Extracted from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7670115.stm


Minister warns over terror plot


Security Minister Lord West has said there is "another great plot building 
up again" and said the terrorist threat to Britain was "rising".

Lord West was addressing peers the day after they threw out government plans 
to extend terror detention limits.

"The threat is huge", he said, adding that "large complex plots" had dipped 
for a while, but were now on the rise.

Later shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve described Lord West's comments as 
"reckless in the extreme".

The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardener said counter-terrorism 
sources were "slightly baffled" at Lord West's comments.

He said while there were continuing investigations, no-one he had spoken to 
was aware of any one "great plot building up again".

'Absolute nonsense'

During the debate Lord West told peers that while some measures had been 
taken over the past 15 months to make Britain safer "this does not, I'm 
afraid, mean we are safe".

He said: "The threat is huge. The threat dipped slightly and is now rising 
again with the context of 'severe', large complex plots, because we 
unravelled one the damage it caused to al-Qaeda actually faded slightly.

"They are now building up again. There is another great plot building up 
again and we are monitoring this."

Later he denied claims that people were being detained arbitrarily for up to 
28 days - the current pre-charge detention limit - telling peers suspects 
were not just "dragged off the street".

He said: "This is an absolute nonsense. We have had the security services, 
GCHQ, SIS, SO15 - these people have been monitored, tracked, listened to, 
spotted, seen who are they talking to".

Later, Mr Grieve said Lord West's comments about the plot were reckless, 
adding: "We are told the police have to strike a balance between early 
arrest during a developing terrorist conspiracy in order to protect the 
public, and waiting long enough to ensure there is enough evidence to secure 
a conviction.

"The minister's comments give us the worst of all worlds - cutting across 
both objectives."

'Enormous offence'

And Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, a former colonel who advised Gordon 
Brown on security matters, told the BBC: "'Al-Qaeda must now be saying: 
Great, we now know they are on to us'."

He added: "I fear the cat has been let out of the bag ... It's not a great 
idea to tell your potential victims that you are onto them and you are 
watching them."

During the debate in the Lords several peers criticised Home Secretary 
Jacqui Smith's implication, in her statement after Monday's vote, that 
42-day opponents took security "lightly".

Lord West said she had not meant the comments "in exactly the way they have 
been taken", to protests from peers who said he should "disassociate 
himself" from the comments which they said had caused "enormous offence".

He added that he thought "we'd done rather better" during the debate about 
the bid to extend terror detention limits to 42 days and was "horrified" at 
the scale of the government's defeat - the measure was thrown out by 309 
votes to 118.

Within two hours of the vote, the government announced it was dropping the 
42-day proposal from the Counter-Terrorism Bill.

But the home secretary said she had written the plan into a separate 
one-page bill which could be pushed through Parliament quickly in the case 
of a national emergency.

Earlier David Davis, the former shadow home secretary who stepped down in 
protest at the measure and was returned as an MP after a by-election on the 
issue of civil liberties, said he had been "vindicated".

"It has failed miserably and I don't think anybody sensible would revisit 
it," he said.

----
You can read the Government like a book. They have been defeated with the 
42-day detention clause, so they "up the fear factor" by saying the terror 
threat is imminent.

I'll give it a few months (maybe 6-8 months) before we have another major 
terror alert in a major city (we've had London, Birmingham and Glasgow). The 
Home Secretary will then say "we need the 42-day detention to defeat the 
terrorists".

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 at 20:31:27, The-Sbray  
wrote in uk.legal :

>Extracted from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7670115.stm
>
>During the debate Lord West told peers that while some measures had 
>been taken over the past 15 months to make Britain safer "this does 
>not, I'm afraid, mean we are safe".
>
>He said: "The threat is huge. The threat dipped slightly and is now 
>rising again with the context of 'severe', large complex plots, because 
>we unravelled one the damage it caused to al-Qaeda actually faded 
>slightly.
>
>"They are now building up again. There is another great plot building 
>up again and we are monitoring this."
>
More gov't BS - I doubt the threat is any greater now than it was with 
the IRA, yet we didn't suffer such erosion of civil liberties then!
-- 
Paul Hyett, Cheltenham