An alleged conspiracy to kidnap a British Muslim who served in Iraq and decapitate him on video is the latest terror merry-go-round to be unleashed on the British public. From past examples we can safely predict that within a month this supposed plot will hold about as much credibility as yesterday's scare in Boston where electronic advertisements for a cable cartoon were mistaken for bombs.

"Police are continuing to question nine men arrested over what security sources say was a plan to film (a Muslim) soldier being executed and post it on the web," reports the BBC.

Expect all the suspects to be released within a month or charged on some petty unrelated offense and it to be reported calmly in the back of the newspaper.

The fact is that a dwindling minority of the British population believe anything Blair or the security services say about so-called terrorist plots anymore. A London Guardian poll taken shortly after the non-existent transatlantic "liquid bomb" attack was foisted upon us, found that just 20% believed the government's version of events.

The complicity of the media in hyping this alleged kidnapping, even if it has any basis in reality to begin with, is to skew what would normally be a routine criminal inquiry into a single murder plot and distort it to scare Brits into believing there are marauding Muslims running around everywhere wanting to chop off their heads. What better reason to accept that national ID card?

Before 9/11, domestic terrorism was viewed largely as a criminal problem that could be combated by normal criminal investigations. Terrorism is a paper tiger as far as its potential risk to the average citizen in any western country, for example more Americans die from peanut allergies and accident causing deer t han they do at the hands of terrorists, and the British population particularly are beginning to grow very cynical over the whole "war on terror" farce. This is probably why the government chose to inflate the beheading story, because as they acknowledged, it represents a "departure" from the usual terrorist hyperbole.

So if you grew weary of the broken record that terrorists were going to attack transportation systems, don't worry because the government has a new subplot, and it's guaranteed to reinforce the fear!

"Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, said kidnappings in the UK would be "much nearer a form of psychological warfare that we've seen obviously elsewhere," the BBC tells us. Psychological warfare indeed, but on behalf of who? The principle goal of terrorists is to terrify populations and governments into acquiescing to their political demands. The only way they can achieve this is by generating a substantial amount of fear and making people believe the lie that their life is significantly threatened by potential terrorism, when in reality the swimming pool or fishpond in their backyard poses more of a danger.

Terrorists only have an effect when they are accredited with significant influence to terrify the public by the government and the media. If we were really fighting a war on terror, the government wouldn't be waving every alleged terror alert or terror bust in front of our faces 24/7, especially when in nearly all cases they turn out to be non-existent - unless they were doing so to fulfill a political agenda by means of fearmongering. By that very deduction, the government is employing terrorist tactics.

The result of such scare mongering has the desired effect of keeping populations paranoid, afraid and willing to submit to gross abuse of their liberties by the state. Nowhere was this paranoia more evident that in Boston yesterday, where small electronic advertisements for a cable cartoon had the city transfixed for hours in fear that they were the target of an orchestrated bombing campaign.

"We should remember the Forest Gate incident where what we talked about was suicide bombs and belts that were supposed to have been found in the place and, in the end, it all turned out to be absolutely 100% wrong," human rights lawyer Amer Anwer told the BBC.

Anwer refers to the bungled June 2006 raid in which an innocent man was shot but not before police broke into the wrong house and beat up the suspect's neighbor. No evidence of terrorism preparation was found at the suspect's address and all charges were dropped. The raid, which involved nearly 300 armed police, was based on the testimony of a retarded government informant.

But it's not just Forest Gate where we can point to an effort on behalf of the Blair government to contrive a fictional narrative of a supposed plot that never existed, because every major terror bust or alert in Britain has led us down the same garden path.

Shortly before Christmas, American and British security sources leaked the news that it would be "a miracle" if London avoided being hit by terrorists over the holiday period. By that logic, the fact that a terror attack did not happen proves one of two things - that miracles really do happen in the modern world or governments are lying to us about terrorism in order to scare populations into accepting the deliberately engineered drift towards authoritarianism.

Add to this past examples where Muslims were targeted, raided, demonized as terrorists, and salacious stories about their supposed impending massacres were given saturation coverage for weeks - before the evidence vanished into thin air and tiny retractions were issued on page 30.

An alleged Al-Qaeda cell was arrested on suspicion of preparing to poison the London Underground with Ricin in January 2003. The government used the incident as a scare tactic to rally Britons behind the imminent war on Iraq. It was eventually disclosed that no Ricin was ever found and all the members of the supposed plot were released with no evidence or charges against them.

In April 2004 police in Manchester arrested a group of Kurds and subsequent newspaper headlines claimed that they were an Al-Qaeda cell planning to bomb Old Trafford football stadium. Their evidence for such a claim was based on police interviews with one of the individuals who had attended a Manchester United game two years previously. Simply because he had attended a football game because he supported the team, the tabloid newspapers invented the story that he was planning on bombing the stadium. All of the suspects, who ironically had come to Britain to escape the regime of Saddam Hussein, were released without charge and with no evidence against them.

In the same month as the Forest Gate raid, British authorities announced they had foiled an Al-Qaeda plot to fly planes into buildings in Canary Wharf. The fact the this story was thoroughly discredited back in November 2004 as a collusion of imaginative government lobbyists and lapdog media collaborators was completely omitted and the story was recycled and regurgitated to re-fuel the politics of fear.

Then came the infamous "transatlantic bomb plot" in August, discredited by a former British Ambassador as "propaganda" and, like the Barot "Limousine Bomber" case, admitted to have been supported by no concrete material evidence.

The origins of the plot strongly indicate it was concocted from within the Pakistani ISI, British MI6 and the CIA - and was intended to go ahead before being scuppered by good intelligence agents who were doing their jobs. The alleged bombers, most of which had not even obtained passports or airline tickets, were probably unwitting dupes. The alleged ringleader, Rashid Rauf, was cleared by a judge of all charges of terrorism in December.