"The experience of being an expert witness on [Islamic terrorist] issues has made me feel a great deal safer on the streets of London" – terror expert Duncan Campbell (not Guardian staffer Duncan Campbell).
Ignore the media circus around the Kamel Bourgass trial. He was a bad thug who murdered a policeman, but for all his posturing he was no more of an Al-Qaeda terrorist than David Bieber or David Parfitt. He didn’t even *have* any ricin, and the only ricin-making plans he had were downloaded over the Internet – mostly from rightwing American militias, although one such document (erroneously labeled the Al-Qaeda Manual by government spin) was originally written by Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s based on US anarchist sources.
Ignore the politicians. They are lying to make you afraid, to make you surrender your freedom to them. Nobody well-informed and with no axe to grind believes that the threat from Islamist terrorists is anything more than an IRA-style law enforcement issue.
Side terror points: Robert Hendy-Freegard appears to be a very naughty, but very amusing man; and I trust that following Eric Rudolph’s conviction, the usual suspects will admit that we’re At War with dangerous Christianofascist maniacs Who Would, If They Could, Kill Every Last One Of Us (TM), and that we urgently need to bomb the Vatican.
Update: The Register, which has been doing some fantastic reporting lately, has a similar, more detailed take.
Update 2: I’ve written a new, post-conviction piece on Robert Hendy-Freegard.
(Guardian article via Tim Worstall)
John, The Times claims on it’s front page that "In the flat were copies of poison recipes taken from al-Qaeda manuals, with the raw materials and equipment to make small quantities." This flat being the one, it’s implied, that Bourgass lived in before legging it to Manchester. Now I am tempted to dismiss this as the Times being shit at reporting, but could you back up your claim that "the only ricin-making plans he had were ones downloaded over the Internet from rightwing American militias."???
Sorry, you’re right: the relevant book was (Campbell again) a Mujahadeen-era translation of a US militia guide: Proving that the Jihad manual was written in the 1980s and the period of the US-supported war against the Soviet occupation was easy. The ricin recipe it contained was a direct translation from a 1988 US book called the Poisoner’s Handbook, by Maxwell Hutchkinson.
> for all his posturing he was no more of an Al-Qaeda terrorist …
Hmm. Not convinced. I thought the whole point of Al Qaeda’s org structure was that it doesn’t have a necessary chain of command and any Muslim can be part of it simply by taking part. Rise up in response to Bin Laden’s call, and you’re automatically part of Al Qaeda.
In that sense it’s true, but it isn’t very scary.
The aim of the government spin on this issue is to suggest that being an Al Qaeda member is like being an IRA member (therefore you have Saudi money and Bin Laden’s elite terror crew behind you), rather than like being an Anarchist (ie they’re no more equipped to do terror than you or I, but have more inclination).
S2, I think I side with you here for pedantic reasons. But the problem which I think John is alluding to is that when e.g. The Times writes "The al-Qaeda plot to poison Britain" in huge letters across the front page, we think of some well-organised plot being run by some international terrorists (presumably based in the next Mid-East country we’re after). The truth is that it was a lone nutter who spent some time arsing about in Afganistan: Bourgass is as much an al-Queda terrorist as Tim McVeigh was a "White supremacist terrorist". Anyone who is a terrorist and has beliefs which fall under fairly wide banner is a member of "al-Qaeda" which makes it a pretty weird sort of organisation to belong to. Then again, as you say, it is the way it’s self-styled. That doesn’t mean that politicians aren’t massively talking up the threat…
By the way, the immoral and totally ineffective fuck-up that is the law-enforcement operation against the IRA is exactly what has convinced some of us that anti-terrorism isn’t a law-enforcement issue. It pisses me off no end, the way some people say that Al Qaeda are no worse than the IRA, therefore we should just live with the occasional bit of violence while dealing with them in the same way. We shouldn’t have lived with any of the IRA’s violence, and dealing with Al Qaeda in the same way would involve giving Bin Laden a seat in Parliament and pardonning any of his followers any crimes, including multiple murder. Bollocks to that.
Sounds like the tales (possibly apocryphal, possibly even a Two Ronnies sketch) from the 80s where various groups ring the papers claiming responsibiliy for an explosion, which turns out to be a gas leak.
Why not? The end result is that IRA terrorism isn’t happening anymore, sectarian violence is way down, and NI is going through a cultural and economic resurgence.
That seems well worth the (entirely imaginary) cost of gritting your teeth and accepting that some of the bad bastards aren’t going to get the punishment they deserve.
