They Need Your Fear: Jury Verdicts Overruled

In the spring of 2009, three Muslims were sentenced for life, for having allegedly intended to blow up a load of planes over America. My book Terror on the Tube, Behind the Veil of 7/7 has a chapter on their earlier trial, in 2008: ‘The Heathrow liquid bombs Hoax.’ The people arrested did not actually have plane tickets, nor had they made any bombs. They were put on trial in 2008, and the jury did not find them guilty of this allegedly-intended crime. Some were convicted of having planned an event that might have caused some ‘terror’ but they were not found guilty of the alleged airplane plot.

That should have been the end of it. There used to be a legal principle called ‘Double Jeopardy’ that prevented you from being tried twice for the same crime. If a jury found you innocent, or rather failed to find you guilty, that was it: but, no longer! Another big, Marathon three-month trial has now taken place, costing the British taxpayer over twenty million pounds, and this time three of them have been found guilty. The pretext for the re-trial was that some e-mails had not been cited in the previous trial! Nowadays, the Crown can override the Double Jeopardy principle if it reckons some ‘substantial’ new evidence has arisen: some e-mails, withheld from the first trial, were used as a basis for having a new one. These e-mails did not show a great deal.

The reports on this second trial did not go into the nature of the explosives intended-to-be-used, maybe because the ‘binary munitions’ story of the earlier trial had been ridiculed rather thoroughly. They were intending, it was said, to bring hydrogen peroxide, sulphuric acid and acetone into a plane toilet, and … There was a gee-whiz explosive called TATP which would allegedly have been formed, except that this would have been really quite impossible.

The story ends: Muslims go to jail, and we the people are supposed to be grateful for being ‘rescued’ from terror. That’s why we are not allowed to bring toothpaste onto the plane at Heathrow. Mothers were forbidden to bring milk on board, to feed their baby. Such an event as this is called in ToT ‘phantom terror’, in that no-one is injured and nothing actually happens, but fear is generated. Such phantom-terror events happen in the wake of real terror, in this case the July 7th London bombings, and they provide an aftermath of fear-and-terror.

Some readers may recall a repeated trial somewhat like this, in the case of the ‘July 7th’ trial. In the summer of 2008 a trial of three friends of the four alleged London bombers took place at Kingston County court, it was a huge affair for over three months. The charge was absurd, concerning the Victorian ‘Explosive Substances Act’ and the Jury did not in the end find them guilty. So, the Crown obtained a new jury and had a retrial! Another marathon three month trial, and this time the jury did agree – they were innocent!

Or at least, they were innocent of conspiring to cause explosions’ in London – the original charge. But, that did not mean they could go home, O no! Two of them were found guilty, on the grounds that they were going to attend a terror training camp in Pakistan. Where did that charge suddenly come from? Never mind that Waheed Ali, one of the accused, had explained to the court, that training to fight for the liberation of Kashmir (that’s what I heard they were training to do, while attending the Kingston Trial of 2008) was OK by Islamic principles, and was a world apart from ‘terrorism.’ But, the trial had not been about such a charge, had it? (1) What really matters in a trial like this, it seems to me, is that the meme of Islamic terror is reinforced, but also that no-one gets to talk to the key figures: there is no stage at which you or I can get to hear the viewpoint of these young men, over what is going on.

The only previous person charged over the 7/7 London bombings had been the chemist Al-Nashar, Leeds biochemistry graduate. His flat, which he rented out to Hasib Hussein, was dubbed the ‘bomb’ factory. He was arrested in Cairo, then released with no charges. His laptop was confiscated and found to be full of music: not bomb-making recipies, not Al-Quaeda contacts, but just – classical music. This situation was resembling the aftermath of 9/11 where, in the years that followed, the FBI seemed incapable of pressing charges against anyone.

Concerning the retrial of the three friends of the Four, its sole notable feature was the arrest of Muad’Dib in Ireland, immediately before it began in January 2008, on the grounds that he had sent some copies of his DVD ‘The Ripple Effect’ to the trial – a normal and traditional feature of British justice (see section on Muad’Dib), where citizens contribute material they believe may be relevant..

For these mega- three month fake-terror trials, no observers can sit though them. No independent observer prepares a resumé of their arguments. The press have to accept the summaries they are given, which contain the prepared ‘meaning’ of the trial, and they simply regurgitate that. I went to the Kingston Trial of 2008 quite a bit, because the BBC kept dragging me over there, for a Conspiracy Files program they were making (they didn’t show any of this – their goal turned out to be, to trash me for their program: guess I should have known that in advance). For this reason my chapter 11 on this trial is quite comprehensive: it describes a vital turning-point in the whole 7/7 story, and I may have been the only person to have an in-depth conversation with the brother-in-law of Mohammed ‘Sid’ Khan, one evening up in Leeds. (My visit to Leeds was more or less ruined by having the BBC film crew following me around, who insisted on coming, and made everyone thoroughly suspicious, quite understandably. But, at least I managed to shake them off for that evening) Those two things enabled me to exercise proper judgement and discernment, concerning the flood of official misinformation that was coming out in 2008, as the story twisted and turned.

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1. Here is Daniel Obachike’s blog-comment on that trial, which sums it up quite well: ‘So MI5’s crude attempts to apportion blame for the 54 killed in the London bombings has failed to convince anyone, judges and jury included. The 3 men charged with assisting a team of alleged suicide bombers had the charges dismissed. The case was based on footage of them in London on a trip with Siddeque Khan.
Yet the British media were told the trio’s fingerprints linked them with alleged bus bomber Hasib Hussain and Jermain Lindsey.
Then, in a comedic twist to justify £100 million of taxpayers money spent on this diversion, 2 of the aquitted were given 7 years for attempting to fly to Pakistan.’

31.3.2010

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