Putin's statement about Syrian ceasefire

PUTIN: SPECIAL STATEMENT ON CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES IN SYRIA STARTING FEB. 27TH [VIDEO + TEXT]

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The statement was first published on the Kremlin’s official website on Monday. This is the full text:

Friends,

I just had a telephone conversation with President of the United States of America Barack Obama. The phone call was initiated by the Russian side, but the interest was certainly mutual.

During our conversation, we approved joint statements of Russia and the US, as co-chairs of the ISSG, on the cessation of hostilities in Syria. Adoption of the statement was preceded by intensive work by Russian and American experts. We also made use of the positive experience we accumulated over the course of cooperation in eliminating chemical weapons in Syria.

Our negotiators held several rounds of closed consultations. As a result, we were able to reach an important, specific result. It was agreed that the cessation of hostilities in Syria commences at 00:00 (Damascus time) on February 27, 2016 on terms and conditions that are a part of the Russian-American statement.

The essence of these conditions is as follows: by 12:00 pm on February 26, 2016, all parties warring in Syria must indicate to the Russian Federation or our American partners their commitment to the cessation of hostilities. Russian and American troops will jointly delineate the territories where these groups are active. No military action will be taken against them by the Armed Forces of the Syrian Arab Republic, Russian Armed Forces and the US-led coalition. In turn, the opposition will cease all military action against the Armed Forces of the Syrian Arab Republic and other groups supporting them.

ISIS, Jabhat Al-Nursa, and other terrorist organisations designated by the United Nations Security Council, are excluded from the cessation of hostilities. Strikes against them will continue.

It is fundamentally important that Russia and the US, as co-chairs of the ISSG, are prepared to launch effective mechanisms to promote and monitor compliance with the ceasefire by both the Syrian Government and the armed opposition groups.

To achieve this goal, we will establish a communication hotline and, if necessary, a working group to exchange relevant information. Russia will conduct the necessary work with Damascus and the legitimate Syrian leadership. We expect that the United States will do the same with regard to their allies and the groups they support.

I am sure that the joint actions agreed upon with the American side will be enough to radically reverse the crisis situation in Syria. We are finally seeing a real chance to bring an end to the long-standing bloodshed and violence. As a result, humanitarian access to all Syrian citizens in need should be made easier.

Most important is the creation of conditions for launching a long-term political process through a broad inter-Syrian dialogue in Geneva, under the auspices of the UN.

Unfortunately, recent history has many examples where one-sided actions not sanctioned by the UN, which favour short-term political or opportunistic interests, have led to dramatic results. These examples are on everyone’s lips: Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Yemen.

Against this background, Russian-American agreements on the cessation of hostilities in Syria, and their joint implementation in coordination with all nations participating in the International Syria Support Group, can become an example of responsible actions the global community takes against the threat of terrorism, which are based on international law and UN principles.

I would like to hope that the Syrian leadership and all our partners in the region and beyond will support the set of actions chosen by representatives of Russia and the US.

Robert Fisk on Syria

On the Road to Aleppo

Where People Have Abandoned all in the Shadow of Isis
By Robert Fisk

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syrian-civil-war-isis-refugees-aleppo-to-damascus-a6886446.html

February 21, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "The Independent" - You can drive these days from Damascus to Aleppo but the road is a long one, it does not follow the international highway and for almost a hundred miles you whirr along with Isis forces to the west of you and, alas, Isis forces scarcely three miles to the east of you.

The moral of the story is simple: you will learn a lot about Syria’s tragedy on the way, and about the dangers of rockets, bombs and IEDS, and you must drive fast – very fast – if you want to reach Syria’s largest and still warring city without meeting the sort of folk who’d put you on a video-tape wearing an orange jump suite with a knife at your throat.

The old road north as far as Homs is clear enough these days. Syrian air strikes keep the men from Isis away from the dual-carriageway. But once you’ve negotiated the Dresden-like ruins of central Homs – the acres of blitzed homes and apartment blocks and shops and Ottoman houses, still dripping with broken water mains and sewage – you must turn right outside the city and follow the signposts to Raqqa. Yes, Raqqa, the Syrian ‘capital’ of Caliph Baghdadi’s cult-kingdom where no man – or no westerner, at least – fears to tread. And then you drive slowly through Syrian army checkpoints and past thirty miles of ruins.

