No surprise here. Given the dogmatic insistence at the highest levels that Islam is a Religion of Peace, MI5 probably wouldn't even have known the proper questions to ask in order to try to determine if recruits had such sympathies, and if they did know those questions, political correctness would have made them not dream of asking them.
"Al-Qaeda supporters 'joined MI5,'" from the BBC, August 1 (thanks to Stday):
A senior Tory MP has asked the home secretary whether al-Qaeda sympathisers were mistakenly recruited by MI5.Patrick Mercer, chairman of the Home Affairs counter-terror sub-committee, said he was told six recruits were ejected after worries about their past.
Two allegedly attended al-Qaeda training camps while the others had unexplained gaps in their CVs, Mr Mercer told the Daily Telegraph.
A Home Office spokeswoman declined to comment on the claims.
'Took advantage'
Mr Mercer said he had learned that MI5 had dismissed the six recruits some time between 2005 and 2007.
The MP said he feared that, in the aftermath of the bombings on London's transport network in July 2005, the security services had rushed to try and take on Muslim recruits, and that had potentially allowed al-Qaeda sympathisers to infiltrate the security service.
He has written to the Home Secretary Alan Johnson asking for further details....
Re-posting what I kept of the original discussion, while we were using IntenseDebate.
First part.
JETCAL said - There is a fine tradition of security services hiring moles. Nothing new here.
-HERETICSCRUSADE said - Did you actually read the article? The guys had things in their past that were NOT considered when they were hired. It is not like they knew the men were linked to terrorists and used them. They were recruited. Increased scrutiny showed they were risks. End of story.
-JETCAL replied - Yes I read the article. I also thought about the manhattan project and some of the fine hiring our own government and the British government did during the late 1940's and into the 1950's.
Hence my comment;
"There is a fine tradition of security services hiring moles. Nothing new here."
U.S. and British history back up my comments.
"services had rushed to try and take on Muslim recruits, and that had potentially allowed al-Qaeda sympathisers to infiltrate the security service."
Nothing new here. Post WWII all over again.
Please feel free to read Mitrokhin's "The Sword and the Shield".
-RNOT told JETCAL - Yep, you mention a time period where our media destroyed McCarthy and he was proven correct in his assertions that there were communists infiltrating. Our left wing liberals still have not changed the history books. Documents were opened in the mid 1990s that showed all of whom McCarthy pointed out as communist infiltrators - was true.
And now we have such ilk as Mr. Islam (yes, that is his name) in high positions in the FBI, and heck, we got to give everyone 'sensitivity' training concerning muslims.
Of course, there is no requirement for muslims to take any training to tell them to tolerate others!
Instead they got away with translating for the security agencies and demanding that no Jews work with them. And it would be better to fire the muslims and hire the Jews instead! Who would I trust after 9/11?! Especially after all their celebrating of all the deaths that just took place!
-IPSOFACTO to RNOT - (quoting) "Documents were opened in the mid 1990s that showed all of whom McCarthy pointed out as communist infiltrators - was true. "
Like Charlie Chaplin? Or a dangerous type like Lionel Stander?
When Stander was called before HUAC, he began by pledging his full support in the fight against "subversive" activities:
"I know of a group of fanatics who are desperately trying to undermine the Constitution of the United States by depriving artists and others of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness without due process of law.... I can tell names and cite instances and I am one of the first victims of it.... [This is] a group of ex-Fascists and America-Firsters and anti-Semites, people who hate everybody including Negroes, minority groups and most likely themselves.... [T]hese people are engaged in a conspiracy outside all the legal processes to undermine the very fundamental American concepts upon which our entire system of democracy exists."
-SORROW said - (quoting another poster) "The guys had things in their past that were NOT considered when they were hired. It is not like they knew the men were linked to terrorists and used them. They were recruited. Increased scrutiny showed they were risks. End of story. "
These jobs were not for bagging clerks at Tesco, but for operative positions.
Intelligence agencies are supposed to do extensive background checks on their employees, and missing things like time spent in al-Qaida training facilities and other unaccounted for absences should have put up a red flag during the application process. Instead, these recruits had already started their training apparently. The big question now is how many people managed to sneak in who were not such obvious problems?
-IPSOFACTO said - Security services are the prime target for the agents of the enemy. We had a few in USSR but KGB had more success infiltrating our services with moles. A few of them false defectors from Communism but the most dangerous were the homegrown ideological types like The Cambridge Five.
