Threat to UK is still serious 20 years on, warns ex-spymaster
These attacks killed 2,977 innocents… but condemned millions more to live in fear
A FORMER MI6 boss has warned that Britain’s state of high terror alert is “almost a routine situation”.
Sir Richard Dearlove said we still face a “serious terrorist threat” 20 years after the 9/11 attacks triggered a new era of menace.
The former head of the Security Service, in post at the time of the 2001 atrocities, said his former colleagues have done a brilliant job making the UK safer since the World Trade Center outrage.
But he fears the Taliban’s return in Afghanistan will weaken our security and inspire “lone wolf” attacks on big occasions like this weekend’s 20th anniversary.
Sir Richard, who is speaking at a memorial conference today organised by educational charity SINCE 9/11, spoke of his “painful” memories. He paid tribute to close friend John P O’Neill, a former FBI agent killed while he was trying to evacuate the North Tower.
Sir Richard said: “We’re at a pretty high level of terrorist alert – not the highest, one or two down.
“I hate to say it but it’s almost a routine situation. We’ve got used to living with that.
“I think we are safer because we have created a more thorough way of coping with the problem. The men and women of intelligence and security have done a very good job, quietly and discreetly protecting the nation. But there is still a serious terrorist threat to the UK and we can’t afford to be complacent.”
Sir Richard, who held the MI6 chief’s post – informally known as “C” – from 1999 to 2004, said the Taliban’s sweep to power last month is worrying.
He added: “There’s no question that what’s happening in Afghanistan may in the future cause problems again for our national security. I personally find it hard to believe
they are going to take a tough line against extremism.
“It may be that we once again face the type of terrorism that has a base – with organisation and training capability.
“That risk has shrunk but the other problem is the inspiration individual extremists might take from the Taliban’s success.
“One might face more lone wolf attacks as opposed to serious conspiracies which are planned and put together over time. Obviously, on an important anniversary that may inspire individuals.”
Sir Richard said he first learnt of the 9/11 Al-Qaeda strike as he flew back from Sweden. “I didn’t actually know what had happened until I got off the plane at Heathrow. I was whisked off immediately to 10 Downing Street.
“Then within 36 hours I was on the only flight across the Atlantic en route to Washington to see the Americans.”
He found out later that his close friend John, a counter terror expert who had recently retired from the FBI, was missing in the carnage of the World Trade Center. John had just been appointed head of security at the North Tower.
The two agents had recently worked together, tracking a gang who attacked the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Sir Richard rememsafe bered: “It was months before they found his remains.
“John had such an important role in countering terrorism. He was a great American hero and a great patriot and a great professional.”
The 76-year-old chair of trustees at the University of London finds footage from the Twin Towers too chilling to watch.
He said: “The fact that it was played out gradually on television and you actually saw it happen. I can’t watch the straight footage. It’s so painful. It takes me back.”
The SINCE 9/11 charity was set up 10 years ago to educate children and young people about the dangers of extremism and hate.
Other speakers at today’s conference include historian and broadcaster Simon Schama and poet Stephen Morrison-Burke. Boris Johnson has sent a video message.
The charity’s founder Peter Rosengard said: “We teach the events, causes and consequences of 9/11 to children.
“But we’re not just about 9/11. We cover extremism, racism, white supremacism, all of which can lead onto terrorism.”
HORRIFIC and almost inconceivable, the images are seared into our collective consciousness. The World Trade Center’s North Tower ablaze after being struck by a commercial jet. A second plane crashing into the South Tower. Innocents leaping to their deaths by the hundreds from upper storey windows. The towers’ catastrophic collapse. Survivors – all too few – emerging ghost-like from the billowing clouds of dust and debris.
The attack on this day 20 years ago by Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda, which killed 2,977 in New York, Washington, DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, struck fear into the hearts of Americans and sent shockwaves across the world that are still being felt today.
It sucked Britain into a retaliatory “War on Terror” that two decades later rages on.
Yet as Americans have seen their civil rights whittled away and democracy diminished in the name of fighting terrorism, many ask: have the terrorists already won? If the objective of terrorism is to spread fear, weaken democracy and undermine the enemy’s way of life, the answer is a resounding yes.
America’s response to 9/11 has handed Al-Qaeda its most substantial victory, stoking the furnaces of fear – and where the US leads, Britain and the rest of the world has followed.
“In the end, bin Laden won,” says Oscarwinning documentary maker Michael Moore. “He couldn’t have done it without us. There was no plan to plunder and steal our natural resources. He simply sought to bankrupt us – financially, politically, spiritually. Bin Laden wanted to blow up the idea of America, not the Mall of America.”
Since 9/11, there is no denying that America – the “land of the free and the home of the brave” – has become more insular, more xenophobic, and more of a police state.
The 7/7 London bombing attack in 2005 that left 52 dead, and the subsequent arrest of several terror cells within the UK, helped propel Britain to follow in America’s footsteps: more insular and spied upon by the ubiquitous network of CCTV cameras.