The IRA and al-Qaeda are totally incomparable. The IRA was a real threat (though much more so if you lived in NI) and had a real political goal (even if I think that goal was stupid, unattainable, and pointless). The threat from al-Qaeda is not very real (seeing as 9/11 is the only attack *in the West* actually linked to serious planning by al-Qaeda, and not some nutter who was too poor not to get caught) and al-Qaeda seem to have, depending on who you believe, no real political goal, or one that is so wide ranging and ill-defined, it might as well be no political goal. I’m with John in that "al-Qaeda" terrorists here are basically anarchists, and the way to deal with them is very much law+order!
Okay, so I left out Madrid, which was rather silly, and slightly weakens my argument. Ahem.
And Bali.
Though I agree with Matt, even so.
Christianofascists such as Eric Rudolph mainly want to kill people who go somewhere near abortion clinics, gay people, people who go to late-night parties, and other such decadent sinners, rather than "every last one of us", as you write.
This means that most readers of the Mail and Telegraph, and most middle-england swing-voters, are entirely safe from the christianofascist threat, hence the lack of scare-mongering.
And as an aside, in the BBC story you link to, Robert Hendy-Freegard "is accused of taking money from his victims and forcing them to endure squalid lives." They were students! They probably led squalid lives anyway…
Ah, well, Bali comes under my rather arbitrary policy of ignoring non-Western countries: I have a feeling that one could explain Bali via local politics going on in Indonesian, rather than via al-Qaeda, but I’m not hugely qualified to do so.
The problem we have is that it’s becoming increasingly easy for single people, or very small groups of people, to inflict damage upon society. No-one seems to be seriously thinking about how to stop this: instead we prattle on about Islamic terrorism or something, always phrased in Cold War like, clash of civilisation speak. One day another Tim McVeigh will happen, but I suppose that won’t count, as they’ll be Christian (probably) white etc. etc. and hence not really a "terrorist".
"The problem we have is that it’s becoming increasingly easy for single people, or very small groups of people, to inflict damage upon society. "
A thankfully non-violent example being Christian Voice’s anti-Jerry Springer: The Opera agitation, which could easily have turned nasty if anyone had followed up the opportunities offered by their publishing of the home addresses of senior BBC execs.
And a rather more disturbing example would be the self-righteous anti-paedophile vigilante mobs five years ago, who didn’t care whether the people they threatened to torch out of their homes were actually guilty of whatever it was they were accusing them of. This isn’t technically "terrorism" in the IRA/Al-Qaeda sense, but the motives are broadly similar, and the disdain for messy things like facts and context all but identical.
> when e.g. The Times writes "The al-Qaeda plot to poison Britain" in huge letters across the front page, we think of some well-organised plot being run by some international terrorists
Fair point. Mind you, wouldn’t the real picture be more alarming to the general public? "It could be anyone. They don’t have to have links to other terrorists. They don’t need any history of extremism. Any Muslim you know could, at any time, simply decide to start killing for Osama." That would be a more accurate picture, and arguably a scarier one.
> The problem we have is that it’s becoming increasingly easy for single people, or very small groups of people, to inflict damage upon society. No-one seems to be seriously thinking about how to stop this
No, some people are seriously thinking about how to stop it. Bush’s theory is that you need to stop the totalitarianism and oppression in people’s home countries that diverts their anger into anti-American violence. You may disagree with the theory, but it’s still a serious one.
> The end result is that IRA terrorism isn’t happening anymore, sectarian violence is way down, and NI is going through a cultural and economic resurgence.
No, the terrorism is happening, but it’s no longer happening in mainland Britain. The economic resurgence should have happened at least thirty years ago, and would have if the IRA had been destroyed rather than contained.
Re: "Any Muslim you know could, at any time, simply decide to start killing for Osama". Yeah, and any Christian could, at any time, simply decide to start killing for Jesus. And any sceptical atheist could, at any time, simply decide to start killing scaremongering nutcases. It’s obvious, irrelevant and boring information.
The point on Bush is irrelevant: the problem according to Matt is not that some Muslims are lone mentalists, the problem is that it’s becoming easier for lone mentalists of any hue (like Rudolph) to blow things up. I disagree here: lone mentalists have been blowing things up since forever; while bombs have improved, so has policing; and the sky hasn’t fallen yet.
Re: "IRA terrorism is happening": Only if you class Mafioso racketeering and punishment shootings as terrorism, which would be an odd thing to do.
