MI5 starved of funds before terorist attacks

Independent:

MI5 had such limited resources in the run-up to the July 7 terror attacks on London that it was only able to properly track less than 1 per cent of its suspects, an official report concluded yesterday.

The document published by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which monitors the security services on behalf of Parliament, revealed that despite the raised terrorism threat in the wake of September 11, MI5's funding had barely increased in the three years before the attacks on London's transport system in 2005. This left the agency "playing catch up, moving resources from one plot to the next" and with leads it could only follow up "when it had time". The report also points out that, since the July 7 bombings, MI5's funding has more than doubled.

The lack of funding was one of several revelations in the report, which concluded that the security services could have done nothing to prevent the attacks. This is despite the fact that the police and MI5 had come into contact with two of the bombers on a number of occasions before the 2005 atrocities, which killed 52 people and remain the biggest terror attacks ever carried out on British soil.

The ringleader of the plot, Mohammad Sidique Khan, had come to the attention of the police and MI5 at least nine times. He and fellow bomber Shehzad Tanweer were observed meeting Omar Khayam, now a convicted terrorist, then the object of an MI5 terror investigation, three times. They were dismissed as "small-time fraudsters".

The report says: "MI5 had seen two of the July 7 bombers and it is therefore frustrating to think how close they could have been to preventing the attacks." But the committee said that it is only with the benefit of hindsight that the attacks could have been prevented, adding: "Having taken everything into account, and having looked at all the evidence in considerable detail, we cannot criticise the judgements made by MI5 and the police based on the information they had and their priorities at the time." They were, the report said, "understandable and reasonable".

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I think the judgment of the government funding priorities should be questioned. While the UK pays generous welfare to the Islamic religious bigot preachers of hate that they cannot deport, they are starving their internal and external security forces Their investment of social welfare sinkhole programs has made them poorer as well as less safe.