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Return of Mr Unspecified-Threat
Peter Preston Monday May 26, 2003 The Guardian
I should be packing for Kenya - and an international conference on the challenges of freedom facing Africa - this week. But our old chum, Mr Unspecified-Threat, has put the lid on that. Flights and challenges duly cancelled. There's nothing to do but bunker down in London, where the selfsame Mr U-T has just had 300ft of concrete blocks strewn around those houses of freedom called parliament.
And will it end there? Of course not. Mr George Tenet, boss of the CIA, held a "summit" meeting last week with Ms Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of MI5. Her new concrete Commons - democracy with a Maginot Line - is only the beginning. Other "landmark buildings" around Britain - other "picture postcard sites" - are earmarked for the same treatment. That's £200m of extra spending, set in stone and barbed wire.
Meanwhile, police on the streets now have "shoot-to- kill" terrorist orders (according to the Times). And Manningham-Buller's finest are apparently hunting a couple of indigenous suicide bombers, who may be planning something (according to the Sunday Times) - though nobody has heard of them for a couple of years and "it is possible that they are no longer al-Qaida followers".
Stand by, next month, for the civil contingencies bill which - more scary leaks to the men of Murdoch portend - will give policemen powers to seize control of telephone companies, postal services and "even the BBC" if terrorists strike. Sir David Omand, the nearest thing Britain has to a director of homeland security, believes: "We have to move from the old idea of a secret state to the idea of the protective state. We have to be able to deal with low-probability, high-impact events."
Sorry ... what was that? A "senior Whitehall source" chimes in behind. "While there is no imminent threat we know of, the belief is that it is only a matter of time before something happens here." Welcome to the marriage of Mr Unspecified- Threat and Miss Low-Probability (not to mention their baby, little Not Imminent).
Time to take a long, deep breath. Nobody, after 9/11, would say there's not a problem. Nobody, after Riyadh, Casablanca and Mombasa, would say that it is going away. We have our cruise missiles and B52s. They have their suicide kits. There is some danger, of course there is (though probably more, on current form, if you're a Moroccan nightclub bouncer or Kenyan hotel gardener than if you're walking down Whitehall looking for postcards). But perspective, like intelligence, seems to have gone missing.
George J Tenet is no great star of the Foresight Saga. He was the one who, four days after 9/11, went up to Camp David with a briefcase full of "top secret" al-Qaida material, showed it to President Bush and told him (before telling Bob Woodward) that the attacks were "the result of two years' planning. Several of the reports specifically identified Capitol Hill and the White House as targets on September 11 ... It was consistent with intelligence reporting all summer showing that Bin Laden had been planning 'spectacular attacks against US targets'." Thanks, George J, but couldn't you have mentioned it earlier?
And, of course, the links go on. The war against Iraq did not just happen. It stemmed - for Messrs Rumsfeld and Cheney - directly from 9/11 and Afghanistan. It was an opportunity to do something, rather than nothing. It was also a supposedly crucial strike against those weapons of mass destruction, as brought to you by CIA surveillance, true Brit assertion and the majesty of old university theses cobbled together in a Downing Street backroom. Mr Unspecified-Threat comes from a big, non-nuclear family, the Gone-Missings of downtown Baghdad.
We aren't talking here about different venues, different casts of characters, different times and windows of opportunity. We're talking about the same old lot who haven't found Saddam, Bin Laden or a single weapon of mass destruction yet. We're talking about stable doors at £200m a time. We're talking about the instinctive back-covering of bureaucracy, the automatic protection of threatened budgets - and the closet feebleness of democratic politicians too awed to laugh in the face of a Tenet bearing awful tales.
We are all of us, naturally, guilty after our fashion. Wouldn't the press make a terrible fuss after the event of a terrorist attack if "too little" had been done to forestall it, if the two-and-a-half ton slabs weren't in place? Yes, that's true. Journalists can be as muddled about threat analysis as anyone. An "exclusive briefing" from some "senior" chap or chapess will soon set our juices running. We are signed-up members of the something-must-be-or-should-have-been-done club: the first to fear those WMDs when they're bruited, and the first to complain when nobody can put a finger on their whereabouts. We ought to be calmer, too.
There are, as it happens, particular British reasons for being calmer than most: the same, rather snooty reasons, recently advanced as explaining why our boys have been so jolly good at running Basra. Northern Ireland, you know? Experience allegedly counts.
But how is such hard-won wisdom helping us now? The Tory conference, the NatWest tower, the Guardian printworks ... all of them, and many more, got the full IRA bombing treatment à la Casablanca. Those threats and consequences were clear enough. Mr Relatively-Specific, Ms Reasonably-Proportionate.
Yet we still did not suspend life as usual. We didn't concrete over every tourist paradise and put shoot-to-kill cops on every street corner. We tried, however frailly and sometimes duplicitously, to keep some semblance of balance. But now the White House has Patriot missiles as well as concrete towers to keep it warm. Now, post-summit, No 10 must play costly catch-up. The coalition of the quavering.
Once, long ago, remember, the noise of geese used to rouse ancient Rome. But how do you tell today when they're merely gabbling?
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