“The flow of young Muslim men from western Europe to Iraq has increased dramatically in the past two years. The ‘pipeline’ of suspected terrorists is being fuelled by growing resentment about American and British policy and scandals such as the mistreatment of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison.” More likely, however, this “pipeline” is fueled by MI6, the CIA, and Mossad, or any combination of the three, with MI6 taking the lead in Britain. If you believe this is little more than a paranoid tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, consider the well-documented history of western intelligence “services” organizing and funding terrorism.

First and foremost, as the corporate media tells us, Scotland Yard, wielding the Terrorism Act 2000, supposedly busted in 2003 a terrorist operation at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London, run by the Captain Hook of Islamic terrorism, Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri. It should be noted that Hamza, a naturalized British citizen (through marriage), got his start in Afghanistan, where the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI ran a notorious covert op against the Soviet Union. Hamza worked for Abdullah Azzam, an asset of the Muslim Brotherhood, long ago penetrated by western intelligence, and responsible for setting up the CIA supported Services Office in Afghanistan. During Hamza’s trial on terrorism charges, he testified that he “met with British secret services [MI5] seven times between 1997 and 2000. He also met French security services and Special Branch officers at Scotland Yard,” according to Chris Marsden. “On August 8, the BBC reported that Abu Hamza’s lawyer had provided papers relating to some of the MI5 and Special Branch interviews with the cleric in the late 1990s.”

In addition to “interviews” with MI5, Hamza worked with former British soldiers who “taught Abu Hamza’s followers to use guns at a camp in Wales as part of an ad hoc terror training network,” according to the Observer (see previous link). “Transcripts of interviews conducted with suspected al-Qaeda terrorists held by America in Guantánamo Bay reveal that the British ex-soldiers, some of whom fought in Bosnia, were recruited to train about 10 of Hamza’s followers at the Brecon Beacons camp [an old monastery in Tunbridge Wells, Kent] for three weeks in 1998. The former troops taught them to strip and clean weapons and gave them endurance training and lessons in surveillance techniques. The training camps in Tunbridge Wells, at which no ex-soldiers were present, were held in 1997 and 1998 and were attended by about 30 people who were trained to use AK47 rifles, hand guns and a mock rocket launcher.” Moreover, the “hardline Islamists practiced with Kalashnikov AK-47s at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London.” MI5, according to the Observer, “recruited worshipers at Finsbury Park who opposed the hardline stance taken by controversial Muslim cleric Abu Hamza, who often leads prayers there, and asked them to help monitor the activities of extremists” who were midwifed by MI5 in the late 90s. Although Hamza was accused of carrying out “murders in other countries,” MI5 and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch were not interested in prosecuting him, as he was obviously a valuable asset (and ultimately a patsy, as he now sits in the Belmarsh Prison, convicted under the Terrorism Act 2000).

Our corporate media expects us to believe, as a free society, Britain is exploited by evil terrorists, who use the country as a launchpad. However, there are serious flaws in this argument. In addition to British intelligence nurturing Hamza and his Finsbury Park mosque flunkies (one such luminary is the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, a certifiable moron, and another is the mental case Zacarias Moussaoui, probably the most notorious patsy in recent history), MI6 sheltered Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British citizen, who we are told was the “mastermind” behind the London bombings. “Aswat was working for British intelligence. Now Aswat’s boss, the one-armed Captain Hook, he gets indicted two years later. So the guy above him and below him get indicted, but not Aswat,” former US Justice Department prosecutor and intelligence expert John Loftus told Fox News on 29 July 2005.

Loftus’ interview “conveys the impression that there were ‘disagreements’ between American, British and Israeli intelligence officials on how to handle the matter. It also suggests that ‘the Brits’ might have misled their US intelligence counterpart,” writes Michel Chossudovsky. “More substantively, what this interview reveals is something which news coverage on the London 7/7 attacks has carefully ignored, namely the longstanding relationship of Western intelligence agencies to a number of Islamic organizations. In this specific case we are dealing with a British based organization Al-Muhajiroun,” supposedly tight with “al-Qaeda.” It should be noted that al-Muhajiroun was formed during the U.S. war against the Serbs in Kosovo. As Michael Meacher, UK environment minister from 1997 to 2003, notes:

According to a recent report by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, a contingent was also sent by the Pakistani government, then led by Benazir Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton administration. This contingent was formed from the Harkat-ul- Ansar (HUA) terrorist group and trained by the ISI. The report estimates that about 200 Pakistani Muslims living in the UK went to Pakistan, trained in HUA camps and joined the HUA’s contingent in Bosnia. Most significantly, this was “with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies”.

As the 2002 Dutch government report on Bosnia makes clear, the US provided a green light to groups on the state department list of terrorist organizations, including the Lebanese-based Hizbullah, to operate in Bosnia—an episode that calls into question the credibility of the subsequent “war on terror”.

