So according to Craig Murray, former British Ambassador, the self-inflicted degredation-of-service attack on the airlines industry that started last week was based on arrests of guys who were barely out of the bragging stage:

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance.

…

We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the “Loner” profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.

This implicitly tells us that one of two assumptions about terrorism no longer holds true. Either the assumptions of who could be a suicide bomber just effectively expanded to include parents of small children or the plot was bogus. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that the Bush & Blair administrations will choose the former, despite all the evidence supporting the latter and the opportunity to prove otherwise having been wasted by acting too soon.

Of course, when we consider how these arrests play out long-term, it doesn’t matter anyway. At this point in the so-called War on Terror, I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason they had to act right now was because the last intercept they picked up and deleted immediately after reading was one plotter saying to the other, “This whole thing is bullshit. It’s never going to happen and my wife is sick of me staying up all night IM’ing about it.”

Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.

A 98% false positive rate for people under heavy surveillance up to and including phone & email monitoring indicates harassment, gross incompetence, or both. If you were to go through the life of any average citizen with a fine-toothed comb*, I’ll bet you’d come up with better than a 2% hit rate for criminal malfeasance. If that’s all they can get as a conviction rate on a population under this level of scrutiny, then these are probably better-than-average citizens who are simply being harassed for the intersection of their skin color and religious affiliation.

* This ignoring any British equivilent to Probable Cause–I’m pretty ignorant on its presence or lack therof in the British legal system, not that it seems to matter any more as soon as someone claims its for “Terrorism.”

[…] Given that we will never know if they were for real or not and that even in the UK, the odds of someone who is arrested being convicted of anything, much less terrorism, is only 2%, we don’t actually know if the profile of terrorists has changed or not. […]