This serious stuff. It isn’t just a matter of “not connecting the dots” — but not noticing the lines. The New York Times:
Britain’s security agencies appeared headed for a period of deeply uncomfortable scrutiny after the government said Sunday that it had been aware for more than two years that one of the two men suspected of hacking an off-duty British soldier to death on a London street had ties to Al Qaeda.
Put this in the context of the Boston Marathon bombing as well and we’re starting to see a pattern among intelligence agencies of either sitting on information or balking on stepping up surveillance on likely terrorist security threats.
A Foreign Office spokesman confirmed that the ministry had provided “consular assistance” in Kenya in 2010 to the man, Michael Adebolajo, 28, a British citizen of Nigerian descent. He had been arrested by the Kenyan police on suspicion of planning to join Al Shabab, an extremist group in Somalia that Britain has classified as a terrorist organization.
Mr. Adebolajo and the other suspect in the London attack — Michael Adebowale, 22, also of Nigerian origin — have been under armed police guard in separate London hospitals since the attack last Wednesday. The soldier — Lee Rigby, 25 — was run down by a car on the sidewalk outside an army barracks, then attacked with meat cleavers. Police officers arriving on the scene shot and wounded the two suspects.
The grisly brutality of the attack shocked Britain as few events have since the bombings on the London transit system on July 7, 2005, which killed 52 passengers and the four bombers. Sunday newspaper headlines about the case focused on what the government knew about Mr. Adebolajo and Mr. Adebowale and why no action was taken that might have prevented Mr. Rigby’s death.
And the Times piece gets more potentially damning as you read it:
In a statement on Sunday, the Foreign Office spokesman sought to tamp down the controversy, saying that the office’s role in the events in Kenya in November 2010 was limited to consular assistance to Mr. Adebolajo, “as normal for British nationals.” It did not address the Kenyan government’s statements that Mr. Adebolajo, using a false name, had been arrested near the Somali border with five Kenyan nationals while carrying Shabab literature.
The statement also did not address a claim made on BBC television on Friday night that Mr. Adebolajo spoke of rebuffing an attempt by MI5, the British domestic security agency, to recruit him. The claim was made by Ibrahim Hassan, a man who says he has links to Islamic extremist groups. Mr. Hassan said Mr. Adebolajo had told him that the recruitment attempt was made after he was deported from Kenya. British security officials quoted in the Sunday newspapers said that efforts to recruit Islamic extremists in such circumstances were common.
There’s more so go to the link to read it all.
A motorist that missed this many signals would likely have an accident record that would lead to a cancellation of his insurance.
On the other hand, the claim about Abedolajo — who provided the ultimate nightmare image of a terrorist murderer standing in the street warning that your government won’t protect you, holding a knife and a cleaver in his red-stained hands while blood literally flowed down the side of the street — could be false and a ploy to make things difficult for the M15.
But as in the case of the Boston bombings, there will be a lot of “what ifs” raised about early signs that there was a deadly person who authorities had serious grounds to suspect was a deadly person walking in a country’s midst.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.