Home Secretary Charles Clarke said Wednesday that the government would instead publish a defining account of events surrounding the attacks in a written "narrative."

But relatives of the 52 victims, Muslim leaders and political opponents said an inquiry was necessary for lessons to be learned.

The former government intelligence analyst Crispin Black, who briefed Downing Street on the terror threat, maintains that intelligence failures leading up to the attacks contributed to the tragedy, which, he argues, could have been prevented.

Prime Minister Tony Blair defended the government's decision in Parliament, saying a full-scale public inquiry would divert the police and security services' attention from ongoing anti-terror operations.

"I do accept that people want to know exactly what happened. We will make sure they do."

But he said it was already known essentially what happened on July 7 and there would be up to five inquiries by parliamentary committees.

"If we ended up having a full scale public inquiry... we would end up diverting a massive amount of police and security service time and I don't think it would be sensible," he said.

The narrative would contain all the evidence the government had, Blair added.

Written by a senior civil servant, a narrative would quote from intelligence sources, whereas an inquiry would have an independent chairman and hear evidence in public hearings.

Clarke told BBC Radio that a full inquiry could compromise intelligence and prejudice ongoing investigations and future prosecutions.

Though the four bombers were no longer alive -- having killed themselves in the attacks -- police were still investigating their links with other individuals, he said.

He denied suggestions the government was avoiding an inquiry because of the allegations that might be made, for example that the Iraq war was a significant motivating factor in the attacks.

But the Conservative spokesman for homeland security, Patrick Mercer, said it was vital to have clarity of all the details surrounding the attacks.

There had been intelligence failures and it was important to expose and scrutinize these in order to prevent them happening again, he argued.

In particular, why had the government's Joint Terrorism Analysis Center lowered the threat level in Britain just weeks before the attacks, and why was so little known about the bombers?

Crispin Black, who formerly analyzed intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Staff, Joint Intelligence Committee and Cabinet Office and briefed Downing Street on the terror threat, has argued that the attacks were both "discoverable and preventable."

He has authored a book "7/7: What Went Wrong?," which argued that intelligence failures provided the bombers with a window of opportunity in which to strike.

JTAC's decision to downgrade the terror threat -- on the basis that there were no groups with the intent and capability of attacking within Britain -- was "against all the evidence," Black said when launching his book in November.

He argued that the security and intelligence services had suffered from a form of group think which led them to dismiss intelligence which did not fit within the accepted perceptions of the terrorist threat.

Though immediately after the bombings the government had maintained the bombers were previously unknown to the security services, it later emerged that at least one of them -- Mohammed Sidique Khan -- had previously been under surveillance by MI5 and Special Branch in connection with a separate plot to attack London. The surveillance was later discontinued.

Meanwhile, both France and Saudi Arabia had gathered intelligence indicating a bomb plot against London from elements of Britain's home-grown Pakistani community. The Saudi information at least had been passed on to British intelligence services.

The radicalizing effect of the Iraq war on elements of Britain's Muslim community had also been ignored, Black said, possibly because of an overly close relationship between intelligence chiefs and the government.

"It seems to me that one of the things which managed to turn off naturally aggressive and naturally inquisitive Special Branch and security service agents, particularly when they were following Mohammed Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 bombs, may have been an inability to understand properly the radicalizing effects of Iraq, the resonance that it has created for some extremists in a tiny proportion of our population," he said.

"My argument is unless you realize that this has happened, you aren't going to get very far in actually dealing with terrorism."

After the Sept. 11 attacks there had been an outrage in both public and official America as to how such an attack could have got past the intelligence and security services, he said. "That was the ball that set rolling the various reforms that they have tried to bring into their security and intelligence establishment."

The Americans had been ruthless on themselves, Black said, whereas in Britain, "we are patting ourselves on the back still."

Relatives of the victims said they would not simply accept the offer of a "narrative."

Colin Ettinger, a solicitor representing some of the victims, said a published narrative was insufficient.

None of the proposed measures were in-depth enough to allow lessons to be learned and safety measures to be improved, he said.

Saba Mozakka, whose mother Behnaz died in the blast near King's Cross Station, said it was "unacceptable" not to hold a public inquiry and families would continue to campaign for one.

"A narrative of events will not satisfy anybody. This is not something we will go away on," she said.

Source: United Press International

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