British born and bred, brought up here and totally aware of British life and values". He dismissed suggestions, both by security sources and in the media, that the terrorists were possibly Algerian or Moroccan.Yesterday's Sunday Telegraph had presented the completely opposite view.
Lord Stevens, writing in the News of the World, said he believed that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama bin Laden's training camps. Of these, he believed that there were now about 200 committed "home-grown terrorists willing and able to slaughter innocents for their perverted view of Islam".
Ministers now believe that the bombings - which left at least 49 people dead in Britain's worst terrorist attack - were the work of a "very, very small number" of individuals who arrived from mainland Europe or North Africa on false passports within the past six months.We still don't know, but the answer to this question is crucial.
If the terrorists were homegrown, that means that some British citizens are willing to kill large numbers of their fellow citizens because they disagree with the decisions taken by the democratically elected (and recently re-elected) government. Many commentators have said that the attacks are the result of "the Iraq war chickens coming home to roost", but if these people are not foreign agents coming from the Middle East or wherever, but actual British citizens, then that claim has far less credibility.
There would be almost no link to Iraq other than the fact that some British people hate their government and, by extension, their fellow citizens so much that they're willing to commit mass murder as a form of anti-war protest.
The Aryan Nation is also against the Iraq War, but I hardly think the Bush Administration would give their views a moment's thought even if they managed to carry out another Oklahoma City. The leader of the Aryan Nation has said he'd like ties with al Qaeda. How different is his group from some homegrown British Islamic extremist group that may be linked or may only aspire to being linked to al Qaeda?
If the media connected the people who carried out last Thursday's attacks with US white supremacists (as I think they probably should) the "I told you so's" would be far more muted.
It may still turn out that Thursday was a foreign plot, but I think too few people have thought through the implications if Thursday's attack was the work of homegrown extremists.
