The suspects are not British citizens, but persons of Middle Eastern and Indian origin who migrated to the UK for work, i.e. as practising doctors. They had been in the UK for a year or so.

 

From what we know one doctor came from Iraq and another from Jordan, at least one other came from India. Does this not imply the possibility that they were recruited in the Middle East / India (probably Kashmir) as medical students with the explicit goal of sending them to the UK to form a sleeper cell. This looks to me like an infiltration several years in the process.

 

Why were the team so poor in carrying out their task? Well they probably could not risk going to any training schools in Pakistan / Afghanistan for fear of being picked up by security services. It was probably assumed that they were intelligent enough to work things out themselves using manuals and instruction DVDs as being doctors they should be very intelligent. However intelligence does not replace experience and that's why I think the attacks failed.

 

The attack in Glasgow was a rushed last resort after the failure in London when they realised that the game was up and they would soon be caught. 

ht*p://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6265500.stm

 

If you were hoping that British elites might be shocked into a state of awareness by the Islamic terror attacks, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Because new prime minister Gordon Brown thinks the best way to approach the subject is to crack down on speech and refuse to acknowledge reality: Brown: Don’t say terrorists are Muslims.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/pictures/ostrich-sm.jpg" width=200 border=0>Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in connection with the terrorism crisis.

The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase “war on terror” is to be dropped.

The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more “consensual” tone than existed under Tony Blair. ...

Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language. “There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,” the spokesman said. “It is important that the country remains united.”

He confirmed that the phrase “war on terror” – strongly associated with Mr Blair and US President George Bush – has been dropped.

Officials insist that no direct links with Muslim extremists have been publicly confirmed by police investigating the latest attempted terror attacks. Mr Brown himself did not refer to Muslims or Islam once in a BBC TV interview on Sunday.

Ms Smith also avoided any such reference in her statement to MPs yesterday.

She said: “Let us be clear – terrorists are criminals, whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religions. Terrorists attack the values shared by all law-abiding citizens. As a Government, as communities, as individuals, we need to ensure that the message of the terrorists is rejected.”

Tory backbencher Philip Davies said: “I don’t know what purpose is served by this. I don’t think we need pussyfoot around when talking about terrorism.”

But former Tory homeland security spokesman Patrick Mercer said: “This is quite a smart idea. We know that the vast majority of Muslims are not involved in terrorism and we have to accept there are sensitivities about these matters.”

 

 

swhitebull -  call a spade a spade, and an Islamic fanatic terrorist, an Islamic fantatic terrorist.

 

More commentary:

 

A good piece in the Daily Mail by Richard Littlejohn: The car bomb you are calling may be switched off - please try later!

It’s best not to dwell on the enormity of what has led us here. In yesterday’s Mail, Melanie Phillips summarised superbly not just the deranged evil of those who seek to destroy us, but also the frightening criminal negligence, stubborn stupidity and callous indifference of those charged with protecting us.

Don’t blame the police or the intelligence service, this is a mess made by politicians. I felt like retching when Gordon Brown sauntered on camera to announce that the safety of the British people was paramount. Here is a man who for the past ten years has been one of the two most prominent members of a government which has turned Britain into a playground for jihadists.

Labour tore up border controls, allowing a mass influx of Islamist psychopaths from all over the globe. Radical preachers and terrorist recruiting sergeants were encouraged to settle here. They were fed and watered, handed benefits, council houses and free cars.

Two years after 9/11, Captain Hook was still given a police guard to peddle his message of hatred and murder on the streets of Finsbury Park. Omar Bakri was safely tucked up in free accommodation in Edmonton and driving a brand new people carrier paid for by the mug British taxpayer.

These were but two among tens of thousands of Muslims living among us who make no secret that they hate Western society and intend to establish an Islamic state in Britain. Yet Gordon Brown’s government wasn’t interested.

Those of us who had the audacity to question the folly of allowing Islamic radicalism to foment in this country in the name of ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ were smeared as ‘racists’.

And here’s the column mentioned above, by Melanie Phillips: Fatal flaws in our defence against terror.

