This is an excellent documentary about modern day Russia under Vladimir Putin.

This article titled “How the shock of 9/11 made MI5 stronger” was written by Richard Norton-Taylor and Nick Hopkins, for The Guardian on Wednesday 7th September 2011 18.58 UTC

MI5 felt almost swamped after 9/11, inundated with leads to plots and fragmentary intelligence, according to Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of Britain’s Security Service.

But in the decade since the attacks, its budget doubled and its headcount has almost tripled, while intelligence operations have increased fivefold.

In her recent Reith lectures on the BBC, Manningham-Buller who led MI5 from 2002-2007, highlighted a key difference in the British and US response to 9/11. She recalled a discussion among British officials in the garden of the UK embassy in Washington the day after the attacks. “Despite talk of military action, there was one thing we all agreed on: terrorism is resolved through politics and economics not through arms and intelligence, however important a role these play,” she said.

She described 9/11 as “a crime, not an act of war”. What made it different from earlier attacks was its “scale and audacity, not its nature”. This was a far cry from Tony Blair’s public stance, standing “shoulder to shoulder” with the US in the “war on terror”.

Blair might have suggested the world would not be the same again, but the immediate response among the senior officials who make up the Whitehall establishment was to look at the causes, including the disaffected Muslim youth in Britain.

Resources poured into the security and intelligence agencies after 9/11, in MI5 in particular. MI5 staff amounted to some 1,500 in 2001. It is now approaching 4,000, some based in eight new regional offices in the UK. MI6 increased more slowly, with a staff closer to 2,000. Staff at GCHQ, the government’s electronic eavesdropping centre, were used to working in compact cells largely determined by the particular Soviet bloc country they were targeting during the cold war. They were reorganised in recognition that the threat now came from an international enemy – which did not recognise national boundaries. This reality is reflected in the open plan design of GCHQ’s new headquarters, nicknamed the doughnut, in Cheltenham.

The spending of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ are not individually disclosed. But the “single intelligence account” – their combined annual budget – has doubled since 9/11 to about £2bn. For the first time since 9/11, it was frozen in the last spending round.

There is a widespread view among security analysts that MI5 and MI6 were slow to recognise the threat of al-Qaida from within, that young men of Asian descent travelling from the UK to Pakistan for jihadist or terrorist training were plotting attacks there, not back in Britain.

“Homegrown” terrorism came as a shock. MI5 admitted they knew little about the areas, mainly in northern England, where the 7/7 bombers lived. MI5 thus set up regional offices, in Leeds, Manchester, and other cities, and developed closer relations with local police forces.

MI5 director general Jonathan Evans has said Britain’s security and intelligence agencies were also slow to respond to the US reaction to 9/11 in another respect – namely the treatment of detainees and terror suspects. Allegations – and in some cases, it appears, hard evidence – of British collusion in the torture or abuse of terror suspects continue to emerge, the latest from Libya.

The issue has faced MI5 and MI6 with the greatest internal crisis since the spy scandals of the early cold war years. Its roots lie in the US response to the 9/11 attacks. As Evans and Sir John Sawers, the chief of MI6, have said, it presents them with a serious dilemma – do they ignore potentially life-saving information passed on by foreign security services because it might have ben extracted by torture?

The issue, which had its roots in the 9/11 attacks, is hotly disputed more than ever, and is to be the subject of an inquiry, under former judge Sir Peter Gibson set up last year. Al-Qaida’s influence and role may have faded but the shock waves from 9/11 continue to reverberate in the corridors of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies.

One important change to the national security landscape over the last 10 years has been the emerging threat of cyber-terrorism – practised by individuals and states. Now at the forefront of concerns in Whitehall, the ability to cause damage by paralysing essential services – phone networks, electricity and gas supply, the internet – is no longer the realm of science fiction.

Scotland Yard sources say it is only a matter of time before terrorist networks influenced in the past by al-Qaida plan cyber attacks.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

(hat tip Breitbart TV)

The BBC funded a paintballing trip for men later accused of Islamic terrorism and failed to pass on information about the 21/7 bombers to police.

Mohammed Hamid, who is charged with overseeing a two-year radicalization program to prepare London-based Muslim youths for jihad, was described as a “cockney comic” by a BBC producer.

The BBC paid for Mr Hamid and fellow defendants Muhammad al-Figari and Mousa Brown to go on a paintballing trip at the Delta Force centre in Tonbridge, Kent, in February 2005. The men, accused of terrorism training, were filmed for a BBC programme called Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, screened in June 2005.

Nasreen Suleaman, a researcher on the programme, told the court that Mr Hamid, 50, contacted her after the July 2005 attack and told her of his association with the bombers. But she said that she felt no obligation to contact the police with this information. Ms Suleaman said that she informed senior BBC managers but was not told to contact the police.

You gotta love the irony that some of the Muslims featured in “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” actually turned out to be terrorists. I think it further proves the point that if you live in Britain, maybe you should Panic if someone is Islamic.

-Samantha Giles