Charles Clarke (paraphrased): “From what we can tell some, if not all, of the 7th and 21st July bombers may have been descended from people who were not British nationals and may occasionally have spoken to some foreigners. Or possibly not. At the same time there may or may not be lots of people planning to do nasty things, we don’t really know – and anyway, what exactly do you mean by ‘planning’? It all depends on your definitions. How do I know that when you look at something and say it’s ‘red’ and I look at the exact same thing and also think that it’s ‘red’ that we are in fact seeing the same colour? It’s all a matter of, like, perception, man… And anyway, perception’s, like, knowledge but not knowledge, you know? I mean, you can be intelligent but not know anything, right? You can have been educated to the highest level and still be stupid, or you can have an incredibly high IQ but be lacking in education and so unable to read – you know? I mean, Sir Paul McCartney can’t write sheet music, but he can write songs, you know what I mean?”

Charles Clarke (not paraphrased): “There is no doubt of a series of international relationships that were engaged in. The extent to which there was some kind of command and control we don’t know at the moment, but we are trying to find out precisely what that relationship is… The word plotting is an interesting word. There are certainly hundreds of people who we believe need to be very closely surveyed because of the threat they offer… Intelligence is not knowledge, it is an effort to understand the threats we face by a variety of different techniques … We didn’t know, but we try and acquire the best possible knowledge that we can.”

Charles Clarke (translated): “We didn’t know anything before. We don’t know anything now. We’re going to try and avoid any outright lies so we can maintain plausible deniability and claim that we were misrepresented when the shit comes crashing down, but in the meantime we’re going to rely on implication and nose-tapping as if we know more than we do. But that wouldn’t be hard because we don’t know anything. We do, however, need to be seen to be doing something – we’ve all seen how much trouble our mate George got into when people thought he wasn’t doing stuff, and we’re not going to make the same mistake…”

What a fucking dick.