The blame game in the 'War on Terror'

Another leaked document has shown that British authorities lowered it’s terror threat from “severe defined” to “substantial”, less than one month prior to the terrorist attacks on London. Published in the New York Times the report seemed to support the views raised in the Chatham House report, published earlier this week. "Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist related activity in the U.K.," said the report, a copy of which was made available by a foreign intelligence service and was not disputed by four senior British officials who were asked about it, according to the NYT. Both Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Foreign Secretary have consistently dismissed a connection between Iraq and increased terror activity. "The terrorists have struck across the world, in countries allied with the United States backing the war in Iraq and in countries which had nothing whatever to do with the war in Iraq," Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, said Monday in Brussels. Two groups have claimed responsibility for the London attacks, the first came from The Secret Organization Group of al-Qaeda [literally the base] of Jihad Organization in Europe and another from Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, although neither claim has been authenticated. Both mentioned the Iraq war as one of the reasons for the attacks.
Today, Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, laid blame for the attacks on the UK government’s stance on Iraq and the western ‘interference’ in the middle-east. “I think you've just had 80 years of western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the western need for oil,” he said on BBC Radio 4. He denounced the suicide bombers, but spoke of the ‘running sore’ that was the Palestine/Israeli conflict. “Those governments which use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy, as we have occasionally seen with the Israeli government bombing areas from which a terrorist group will have come, irrespective of the casualties it inflicts, women, children and men … Under foreign occupation and denied the right to vote, denied the right to run your own affairs, often denied the right to work for three generations, I suspect that if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves."
[12:25 GMT 20/07/2005]