Sir Ian Blair lies to Parliament (again) Jacqui Smith lies to DailyMail, Max Mosley the jihadist ? Joining the Dots in the War on Counter Terrorism

At 11.06 am on the morning of April 22nd 2008 the House of Commons Committee considering the Counter terrorism Bill welcomed as witnesses Sir Ian Blair Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis and Bob Quick, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, with responsibility for counter-terrorism. Bob was of copurse also chairman of the ACPO-TAM committee having replaced the previous occupant "Randy" Andy Hayman who left in rather hurrid circumstances. See Dec 10th 2007 Just Imagine , Andy Hayman CBE was in charge of terrism - and de Menezes murder - what a wanker see also "Randy" Andy - Sex in the City suffering from what is increasingly known as Chief Constable Syndrome, a deeply felt urge to shag the staff, then promote them and also fiddle expenses, see also Randy Andy Hayman and the luscious female IPCC textee and phone sex enthusiast

The Committee was considering the proposition to extend the period of detention without charge from 28 to 42 days.

Q 9 Martin Salter: Once again, Mr. Bercow, I will obey your strictures, but it is probably helpful if you ask us to be pithy in a pithy manner—that is me done, now.

I have three quick questions for Sir Ian Blair and Mr. Quick. I know that you put some of this evidence in front of the Select Committee on Home Affairs a few months ago, but, for the benefit of the Committee, could you indicate how many serious terrorist plots the police and the security services have disrupted since the London bombings of 7/7?

Sir Ian Blair: I will stretch to something like 12, but where would you get to, Bob?

Bob Quick: I am still being briefed on the very complex history to fighting terrorism, but my understanding is in the order of about 15 occasions. On some very recent occasions we have been able to disrupt terrorism by some sophisticated and unusual methods. That is what we do. We are constantly seeking opportunities to disrupt. That is part of a multi-pronged attack on terrorist activity.

Martin Salter persisted to discover how serious such terrorist plots were in terms of the potential loss of life ..

Q 10 Martin Salter: Without compromising, allowing me to pry or giving aid to people who would wish to do us harm, could you indicate to the Committee how many of those 12 to 15 serious plots would, had they been successful, have resulted in a loss of life in excess of 100?

Sir Ian Blair: If you had asked about loss of life, I would be reasonably comfortable, but to put a figure of 100—

Martin Salter: Significant loss of life.

Sir Ian Blair: I would have thought that most of those incidents would have resulted in that.

Which suggests that Sir Ian Blair had a sufficient grasp of the plots to which he referred to arrive at such a detaild response.

How curious then that in the Sunday Times on May 4th David Leppard reported that ..

"Scotland Yard said Blair accepted he had made a mistake. His office had contacted the committee’s clerk to clarify the error as soon as it became known.

It said: “Any suggestions that the commissioner or assistant commissioner Bob Quick deliberately misled the committee whilst giving evidence on April 22 is completely wrong. A corrective statement was issued to the Press Association.”

June 10 or 11 has been identified as the crunch time for the Counter Terrorism Bill. The Herald today quotes the Prime Minister's spokesman, asked if the UK Government was preparing the ground for a tactical retreat, insisted: "There can be no question of any compromise on 42 days."
They also add..."While the police are backing the UK Government, other forces are set against it, including Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General, Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Conservatives, LibDems and Nationalists. On Wednesday, Westminster's Joint Committee on Human Rights, made up of MPs and peers, said an extended detention limit was "unnecessary".

We should not forget the golden days of terror plot guessing when the fragrant, charming and beguilingly beautiful Eliza Manningham-Buller,(Now Baroness) the director general of MI5, (now exposed as the grisly lash wielding nazi tormentor of Max Mosley in today's papers) warned recently as last February that there were more than 1,600 "identified individuals" actively engaged in plotting terrorist attacks. There were 200 known networks involved in at least 30 terrorist plots. Daily Telegraph (Information leaked from a private lecture given at London University in November 2006.)

Oddly enough on April 14th 2008 (8 days before the Ian'n'Bob show at Westminster) the Daily Mail 14th April 2008 had the headline Terror risk is still severe warns Jacqui Smith in effort to drum up support for tighter detention laws which lead a story that commenced "The threat of a terror attack in Britain is "severe" and "growing", the Home Secretary declared yesterday. Jacqui Smith said that police and security services were monitoring 2,000 individual fanatics, 200 terror networks and 30 plots. " almost identuical to what Miss Whiplash said a year earlier.

Perhaps we should all be grateful that Sir Ian has managed to get the number of "plots" down from 30 to only 6... and without extending detention without charge. Why wait 42 days ? ... maybe there is a clue in the Thought of Chair Leg lady Whiplash ...

PS Miss Whiplash will of course be remembered when asked by a House of Lords Committee about obtaining information by torture "Eliza Manningham-Buller in one of her submissions said : 'We're not going to ask, because that would make things difficult.'

PPS The Monbiot Calculus. Think of a number ... er... make it bigger.