The present conflict with Islam is also an ideological conflict and everything indicate that our services have been infiltrated by fundamentalist Muslims posing as informants at the lower levels. The difficulties in hiring Arabs or Asians as informants for MI5 to gather information from local Muslim communities and the counterproductive amateurish methods used became public knowledge a couple of months ago:
'Five Muslim community workers have accused MI5 of waging a campaign of blackmail and harassment in an attempt to recruit them as informants.
The men claim they were given a choice of working for the Security Service or face detention and harassment in the UK and overseas.'
The obstacles are enormous and that is even before we are talking vetting process. I am afraid the MI5 has very few assets in the Muslim commuties. That´s one of the reasons we are flying blind in our war against radical Islam."
Re-posting next portion of original discussion:
REDQUEEN said - After London bombings they rushed to recruit more Muslims?! This is just ridiculous. What is that supposed to prove - ''we're not racist''. Well weather [whether] MI5 likes it or not, Muslims, in the name of Jihad and their psycho duo Muhamed and Allah killed innocent civilians in London!
So now run to recruit more of them? That's like saying ''well Nazis have been a bit naughty during the 1930s and 1940s but since not all of them were involved in killing Jews and other civilians we better recruit more of them for the sake of racism''.
Just appaling.
No wonder UK is going down hill.
-JETCAL told REDQUEEN - Many Nazis with known war crimes were hired, their past was overlooked in order to spy for the west.
Other were hired and protected after their war crimes became known.
-SORROW told JETCAL - At least in those cases, they were no longer a threat. The Third Reich was dead, and most of its former minions were trying to hide anywhere they could. This is not the case with Islamists and Islam.
WELLINGTON said - Surely many in MI5 know official policy is nuts and yet are not powerful enough to do anything about it. I should think one Western intelligence agency after another has this quiet kind of dissension going on.
To the extent that this is so, then to such extent there exists possibilties, though not guarantees, to develop a far more realistic approach to all the problems that Islam in the West poses to the West.
-SORROW said to WELLINGTON - I do wonder if there are in fact paid moles in some of these organizations. Some of the lapses and breaches go beyond negligence and blindness.
HUGH (Hugh Fitzgerald) said - With such intelligence operatives recently working for MI6 (or is it MI5? I forget) as that well-known non-Muslim indigenous enthusiast for Hamas and Hezbollah Alastair Crooke, why should it surprise anyone that Al Qaeda supporters, of the Muslim Arab variety, should have been recruited as "agents" by MI6 (or is it MI5? I forget).
REVPARADIGM said - (quoting) "British intelligence service mistakenly recruited Al-Qaeda sympathizers"
Is this from a script of some Monty Python reunion show or what??? Or maybe some Benny Hill tribute??? Please don't tell me this is real "intelligence" at work...it has to be comedy...please.
-SORROW replied - No, it is the sound of moles burrowing in ever deeper.
MUSABM said - A *sane* intelligence service would, of course, take advantage of the huge pool of non-Muslim emigrants from relevant countries.
Thanks to vigorous persecution by their Muslim countrymen, we have hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians (Assyrians, Chaldeans and others) in the West, many of them highly educated and willing to work hard for an open, non-fanatical Middle East.
From Egypt, we have a constant stream of hard-working Coptic Christians.
From Iran, we have tens of thousands of expelled Baha'is, Jews and various ethnic minorities.
From Afghanistan, we have ethnically persecuted Hazaras, "Bukharan Jews", and a small but well-established pre-Taliban middle class many of whose members are now seeking a new life in the West.
Members of all these groups could serve as loyal and reliable "intelligence agents" in the true sense of the word, with the benefit of in-depth, native linguistic skills and social understanding and even social connections far beyond the reach of a 6 month CIA course.
Of course, anyone who has seen pairs of government security (!) personnel at Heathrow airport with Muslim-style full beards will know that the UK has long laken leave of its senses in frantic pursuit of Euro-trash cool.
In the U.S., masochistic insistence on religion-blind hiring even for sensitive positions in government service has opened the gates (and our purse-strings) to incompetents, "jobsworths" and outright traitors. Meanwhile, our potential intelligence aces are left to repair cars or sell insurance.
GRAVENIMAGE said - '(quoting) "The MP said he feared that, in the aftermath of the bombings on London's transport network in July 2005, the security services had rushed to try and take on Muslim recruits, and that had potentially allowed al-Qaeda sympathisers to infiltrate the security service."
.............................
{insert British "intelligence" joke here}'.
And the rest of the discussion, as much as I happen to have kept:
WHOAJ said - Eurabia is in for real trouble, now that their intel services are being infiltrated by Islamists. God when is Geert Wilders gonna be the PM already, so he can tell Europe how it better be.
