Suicide bombing?
What’s a few hundred deaths compared to being a good country?
Telemarketing?
I said evil, not Satanic.
Advertising in general?
I’m calling BS on the “17 minutes before explosion” part. Where were the aircraft? Who could have altered the scenario in 17 minutes to prevent the explosion?
I could imagine a scenario where they learned that a bomb was in package X about to be loaded onto flight Y, and they intercepted the package at the airport before loading, a scant few minutes before departure. That’s plausible. But that’s 17 minutes before a bomb was planted, not before an explosion.
Schedules aren’t punctual enough to plan a timer-bomb to go off just after takeoff or before landing. You need to aim for mid-flight. Pan Am 103 fell over land and the wreckage recovered only because the flight was an hour late; the timer was set such that had the flight been on time the aircraft would have been well out in the North Atlantic.
So some part of the claim is IMO either garbled or pure BS.
Proselytizing atheist?
Most contemporaneous accounts of the bomb plot tell a different story - that a man and former Guantanamo prisoner who had rejoined Al-Queda named Jabir Juban al-Fayfi turned himself in to Saudi authorities and revealed the details of the plot. Saudi intelligence then called British intelligence and the plot was intercepted.
There is some speculation that al-Fayfi was working as a double agent when he rejoined al-Qaeda, or maybe he was just a wishy-washy terrorist. But there are a multitude of reasons why it wouldn’t be smart to interrogate a willing informant .
This story seems to make more sense to me than the suggestion that they somehow obtained and tortured a stalwart terrorist who was unwilling to talk. How would they know who to torture and what questions to ask? Even if they had gotten wind of the plot, how would they have known exactly who had the relevant details? If they had the kind of intelligence that let them know EXACTLY which individuals knew the flight numbers and relevant villain-foiling details, why couldn’t they figure out the rest without torturing anyone?
The guy in Terr’s linked article seems to think that the fact that Mi6 called Saudi Arabia with specific questions and got quick answers means there was someone being tortured for information, but it is also consistent with the presence of a willing informant.
Methinks that the former head of Mi6 is suffering from a case of Williams-O’Reilly Syndrome.
Oh, and torture is immoral and shouldn’t be used under any circumstances but I still wanted to call BS.
Nice work Ann Hedonia.
Sir John Sawers’ story is full of shit. And even if he could show concrete evidence that torture had averted any terrorist plot torture remains ‘illegal and abhorrent’.
Nice. Took me a moment to get it (since my brain keeps turning Brian Williams into Brian Wilson), but nice.