Zia Sardar in the current edition of the New Statesman on the folly of “intelligence-led” police operations:

Don’t be fooled by the mantra that intelligence is an extremely difficult business, prone to absurdly wide margins of error. If that were so, Britain would have lost the Second World War. The remarkable success of British intelligence, including counter-intelligence, during that war proves that we can produce reasonable - say, 25 or even 50 per cent - rates of success. Intelligence may be difficult to gather but it is not impossible to get right. It must follow certain simple rules and principles. One has to ask some fundamental questions. Is the source reliable? Clearly a source that has been tortured is going to tell you whatever you want to hear. If you are going to recruit your source from a mosque, you have to make sure he doesn’t harbour grudges against certain members of the group that you are targeting - which is probably what happened in the Forest Gate case. Can the source’s evidence be corroborated? The official excuse that the police have to act on every single tip-off, however dodgy the source, without bothering to corroborate it, is not only ridiculous, but dangerously so. Intelligence, to be intelligence, has to be based on more than one source. And then, to increase the margin of success, one has to check out the intelligence, using proper surveillance.

His conclusions are that these “intelligence-led” jobs are often the fruit of political expediency, often involving people who entered into conspiracies at the instigation of the informers themselves. The whole article can be read once per day only, other than by subscribers.

The former waiter, a childhood friend of the two brothers who were arrested during the raid two weeks ago, was jailed for six years in January for terror offences.

The paper has been told that it was after friends of Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, and Abul Koyair, 20, visited the man in top-security Belmarsh prison that the brothers were put under surveillance.

The brothers reportedly laughed off the fact that they were being followed by the security services. New information passed to the services, said to include detailed drawings of a suicide vest, led to Operation Volga and the early morning moves to arrest the pair, the paper claims.

Friends of the brothers told the paper they believe the man was the trigger for the operation that culminated in 250 police officers descending on their home.

So, perhaps the gullibility which commonly affects people with very low intelligence might have been a factor in his being persuaded to tell whatever he told about the brothers that led to the raid? I mean, how can anyone take something such a person says seriously anyway? (More: Osama, Bradford Muslim, Londonist.)

An anti-police demonstration was given huge advance publicity in the media, but in the event, only a hundred or so people turned up, many of whom were white Islamists from the Socialist Workers party. Since then, nothing.

I really feel the British Muslim community is letting everyone down. The papers, the broadcasters, the Liberal Democrats and the Trots are all desperate for a display of fury, but the stubborn Muslims refuse to oblige.

Sorry Nick, but as one who was there I can say that the majority of attendees by far were Muslims. Yes, the usual contingent of Marxists of various hues, or perhaps I should say tones, was in attendance, some of them trying to push bits of paper under our noses (though interestingly, I didn’t see any copies of Socialist Worker), but most of the demonstrators were Muslims who were demonstrating against attacks on Muslims.

As for the “since then, nothing” bit, there is another demo planned for today in Plashet Park, which is as it happens very near to Forest Gate. The likely reason why last Sunday’s event was not as well-attended as some might have hoped (though it was a couple of hundred at least, not just 100) was that the local community had decided to make their views known at Plashet Park. (More: Kitty Killer.)

Abdul Kahar: As soon as I turn around I just see an orange spark and a big bang.

At that time I flew into the wall. As I flew into the wall, I slipped down. As I slipped down, I was on the floor. I look to my right, on my chest I see blood coming down my chest and I see a hole in my chest.

At that moment, I knew I was shot, but the first thing I was thinking is that there’s an armed robbery taking place.

… I was begging: ‘Please, please, I cannot move.’

He just kicked me in my face, and he kept on saying: ‘Shut the fuck up. Stay here.’

I thought they were going to shoot me again or shoot my brother.

Abul Koyair: Actually me myself, I applied to be a police officer, a community police officer, recently.

They gave me a confirmation letter, which I received from them.

My family was behind me in what I wanted to do, and now I think all their views has changed.

They don’t want me to be associated anywhere near police. I feel that my mum, my dad they don’t trust polices anymore.

Note: one of the Guildford Four, Carole Richardson, actually rode round the streets of the London suburb she was living in with police who were investigating a crime in which she was the victim just weeks before her arrest on trumped-up terrorism charges. Seems like they still can’t judge the behaviour of someone who should be on the run from the police …

Abdul Kahar: At the beginning, I was more curious. I wanted to know the reason why I got arrested.

I knew it was something to do with terrorism. I asked the officer in charge of the police: ‘Can you tell me, what have I done?’

They mentioned a few names of terrorist organisations. I didn’t recognise any of them until they mentioned al-Qaeda.

Then they said: ‘Are you a member of Jemaah Islamiah?’ They kept on telling me I’m a member of a few things.

Then at the end they go: ‘I know it’s going to be a daft question, but are you a member of a white organisation, the Ku Klux Klan?’

I didn’t even have time to laugh. I thought: ‘These people are thinking I’m a white terrorist now’, and they wasn’t even joking.

(More: Osama Saeed, Pickled Politics.)

