I came across a couple of links on media coverage of the London bombings in July 2005 that I hadn’t previously discovered. Maybe you missed them too.

Mike Thelwall did some research into bloggers and the bombings which ‘scratches the surface’ of the use of blogs to cover a major news event:

Interestingly there was:

"…a fall in the percentage share of the top linked-to sites at the time of the attacks, perhaps reflecting a widening of the search for information rather than a sudden reliance on a few authoritative sources."

And we learn that:

"…in comparison to major media representations of the London attacks, blog posts give insights into contemporary discussions and can highlight issues, such as the alleged Iraq connection which may be forgotten or deliberately ignored in hindsight."

I also picked up this article from Media Guardian earlier in the year in which Sky News’ John Ryley claims that Sky’s coverage of the attacks influenced BBC policy on breaking news:

"BBC bosses have admitted that they rewrote their policy after handling of the attacks…News does not usually break cleanly. Big stories emerge in dribs and drabs, bits of information from many sources. Often conflicting and confusing … when a big story breaks we report new information, clearly attributed to its source, even if things turn out differently…It was precisely that policy that the BBC decided to adopt after the London bombings." 

US Army and Milblogging

US military bloggers were meeting up at Blog World Expo last week and I see there was a panel entitled, ‘Milblogs: Not your standard news source’, which I’ll have to find out some more about. But in the meantime, Public Affairs Officer, Lindy Kyzer, explains how relations have changed between milbloggers and US Army.

Bonus Afghanistan ‘section‘ (OK. It’s one link. But that’s enough for a section on this blog)

Excuse the in-house appreciation club but Frontline blogger, Alex Strick van Linschoten, and colleague Felix Kuehn, have a great piece up on Foreign Policy drawn from their experience of living in Kandahar. Well worth a read.

Leaving aside various ineffectual plots, fundraising and propaganda efforts, the so-called Doctors’ Plot was at least the fourth serious attempt at inflicting mass civilian casualties by the supporters of Osama bin Laden. There are historical, social and political reasons why this should be the case as is demonstrated by the four main bombing conspiracies.

The 7/7 bombers and those convicted in the Operation Crevice inquiry for conspiring to bomb the Bluewater Shopping Centre were primarily made up of young British-born Muslims whose families had emigrated to Britain many years ago from Kashmir in northern Pakistan. The importance of Kashmir to this group of al-Qaeda sympathisers – many of them associated with the now-banned al-Muhajiroun organisation – was underlined by the arrest of Dhiren Bharot in 2004 – now serving a 30-year prison sentence.

Bharot first travelled to Kashmir in the mid-1990s and wrote a book – The Army of Madihah in Kashmir – recalling his own experiences fighting the Indian Army. “Initally he fought in Indian-occupied Kashmir against the Hindu oppressors for a while, before returning. One of the few not martyred from his group…”, the blurb on the book’s cover reads.

Bharot’s book found an eager audience amongst aspiring young jihadis in Britain. Others were to follow in his footsteps, including Mohammed Siddique Khan, leader of the 7/7 bombers, Omar Khyam of the Crevice plotters and Mohammed Junaid Babar, who was a member of al-Muhajiroun in New York, but connected to the Crevice plotters.

With more than 400,000 people travelling from Britain to Pakistan every year it has been relatively easy for fired-up young zealots to visit Kashmir or the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, get military training and return to await a call. The 21/7 bombers came from an entirely different background. All four men convicted in July arrived in Britain from the Horn of Africa as child refugees.

In Britain they were radicalised by the other major pole of attraction for young Muslims – the Finsbury Park mosque and its now imprisoned leader, Egyptian-born cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri. Unlike those of Pakistani origin, this cell had more of a background in petty crime and street gangs. Much of their youth had been spent clubbing and taking drugs. Formally uneducated, they lived primarily on state handouts and spent much of their time at the Finsbury Park mosque.

Their leader, Mukhtar Ibrahim, who was initially radicalised while serving a prison sentence, travelled to Pakistan in 2004 and is alleged to have spent time with Mohammed Siddique Khan at a  training camp where both men learned to make the hydrogen peroxide bombs they eventually used in London. The judge at his trial said he had little doubt that the 7/7 and 21/7 attacks were coordinated, probably by senior al-Qaeda figure Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi who is now in Guantanamo.

The Doctors’ Plot appears to have involved yet another kind of group. All the members of this group were recent arrivals in the UK, of Indian and Arab background. Highly-educated professonals, it is less likely that any of them have spent time in jihadi training camps in Pakistan.

Their chosen method of attack was crude and ineffective. We can see from these bare facts that al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan and its main franchise in Iraq have had a close relationship with the attacks in Britain. They give the lie to the old saw from Omar Bakri Mohammed, the leader of al-Muhaijroun, who used to argue, before he fled to Lebanon, that Muslims in Britain lived under a ‘Covenant of Security’ that guaranteed no attacks in exchange for the right to propagandise their beliefs.
 
The four attacks also demonstrate that al-Qaeda will adapt its methods to suit particular conditions, using different social groups and varying its techniques. The real question now is not so much whether it can continue to find willing recruits to carry out further atrocities in Britain – in the short term the answer is yes – but where are we on the curve? Are we likely to see a growing number of attacks or will they begin to diminish? Looked at purely from the standpoint of effectiveness, most of the attacks in Britain have been dismal failures. Only the 7/7 bombers managed to carry out their missions as planned.

The rest have resulted in capture and long prison sentences. More than 20 would-be ‘martyrs’ are now in prison serving life sentences where they are unlikely to provide inspiration to a new generation. What is remarkable about all four conspiracies is that significant moments in all the plots were captured on surveillance cameras. This is unprecedented. Compare this situation to the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland where surveillance footage of IRA volunteers in action is almost unknown. Like it or not, Britain’s thousands of security cameras now mean that anonymity for bombers is almost impossible.

And while the Security Service, MI5, has rightly been criticised for its failure to stop several of these attacks, it is also true that very few of the conspirators were completely unknown to them. This demonstrates that the watchers are looking in the right places.