As far as I’m aware, no Christian organisation with large amounts of weaponry is currently calling upon every Christian in the world to kill every non-Christian in the world. Besides, since when have the media avoided publishing information if it’s obvious, irrelevant, or boring?
> Mafioso racketeering and punishment shootings
It’s sad that you think that’s all that’s happening. Even if it were, it’s still part of a wider terrorist operation. When Al Qaeda rob a bank to pay for weaponry, that’s terrorism.
Well, the weaponry is rather the point: the ricin blokes in the UK precisely didn’t get their weaponry from AQ, because AQ is an ideology not an IRA-style organised group.
What is happening in NI, then? I thought the ex-terrorists on both sides had turned into ganglords who robbed and extorted from businesses (including the bank job at Christmas), murdered people like Mr McCartney for disrespecting them, and generally acted like evil ganglords everywhere.
Firstly, the issue is what they want the money for. The IRA aren’t running organised crime only to enrich themselves; they’re doing it to pay for a war, and everyone knows it.
Secondly, they don’t just use violence for profit or respect; they also use it to influence voting behaviour. McGuinness’s recent "veiled" death threat against the McCartney sisters is a case in point: opposing the IRA didn’t upset them half as much as threatening to oppose an IRA candidate. Large numbers of Northern Irish Catholics are faced with "Vote for us or die" on a daily basis. The IRA use violence against civilians to manipulate Parliament. That’s the wider point you’re missing about the McCartney murder.
Thirdly, they still use violence to force Protestants to move house.
I’m not sure I can add much, except to this comment of S2’s
"It could be anyone. They don’t have to have links to other terrorists. They don’t need any history of extremism. Any Muslim you know could, at any time, simply decide to start killing for Osama." That would be a more accurate picture, and arguably a scarier one.
I would say that you’re over-egging with "They don’t need any history of extremism." Also, as others have said, it’s not just any Muslim.
But even if this is scarier, it is certainly truer. And it also shows that things like detention without trial, use of torture to get information etc. are not warranted. If there is not some massive, well-organised group behind it all, then those policies will at best achieve nothing, and at worst will alienate other people in communities who might notice lone nutters being nutty, and confirm lone nutter’s paranoia.
The fact we live in a vaguely dangerous world is true. What politicans want us to believe is that we live a dangerous world that they can, with their draconian policies, make less dangerous. It’s this latter view that I have problems with.
Okay, so more flogging of a dead horse. My argument is, I think, well summed up by these articles:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5170380-103677,00.html
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/story.jsp?story=629209
In the latter one, scroll down and read below "What now for the terror laws?"
Oh Bollocks, I now see that this is actually the article which John linked to (I should actually click on them, instead of just going by what I’ve read on the subject elsewhere). The point is that the truth behind Bourgass, and what Blair etc. tried to make it into, is quite a vast chasm of exaggeration.
Anyway, horse flogged and found to be dead.
Squander Two’s comments, "It could be anyone. They don’t have to have links to other terrorists. They don’t need any history of extremism. Any Muslim you know could, at any time, simply decide to start killing for Osama."
Surely then it’s unbeatable without killing all the Muslims? Or would just Osama do?
I think that comment is being misread. Please read it in context, look at the point I was replying to, note that it’s in inverted commas, consider the literal meaning of the words "could" and "anyone", and try not to impose a hysterical tone of voice on it.
All this reminds me of the sort of tabloid ‘I got through security and I could have had a bomb’ claims. To which my response is always, no, you DIDN’T have a bomb. Try getting through security with a real bomb and we’ll see how lax security is – you’d have to have brought the materials and obtained the expertise. Chances are you’d get nowhere near the gates. To conclude otherwise is to suggest in very strong terms that the threat from terror is grossly overplayed as the Queen has not been blown up and neither were the Olympics or any other event.
The Olympics had my favourite one of these, where a ‘journalist’ placed peices of paper with the word ‘BOMB’ written on them under stadium seats, and then declared that they could have planted bombs instead. C’est ne pas un bomb. Or whatever. Or as the police cheif put it – sniffer dogs are trained to sniff out explosives. Not peices of paper. You could tell that under his breath there was something like – you stupid fucking prick.
‘It could have been a bomb’ is no better than walking into Tescos with a raincoat on and then, once you are safely home, declaring that under that coat there could have been a machine gun and you could have murdered everyone. Whoopy-doo. What an amazing claim.
Incidentally, if Al Queda is reduced to an ‘ideology’ which includes any Muslim terrorist then it is a useless concept as far as effective strategies vs. terrorism are concerned, only having value as a political tool to maintain a state of tension.