These are not the gaunt, hanging six-storey blocks of central Hama. They are the suburbs and the surrounding villages where the revolution began almost six years ago and where it metamorphosed from the ‘Free Syrian Army’ of which Dave Cameron still dreams – all 70,000 of them – into the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra and then, like a Victorian horror novel, into Isis. For all of those 30 miles – perhaps 40 if you count some outlying hamlets in the dust-storms that blow across the desert – I saw only feral children, two makeshift sweet stores and a few still-standing homes. The rest is crumpled concrete, sandwiched roofs, weed-covered and abandoned barricades from wars which no reporter witnessed and of which there is apparently no visual record. They are the homes of the poor, those who had no chance of salvation in their own country.

It’s strange how the visual disconnect interrupts you as you speed down the bumpy, pot-holed road. Where have all the people gone, I kept asking myself? Why are those who live here not rebuilding their homes? And then I remembered the thousands of Syrian refugees I saw and met streaming through the hot cornfields of northern Greece last summer en route to Macedonia, and the pictures of those tens of thousands walking the frozen railway tracks north to Germany, and of course it made sense. This is the midden which those people left, the “Ground Zero” they abandoned. This is the empty bedlam which drove them to despair and to Europe. These are not the homes of the internally displaced. They are the homes of those who have abandoned all.

“Raqqa 240 kilometres,” says the official blue road marker which flashes past us, and I look at my driver – his name is Mohamed – and he casts me a look of both humour and palpable unease. Straight north of Hama is the international highway we should have been travelling on, but – I missed all reports of this – Isis has cut this road in several places. So we head on north east on this uneasy road in near silence.

Then the wreckage starts. A burned-out bus on my side of the car – “38 passengers were killed in that bus,” Mohamed says, but he can’t remember if it was hit with rocket-propelled grenades or drove over a hidden mine left for the army. Mohamed’s wife is in the back of the car and points east across the grey desert to a swaddle of concrete two miles to the east. “That’s al-Mabouji,” she says quietly. “Isis went in there six months ago and massacred 65 civilians and took eight women away as slaves. No-one has seen them since.” Another road sign. Raqqa 219 kilometres.

So now we know that Isis is to the west of us on the old highway and that Isis is scarcely three – at the most eight – miles to the east of us. I begin to count the Syrian army checkpoints, teenagers with Kalashnikovs and the Syrian flag flying over their concrete huts. This is how the government keeps the road open – conscript soldiers and a series of flying columns, open-top trucks mounted with heavy machine guns and soldiers cowled behind scarves to protect them from the desert wind. Most of the transport trucks are travelling in convoy – patrols at both ends – and a military column races down the road towards Homs, trucks and armour with rifles pointing like hedgehog quills from the military lorries.

There’s another village close by – Khanaifis – which Isis shelled several weeks ago in an attempt to cut our road, killing 45 civilians, mostly women and children.  “Raqqa”, says the next infuriating sign. “167 kilometres”.  And I remember that somewhere over there to the east, on grey sand looking identical to the stony earth around us, Isis put to death those poor Western men on the videotapes with knives to cut their heads off.  The Syrians have built little fortresses beside the highway now, tiny castles of sand and concrete sprouting with machine guns, a few Katyusha batteries and an occasional tank.  It becomes an obsessive task to count these little protective ramparts.  Could they really disgorge a Syrian version of the US Cavalry if the black flags of Isis suddenly appeared on the road?  The black flags did appear about a month ago but the Syrians drove to the road-block and killed every armed member of the world’s most fearful cult.  

One of Syria’s top soldiers, General Suhail, known to most Syrians as “The Tiger” – he is now fighting in the eastern desert far from here – blasted our two-lane highway open two years ago and relieved the siege of Aleppo and now it trails across the desert like a single spider’s thread, a lifeline for the government and its supporters.  That’s why it’s called the ‘Military Road’.  There’s another burned-out, overturned bus on the right and a scattering of rusting oil tankers hit by rockets.  The passenger coaches that now race past us have their curtains pulled, just like the old buses in Afghanistan when the Taliban were on the hunt for victims.

