“Yesterday Melbourne’s Sunday Herald Sun said information from an Islamic ’supergrass’ who had met bin Laden had been crucial in the arrests of the alleged terrorists,” the Herald reports. “The newspaper said the informant, now in hiding and in fear of his life, was a former follower of radical Melbourne cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika, also known as Abu Bakir, the alleged leader of the terror group, and an associate of another alleged member of the Melbourne cell, Gregory Kent…. Benbrika, according to a Weekend Australian investigation, had turned to extremism after hearing a sermon in 1994 by Abu Qatada, the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Europe, who had been invited to Australia by another Melbourne radical cleric and former Benbrika mentor, Sheik Mohammed Omran.”

As we know, Abu Qatada, described as the leader and mastermind of al-Qaeda’s European network, is an MI5 asset. “Senior European intelligence officials tell TIME that Abu Qatada is tucked away in a safe house in the north of England, where he and his family are being lodged, fed and clothed by British intelligence services,” Paul Joseph Watson writes in Order Out of Chaos. “Despite official denial French anti-terrorist officers stated on the record that they were certain MI5 were protecting Qatada, and in addition believed they had actually colluded in his disappearance.” Qatada was convicted in absentia in Jordan for his role in the foiled millennium attacks and the French want to get their hands on him for his alleged role in a plot to blow up the U.S. embassy in France in 2001.

The official British excuse for sheltering Qatada is to deprive him of “contact with extremists in London and Europe,” according to Bruce Crumley, writing for TIME. “The British win because the last thing they want is a hot potato they can’t extradite for fear of al-Qaeda reprisals but whose presence contradicts London’s support of the war on terror,” a European intelligence official told Crumley in 2002. In other words, Abu Qatada is too valuable as an intelligence asset and knows too much about British involvement in terrorism to be extradited. In fact, in late 2001, MI5 offered Qatada a chance to escape to Afghanistan. “I do not trust this government,” Qatada told the Guardian. “If I get on a plane, I am afraid I will be shot or handed over to the Jordanians, the Egyptians or the Saudis.”

In other words, Qatada feared he would suffer the fate of many intelligence operatives and patsies who are of more use dead than alive, or at least wasting away in a dungeon. For instance, Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident and “unpaid [al-Qaeda] intermediary,” was “seized by the CIA in Gambia, West Africa, in November 2002 and secretly flown to Afghanistan and then Cuba [to the Guantanamo Bay rape and torture gulag] as a suspected al-Qa’ida supporter,” according to the Independent, and the British left him there to rot, or more accurately to be “interrogated” (possibly with panties over his head and electrical wires attached to a certain appendage) and probably wishing he was dead, as the high attempted suicide rate at Gitmo attests.

Another person protected by British intelligence is one Haroon Rashid Aswat, the so-called “brains” behind the London bombings last summer. Aswat “was a British intelligence plant,” according to former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus. “So all of a sudden he disappears. He’s in South Africa. We think he’s dead; we don’t know he’s down there. Last month [July, 2005] the South African Secret Service come across the guy. He’s alive… the Brits know that the CIA wants to get a hold of Haroon. So what happens? He takes off again, goes right to London. He isn’t arrested when he lands, he isn’t arrested when he leaves… He’s on the watch list. The only reason he could get away with that was if he was working for British intelligence.”

“[Qatada’s] impact [on Benbrika] was enormous, and that is where it all began,” a senior Muslim source told the Sunday Herald Sun. In short, the roots of this “captured” coven of terrorists in Australia stem from British intelligence, a familiar pattern, from Northern Ireland—killing civilians and bombing pubs—to Kosovo—creating organizations such as al-Muhajiroun (actually a collaborative effort between British intelligence and al-Qaeda, according to Loftus) engineered to brainwash and train “Mujahideen” to fight in the Balkans and assist the KLA (the Kosovo Liberation Army, a creation of British SAS Special Forces and NATO) in running drugs and weapons.

British, American, and Pakistani efforts to create terrorist organizations and cells is a well-documented fact, going back at least to the late 1970s. Thus we can only conclude that the “alleged Islamic terrorist cell in Sydney” that supposedly “stockpiled bomb-making materials, trained at outback hunting camps and sized up Australia’s only nuclear reactor as a possible target,” according to the Associated Press, is yet another intelligence contrivance, as it was penetrated by ASIO and key people are in fact British intelligence assets. In 2003, the Howard government pushed the ASIO Terrorism Act through the Australian parliament, thus providing “the Australian Security Intelligence Organization … the power to detain and question people without charge or trial. ASIO and Federal Police officers can raid anyone’s home or office, at any hour of the day or night, and forcibly take them away, interrogate and strip-search them and hold them incommunicado, effectively indefinitely,” write Mike Head and Richard Hoffman. As such, we can expect the Australian government to stage more raids on “terror cells” with links to intelligence services.

Fake terrorism leading to the dismantlement of civil liberties is the raison d’être of all authoritarian governments, from Hitler’s “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich” (the Enabling Act, dismantling civil liberties in Germany after the torching of the Reichstag, an act of arson claimed by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy and legal heir) to Bush’s contrived war on terrorism in the wake of the nine eleven inside job.