Slowly but surely we are getting nearer to finding out what drove four young British Muslim men to blow themselves up in London last year and whether the tragedy could have been prevented.

The most damaging of all these questions is whether British foreign policy, most specifically in relation to Iraq, was in any way to blame. Tony Blair has repeatedly tried to deny that it is, because to do so would undermine his credibility on one of the reasons we went to war: it was supposed to make us safer.

Now it seems we have answers to two of the most pressing questions. British MPs from the Intelligence and Security Committee have spent six months interviewing security officials and examining their work to see if the July 7 attacks could have been prevented. They have recently concluded that the security services could not be blamed.

One of those to have seen a draft of their report is the BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner. When interviewed Gardner said: "Could they [the 7/7 attacks] have been prevented with better intelligence? Yes. Could they have been prevented given the resources that the agencies had? They think probably not."

Another report has also been leaked that makes damning reading for Blair.  A copy of the report into the bombings by the Home Office has concluded what Blair has long denied: that Britain’s home grown suicide bombers were inspired by the invasion of Iraq.

Initial drafts of the report are said to say that Iraq was a key “contributory factor” in the “radicalization” of the bombers, along with issues such as economic deprivation, social exclusion and disaffection with their community elders.

The full Home Office report will not be published for another five weeks, but the same conclusion has been reached by an extremely timely book  called “7/7 – the London Bombings – Islam and the Iraq War”, written by Milan Rai, who founded the British branch of Voices in the Wilderness.

In the book, Rai sets out to prove “how Tony Blair lied” to the British people over the 7/7 bombings. He cites secret intelligence documents that show that Blair knew that the Iraq war could increase the risk of a terrorist attack in the UK, yet he repeatedly denied the fact.

To build his case, Rai details some of the statements made by the British government that included this one by the Prime Minster’s Official spokesperson some four days after the bombing: “It is not right in anyway to suggest that this kind of terrorism was spawned by the Iraq war. It was something that was active before then”.

The British government line was simple: Because al-Qaeda had attacked targets before Iraq, then Iraq could not be the cause of the bombings. The British government line was also sinister. The message from the government was that if you questioned the government line you were being sympathetic with the bombers. It was a repetition of Bush’s stance on the War on Terror: you are either with us or against us.

“Blair repeatedly implied that those who try to understand the causes of the violence end up justifying that violence” writes Rai. This line led one journalist to remark: “I noticed at the beginning that the people who were asking about the issue of Iraq [were] made to feel, and I feel that way, as if they were justifying what the terrorist has done”. The reason that the Blair government had to attack its critics was it was hiding a dirty secret. It was lying.

 We know the British government lied. And we know this from British government documents that Tony Blair would have read. Five weeks before the invasion of Iraq, the top intelligence committee in the UK – called the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) – actually warned Blair that if the UK assisted America in invading Iraqi it would “heighten” the risk of terrorism in Britain. 

 The report, dated February 2003, stated that “Al-Qaeda and associated groups continue to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat is heightened by military action against Iraq”. The JIC also assessed that any collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase rather than decrease the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology finding their way into the hands of terrorists. Put simply: Any war in Iraq would make things much, much worse, and Blair knew it.

 Some fifteen months later, in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, that killed 192 people travelling in commuter trains on 11^th March 2004, the British government set up a project called “Operation Contest,” whose main aim was the prevention of terrorism from the British Muslim community.

As part of Operation Contest, the head of the British Foreign Office, Michael Jay, wrote that while other colleagues had “flagged up some of the potential underlying cause of extremism that can affect the Muslim community, such as discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion” a “recurring theme” was “the issue of British foreign policy” especially in the context of “the Middle East Peace Process and Iraq”.

 Jay’s Department, the Foreign Office then published a joint report with the Home Office called “Young Muslims and Extremism”. What causes “extremism” the report asked? It listed three factors including “anger” that revolved around a “perception of double standards in British foreign policy” where “democracy is preached but oppression of the Ummah is practiced or tolerated – eg in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Chechnya”. This was accompanied by “a sense of helplessness” over the situation with Muslims and a “lack of real opportunities to vent frustration.”

The report concluded that there was no doubt the British foreign policy was a strong cause of disillusionment with British Muslims. The perception of double standards had gotten worse since September 11^th - where passive oppression – inaction on issues such as Kashmir and Chechnya had given way to “active oppression” – whereby Britain was now active in “the War on Terror, Afghanistan and Iraq.  Here was a government report saying that British foreign policy was widely perceived as being a main cause of the problem through active oppression of Muslims. It was another report that Blair ignored.

 Just three weeks before the July 7^th attacks, another government committee – called the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre – that includes representatives from eleven government agencies and departments – wrote a report. It said that “Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activities in the UK”. Although all these reports were secret Blair would have seen them.

Ironically, the British government has also admitted that Iraq was a factor publicly. The domestic security service, M15 has even admitted on its website that “Both British and foreign nationals linked to or sympathetic with al-Qaeda  are known to be present within the UK … Through they have a range of aspirations and causes, Iraq is a dominant issue.”

 In his book, Rai continues to build his case that Iraq was a significant factor in the bombings. He quotes ex-Conservative Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd who said: “We attacked a Muslim country on grounds that turned out to be empty. We broke international law. We faced no serious threat from Saddam Hussein and received no authority from the Security Council. We brought about the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis”.

Rai argues that there is only one inescapable conclusion: Since 7/7, British Ministers, including Tony Blair have “concealed and distorted” the truth. They have lied. Iraq was a factor in the bombings.

 He writes “The leaders of al-Qaeda share some responsibility for the atrocity of 7/7. By the same token, Blair and Bush cannot escape their responsibility for deliberately, unnecessarily and dishonestly inflicting massive suffering on the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, thereby inflaming the rage and despair of young Muslims around the world, and making them more willing to listen to al-Qaeda’s message of hatred and revenge”.

So how do you overcome this message of hate and revenge towards one of peace and hope? Rai quotes theologian Martyn Percy, who wrote in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York that there had to be the building of “a new dynamic, political, ethnic and religious consensus that robs this kind of terrorism of its root cases”. This, he says, would be a fitting memorial to the 52 people who died on that day and the hundreds of others whose lives were changed forever. I, for one, agree with him.