect. Peter Taylor, The Secret War on Terror II
Is the West winning? And ten years after 9/11 are we any safer from attack? ibid.
MI5’s budget increased dramatically after the 2005 London attacks. ibid.
Is there a danger that anti-terror laws give impetus to radicalisation? Peter Taylor, Generation Jihad
In the spring of 2002 Tony Blair was telling Britain and his Cabinet that no decision had been made to invade Iraq; secretly his aides were learning from their American counterparts about plans for a pre-emptive attack. The Blair Decade II
Blair’s bridge was crumbling as Chirac led fierce European opposition to war. ibid.
The failure to get a second UN resolution would come to define the road to war and haunt Tony Blair for the rest of his premiership. ibid.
He could see no way out of the long dark tunnel that was Iraq: he considered resigning. It wasn’t just Iraq that was dragging Blair down, the Gordon Brown problem was surfacing yet again. ibid.
The UK is currently the only European nation to have suspended Article 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights which prevents such detention ... Consider the cases of the following terrorists: Walter Wolfgang, the eighty-two-year-old pensioner removed from the Labour Party Conference in September 2005 for heckling Jack Straw, and then after he tried to gain re-entry, detained under the Terrorism Act; eight-year-old John Catt stopped by police for wearing a T-shirt suggesting that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes – searched under the Terrorism Act; Sally Cameron arrested and held for four hours for walking on a cycle path in Dundee – under the Terrorism Act; Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft stopped and searched under the Terrorism Act despite being eleven years old. Ludicrous Diversion: 7/7 Bombings
Ironically, it’s not the terrorists attacking our way of life but our own government. Through the expansion of police powers and stringent anti-terrorist measures being imposed upon Britain, they are using our fear for our safety to restrict our liberty and they are using their false promises of security to erode our privacy. This is happening now. And it’s happening to every person in the UK. ibid.
Bush knew of the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. Colonel Stephen Butler
The fact that Bush followed the invasion of Afghanistan, which had sheltered al-Qaeda, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, will puzzle historians for centuries. It is as though, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR had asked Congress to declare war on Argentina. Michael Lind, He’s Only Fifth Worst 2006
‘Terrorism’ is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence – our violence – which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing ‘commentators’ of the America east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim Imam’s gown and ate yogurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yasser Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then again, a master of terror, linked by Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave. Robert Fisk
As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims. Robert Fisk, The Independent article 24th October 2010, ‘The Shaming of America’
But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America's shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 – I loved the 81 bit – is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations? ibid.
Rumsfeld actually puts Iraq on the table and says part of our response may be, should be, to attack Iraq. Bob Woodward, author Bush at War
So now we are at war, apparently, to root out the horror of New York. I would define that horror as reckless bombing without warning which leads to the mass murder of innocent people. As a result, every night on the television there are the familiar pictures of explosions in the night air, superannuated generals discussing tactics, endless talk about precision bombing, targeted terrorists, humanitarian missions, international law. And already we can see what it all means – reckless bombing without warning which leads to the mass murder of innocent people. Paul Foot, Stop the War: The Truth Machine
Before the operation, the city was [Fallujah] bombed to ‘encourage’ its evacuation, and shortly thereafter sealed off – any male of fighting age (ten years old and upwards by present occupation standards) was prevented from leaving. During that operation, white phosphorus was used against civilians since, as one US soldier explained, anything that walked or breathed was considered an enemy combatant. It is reasonable to suppose that some of the melted bodies discovered had suffered agonizing deaths as the material sizzled their flesh to the bone. Others may have been more lucky – if they inhaled the substance, it will have blistered their mouths, throats, and lungs, suffocating them to death before they had to suffer the pain of flesh melting away both inside and outside. It is indeed hard to overstate what was pitilessly inflicted on Fallujah: a hospital deliberately bombed; another occupied; more than half of the houses damaged or destroyed; 150,000 people obliged to flee to live in rough tents on the outskirts of the city as they were bombed and their water and electricity cut off; those returning to the devastated city were to be subjected to forced labor. While the US military only admitted to having killed 1,200 insurgents, initial civilian tolls were as high as 800. Lately, Iraqi NGOs and medical workers have estimated as many as 6,000 deaths, mostly civilians. Richard Seymour, article 26th November 2005, ‘The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens’