FEBRUARY 23, 2002, Salt Lake City International Airport, Utah. I was coming home from the Winter Olympics, the first global sporting event to take place in America after 9/11. Various passengers were selected at random to have security staff fine-toothcomb their luggage. Me — and the Italian speed-skating team.
Hey, it could happen. At some time in the 1980s al-Qaeda operatives could have set aside their struggle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and entered into a crash course on winter sports instead. Hacking a rudimentary ice rink out of the rocks of the Panjshir Valley, they could then have become proficient enough to travel to, for instance, Padova where they might successfully brainwash several athletic infants with the ideals of Islamic fundamentalism, on the off-chance they could also groom them into a highly efficient speed-skating unit without their mums knowing. From there, it only needed an American city to be awarded the Games in 2002 and the Secret Organisation of the Al-Qaeda Jihad (Padova Speed-Skating Branch) to get the nod from the selectors before several kilos of high explosives could be secreted in the athletes village and — pow! — the 11.10am to San Francisco would have been blown to smithereens. Or not.
Maybe what happened in departures that morning, as several young, European, Catholic athletes stared in collective incomprehension as clueless, over-officious security staff unloaded sports equipment (and panicked at a block of wood with a strip of metal mounted in it, until this was revealed to be a standard skate-sharpening device) was just another colossal misuse of security forces. The same type that has taken place every day since War on Terror was declared. Random surveillance, producing random results, so random terrorists cause random mayhem in central London. It was inevitable, we are told. No, Commissioner. Death is inevitable; violent death is not.
Brian Paddick, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, slapped down a questioner who had the temerity to mention Islamic terrorism on Thursday. “As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words which do not go together,” he said. Hence my little story about the Italian speed-skating team. This is what we are up against, at home and abroad. Faced with the Spanish Inquisition, Paddick would find no link to Catholicism and randomly pull in a couple of Huguenots who happened to be passing. Just in case.
There has been a massive police operation since the bombs exploded. Much of it PR-based. Who do you think is providing the lurid details of the hellish conditions police forensic teams are working in below ground on the Piccadilly Line? Who do you think is ensuring that those cordoning off roads after the event are branded heroes?
A friend of mine whose wife works in that field (public relations, not counterterrorism, although the two appear to be merging lately) said how impressed she had been with the way Scotland Yard chief Sir Ian Blair got his three messages across on Thursday morning. Don’t travel (we can’t, mate, all the stations are shut), don’t dial 999 (no point, you clearly know about as much as we do) and, best of all, don’t panic. Had the policeman who said this not been addressing Radio 4 on how British anti-terrorist procedures were the envy of the world just before the bombs went off, this would have been a more comforting thought. As it is, if you did not know the bombers were out there, Sir Ian, how do you know we shouldn’t panic? The threat from al-Qaeda had been downgraded as a result of anti-terrorist intelligence. Never forget that.
Of course the capital did not panic. Yet if good old London knew the extent to which security resources around the free world and its borders have been misdirected, mismanaged and squandered, maybe its citizens would not be dashing so eagerly towards its transport systems.
The greatest effort of the last four years appears to have been made coming up with silly names to make public servants sound dashing. After the blasts, Home Secretary Charles Clarke immediately chaired a meeting of Cobra. That stands for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. Now isn’t that fortunate? If it had been held in cabinet briefing room P it would have been COBRP, which just sounds like something that might happen after a heavy lunch. And how long did it actually take to come up with something cool and groovy like Cobra? It sounds like a new line of surf wear. Grown men, with work to do, are wasting time on this rubbish.
The Met Police, in emergency situations, has a Gold Control and a Gold Commander. Beneath him is a Silver Commander. I’m not making this up. Maybe it goes all the way down to tin, like anniversaries. What do they think this is: Captain Scarlet? So what say we take Cobra, Gold Commanders, stupid slogans on the sides of police cars, random searches of people who could not possibly be terrorists, graded terror threats, coppers making self-serving speeches on Today and consign them all to the rubbish bin inside a black bag labelled: Stuff That Did Not Work (2001-05). Then we take all that manpower, brainpower, extravagance and effort and use it to put a sniffer dog at every station entrance. Then we scrap each bogus PR initiative and bonding exercise and put another dog on the platform. And take the ring-fenced money from motor offences to put Fido on each train, too. Then we can begin to find out what is and isn’t inevitable.
On my way back from New Zealand last week, the plane stopped in Brisbane. Local rules said we had to disembark and, having walked along an empty corridor, we were then herded pointlessly through a security checkpoint before reboarding. I suggested this was merely to reroute us through duty free. At which point, stone me, it was time for another random search. A belligerent buffoon randomly informed me that Australia had far tighter security than its neighbour and often turned up material that New Zealand’s border guards had missed.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Forks,” he said.
Sleep tight.
