Craig Murray the former ambassador at odds with the UK government's actions in relation to the "war on terror", is getting skeptical about whether the recent arrests related to a planned large scale terrorist attack targeting multiple airliners have any substance beyond a public relations exercise for the government. I've been taking a break from writing and my reading in the past couple of weeks has been limited exclusively to entertaining fiction, so I haven't caught up with all this yet but Murray's piece is worth a read.
"In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. More than 1,000 British Muslims have been arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, but only 12% have been charged. That is harassment on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% were acquitted. Most of the few convictions - just over 2% of arrests - are nothing to do with terrorism, but some minor offence the police happened upon while trawling through the lives they have wrecked.
Plainly, Islamist terrorism does exist. But its growth is encouraged by our adherence to neocon foreign policy, by our support for appalling regimes abroad, and by our trampling on the rights of Muslims in the UK."
