One line stands out from the long-awaited report into last year's July 7 London bombings, released last week by the British Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). It says: 'Across the whole of the counter-terrorism community, the development of the home-grown threat and the radicalisation of British citizens were not fully understood or applied to strategic thinking.'
It is a realisation that not only dominates the thoughts of those investigating the London atrocities, but will also be at the heart of western counter-terrorism for years to come.
When Britain was attacked, it was not, in and of itself, a surprise. Following September 11 and Madrid, and the British role in Iraq, the threat was clear, and in the months before July, John Stevens, former Metropolitan Police commissioner, publicly warned that an attack was inevitable. The surprise was that the threat emerged from within.
The story of the July bombers has, thus, already become a model for the west's intelligence community: the tale of a group of relatively apolitical young Muslims, brought up in, and well integrated into, the country, who were radicalised (by elements including charismatic preachers) into politically and theologically motivated activists determined to die and kill.
Until that day, the emphasis of British security agencies was on foreign nationals. Only sparse resources were focused on 'home-grown' elements, and this lack of resources formed the main emphasis of the ISC report.
Three of the four bombers were 'known': they were filmed during surveillance of other suspects, yet were considered peripheral figures and none was even identified.
The report confirmed that British authorities do not now believe there was a fifth bomber, and thus that no al-Qaeda 'mastermind' had been co-ordinating the attacks. Al-Qaeda's fingerprints are, nonetheless, all over the operation.
