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I'm reading Pandagon (http://pandagon.net/2006/08/10/no-hair-gel-at-heathrow/) on Heathrow, and it's pissing me off. I mean, really pissing me off.
Usually, I like reading Pandagon. It's a feminist site, and reading it makes me a lot more aware of the cultural baggage USians can carry -- which, in turn, helps me stay aware of my own cultural baggage.
However, the tone of the article -- and many of the comments -- seems to be one of, 'Oh, this is trumped up/exaggerated in order to benefit the Bushies and Blairites/have an excuse to arrest these 21 suspects'.
Whatever benefit the US or UK government might get from a heightened security alert, I have to point out that the losses for UK airports and European airlines will probably hit millions after this. The FTSE 100 is down 37 points. Shares in airline companies are down across the board. Not to mention the cost of cancelling flights during the busiest season of the year: no, we shan't mention that, or mention that a government lives and dies by the state of the economy. This mightn't be a UK election year, but no European government knowingly plays games that might threaten investors' confidence.
I will not speak for the US, of course: it is to be generally assumed that a foreign adventurer should not be trusted with responsibility for a modern economy.
The UK police and security services have years of experience conducting anti-terrorism operations. Some of those operations went wrong or otherwise pear-shaped, which is the kind of thing that happens when humans are involved in things that involve other humans and items of an explosive and/or deadly nature. But the reason the Northern parties agreed to a negotiated peace process was because they were on the losing end of the policing and intelligence operations. If there's any organisation in the world that has learnt lessons from that little piece of unpleasant history, it's the British special branch police and their intelligence counterparts.
I have to believe they learnt the right ones.
I can't answer for the politicians. They'll use events to push their agendas, of course: that's what politicians do. But to suggest that a disruption of this extent was, well, stage-managed in order to benefit the current US government, well --
It's an intensely US-centric position to take. It assumes that British police and politicians would risk their reputations (yes, I know Tony Blair has no reputation worth speaking of left, but his ministers still have to worry about re-election) to profit people who aren't profiting them. Really. If you think Labour is still getting any mileage out of the Bush-Blair 'special relationship', you're out-of-touch. I get the feeling that certain Labour back-benchers have been looking askance at it for a while now, not to mention the members of the Opposition.
It also assumes the police would go along with it. After that little fatal shooting accident, they have to be concerned for their image. If Jack Public doesn't trust the coppers, he's not going to co-operate with them. And police do really rely on a certain amount of civic co-operation in order to do their jobs. Alienate the public with trumped-up arrests, or arrests on exaggerated charges, and it makes it a lot more likely that the next time, they won't get the information they need to make those arrests. Which runs the risk of something going BOOM! for real.
(Not to mention that the lawyers would have a field day. And I think Their Lordships of Her Majesty's bench might not be unsympathetic to the plaintiffs, in such a case. Wrongful imprisonment, etc. Possibly they could drag religious/ethnic bias into it, too.)
The last thing the Brit services want to do is actually provoke a serious spate of attacks and violence. So far it's been a handful of isolated, though serious, attempts, but they remember Canary Wharf, and nearly three decades of needing to be worried about every brown paper bag on the train and the Underground. Mind you, that's back in place, but it hasn't been so long that they've grown out of the habit.
It's easy to cause casualties and chaos. Plant a bomb on a train line, and wait for the moment the train roars past to detonate it. Not hard. And nobody can police every single metre of track.
(Is this something the US has considered? If they haven't, they should consider how fortunate they are that the 'enemy' goes big in for flashy and generally suicidal gestures, and not so much for coordinated-campaign-of-death-and-fear. In fact, they should consider how fortunate they are in that respect anyway. Flashy means harder to carry out: harder to carry out means easier to prevent.)
Hell, I remember not so long ago when we'd get hours of train delays every six months or so, because one of the Northern groups would threaten to put a bomb on the Dublin-Belfast line. Most of the time the threat was all it'd turn out to be, but it still meant that the Army bomb disposal unit would get dragged out to check whatever section of the line was at risk, and no one who commuted on that stretch of railway line would breathe easy until they gave the all-clear.
