September 11th 2001 - COBR meeting

[Wokeman]

"We had a hastily convened COBR briefing, which Tony chaired and chaired very well. Geoff Hoon was gung-ho. "We are ready", he said to Tony, "to put our air force and our facilities at the disposal of the intelligence services". I said: "I think we need a moment's pause on this". I could tell that they were getting carried away." Huh!

I won't include other supposedly helpful and creative ideas posed by various synchophants that day including placing a battleship (I believe we no longer have any - OK, a destroyer!) off the coast that would have a capacity for ground-to-air missiles in case of "unauthorised planes" that looked as if they were going to attack the conference centre or hotel. (It gets better!) "When I said I thought this was way over the top, the MoD said they could have missiles mounted either on the roof or in a series of lorries near by. I vetoed that as well."

Quoted excerpts from The Blunkett Tapes by David Blunkett

[Wokeman]

WHAT A CARRY-ON, A FARCE!

December 19th, 2001
A farce. I was due to chair a cabinet committee on crime, but had to hand over to John Denham because I discovered that eight of the 10 terrorist suspects had been picked up but not Abu Qatada or another leading dissident. It seemed that Special Branch had lost track of them. In the case of Abu Qatada they were watching his home on Monday evening and then had lost him when he went out. When I asked how they could have lost him, they said that there were lots of press waiting up the road and by the time they'd picked up that he'd left home, they weren't close enough to keep in touch. I was flabbergasted and said so. They then said they thought they'd got him as his car was parked outside a known address and they had raided it first thing Wednesday morning, but he wasn't there. I said: "Well, he wouldn't be, would he?"
They then said that they wanted to raid his home at 11.30am that morning in the hope of finding something that would give them a clue, I said: "Do you mean he might have left a little note saying he was round at Uncle Joe's and here's the address?" I also said: What do you think would be the consequence of your raiding his house? You know he's not there and so you come out without him. What will the media do?" Total silence. I said: "They'll splash it across every TV channel and every front page that we've lost Abu Qatada".
The prime minister would be up for prime minister's questions at noon, and if we didn't raid the house, we would at least have bought ourselves some time. I said: "Well, I'm not in operational control, you are, but I'm instructing you nevertheless to abort the invasion of Abu Quatada's house" — and they rushed out and phoned. 'So with 90 seconds to spare, they cancelled the raid. What a carry-on — more like 000 than 007'.

Excerpt from David Blunkett's new book, The Blunkett Tapes

[ComfortablyNumb]

Sorry, but who are your quoting?