There is a total disconnect between what I’m hearing from most of the media, and what everybody bar the wingnuts is saying on the blogosphere. On the media we’re seeing straggling lines of travellers in the rain in Heathrow car park, with talk of ‘stoic Brits’ with implications of the Blitz spirit. Nobody is interviewing the thousands of people who have cancelled their trips, or any the large number of people who have had their valuables lost, destroyed or stolen in baggage handling. We did have the head of Ryanair on Channel 4 News publically questioning the baggage rules that threaten the very survival of his business, and implying that security bureaucrats didn’t have a clue. That man was angry. Justifiably.
Amadán and Dave are both pretty scathing of events from a US perspective, with Dave fisking one of the morons who is accusing anyone that questions the official hogwash as ‘selfish’ or ‘endangering the lives of thousands of people’.
Security expert Bruce Schneier has a fairly level headed commentary on why the current security theatre isn’t going to save any lives.
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who knows a lot about the dark side of the ‘war on terror’, speculates that this is closer to the real story than the official line being spun by the government.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes – which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.
. . . .
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for “Another 9/11″. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
Tinfoil hat territory? Maybe. But his story is at least as credible as the line being officially spun.
As for the loathsome Home Secretary, John Reid:
For those who don’t know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling University he was the Communist Party’s “Enforcer”, (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students’ Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
If the Government really are spinning a line which is mostly hyperbole and lies, as Murray suggests, that I pray that it all unravels sooner rather than later. And I hope that unravelling takes this vile man down with it.
Our way of doing things requires the law enforcement authorities to produce evidence in court. It won’t be long now before it is time for some evidence to be produced in this case. If there is some then all the hassle has been worth while, but it really is time for it to be produced.
Once upon a time I believed a man who said we had to go to war because another country was threatening us with weapons of mass destruction. They were never found. It seems probable they never existed. How can I ever trust that source again?
I accept that there are a tiny number of people who want to blow aircraft out of the sky, but the moment one allows them to take control they have won without having to kill themselves.
I am about to drive my car to work. This is a dangerous activity. People die in road accidents every day. Air travel is still safer than driving. Even in terms of environmental damage, gas emissions per passenger mile are better in a modern aircraft than some road vehicles.
The only possible answer to those who seek to dominate by fear is courage. I don’t care if those who are using fear are madmen with exploding shoes/liquid explosive/bolt cutters or politicians who want my liberty to “keep me safe” from the aforementioned. Security clampdowns will only work in the short term. The longer term solution must be to convince people who percieve no good reason to stay alive that suicide bombing is not going to get them direct entry to Paradise.
Since you work for an airline I know that you know what you’re talking about.
I wonder if the next Al-Queda attack will come in two stages. The first will be a feint, a far-fetched plot that probably won’t actually work. If it does, it would be a bonus for them, but the real purpose is to trigger a paranoid security panic like this one.
The *real* attack will use the resulting chaos as cover, and will be against a totally different target.