Salon: Real threat or fake terror?

"...On Aug. 10, British authorities announced that they had made 24 arrests in a plot to use liquid explosives to down airliners en route to the United States from London. Stepping off Air Force One in Wisconsin that morning, the news from Britain still fresh, President Bush called the arrests "a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists." He warned Americans to be on the alert. "We're still not completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in."

Less than 24 hours later, police in Caro, population 4,000, stopped the three men outside a local Wal-Mart with roughly 1,000 cheap cellphones in their van. It was 2 a.m., and they had just purchased 80 cellphones from the store, raising the suspicion of an employee. Less than a year before, federal law enforcement officials had warned their state and local counterparts to be on the lookout for people buying large numbers of prepaid cellphones, since the phones could be used as detonators. The Caro police arrested the Othmans and Muhareb.

As Britain's outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig Murray helped expose vicious human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of Islam Karimov. He is now a prominent critic of Western policy in the region.

Murray is doing an excellent job critically analysing the "Liquid Terror Plot". Right now he's verbally jousting with the President of the UK's Association of Chief Police Officers, but check out his posts over the last couple of weeks, good stuff;

Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, appears appalled (Letters, August 19) that I had the temerity to suggest that the police and security services are becoming politicised. Yet in this same letter, he specifically states that the police last year requested longer periods of detention without charge, and he argues that "our core criminal-justice processes ... must continue to evolve to adapt to the very real threat we now face". Mr Jones is a policeman with a deeply political agenda. His "evolution" is a continual increase of police powers and diminution of the rights of the individual. There could be no clearer example than his letter of what it is that makes me uneasy about the politicisation of the police. It used to be their job to enforce the laws, not tell us what they "must" be.