Terrorism

What is the point of airport security? It's most important job, it seems to me, is not to deter or even prevent terrorism but to remind the public that there is a terrorist threat. If this was true before the Knicker-Bomber it's even more clearly the case now. That's not just because Mr Abdulmutallab was able to board his flight to Detroit but because it's apparent, if this was ever in doubt, that just three things have improved airline security since 9/11: reinforced cockpit doors, the increased vigilance of other passengers and the incompetence shown by at least some of the would-be bombers. The rest is just security theatre. (See Bruce Schneier for more on this.) Tedious and dispiriting and muddle-headed as it is, however, this security theatre does serve a purpose.

Six years ago I wrote a review for the Observer about Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, a quite brilliant polemic about the way the legitimate liberal desire to overturn the conventional or the bourgeois can so often turn to murderous terror. I recognised at the time that it was an extraordinary book, but I couldn't quite accept his final conclusions, which seemed to elide different forms of barbarism so that Palestinian suicide bombers became equated with the genocide of the Nazi death camps. I still think it is important to make distinctions between the geographical, cultural and historical specifics of individual patterns of atrocity. This is not to say there is a hierarchy of such things.

Good grief: All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer's personal communications, showing who they are contacting, when, where and which websites they are visiting. Despite widespread opposition over Britain's growing surveillance society, 653 public bodies will be given access to the confidential information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, fire authorities and even prison governors. They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to access the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.

David Aaronovitch's column in the Times today is a curious beast indeed. Some sub-editor has given it the headline Complacency has crept up on us (yet again) which seems curious since the partially-successful prosecution of the men accused  - and guilty - of plotting to use "liquid bombs" to blow up transatlantic airliners would seem to suggest that complacency has not in fact crept up on us and that, quite rightly, the security services are doing the job they're charged with. Now Aaronovitch is not responsible for the headline, nor for the sub-deck arguing that No amount of handwringing about civil liberties should distract us from the very clear and present danger of terrorism.  Nonetheless, this doesn't seem an unfair summary of his column.

David Miliband on the Today Programme on September 2nd: “We did not want him [Megrahi] to die in prison.” Ed Balls on the Today Programme on September 7th: “None of us wanted to see the release of al-Megrahi” Considering that Megrahi was sentenced to life imprison for his role in the Lockerbie bombing, I cannot see how both of these statements of the government’s view can be correct. If the government did not want him to die in prison, it wanted him to be released.