Far from damping this fire down, the Government itself is fanning the flames still further. Because it refuses to acknowledge that this is an Islamic religious war against the West, the political and security establishment is actually trying to use Islamist religious extremism as an antidote to Islamist terrorism without acknowledging the unbroken line between the two.

So it is actually promoting, as role models for impressionable young Muslims seeking a purpose to their lives, Islamists who claim not to support violence - even though they spout hatred of the West, Americans and Jews.

Ludicrously, it has even recruited Islamist radicals into government - to act as advisors against Islamic radicalism.

This lethal misjudgment has had disastrous results. Extremism has multiplied. The police themselves have been compromised. As the former radical Ed Husain has written, Islamists who work closely with the police to “represent Muslims” have been tipping off jihadists about police activities.

And the Government’s refusal to outlaw Hizb ut Tahrir, on the spurious grounds that although it promotes the Islamic takeover of Britain it is not committed to violence, has meant that this group continues to recruit thousands of students on campus to the cause of jihad against the West.

This is madness. The result is that, while most British Muslims say they would have no truck with terrorism or violence, an insupportable number of them do endorse appalling ideas.

 

swhitebull

News over here in Oz has British police tipping off our fed police which led to a doctor from the Gold Coast (Indian descent) being apprehended at Brisbane Airport trying to get back to India just after the attacks in Britain.  Another OS trained doctor has helped with inquiries and has been released.  Apparently the airport guy had recent phone comms with the Brit attackers and, although it is not out of the question that the relationship and correspondence was purely professional, he is being kep in custody under new terror laws and is to be interogated by Oz feds and a senior Brit officer who is already on his way down under.

 

Our terror alert status is unchanged but they have put some extra precautionary security around key installations.

Quick - unless you're Gordon Brown.

 

 

What links the 8 terror suspects together? Is it their profession? Is is that they were all on UK soil? Nah,  is it that their religion is.... is...is....?  NAh,  can't be the Religion of Peace, cant even think that, since it wouldnt be politically correct.

 

 

Some comments on Brown's arse up in the end ostrich-behavior:

 

 

Five guys named Mo   [Mark Steyn]

If you're a police commissioner or a government minister, what's the first thing you should do if a chap with a name such as "Mohammed Asha" or "Muhammad Hanif" turns up in the news in connection with some wacky novelty such as a flaming Jeep Cherokee crashing through the airport concourse?

Britain's new Prime Minister knew exactly what to do:

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word ‘Muslim’ in connection with the terrorism crisis... The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more ‘consensual’ tone than existed under Tony Blair.

So did the new Home Secretary :

Any attempt to identify a murderous ideology with a great faith such as Islam is wrong, and needs to be denied.

In less than six years this has become a time-honored tradition. After the 2005 Tube bombings, the first reaction of Brian Paddick, the deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was to declare that "Islam and terrorism don't go together." After the 2006 Toronto plot to behead the Prime Minister, the Canadian Intelligence Service's assistant director of operations, Luc Portelance, announced that "it is important to know that this operation in no way reflects negatively on any specific community, or ethnocultural group in Canada."

In the old days, these coppers would have been looking for the modus operandi, patterns of behavior. But now every little incident anywhere on the planet apparently testifies merely to the glorious mosaic of our multicultural societies. Or as the Associated Press puts it, "Diverse Group Allegedly In British Plot":

LONDON - They had diverse backgrounds, coming from countries around the globe, but all shared youth and worked in medicine...

What I can't for the life of me understand is why isn't Britain's, indeed Europe's Muslim population, on the streets protesting against Al Qaida and all that it stands for?  Not once have I seen a demonstration by Muslims against Islamic terror - this is deeply disturbing to me.

An interesting point.  There were certainly many Western demonstrations against the Iraq war in contrast.

However, I don't recall Catholics protesting the IRA.

I don't think the IRA ever pretended to represent Catholocism or to act in the name of it and I'm pretty sure there were protests in N.I. in support of peace from both Catholics and Protestants.

I recall the instance of a black man being beaten in E. Germany and he claimed his assailants were Neo-Nazis (turns out later that they weren't) and there were thousands out in the streets protesting against Nazism.  This was "just" a beating but bombs in civilian areas - that's a different sort of violence.

Are these attacks related to his recent Knighthood?