Then – and I need not describe the sense of relief – we turn left towards ancient Aleppo and there are bomb racks from Syrian jet aircraft and discarded extra fuel tanks and then a series of black smudges far to the east where the Syrian army are beginning a series of military operation against the al-Nusra.  One of them appears to be an oil fire and five chimneys of a power station loom through the distant mist like a goliath, over-chimneyed Titanic.  A thousand people have been killed by violence on this road in two years.  Isis desperately want to take it back.

We pass a village where there were four suicide car bombs – the place is now swamped with armour and police cars – and then the countryside lights up and turns green and the fields are dark with fresh earth and women working in the strawberry fields and an old railway track with all but 20 feet of track stolen by theives.  And we drive into Aleppo, the place still thumped by the sound of shellfire – outgoing, from the Syrian army, which is now winning ground around the city – and I see a railway bridge behind which I hid with Syrian soldiers two years ago from night-time snipers.

No longer. The city is reborn.  There are smart military policemen in red berets on the checkpoints, new shops opened beneath crushed apartment blocks, and the sound of incoming shellfire and ambulances driving painfully through the traffic jams.  Who would believe we could be so happy to see this dangerous old city and its burned medieval market and decrepit hotels?  Now that tells you something about the war in Syria.

Revisiting the London bombings

As we approach the London Olympics with all the warnings of possible terrorist attacks and false flag operations, it may be timely to look at the 7/7 London bombings

