With three-and-a-bit weeks to go, now seems the time to pose this vital question: when Mr Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and the gang decide to unleash the flammed-up terrorism scare, where will they place it? Those who saw last week's Newsnight item featuring the American focus groupie Frank Luntz will have been struck by one finding. Mr Luntz went to marginal Milton Keynes to ask floaters for their thoughts, and the issue on which they gave the PM his best score was decisiveness in the face of a security crisis. Doubtless Labour's internal polling shows the same thing, which strongly suggests that a little judicious scaremongering is on the cards. A message from Bin Laden along the lines of his US intervention would certainly help, but Ossie can hardly be relied upon to ride to the rescue. And while sending the tanks to Heathrow for no apparent reason would have visual impact, it lacks a certain freshness. What's needed, then, is a front-page splash calculated to allow an ashen Mr Blair to remind us that, while the intelligence is "non-specific", we live in the face of "a unique threat to our way of life", and that he alone can be trusted to preserve it. But where to plant this potentially fruitful tree? The Times and The Observer are close allies, but at times of electoral emergency No 10 would look for maximum impact, which means a tabloid. The Mirror, recent home to a moving hand-written note from the PM, seems an obvious choice, but that paper already nestles snugly in his pocket. So the smart money is on The Sun, which is suffering an unaccustomed bout of indecision as to whom to support. A world exclusive carrying the byline of Trevor Kavanagh, and the headline: "PM: Don't Panic, Don't Panic ... But Without Me You're Dooooomed!", packed with dark if nebulous hints at an imminent atrocity would shepherd credulous voters back into the fold. We look forward to reading it.

COP killer Kamel Bourgass was yesterday unmasked as Osama Bin Laden’s master poisoner — with a mission to murder as many Britons as possible.

Mr Clarke said the case highlighted the need for identity cards, along with stronger borders to deal with migration issues.

Algerian Kamel Bourgass, 31 - a suspected al-Qaeda member - was "prime mover" of a cell which plotted to produce ricin, cyanide and botulinum for holy war. The poisons were to be smeared on car door handles, used in spray form or to contaminate supermarket products.

The Government's "chaotic" asylum policy allowed an Al Qaeda terrorist to plot a deadly ricin campaign and murder Detective Constable Stephen Oake, the Conservatives have claimed.

An al-Qaeda terrorist, jailed for life for killing a Special Branch officer, has been found guilty of planning to unleash a deadly poison in the UK.

Yesterday's verdicts on five defendants and the dropping of charges against four others make clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the "ricin ring" make or have ricin. Not that the government shared that news with us. Until today, the public record for the past three fear-inducing years has been that ricin was found in the Wood Green flat occupied by some of yesterday's acquitted defendants. It wasn't.

...

The third plank of the al-Qaida-Iraq poison theory was the link between what Powell labelled the "UK poison cell" and training camps in Afghanistan. The evidence the government wanted to use to connect the defendants to Afghanistan and al-Qaida was never put to the jury. That was because last autumn a trial within a trial was secretly taking place. This was a private contest between a group of scientists from the Porton Down military research centre and myself. The issue was: where had the information on poisons and chemicals come from?

...

I was asked to look for the original source on the internet. This meant exploring Islamist websites that publish Bin Laden and his sympathisers, and plumbing the most prolific source of information on how to do harm: the writings of the American survivalist right and the gun lobby.

...

When, in October, I showed that the chemical lists found in London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto, California, the prosecution gave up on the Kabul and al-Qaida link claims. But it seems this information was not shared with the then home secretary, David Blunkett, who was still whipping up fear two weeks later. "Al-Qaida and the international network is seen to be, and will be demonstrated through the courts over months to come, actually on our doorstep and threatening our lives," he said on November 14.

...

We have all been victims of this mass deception. I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an Al Qaida-trained superterrorist. An Asbo might be appropriate.

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4 Comments:

On April 14, 2005 4:25 PM,  CuriousHamster said...

We're all doomed! It's the greatest threat to our way of life since the last time New Labour needed to whip up a fear frenzy. And the media just love a good circulation boosting scare story. What have the facts got to do with it anyway?  

On April 14, 2005 8:07 PM,  Eddie said...

Good summary. The way this story has broken today has been disgraceful... and since it's in no one's interests to actually tell the truth, we are expected to just swallow the line fed to us by the media.

This is what the blogosphere is so good for.  

On April 15, 2005 2:12 AM,  Quinn said...

I was particularly impressed by the Express, with it's headline "Police so scared of upsetting Muslims they did not cuff suspect...and he stabbed DC Oake to death"; shame the news story itself made no mention of this being the reason that Bourgass wasn't handcuffed. Still, who reads the stories anyway, eh? Islamophobia anyone? Job done.  

On April 15, 2005 11:46 AM,  Underblog.co.uk said...

What gets me is the impression given by most of the media that this was a sophisticated operation. The flat has been described as a "chemical weapons laboratory".
This globalsecurity.org article debunks the myth.  

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