Back in the “War on Terror” days, the U.K. security services fabricated multiple fake terror plots. There was, for example, the 2009 Easter Bomb Plot in Manchester, taking entire front pages of newspapers.
Gordon Brown as prime minister hyped it as a “very big terror plot.” It was a total fabrication, nobody was convicted and it eventually emerged that the trumpeted “bomb-making ingredient” the police confiscated from kitchens was sugar — in normal quantities.
The Great Ricin Plot in 2003 was again kitchen obsessed, and the media that ran screaming headlines about the discovery of ricin did not bother to later report that the amounts the police announced they had discovered turned out to be the almost undetectable trace which might be found in any kitchen.
The propaganda was the purpose, all ramping up Islamophobia to justify the Western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
When the Manchester Arena attack eventually did happen, it turned out that MI5, the domestic intelligence service, had been the perpetrator’s sponsor and he and his father had been ferried from Libya by the British armed forces. Sponsorship of terrorism abroad is always likely to result in blowback at home.
[See: How the West’s War in Libya Spurred Terrorism in 14 Countries and Why We’re Never Told Why We’re Attacked]
The propaganda is now being ramped up again to promote the Islamophobia intended to drive public support in the U.K. for the genocide in Gaza and a forthcoming attack on Iran.
MI5 Head Ken McCallum is arguably the most prolific and sustained liar in the history of the U.K. public service. He has not yet generated the deaths with his lies that Alistair Campbell caused, but give McCallum time for his Goebbels-like repetition to pay off. McCallum has a much more compliant media landscape to work with than existed a quarter of a century ago.
I have to remind myself that my continued outrage at the destruction of millions of very real and ordinary people in the Middle East from 2003 onwards, to secure hydrocarbons for rich and evil men and based on total lies about Iraqi weapons, is something extremely vivid and fundamental to me, but the average university student was not even born at the time.
Hellbound and Down 