Imagine looking across the breakfast table at your wife and kids knowing that the corn flakes and orange juice consumed by them are dripping with the blood of innocents because you bought them with your terror-funding wages. Imagine driving your children to school in a luxury car which in itself is a fine-looking machine but - you well know - was bought with money reeking of innocent corpses and wrecked lives from some other corner of the planet. Imagine looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror when your eyes catch their reflection pupil to pupil - in the knowledge that you are profiting from a trade which aids terrorists, spreading fear, doom and dread across the globe. Imagine knowing for a fact that you have blood on your hands and that, should such things as spirits exist, there are surely scores looking down on you wondering why they returned to the ether so abruptly; why their lives were curtailed because your acquiescence in the business of terror led to their violent deaths.

Yet there are men and women in the West - some who attend church on a Sunday and have their children enlisted at good schools - who are killing innocents by carrying on with their day job without telling the police. You may have met them but not noticed as these are apparently innocent people who leave other innocents with wrecked lives. Likely employed as front assistants and accountants, they carry on working in their roles even though they know the job that feeds them directly fuels terrorism.

These people (and, appallingly, there are dozens) make themselves feel better by listening to feeble excuses. Perhaps the terrorist justifications of 7/7 or 9/11 perpetrators: all tax payers residing in Western countries which dabble in wars in "Muslim lands" have blood on their hands, so goes the terrorists' irrational rationalization. Or they fall back on government arms-dealing examples; if governments can sell arms to corrupt regimes, why can't we trade in goods and false goods which are used to launder terrorist funds? To these people, value judgments are not assessable in terms of value as long as avoiding the judgment is always going to be more valuable. And life goes on.

For those lacking moral fibre or just born weak, guilt is an easy thing to cover up. Such people think they are justified in continuing a blatant wrong because, wearing their interchangeable sociopathic blinkers, they think they see the innocent goodness in the value of their family, in the good that their tax dollars achieve and in the fact that the business they work for is employing lots of other people who must therefore be just as much to blame (the "too many to jail" excuse is a perennial favourite of the weak). They'll defend their position one way or the other to the hilt - knowing, though never admitting, one day they will fall on Jonathan Aitken's same sword of truth - and likely instruct their lawyers, even try to kill the messengers of home truths. The weak always keep digging until they bury themselves alive.

Fortunately, there are some gentlemen and some gentlewomen left. There are some decents who will realise that, though they are supporting terrorism by continuing in their role, they are well-placed to provide really useful intelligence to interested authorities. They will not be able to sleep at night because, in the circumstances, decent people don't. Their consciences will make their hair recede even more and make the mirror increasingly avoidable unless they do the right thing and stop defending the indefensible.

The strong will stop defending evil and will start to embrace the good. They will look at their luxury cars as blood-spattered, amalgamated shrapnel rather than warranted badges of wholesome success. They will face facts - soak up the images of the charred corpses and detached torsos they and their colleagues have butchered. Then they will find out which policemen spend their days collecting evidence against their companies.

The strong will seek the correct policemen out and sit down with them in confidence, telling them of their wrongs; hoping to still be able to turn their errors of judgement into light. They will not obfuscate any potential evidential chains. They will pass over bank statements, accounts, letters and all incriminating physical and electronic data to the police. They will tie up all loose ends - for good. There will be arrests - and appalling atrocities will hopefully be prevented.

Most men and women on planet Earth are weak. That, alas, is how the world is. They will just carry on. Keep going to work and collecting their wages, hiding behind the apparent positives of progress and success. They won't dare face up to the facts, though they are logical enough to know that in the long run one error of judgment is going to be far less burdensome than several accumulated. The policemen who have the evidence against their companies will be sentient as to when they were made aware that they were working alongside the Devil - be sure they will have been informed by someone, somehow.

Belgian police this Thursday arrested a woman they called an "al Qaeda living legend" as part of an operation to thwart a terror attack being planned to coincide with an EU summit in Brussels. Malika El-Aroud is the widow of one of the men who killed Afghan anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. Police seized 14 people, one of whom was planning to carry out a suicide attack in Belgium. An informant came good.

El-Aroud described the "love" she and her late husband felt for Osama bin Laden in a 2006 interview with CNN. "Most Muslims love Osama. It was he who helped the oppressed. It was he who stood up against the biggest enemy in the world, the United States. We love him for that," she told CNN back then. Gazing into CNN's cameras she said, "It's the pinnacle in Islam to be the widow of a martyr. For a woman it's extraordinary."

Three of the plot suspects had travelled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region to participate in fighting or training camps, and were in contact with an unnamed suspect who had direct links to important al Qaeda figures. Two of those three returned to Belgium several months ago and started surveillance operations, and the third returned to Belgium a week ago. Intelligence showed that a third person was ready to carry out a suicide attack. Information showed the suspect who was to carry out the attack had received the green light to execute the operation. The 14 suspects were arrested after police carried out 16 search warrants in Brussels and one in the western Belgian city of Liege.

Most men are weak. Fortunately, some are strong. The strong inform on terrorists and those linked to terrorism; however inconvenient and at times incredible the form that truth shall take. What's the greater good? Saving a company on the one hand or life and your life's reputation on the other?

Dominic Whiteman is the Editor of the Westminster Journal.

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