Considering the above, it makes perfect sense there is an “extensive network for would-be ‘holy warriors’ in Britain,” as the Sunday Times explains. “A senior police source said that some [of the so-called “holy warriors”] went to Pakistan while others went to Middle Eastern countries, such as Syria, before being smuggled over the border,” as one would expect, as Syria is in the process of demonization, as mandated by the Straussian neocons, and is on the target list, right behind Iran, soon to be shock and awed, its civilian and military infrastructure reduced to rubble.

More telling, however, is the fact British intelligence collaborated directly with “al-Qaeda,” as revealed by British whistle blower David Shayler. “British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice,” the Guardian reported on November 10, 2002. “According to journalist Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, an adviser to French President Jacques Chirac, British and US intelligence agencies buried the fact that the arrest warrant [issued in connection with the murder of two German anti-terrorism agents] had come from Libya and played down the threat. Five months after the warrant was issued, al-Qaeda killed more than 200 people in the truck bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.”

The Libyan al-Qaeda cell included Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government’s most wanted list with a reward of $25 million for his capture. He is wanted for his involvement in the African embassy bombings. Al-Liby was with bin Laden in Sudan before the al-Qaeda leader returned to Afghanistan in 1996.

Astonishingly, despite suspicions that he was a high-level al-Qaeda operative, al-Liby was given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May of 2000 when he eluded a police raid on his house and fled abroad. The raid discovered a 180-page al-Qaeda ‘manual for jihad’ containing instructions for terrorist attacks.

Like many terrorists on the Most Wanted list, al-Liby appears to be of below average intelligence, a malleable patsy incapable of the crimes attributed to him. “Some believe al-Libbi’s significance has been cynically hyped by two countries that want to distract attention from their lack of progress in capturing Bin Laden, who has now been on the run for almost four years,” write Christina Lamb and Mohammad Shehzad Islamabad for the Times Online. “A former close associate of Bin Laden now living in London laughed: ‘What I remember of him is he used to make the coffee and do the photocopying,’” in other words, al-Liby is a perfect candidate for British intelligence patsyhood.

The British Brigade story dovetails nicely with the “nerve gas plot” story now making the rounds in the corporate media. “British police were frantically searching on Sunday for evidence of what security sources fear is a plot to unleash sarin nerve gas or another deadly agent,” reports News 24. “The Sunday Telegraph said MI5 domestic intelligence agents suspect that al-Qaeda sympathizers intended to produce a nerve agent—probably sarin—and release it in a closed space such as in an underground train…. The plot would be timed to be on or close to anniversary of the suicide bombings on the London transport system that killed 56 people, including the four bombers, on July 7 last year,” so-called suicide bombings supposedly masterminded by the dimwit Haroon Rashid Aswat, an intelligence asset sheltered by British intelligence, much to the chagrin of John Loftus and, so we are told, American intelligence.

Obviously, the Brits and Americans—and now Canada, under the leadership of the neocon PM Stephen Harper, where a terrorist plot was recently “foiled” in Ontario—are ramping up fake and false flag terrorism as the next phase of the neocon “clash of civilizations” agenda moves forward. It is no coincidence Donald Rumsfeld, holding court in Singapore, characterized Iran as “one of the leading terrorist nations in the world” and warned against admitting the country into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional organization that includes Russia, China, and Central Asian countries. Rumsfeld “painted a dark picture of Iran, saying that it had a long history of ‘being engaged in terrorist activities’ and, thus, was not an appropriate participant in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” reports the International Herald Tribune.

Meanwhile, Sec State Condi Rice, talking with the propaganda unit at Fox News, “made clear that if the first major public negotiations in more than 25 years involving Washington and Tehran go ahead, ‘This is not an offer of a grand bargain somehow with Iran. This is not an offer to let bygones be bygones and to forget the record of terrorism or the human rights,’” never mind the United States’ “record of terrorism” in Iran, beginning with the overthrow of its democratically elected government in 1953. Additionally, Rice provided a timeline, of sorts, sketching out the shock and awe campaign against Iran. “I’m not one for timelines and specific schedules, but I think it’s fair to say that we really do have to have this [illusory nuke program accusation] settled over a matter of weeks, not months.”

Iran, however, in regard to terrorism, is no match for Britain, the United States, and Israel, all three with a long, sordid, and well-documented history of creating, sponsoring, and unleashing terrorist operations around the world, a small portion mentioned above. It is no mistake the so-called British Brigades, midwifed by British intelligence, are specifically connected to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” the latter, according to Newsweek and Jordanian intelligence (Dairat al Mukhabarat, or General Intelligence Department, funded by the CIA), “has gone back and forth across the Iran-Iraq border since Saddam’s regime fell” (that is, since the resistance began) and allegedly met a “high-level Iranian contact” who “encouraged him to organize violent resistance to the American occupation of Iraq.” Newsweek, however, to its credit, notes that all of this is likely nonsense, as al-Zarqawi allegedly hates Shia Muslims, and has vowed to kill them as infidels in Iraq. Iran is of course a predominately Shia nation, thus demonstrating that hatred indeed lives beyond the grave.