AIR travel has become an ordeal, requiring a stripping of shoes, belts, watches and dignity. Toiletries, only allowed in small quantities, have to be zipped into transparent plastic bags. Even bottles of baby milk are under suspicion.
America’s police have become militarised, equipped with armoured vehicles and sub-machine guns that would be the envy of many armies. Faced with such heavily-armed police, peaceful street protests have increasingly become violent conflagrations.
Civil liberties have been curtailed to allow greater police powers, ironically under the name of the Patriot Act. Meanwhile, CCTV surveillance has exploded across America, and it is even more widespread in the UK. Last month it was reported that London has more spy cameras than any city in the Western World – and all the other cities in the global top 20 were in China and India.
Yet Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, with his small force of terrorists, never expected to militarily defeat the US and establish a global Caliphate. To claim victory he only needed to instil enough fear in America to force it into foreign wars that bled the US, with a crippling cost in lives, and to the economy and morale, provoking repressive restrictions against its own people. “The usual object of terror is to draw one’s opponent into repressive blunders,” wrote
Lawrence Wright in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Looming Tower. “Bin Laden caught America at a vulnerable and unfortunate moment in history.”
The US’s longest-ever war ended last month with its ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan, a conflict that ended in failure and chaos as the Taliban overran the nation before US troops had a chance to leave.
Bin Laden knew that he was waging a cultural war, turning
America against itself. “It is obvious that the media war in this country is one of the strongest methods,” he wrote in a 2002 letter to Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Barely two months after the 9/11 attacks. Ellen DeGeneres hosted TV’s Emmy Awards in November 2001, telling viewers that the show had to go on, “because to do otherwise is to let the terrorists win”.
It was the catch-all excuse used to justify the invasion of Iraq, the authoritarian Patriot Act, the use of torture, the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists held for years without trial, and indiscriminate spying on American citizens. 9/11 sparked a surge in patriotism that gave the US government
cover for its attack on civil liberties: Walmart alone sold 116,000 Stars and Stripes flags that day. This was accompanied by an equal rise in xenophobia and Islamophobia, which found its apotheosis in President Donald Trump, who in 2017 banned immigration to America from seven Muslim-majority countries, claiming that ISIS and Al-Qaeda operated there.
This was despite no immigrant from those nations having taken part in the 9/11 attacks, or any terror attack on US soil.Trump’s immigration crackdown was later extended to asylum seekers from Central and South America.
“We have to be safe,” said Trump, accusing immigrants of being murderers, rapists and criminals, despite crime figures showing a lower incidence of offences than by American citizens.
US military spending rose 48 per cent since 9/11 to fuel the war on terror, leaving domestic social welfare programmes desperate for cash.
In response to 9/11, America and Britain invaded Iraq, in the mistaken belief that it harboured Al-Qaeda terrorists, and that its dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Not one was found. The Allies soon turned to Afghanistan, which had been nurturing terrorists, but having speedily dispatched the Taliban, the US transformed its mission to nation-building, with disastrous results. Departing Kabul last month in abject failure, US troops left behind resentment against their country and a fresh breeding ground for terrorism, emboldening enemies of the West. Only yesterday, the head of MI5, Ken McCallum, warned that the Taliban takeover is likely to
have been a “morale boost” for extremists, while revealing that 31 late-stage terrorist attack plots had been foiled in the UK in the past four years, including a growing number from the far-Right. Killing Osama bin Laden in his Pakistan bolt-hole in 2011 was a symbolic victory, but did little to halt his armed jihad’s murderous ambitions. While America’s war on terror has reduced the risk of attack from overseas, ironically it has left the US more vulnerable to assaults from within.
“For the last 20 years our biggest concern was international terrorism – ISIS,Al-Qaeda,” said former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton earlier this year. “Now it’s here, and it’s us, and it’s the citizens of the United States.”
DOMESTIC terror arrests have outnumbered international arrests for the past four years. It is “much, much harder” to battle domestic terrorism, and the US lacks the “tools to battle domestic terrorism,” said Bratton.
The insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021, in a bid to prevent the democratic election of President Joe Biden, was almost entirely enacted by US citizens.
“I have not seen a more dangerous threat to democracy,” said US Attorney General Merrick Garland, revealing that white supremacists are now America’s biggest terror threat.
As the war on terror expanded, American minds have been closing. The wealthy retreated to their private estates and high-rise towers behind security gates and doormen, exacerbating economic inequality and fracturing society.
On university campuses the walls and gates were deemed insufficient, and many created “safe spaces” where those with ideas frightening to students and lecturers are not welcome.
In Europe, nations built walls to keep immigrants out, and in 2016 Donald Trump was elected president on a platform of building a wall across the US border with Mexico.
Worse, America’s intense focus on foreign terrorism has left it exposed to the real dangers of climate change, mass poverty, homelessness and inadequate health care.
Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, says: “We are less vulnerable to terrorism; we are far more vulnerable to threats that actually are far more dangerous than terrorism.”
True victory for America in the war on terror would have been if nothing had changed after 9/11.
Instead, 9/11 changed everything.
‘Bin Laden knew he was waging a cultural war, turning America against itself’