Beware of scouts?

According to Brendan O'Neill, the official narrative, assumption, and conventional wisdom about the perpetrators of the July 7, 2005 attacks in London were wildly off the mark.

The narrative exposes the gaping chasm between the myth and the reality of al-Qaeda-style terrorism. The myth about 7/7 was that it must have been an al-Qaeda-designed attack on Britain, for its foreign policy or for its close relationship with the US, facilitated and financed by fanatics in Pakistan or the Middle or Far East; the reality is that a self-financed group of four Britons, three from Leeds and one from Huddersfield, decided over a rowing machine or during a white-water rafting trip to commit suicide by bomb on the London Underground. The myth of contemporary terrorism is that it is a new and ruthless war against Western values by a network of radical Islamists; the reality is something more akin to the Columbine school massacre, where usually respectable young men either born or educated in the West decide for various different reasons, or none that we can work out, to kill themselves and scores of civilians. (Where the Columbine killers calmly played that all-American sport ten-pin bowling before killing their fellow students, the 7/7 bombers played the quintessential English sport, cricket, the night before blowing up London.)

O'Neill's point is that the terror attacks represented something both less frightening (there appeared to be no foreign conspiricy behind the attacks) and more frightening (the attacks were meaningless and perpetrated by unexceptional losers) then the narratives fashioned immediately after the attacks conveyed.