Wanna Know What's Really Terrifying?

Although we are now eleven days into 2010 I would still like to wish you all a happy New Year and I hope you all had a pleasant Christmas. See, I do have a nice bone in my body. Apologies for lack of blog last week. I'm a lazy fecker and considered it to still be my hols. And I was doing my dissertation, which I pretty much have not stopped doing since. Anyway, on with perceptive
(*cough cough*) political comment.

If you’ve been anywhere near a TV, radio, newspaper or any form of mass media it can’t have escaped your notice that for the people on board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day it was probably not the relaxing day they had planned. Some fool tried to blow the plane up. He failed.

Not surprising really, considering he was carrying the bomb in his underwear. Oh well, I suppose it was an original excuse as to why you’re uncomfortable on a long haul flight. He intended to ignite the powder he had stored in his trollies with some liquid. That doesn’t sound like a particularly efficient way to cause an explosion. I'd have used a fuse. Note to anti-terrorist cell, you’ll be please to know I was crap at chemistry and therefore no threat to national security.

And some brave bod jumped on him long before he could produce anything better than a few choice flames, so he only managed to singe two people’s eyebrows and one of them was his own. Kudos to that brave bod though. I think that’s how we’d all like to imagine we’d react to an attempted terrorist attack on a plane we were currently inside. And this is by no means a slight to the no doubt shaken and perplexed passengers. A terrorist attack, even a failed one, is quite frightening. If they’ve stopped shaking already they’re clearly made of stern stuff.

But, fortunately, the attack failed, although if you’ve been following the news you’d be forgiven to think that it was successful and everyone in Detroit died in a deadly fireball. Although I'm fairly sure the apparently unflappable Obama reacted in a more rational manner than George W Bush would have done it still seems to have been blown out of all proportion. No pun intended...well, maybe just a small one.

The already frankly ridiculous security measures have been stepped up. We are now subject to full body scanners that, as well as clearly having been invented by the kind of pervy old man you don’t want sat behind you on a bus, take about twenty minutes to get through. Oops, you’ve missed your flight. No holiday for you. Please bend over while we shove this special exploding underpants detector up your rectum. It sounds like something out of Black Adder. As well as powders, liquids, Jilly Cooper novels and insulin needles (have you any idea how long it would take to stab someone to death with an insulin needle? They’d die of old age first) we are only a few days away from being unable to wear our own underwear on flights. We’ll have to be provided with special airline pants with the corresponding logo emblazoned on them so if you so get arrested they know immediately who to bollock for not checking your passport.

Due to someone’s oversight somewhere Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (that’s the terrorist that is) should not even have flown. He was on a no fly list. But rather than tell those whose job it is to check such things to shape up a bit we’re now probably going to have to go through a hell of a lot more faff to get a passport. As a random aside, how exactly do those no fly lists work? There’s pretty much no one in the world with an entirely unique name. Just an aimless ponder...

It seems whatever we do terrorists are one step ahead of us. Whatever draconian measures are put in place they find a way to get around it. Kind of like organised criminals, which I suppose they are. Eventually so many restrictions are going to be put on our freedoms that the ‘civilised society’ the terrorists are apparently trying to destroy and we, the ‘good guys’, are trying to protect will be unrecognisable.

Abdullmutallab may have failed in his attempt to bomb a plane, but he has sufficiently terrorised the US (and therefore the UK by default) to merit the title terrorist. It wasn’t his ill thought through pants bomb that did it either, it was the panic stirred up by the media and the over reaction of security services eager to be seen to ‘do something’ to appease that very same fear mongering media. It’s a sad state of affairs when the terrorists don’t even need to detonate their bombs to do their work.

We should be grateful the Christmas bomb plot failed, and we should review the measures already in place. We should not use it as an excuse to make air passengers even more paranoid and ordinary members of the public more suspicious of each other. After the bombings on the London underground the general public had the right attitude. They just kept going about their daily business, determined that they would not allow themselves to be ‘terrified’. In contrast the security services overreacted and shot an innocent man to death.

Retain some perspective and stop doing the terrorists job for them.

Peace and Love x