So Pandagon's assumptions are annoying me. To put it mildly.
Usually, I like reading Pandagon. It's a feminist site, and reading it makes me a lot more aware of the cultural baggage USians can carry -- which, in turn, helps me stay aware of my own cultural baggage.
However, the tone of the article -- and many of the comments -- seems to be one of, 'Oh, this is trumped up/exaggerated in order to benefit the Bushies and Blairites/have an excuse to arrest these 21 suspects'.
Whatever benefit the US or UK government might get from a heightened security alert, I have to point out that the losses for UK airports and European airlines will probably hit millions after this. The FTSE 100 is down 37 points. Shares in airline companies are down across the board. Not to mention the cost of cancelling flights during the busiest season of the year: no, we shan't mention that, or mention that a government lives and dies by the state of the economy. This mightn't be a UK election year, but no European government knowingly plays games that might threaten investors' confidence.
I will not speak for the US, of course: it is to be generally assumed that a foreign adventurer should not be trusted with responsibility for a modern economy.
The UK police and security services have years of experience conducting anti-terrorism operations. Some of those operations went wrong or otherwise pear-shaped, which is the kind of thing that happens when humans are involved in things that involve other humans and items of an explosive and/or deadly nature. But the reason the Northern parties agreed to a negotiated peace process was because they were on the losing end of the policing and intelligence operations. If there's any organisation in the world that has learnt lessons from that little piece of unpleasant history, it's the British special branch police and their intelligence counterparts.
I have to believe they learnt the right ones.
I can't answer for the politicians. They'll use events to push their agendas, of course: that's what politicians do. But to suggest that a disruption of this extent was, well, stage-managed in order to benefit the current US government, well --
It's an intensely US-centric position to take. It assumes that British police and politicians would risk their reputations (yes, I know Tony Blair has no reputation worth speaking of left, but his ministers still have to worry about re-election) to profit people who aren't profiting them. Really. If you think Labour is still getting any mileage out of the Bush-Blair 'special relationship', you're out-of-touch. I get the feeling that certain Labour back-benchers have been looking askance at it for a while now, not to mention the members of the Opposition.
It also assumes the police would go along with it. After that little fatal shooting accident, they have to be concerned for their image. If Jack Public doesn't trust the coppers, he's not going to co-operate with them. And police do really rely on a certain amount of civic co-operation in order to do their jobs. Alienate the public with trumped-up arrests, or arrests on exaggerated charges, and it makes it a lot more likely that the next time, they won't get the information they need to make those arrests. Which runs the risk of something going BOOM! for real.
(Not to mention that the lawyers would have a field day. And I think Their Lordships of Her Majesty's bench might not be unsympathetic to the plaintiffs, in such a case. Wrongful imprisonment, etc. Possibly they could drag religious/ethnic bias into it, too.)
The last thing the Brit services want to do is actually provoke a serious spate of attacks and violence. So far it's been a handful of isolated, though serious, attempts, but they remember Canary Wharf, and nearly three decades of needing to be worried about every brown paper bag on the train and the Underground. Mind you, that's back in place, but it hasn't been so long that they've grown out of the habit.
It's easy to cause casualties and chaos. Plant a bomb on a train line, and wait for the moment the train roars past to detonate it. Not hard. And nobody can police every single metre of track.
(Is this something the US has considered? If they haven't, they should consider how fortunate they are that the 'enemy' goes big in for flashy and generally suicidal gestures, and not so much for coordinated-campaign-of-death-and-fear. In fact, they should consider how fortunate they are in that respect anyway. Flashy means harder to carry out: harder to carry out means easier to prevent.)
Hell, I remember not so long ago when we'd get hours of train delays every six months or so, because one of the Northern groups would threaten to put a bomb on the Dublin-Belfast line. Most of the time the threat was all it'd turn out to be, but it still meant that the Army bomb disposal unit would get dragged out to check whatever section of the line was at risk, and no one who commuted on that stretch of railway line would breathe easy until they gave the all-clear.
So Pandagon's assumptions are annoying me. To put it mildly.
