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April 15th, 2016 
Awake Goy Aimen Dean now says that these characterisations are inaccurate:
“I never claimed on any platform or forum that I was a ‘founding member of AQ [Al-Qaeda]’… Never said that anywhere and I was annoyed and puzzled by the BBC choice of title… People like me who joined in 1997 (post Bin Laden’s return from Sudan to Afghanistan) are just the new cadre.”
Dean also told me that his efforts to correct the record have been in vain, with the BBC ignoring his concerns and the rest of the media simply duplicating the BBC’s bio:
“I was never senior and never claimed seniority… I voiced my concerns a year ago and since then every interview, I stress always to the interviewer/journalist that I’m not an ex founding or even senior member of AQ… But I have no power over BBC editorial policies… I always state the truth, that I was a member of AQ, but that’s it. Nevertheless I spent 9 years with them from 1997 until 2006.”
I further asked Dean whether he agreed with the premise of the BBC’s reporting that large sections of the British Muslim Deobandi communities and mainstream mosques could be supportive of al-Qaeda terrorism.
“I never implied that at all,” he said.
“In the end I was not looking at it only from what I saw in the UK, but also what I saw in Afghanistan,” he added. “There were several camps of ‘Harakat al-Ansar’ [or Harkat ul-Mujahideen] in Afghanistan that received dozens of UK citizens, all Deobandis from London, Luton, Blackburn, Bradford.”
As the late Indian counter-terrorism intelligence chief, B. Raman, had noted, this funnel of Britons into the mujahideen network was opened up under the auspices of the CIA and MI6.
In Bowen’s own book, contradicting her latest BBC report, she concludes that Masood Azhar’s UK tour of a small number of mainstream Deobandi mosques in the UK was “an aberration for a network dominated by the apolitical, pietistic strand of Islam.”
However, yesterday a BBC press spokesperson informed me that the publicly-funded broadcaster would be amending only one of its errors in its reporting on Deobandi Muslims, relating to Aimen Dean’s biography:
“The BBC’s description of Aimen Dean was meant to indicate only that he was an early member of Al Qaeda. We do not have any record of a complaint from Aimen Dean, but we have since contacted him and agreed to describe him as an ‘early member.’”
INSURGE’s investigation had also revealed that Aimen Dean had previously sponsored, through his UAE-based security firm Five Dimensions Consultants, oil industry conferences organised by the Henry Jackson Society, an anti-Muslim London-based think-tank with extensive connections to Bush administration neoconservatives.
When I asked Dean about his association with HJS, he stated that this was one of his “biggest regrets. I’m not fond of neocons at all and loathe those who generalise against Muslims.”
He confirmed that the decision was made by a business associate at his consultancy firm, due to the focus on security for the oil industry. Since then, however, he has severed ties with the think-tank:
“I can’t in clear conscience support a think tank that has a blatant anti Muslim agenda like that. So since 2014 there was no association whatsoever.”
Whatever the case, the evidence fundamentally discredits the BBC’s recent coverage of Deobandi Muslims in Britain, and raises hard questions about the highly inappropriate nature of its reporters’ relationships with the very government agencies the broadcaster is supposed to cover impartially.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is a weekly columnist for Middle East Eye.
He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was twice selected in the Evening Standard’s top 1,000 most globally influential Londoners, in 2014 and 2015.
Nafeez has also written and reported for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, The Ecologist, Alternet, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others.
He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University, where he is researching the link between global systemic crises and civil unrest for Springer Energy Briefs.
Nafeez is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
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