The latest incident in London was so entirely preventable that it is difficult to describe it as anything less than deliberate.
In yet another headline-grabbing terror attack – an armed man in south London left several injured – some seriously – with the suspect himself killed at the scene by police.
Entirely predictable was the fact that the suspect named as Sudesh Amman – was a known terrorist – having been previously arrested, tried, and imprisoned for terror-related offenses, only to be inexplicably released early.
The London Telegraph in its article, “Streatham attack knifeman named as Sudesh Amman who had a previous terror conviction,” would report regarding his earlier conviction that:
Alexis Boon, then head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, said at the time of his conviction that Amman had a “fierce interest in violence and martyrdom”.
He explained: “His fascination with dying in the name of terrorism was clear in a notepad we recovered from his home. Amman had scrawled his ‘life goals’ in the notepad and top of the list, above family activities, was dying a martyr and going to ‘Jannah’ – the afterlife.
Also predictable was the fact that this known terrorist would once again menace the public – being only the most recent example in a string of headline-grabbing terror attacks carried out by similar suspects similarly known to police and intelligence organizations, but otherwise inexplicably allowed to menace the public.
Major terror attacks in France and Belgium were likewise carried out by suspects entirely known to local police and regional intelligence organizations.
Not only are these suspects known to Western authorities, but they are also affiliated with Western-sponsored terrorist organizations most notably Al Qaeda, its various franchises, and the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) which have for nearly a decade served as proxies in Western-engineered regime change wars aimed at Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and beyond.
The latest incident in London was so entirely preventable that it is difficult to describe it as anything less than deliberate.
It is only a matter of time before politicians begin spinning and exploiting the incident – using it to shape policy both foreign and domestic – allowing analysts to better understand why such an entirely preventable act of violence was allowed to unfold nonetheless.
From London to Paris: The West’s Self-Perpetuated Terror
As seen in nearly every terror attack in recent years both in Europe and North America including high-profile incidents like the “Charlie Hebdo shooting” and the Garland, Texas attack, the alleged suspects all have one common thread – they were all already under the watch of security agencies for years, some even imprisoned one or more times for terror-related and/or other violent offenses, some even having traveled overseas to fight alongside Western-backed terrorists in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond.
The Guardian in an article titled, “France passes new surveillance law in wake of Charlie Hebdo attack,” admitted then that the French government alone had over 1,400 people under watch, including hundreds of terrorists who have recently returned from fighting alongside Western-backed terrorists in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
Among these monitored potential risks were in fact the suspects behind the “Charlie Hebdo shooting.”
Slate Magazine would report in their article, “The Details of Paris Suspect Cherif Kouachi’s 2008 Terrorism Conviction,” that:
Kouachi was arrested in January 2005, accused of planning to join jihadists in Iraq. He was said to have fallen under the sway of Farid Benyettou, a young “self-taught preacher” who advocated violence, but had not actually yet traveled to Iraq or committed any acts of terror. Lawyers at the time said he had not received weapons training and “had begun having second thoughts,” going so far as to express “relief” that he’d been apprehended.
Kourachi and his brother would be reported to have traveled to the Middle East to receive training from Al Qaeda, then to have fought in Syria in a war backed in part by France, before returning home and carrying out their grisly terror attack, all while being tracked by French intelligence.
If Kouachi previously could be arrested for “association with wrongdoers with the intention of committing a terrorist act,” why wasn’t he arrested immediately upon his return to France for having subsequently received and employed military training by a terrorist organization?
CNN would report in an article titled, “France tells U.S. Paris suspect trained with al Qaeda in Yemen,” that:
Western intelligence officials are scrambling to learn more about possible travel of the two Paris terror attack suspects, brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, with new information suggesting one of the brothers recently spent time in Yemen associating with al Qaeda in that country, U.S. officials briefed on the matter told CNN. Additional information from a French source close to the French security services puts one of the brothers in Syria.
The problem that led up to the “Charlie Hebdo shooting” – or any high-profile attack since – was clearly not a lack of intelligence or surveillance.
French security agencies then more than adequately identified the “Charlie Hebdo shooting” perpetrators as potential threats and tracked them for years beforehand. More recently, British authorities were more than well aware of the danger Sudesh Amman posed to society.
The problem is instead what appears to be a deliberate effort to keep these terrorists roaming freely among society. Free to join Western-backed mercenary forces abroad to fight in the West’s various proxy wars, and free to commit heinous acts of terror at home, both serving the singular agenda of expanding Western hegemony abroad while preserving the primacy of select special interests at home through divide and conquer politics and the use of fear as a political weapon.
Whichever side of the political divide the general public finds themselves on regarding terrorism at home and the West’s endless wars abroad there should be common ground everyone can meet on regarding what is either unforgivable negligence and incompetence or equally unforgivable, deliberate efforts to perpetuate a deadly terrorist threat.
In either case, attacks like those in France and Belgium or this more recent event in the UK are exploited – used to paralyze the public with fear and coerce them to accept growing constraints on their freedom at home and growing expenditures in blood and treasure for wars abroad.
Terrorists are indeed a threat to the peace and stability of society. So are those interests that perpetuate them either by actively supporting them, or passively allowing them to carry out violence. For the British government – it is guilty of both – and in the case of this recent attack in London – it really doesn’t matter whether it was police negligence or a deliberate act of violence facilitated covertly by the state – it could have and should have been prevented. Now the public must ask why it was not.
Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.