The 7/7 London Bombings: Documents Prove that the Official Story Cannot be True

by Tom Secker

Global Research,

3 July, 2012

The 7/7 paper trail has led me in many different directions.  From the results of J7 FOIA requests to court documents from PACER to the vast range of materials made available at the inquests into the 52 deaths, I have tried to see that no document goes unread.  There are many pieces of paper that show that contradict the official story, but only some that categorically prove it is untrue.  The official story comprises three reports: 1) The Home Office narrative account of events 2) The 1st Intelligence and Security Committee report, released in tandem with the narrative account 3) The 2nd Intelligence and Security Committee report, released three years later in May 2009, in particular its narrative timeline of events The following 7 documents show that key claims of the official story presented in these three reports simply cannot be true.  Collectively and cumulatively they show that the overall official story likewise simply cannot be true.    Document 1:  The Home Office Amendment to the narrative account In the original Home Office narrative it claims that the alleged bombers got on the 7:40 train from Luton station to Kings' Cross Thameslink station in London.  At that point, it had already been established that the 7:40 train did not run that day, leading to considerable criticism of the Home Office.  In August 2007, over two years after the bombings and over a year after this fundamental untruth had been pointed out to the authorities, they published an amendment to the official narrative.  It changed two paragraphs in the original narrative.  The links to both the Home Office webpage and the pdf file now come up as not found.  Because a new version of the narrative has not been published, we are presented with an Orwellian paradox.  If anyone looks for the official story today, they will find the original narrative with the incorrect train time.  Even if they know about the time being wrong, they might never find the amendment that proves beyond any doubt that the official story in the Home Office report is incorrect.  You can download the narrative amendment here, (onsite backup here) though despite being a single page it comes in at a whopping 2.45 MB.  This can only be part of a deliberate attempt to discourage people from finding it and sharing it.  There's literally no other explanation for why you would make a single page text-only PDF have such a large filesize.  By comparison, the Home Office narrative PDF file, which is 60 pages and includes graphics, is only 584KB.  Document 2:  Sidique Khan's resignation letter Towards the end of 2004, supposed 7/7 ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan resigned from his job as a teaching assistant at Hillside Primary School in Leeds.  He then travelled to Pakistan for around three months, returning in February 2005.  The Home Office narrative refers to 'Khan and Tanweers visit to Pakistan from 19 November 2004 to 8 February 2005'.  The ISC's first report says, 'Siddeque Khan travelled to Pakistan in 2003 and spent time there with Shazad Tanweer from November 2004 to February 2005'.  Their second report does not give any dates at all.  So, the Home Office claim that Khan left for Pakistan on November 19th 2004, and note: (...)his increasingly poor attendance record. This culminated in a period of sick leave from 20 September to 19 November 2004. The school administration had reason to believe that the absences were not genuine and dismissed him. At the same time, he had in any case, written tosay he would not be returning to work. There is a problem here - there is no evidence to support the idea that Khan went to Pakistan as early as November 19th 2004, or that he was dismissed.  A response to a J7 FOIA request lists his absences from work including '20 September 2004 - 30 November 2004 Sick Leave' and '1 December 2004 - 7 December 2004 Unauthorised absence resulting in Mr Khan handing in his resignation on 7 December 2004.'  If he handed in his resignation in Leeds on December 7th then he couldn't have been in Pakistan since November 19th. Even if he had posted the letter before leaving, or left it with someone else for them to hand in, that does not explain why the school did not receive it until nearly three weeks later. The letter itself has several sections redacted, including where the date would likely be.  The attached 'leaver's form' lists numerous possible reasons including dismissal for a contract worker, which would be appropriate if Khan had been sacked.  Instead, the box that is ticked is 'Resig, Family Commit'.  There are other questions around Khan's work for Hillside Primary School that are detailed here, and you can download his full personnel record here (PDF, 71.9MB). However, the letter itself provides other significant details.  You can download the letter and attached form here (PDF, 3.96MB).  It is clear that this letter was written before Khan departed for Pakistan, but also that he intended to return from whatever he was doing there.  The notion that he was going there to fight, either in Kashmir in the Afghan border region, is not substantiated at all.  This whole story about Khan and Tanweer travelling to training camps with the aim of fighting in the jihad, but then changing their minds and coming back to Britain to carry out suicide attacks appears to be total speculation.  Even the basic facts of the story, the whens and wheres, as presented by the Home Office and ISC, are wrong.    Document 3:  MI5 Subscriber check on Sidique Khan's mobile phone The question of how much MI5 knew about the alleged bombers, and Sidique Khan in particular, and when they knew it has been an issue of some dispute and discussion.  According to the original ISC report: In the comprehensive review of intelligence records that it conducted, the Security Service found that it had on record a telephone number which it was only possible to identify after the attacks as belonging to Jermaine Lindsay. They also had on record a telephone number registered to a Siddeque Khan and details of contacts between that number and an individual who had been under Security Service investigation in 2003. A review of related surveillance data showed that Siddeque Khan and Shazad Tanweer had been among a group of men who had held meetings with others under Security Service investigation in 2004. That was in 2006.  Over time, more and more details became available.  