DSINC said - [citing] 'The Management of Savagery (2006) by Abu Bakr Naji Section 9'
“(We) should infiltrate the police forces, the armies, the different political parties, the newspapers, the Islamic groups, the petroleum companies (as an employee or as an engineer), private security companies, sensitive civil institutions, etc.
That actually began several decades ago, but we need to increase it in the light of recent developments. Likewise, we may need to infiltrate a single place with more than one member-one member will not know another (member) and vise versa- for different roles or the same role if it requires more than one member.”
PULSAR said - (quoting) "the security services had rushed to try and take on Muslim recruits,...."
not far removed from the diversity fiasco of "Let's Hire Muslims to be fair" concept in which
the numerous lawsuits, health scandals, asinine Muslim demands, public disruptions, breaches of security, Muslim intimidations, and the creation of fear in the workplace have shown that hiring Muslims is a bad practice....
DUMBLEDORESARMY said - The most important aspect of this story is that, yet again (google jihadwatch and his name), Patrick Mercer (ex-army officer and Bishop's son) is showing signs of intelligence.
English jihadwatchers: does he appear to you to be educable? If so: encourage him! Educate him! Send him a copy of 'Stealth Jihad' and a copy of Sookhdeo's 'Islam in Britain' - if you are one of his constituents, present it in person. Dig out Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, the issue from last year (September 26 2008) that had Mr Raymond Ibrahim's article "Islam's Doctrines of Deception" in it, photocopy the article and send it to him with a suitable covering letter. For all you know, he's already read it; but you won't know that unless you raise the subject. I didn't know that Archbishop George Pell had read Bat Yeor, until I wrote him a letter mentioning her books, and he wrote back and told me that yes, he had read them.
-SORROW replied to DUMBLEDORESARMY - I think Robert Spencer's upcoming commentary on the Koran would be interesting reading for him [i.e. Mercer].
-STEPHENA55 replied to DUMBLEDORESARMY - I tried to educate my local MP, who I already knew slightly. He remained outwardly stubborn in adhering to the party line, ie Muslim (votes) are good, terrorists are a tiny minority. At least he got the information from me about the true sources of Islamic violence, perhaps some of it might stick.
I think Mercer is educable, he has shown signs of a practical, independent mind. His boss Cameron much less so unfortunately.
-DUMBLEDORESARMY said to STEPHENA - If you think Mercer is educable, do your best to encourage and educate him. If, every time he shows a spark of common sense and guts, he gets people ringing or writing or visiting and expressing intelligent and sincere praise, he may be willing to go further and do more. He needs to know that he has many honest citizens behind him.
For example, he has just stood up and voiced anger in response to Anjem Choudary's call for the Queen to be prosecuted for 'war crimes'. His (Mercer's) turn of phrase was magnificently medieval and completely accurate - "an insult to our monarch". For coming out and saying this he should be receiving an avalanche of Love Mail...with a view to urging him to not leave it at a mere verbal condemnation, tell him to push harder, speak up louder, and not stop till Choudary is hauled up before a court and sentenced and booted clean out of Britain on a one way ticket, permanently.
(I should add, too, that in this instance a *Labor* MP, Mr Andrew Dismore, has also responded to Choudary's insulting the Queen, by stating that the Queen herself should prosecute Choudary...an excellent idea! Perhaps, besides of course writing to Mr Dismore to applaud this show of spirit, humble non-Muslim citizens all over Britain should write to Her Majesty herself, expressing their anger at the way in which this evil, treacherous, seditious Mohammedan has insulted and slandered her, and urgently petitioning her to do as MP Dismore has suggested, and...prosecute!).
TPELLOW said - As long as the 'multiculturalist' MI5 believes, like the BBC, that it too must have a quota of Muslims in its employ, the statistical chances are high that there will be Al Qaeda supporters taken on, judging by the polls of Muslims in the UK.
The British MI5 would do much better if it were to employ proven ex-Muslims instead; has this even occurred to Brown?
-ABU LAHAB said to TPELLOW - Hire apostates!??!?!??! Why you'd run the risk of upsetting the moslems!
/sarc
-DUMBLEDORESARMY said to TPELLOW - "Yes: they could ask Canon Dr Patrick Sookhdeo (author of 'Islam in Britain' and 'Global Jihad' and 'Faith, Power and Territory', all of which companion Mr Spencer's books beautifully) and Ibn Warraq, both of them formerly Pakistani Muslims and now very publicly apostate, to be on the selection/ interview panel, and perhaps also get advice from Magdi Cristiano Allam and Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ali Sina, since these four cover the bases - Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Persia - quite nicely."