18.10.08

Ex-MI5 chief: Response to 9/11 was 'huge overreaction'

In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.
"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.
In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.
Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.

Read here the interview she gave to The Guardian

With Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the official authorisation and public acceptation of torture in the name of security, the Iraq war which shattered an entire nation as well as hundred thousands lives and put the middle east in turmoil, and the politisation - not the criminalisation - of terror, I think we are way above an overreaction, we are in a delibrately planned large scale coup against civilian society conducted by a military-industrial cartel with the complicity and the responsibility of the citizen of the 'free' societies.

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