We know know that there the individual who was under investigation in 2003 was Mohammed Qayyum Khan, known as 'Q'.  He was apparently an Al Qaeda facilitator in the UK and the mastermind of the 'Fertiliser bomb plot' based around Omar Khyam.  During the course of the Operation Crevice investigation into Khyam, Q and others the security services came across Sidique Khan on several occasions, in several different ways.  The initial connection was said to be via phone calls to Q.  The second ISC report says: 13 July 2003 Data from a mobile phone associated with Mohammed Qayum KHAN shows a number of calls with a telephone number MI5 had not seen before. Checks reveal that the telephone number in question is registered to "Siddique KHAN" of 49a Bude Road, Leeds (the address of a bookshop selling extremist literature). MI5 cannot match the name "Siddique KHAN" with any in their databases, and the contact is not investigated further since there is nothing to suggest involvement in any terrorist-related activity. The report goes on to detail further calls between these phones in July and August 2003.  The problem is that the MI5 subscriber check on a mobile that turned up Sidique Khan as the registered user was carried out in March 2003.  This is not only earlier in the year, but before Crevice had even started, if we go by the timeline presented by the ISC.  Though discussions at the inquestslargely muddied the waters instead of clearing them, it has become abundantly clear that MI5 knew a lot more than they have ever admitted.  Once again, the basic question of what happened and when is simply not a true account. You can download the MI5 document detailing the subscriber check here (PDF, 100KB).  For a larger discussion of Operation Crevice, which appears to have been a sophisticated entrapment operation, see the Mohammed Junaid Babar document collection.    Document 4:  Email exchange between MI5 and West Yorkshire Police Aside from the phone calls between a phone registered to Sidique Khan and Q (who was probably working for MI5), the other major connection between Khan and the Crevice suspects was through surveillance of Omar Khyam.  Khyam and Khan met on several occasions, and MI5 and Special Branch surveillance teams followed Khan, sometimes over 200 miles up the M1 to Leeds.  They took photographs of the occupants of the car, registration numbers, and noted addresses where they stopped.  On February 2nd 2004 they followed Khan around as he met with Omar Khyam and others in Crawley, near London.  They then watched and followed the car North, all the way to Leeds, where they saw it drop off some of its occupants before finally stopping outside 10 Thornhill Park Avenue.  This was the home address of Sidique Khan's wife Hasina Patel, though whether Khan was living there at the time is not certain.  Nonetheless, Khan parked and went inside the house on the evening of February 2nd 2004, and MI5 watched him do it.  That much is not disputed, though of course it was not mentioned in the first ISC report.  The second one explains that: 16 February 2004 MI5 runs checks on the green Honda Civic (seen on 2 February), which is shown to be registered to a Hasina PATEL at 10 Thornhill Park Avenue, Dewsbury. MI5 ask West Yorkshire Police for any details they have on Hasina PATEL in order to enable us to fully identify any potential associates of KHYAM. There is no record of a written response to this request. This claim, that West Yorkshire Police (WYP) simply didn't bother to respond to this request for information, is one of several attempts in Crevice and other related operations to put the blame on WYP for the 'intelligence failures'.  Much the same thing also happened with the story aroundMartin McDaid, another probable security services agent who knew Sidique Khan.  However, this was not the only story that MI5 told the ISC.  In another section of the second ISC report it says: MI5 asked West Yorkshire Police to check the name "Hasina PATEL" and the address (10 Thornhill Park Avenue, Dewsbury) against their databases in order "to enable us to fully identify any potential associates of KHYAM". Nothing significant was found and, with no evidence to justify further action, none was taken. So is there 'no record of a written response' or was there a response but 'nothing significant was found'?  But wait, just to make it even less clear, the ISC also reported that: After the meeting on 2 February 2004, level 1 checks were carried out which showed that the car was registered to a Hasina PATEL at 10 Thornhill Park Avenue, Dewsbury. MI5 then asked West Yorkshire Police for any details they had on a Hasina PATEL in order to enable us to fully identify any potential associates of KHYAM. No information was discovered. That makes it three different stories that MI5 told the ISC just about whether or not they got a response from WYP about Hasina Patel and if they did, what the response said.  One story is that there was no response; the second that the response contained 'nothing significant'; the third that the response contained 'no information'.  So which is it?  As you might have expected, WYP did respond, with information about Hasina Patel and the house at 10 Thornhill Park Avenue.  Whether you consider this information significant or insignificant, yet again what is clear is that the official story told by the ISC is not true.  Indeed, two versions of what MI5 told the ISC, and the ISC told us, are not true.  MI5 claimed there was no response, but there was.  They said no information was discovered, but some was.  The only point on which they might be telling the truth is whether or not the information discovered was significant.  That is difficult to judge since so much of the information is redacted.  You can download the email exchange between MI5 and WYP about Hasina Patel here (PDF 55KB).    Document 5:  Forensic links between the alleged bombers and the 'bomb factory' The physical, forensic science case against the alleged bombers is just as shoddy as that presented by the Home Office, the ISC and MI5.  One of the major problems is that the police investigating the crime appear to have simply assumed the guilt of the four men, despite a distinct of forensic evidence at the most critical points in the story.  A full examination will have to be reserved for later but one particularly important aspect is the alleged bomb factory in Alexandra Grove, Leeds.  This is where Khan, Tanweer, Hussain and Lindsay are supposed to have cooked up their homemade peroxide and black pepper explosives.  