Those who read this blog appreciate my deep affection for Britain. I’m qualified to practice law there and I proudly hold a degree from one of Britain’s best universities. My two years there profoundly influenced me for the better. And yes, I’m a flag-waving Yank. But I also acknowledge that most of what we Americans know about liberty we learned from the British.
So it’s very sad to see how far our friends have fallen – to the point where the British authorities have had to outsource their internal security to the CIA because of the sheer numbers of Jihadis there. From the UK Telegraph:
American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain. . . .
Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.
A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.
And all of this being done with the apparent approval of MI5.
Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone does not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. “We don’t have anything approaching comprehensive coverage,” he said.
The dramatic escalation in CIA activity in the UK followed the exposure in August 2006 of Operation Overt, the alleged airline bomb plot.
The British intelligence official revealed that CIA chiefs sent more resources to the UK because they were not prepared to see American citizens die as a result of MI5′s inability to keep tabs on all suspects, even though the Security Service successfully uncovered the plot.
MI5 manpower will have doubled to 4,100 by 2011 but many in the US intelligence community do not think that is enough.
For their part, some British officials are queasy that information obtained by the CIA from British Pakistanis was used to help target Mr Rauf, a British citizen, whom they would have preferred to capture and bring to trial.
Sensitivities over the intelligence arrangement formed a key part of briefings given to Mr Obama, since they are central to what is often called “the most special part of the special relationship” and could complicate his dealings with Gordon Brown.
And how bad is the Jihadi problem in Britain? You be the judge. Here’s a video of a January Gaza ‘protest’ in London. The Muslim mob is cursing the police, who are completely humiliated.
The leftist establishment naturally blames the United States – for everything. And we can only hope that our friends rediscover themselves and appreciate – as we Americans do – what a grand thing it is to be British.
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