Plus: in this week’s New Statesman, former editor Peter Wilby on the contradictory stories of the events last Friday:

The brothers who lived there were planning a terrorist attack using cyanide, sarin, anthrax, or bubonic plague germs. The noxious substance would be released from a vest or a canister. It would be a suicide attack or a remote-controlled explosion. The “bomb” was inside the house or “out there”. Its use was imminent or it was nowhere near completion. The information came from an MI5 informant or a police informant. The police operation was code-named Volga or Volgo.

Officers entered the house by smashing a window or battering down the front door. One brother was shot by the police (either after a warning or not after a warning, and either after a scuffle or not after a scuffle), or he was shot by the other brother. The shot came from a Glock pistol or a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun. Both brothers had criminal records or they didn’t.

One official, with knowledge why police acted and what had been found from days of searching, said the intelligence had been acted on correctly, but added last night: “There is no viable device at that house. There is no device being constructed, or chemicals. There does not appear to be anything there or anywhere else.” As lawyers for the two arrested men continued to protest their innocence, it emerged that the man who had passed the specific information that led to the raid in which a man was shot last Friday was a police informant who had been providing intelligence about the activities of alleged Islamist militants for several weeks.

It seems that the BBC had to get a quote from Muhammad Abdul-Bari, the recently-elected head of the Muslim Council of Britain, and this is what they came up with:

Dr Bari, who was recently elected as head of the MCB, visited Forest Gate to listen to the “evident concerns” of Muslims in the area. He said this was a “crucial time” for the Muslim community. “The danger is the trust between the community and the police may be broken. The community feels very vulnerable.” He said the police needed to speed up their search because “three or four days’ frustration, confusion and anger in the community is not good”.

He was also quoted on the BBC London radio station today as saying that angry people can do such things as taking the law into their own hands. Someone called Arif who rang the Vanessa Feltz show said that he was in the wrong position, and that in his home country (Bangladesh) he had been involved in politics and his group were known for doing just that. Dr Abdul-Bari was then interviewed, and said he had never been in politics, only the Bangladeshi Air Force, and had come to the UK in the 1970s. (More: Harry’s Place.)

For my part I don’t believe that there will be any riots as a result of this. There have been race riots in the past, mostly arising out of continual police harrassment of young men in the street, and of rumours of attacks on areas where Muslims live. If there are repeated incidents of people (particularly women) being mistreated during such raids, violence may become a distinct possibility. If the point is made effectively enough that the police acted honestly on the basis of intelligence, I think most Muslim youths are not so stupid that they don’t realise that this sort of thing has to be done. They would have done this if they had received intelligence about such materials whatever the ethnic or religious background of the house’s residents. And let’s face it, anyone can be the victim of police incompetence - think of JC de Menezes and Harry Stanley - or cowardice (like the woman who was left to bleed to death because the police entertained a suspicion that her pleading on the phone that her husband was dead and she was bleeding was a ruse by the husband to ambush and kill policemen).

I think most Muslims will realise that the fault lies here with whoever passed on the intelligence: it may well have been someone with a malicious motive, or as Kashif pointed out, someone paid by the intelligence services or police who found no material and wanted to “earn” his salary by fingering someone who looked a bit dodgy, or even someone with a grudge against the police who were annoyed by the way he, or one of his friends, were treated who wanted to rub their noses in the dirt. The upshot will be that Muslims will get more suspicious about police and other informers in their midst; as UZ blogged last week, the Muslim community in the USA have seen a number of incidents in which police agents have entrapped Muslims into agreeing with them to commit acts of terrorism; this article at antiwar.com shows the sort of things the FBI will present as terrorism. We have so far seen nothing of the sort here. We have also not seen any of the stitch-ups which followed Irish terrorist bombings in the 1970s.

Much as the police are expected to reconsider their tactics after yet another very public disaster, I wonder if sections of the press will be doing the same? Over the weekend massive amounts of material about the two brothers’ past and private lives was exposed, notably the fact that following 9/11 the two men abandoned their “gangsta” lifestyles and became devout Muslims and started wearing Islamic dress - as if this was in itself something for anyone to be afraid of. I have heard it remarked that, given the amount of publicity surrounding the raid, the chances of them receiving a fair trial if they were ever charged were slim (although in the past this has not stopped people from actually being tried, notably Barry “Bulsara” George who was convicted of killing the TV presenter Jill Dando).

The press have for years spun lines about “jihad training camps”, none of which have ever been found in this country, and suburban bomb factories, so it’s not surprising that when police report that they had “specific intelligence” about where one such factory was located, that they should eagerly latch onto the story. The Times on Saturday noted that the “new generation of terrorists” were more discreet, preferring to “set up their own youth clubs, using back rooms in their parents’ houses to devise their schemes”, rather than congregating with known militants at well-known extremist-run mosques. “Youth clubs” in their parents’ back rooms? How small can a club be that people can plot a terrorist act and not be overheard, or joined in, by the people on the Playstation? And the most suspicious bit of all:

Today’s terrorists are suburban men who neighbours invariably describe as “hard-working, respectable and British to the core”.

Of course. Nothing more scary than the idea of a terrorist who is the last person you’d think would be one, is there? But will they eat humble pie when it becomes known that the brothers who will no doubt be released without charge in the next few days were totally innocent, and that he was known as a perfectly respectable member of the community because that is exactly what he is? (More: Lenin, Opinionated Voice.)