All the official reports are unanimous on this point, even though they aren't even certain that the explosions were caused by peroxide-based explosives.  Go figure.  At the inquests into the deaths of the 52 the Metropolitan Police Service entered into evidence displays of the 'items of note' found in the alleged bomb factory that were linked to the alleged bombers by handwriting, fingerprints or DNA.  They found all sorts of items, from saucepans to extension cables to scissors to lightbulbs to kitchen foil.  So what's the problem?  The problem is that all these mundane items could be connected to the alleged bombers, but the most critical items could not.  These plastic tubs supposedly contained the explosive mixture used in the 7/7 bombings, though only one type of sludge actually had explosive properties when tested.  None of these tubs, out of dozens, were linked to any of the alleged bombers by DNA or fingerprints.  The sludge was not poisonous or particularly corrosive, so there is no reason for them to have always worn gloves when handling it.  Without this critical bit of evidence, which should exist if the official story is true, it is impossible to see how those four men used those tubs of sludge to bomb London on 7/7. The original exhibits were hi-res images but for the sake of convenience and for those with low bandwidth I have put together both a lower quality and a high quality file containing all four exhibits, one for each of the alleged bombers.  You can download the higher quality version here(PDF, 8.09MB) and the lower quality version here (PDF 1.64MB).   Document 6:  Metropolitan Police diagram of explosion on Liverpool St train Returning to the Home Office narrative, it says: Forensic evidence suggests that Tanweer was sitting towards the back of the second carriage with the rucksack next to him on the floor. The blast killed 8 people, including Tanweer, with 171 injured. The MPS produced diagrams for the inquests showing the carriages where the alleged bombers are supposed to have been, and the locations of victims and survivors.  Fundamentally, these diagrams do not first the Home Office descriptions of events.  The  Liverpool Street train is perhaps the clearest example.  The alleged bomber, Shezad Tanweer, is shown in purple as person number 5.  As you can see, he is stood up in a standing area, not seated.  The person sat where one witness vaguely placed Tanweer is number 3, William Walsh, who suffered minor injuries when he broke through the window behind him to escape the carriage after the blast.  How did William Walsh, and for that matter Greg Shannon (number 8), survive, while people further away and shielded by other people such as Carrie Taylor (number 17) were killed?  Perhaps even more perplexing, the Home Office says that 171 people were injured in the explosion.  The full version of the diagram shows that there were 43 people in this carriage, including Tanweer (if he was actually there).  If the blast killed 8 of them, that leaves 35 injuries in the bombed carriage.  That leaves another 136 injuries on the rest of the train, which is the equivalent of about another 3 whole carriage loads of people at the same rate of occupancy.  How were that many people injured by one small backpack bomb?  Fundamentally, this diagram does not show a realistic scenario, and contradicts the Home Office version.  You can download a full hi-resolution copy of this diagram here (PDF, 3.34MB).   Document 7:  Extract from Sidique Khan's Last Will and Final Testament The narrative says that among the 'key evidence indicating that these were co-ordinated suicide attacks by these 4 men' is a page of Sidique Khan's will. It says: There is a video statement by Khan, shown on the al Jazeera television network on 1 September, and, separately, a last Will and Testament indicating his intention to martyr himself through a terrorist attack. The video statement is of unknown provenance, and makes no clear references to suicide bombings or martyrdom or terrorist attacks.  The will is not available in full, and despite the Home Office citing it as key evidence, and numerous mainstream media reports on it, it was denied to us for many years with a variety of excuses.  Perhaps the most ridiculous among these is the idea that it would be an invasion of Khan's privacy.  In this way, the state could continue to accuse Khan of being responsible without releasing the evidence they cited in support of that conclusion.  The claim that he indicated his intent to martyr himself in his will is based on the inclusion of a single word, 'shaheed'.  This can be used by Muslims to refer to martyrdom, but it can also mean to die as a good Muslim, and hence be accepted in paradise without having done anything as dramatic as becoming a suicide bomber.  In context, it is clear that Khan was not referring to killing himself: This passage is addressed by Khan to his daughter, refers to changing her nappy and being the first to feed her ice cream and get her eid presents.  The notion that this is somehow a confession of suicidal and murderous intent is ridiculous, though curiously this document has never appeared in the mainstream media, even though it is now partially available.  You can download it for yourself here (PDF, 125KB). Together, these seven documents are the smoking guns that prove that the official 7/7 story cannot be true.  From the account of Khan's motives, to the facts of how and why he left his job to travel to Pakistan, to what connects the alleged bombers to the alleged bomb factory, to how and where the explosions took place, to what MI5 knew and when, the state has not told the truth at every turn.  Every fundamental part of the official 7/7 story is contradicted by the very source material that should have been used to put that official story together.  As we approach the 7th anniversary of these attacks we must use the evidence at our disposal to show just how fundamentally and how broadly the state has lied about the bombings.  While these documents do not prove government complicity in the attacks, they make the question of their involvement ever more important.  We have the evidence now to show how the cover-up and the lies are not just the lazy, partial response of a system trying to hush up talk of incompetence, but are the response of systemic culture of deceit within the state.  At its heart, the terror we must confront is the fact that if those four men did not carry out the attacks then the real culprits are still out there.