Former major event security specialists at the FBI have told Sky News Online of the "close working relationship" between the US and the UK on Olympic security.

However, they have expressed "real doubts" about reports the US is preparing to send as many as 500 agents to the UK to ensure the safety of its athletes during London 2012.

NEW YORK - Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to the police with their concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups.

The Soufan Group's International Adviser, Mark Pritchard, has been highlighted as one of London's 'One Thousand Most Influential People' by the London Evening Standard newspaper.

A new book co-authored by Jim McGee, Senior Program Manager for The Soufan Group.

Soufan was an FBI special agent for eight years, a rare native Arabic speaker in a professional FBI culture that was shaped by former Marines, often Irish Catholic and working class, and which had traditionally viewed counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism work as second tier specializations.

Police aren't yet advising people to stay away from symbols of power and corporations this Saturday, but perhaps they should. If the more extremist and anarchist elements behind the Occupy Wall Street protesters, and their copycat groups around the globe, are secretly planning to cause trouble - it's likely that November 5 will be the day.

The name and face of former FBI special agent Ali Soufan have only recently become known to the public, but to those inside the U.S. government Soufan has long been something of a legend. He conducted the most effective and fruitful interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects during the war on terrorism, and save for some inexplicable failures by the CIA, he and his team might well have prevented 9/11.

The testimony was explosive. Here was a man on the front lines of the battle against al-Qaeda, announcing that the CIA's brutal interrogations were "ineffective, slow and unreliable." Now Soufan has fired another salvo, in a memoir titled "The Black Banners." The book goes behind the scenes of some of the most important terrorism interrogations since 9/11 ...

I'm the person whose team came closest to preventing 9/11, but when I tried to put my story out there, I ran up against the censors in the CIA. I wrote a book that describes the history of the war against al-Qaeda, including how the CIA missed its chance to derail the 9/11 plot by refusing to share information with the FBI. As far as 9/11 is concerned, I know what I'm talking about because I'm a former FBI supervisory special agent and interrogator.

He has reason to feel strongly, not just because several of his most important cases were cut short by the CIA's insistence on turning to 'enhanced interrogation,' but also because his subsequent evidence in front of a Senate committee led to an inter-agency struggle which contributed to him leaving the bureau he loved.