Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of MI5, wants Brits to be afraid.

“There are up to 30 alleged ‘mass casualty’ terror plots in operation in Britain, as well as hundreds of young British Muslims on a path to radicalization,” reports the Independent. “Describing the scale of the home-grown terrorist problem, she said MI5 and the police were tackling 200 groups or networks totalling more than 1,600 identified individuals in the UK who were ‘actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts,’” never mind that such terrorist acts rarely come to fruition, usually instead sputtering out into absurd allegations of liquid bombs and other fantastical plots nipped in the bud, or so we are expected to believe, that is after we suspend credibility, again for the umpteenth time.

In addition to freeze-drying credibility, Manningham-Buller would have us stooped with amnesia as well.

A bit of Google sleuthing produces embarrassing results on the depth and breadth of British involvement in terrorism. For instance, as it now appears, the so-called Dirty War in Northern Ireland was an MI5 affair, with the Brits going so far as to provide “infra-red equipment which was used to provide the IRA with state-of-the-art bomb detonation technology,” according to the Sunday Herald. According to “a former soldier who joined the Provisional IRA at army intelligence’s request,” reported the Guardian in 2002, both MI5 and the FBI were in on the act. As well, it turns out some of the most violent and feared members of the IRA were in fact members of Britain’s special forces, including John Joe Magee, billed as the IRA’s “torturer-in-chief,” again according to Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor of the Sunday Herald.

Contrast Manningham-Buller’s comments, obviously designed to trick the gullible into accepting more police state intrusion, with the reported fact British intelligence put Abu Qatada—the “alleged spiritual leader of the al-Qaida terrorist network,” “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe,” and “believed by several European countries to be a pivotal figure in international terrorism”—up in a safe house, an assertion apparently corroborated by French intelligence, according to the Guardian. Instead of delivering Qatada to justice, “British security services offered him a chance to escape to Afghanistan,” the Guardian reported elsewhere. In fact, if we are to believe a report published by the Times Online, Qatada “has been revealed as a double agent working for MI5.”

In addition, British intelligence nurtured al-Muhajiroun, said to be a recruiting arm for al-Qaeda in London, run out of the Finsbury Mosque and managed one Abu Hamza al-Masri, now in prison. Abu Hamza al-Masri’s right-hand man, Haroon Rashid Aswat, “is believed to be the mastermind of all the bombings in London,” according to intelligence expert John Loftus. Aswat had connections to British intelligence and while “the entire British police are out chasing him … one wing of the British government, MI-6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him.”

But, according to two French intelligence experts, it is worse, far worse. “British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice,” the London Observer reported in November, 2002. “The latest claims of MI6 involvement with Libya’s fearsome Islamic Fighting Group, which is connected to one of bin Laden’s trusted lieutenants.”

Because “of the sheer scale of what MI5 faces, the issue” of preventing terrorism “is a daunting one,” Manningham-Buller told the department of contemporary British History at Queen Mary College in London. Or rather, considering the above, because of the sheer scale of what MI5, MI6, the CIA, FBI, Mossad have created through collaboration, the issue of preventing “30 alleged ‘mass casualty’ terror plots” will be daunting unless the British people consent to live in a police state.