I name the four powers who are
behind the al-Qaeda conspiracy Matthew
Parris
AT TIMES of national emergency,
the habit of the news media to drop a story or a lead in mid-air
when it seems to be going nowhere unsettles the public. The media
betray a sort of sheepish wish to move on from an erroneous
report, hoping that their audience will not notice. Rather than
acknowledge this, they publish a new report, leaving us to compare
it with what had previously been said and draw our own
conclusions. Or they start barking up a different tree, the
inference being that the last tree may have been the wrong tree.
The habit is more disliked by listeners and readers than I think
editors appreciate. Perhaps the first item on each days news agenda
should be matters arising from yesterdays news. News editors
would then do us the courtesy of explaining where some of those
stories went.
Immediately
after July 7 it was prominently reported that the explosions bore
all the hallmarks of the use of a type of high-grade military
explosive whose presence would indicate a sophisticated
international dimension to the bombings. We were alerted to a likely
al-Qaeda link.
Then the news went silent. Then it was announced that tests
showed the explosive to be of a home-made (or home-makeable) kind
that al-Qaeda were known to know about from the internet. Then that
story, too, seemed to fizzle out.
I have seen no explanation of how the initial assessment of the
type of explosive could have been the reverse of the truth, and no
acknowledgement of error from those who made it. Nor has the
al-Qaeda/internet angle been followed up. The most recent
assessments (Kevin Toolis in The Times yesterday) have
suggested that there was nothing special or hallmarked about the
explosive at all.
Immediately after the first bombing, a report was splashed that
two people had been arrested trying to leave Heathrow. The later
report that they had been released without charge appeared as little
more than a footnote.
A few days after that, much was made of the arrest in Egypt of a
British Muslim whom the less-scrupulous news reports called a
chemist (he is a biochemist). There was talk of British agents
attending (or joining) his interrogation in Cairo. A statement from
the Egyptian authorities denying that they had linked him to the
bombing or that he was on their list of al-Qaeda suspects, did
receive momentary attention and then the story seemed to die. I do
not know what has happened to it, or him.
Then there were some big headlines about an alleged al-Qaeda
operative who had slipped into Britain, and slipped out just
before the bombings. But it transpired that he was low on our
counter-terrorist services lists of security threats and that
story, too, has disappeared.
Then there was an arrest in Pakistan of an alleged al-Qaeda
mastermind, about which reports have become increasingly confused,
dropping from their early position as leading news items. I do not
know where we are now on these reports. If I understood them
correctly, what helped to trace this mastermind were records of
calls made to him by all, or some, of the four July 7 bombers from
their mobile phones.
If anyone has asked (or answered) a question that surely occurred
to millions of us, then I have yet to hear of it: why did the
bombers not take the elementary precaution of phoning the mastermind
from a telephone box? Just how master was this mind? Is it not a
curious way of operating a terrorist network, if the terrorists are
to call their mastermind on their mobile phones, then take the
phones with them on their bombing spree?
This is only a small sample of the deadends (or possible
deadends) in the July 7 and July 21 stories. You will have noticed
many others. You will notice, too, that every one tends in the same
direction. Each report, when first we read it, accentuated the
impression that we face a formidable, capable, extensive and
well-organised terrorist movement, with important links abroad, and
that is almost certainly being masterminded from abroad.
And indeed we may. Nothing I repeat, nothing I write here is
meant to exclude that possibility. Some of the scares that grip our
headlines and imaginations do later turn out to have been every bit
the threat we thought they were. I have not the least idea what may
be the size, shape and competence of al-Qaeda and would not dream of
suggesting (and do not believe) that they are uninvolved.
Nor do I mean to downplay the horrors that have hit London: death
and destruction are death and destruction, whoever causes them.
Nor do I want to imply doubt about the scale of the horrors that
may lie ahead. Home-grown or foreign-born, at whatever level of
competence, and whether a concerted campaign or demented craze, this
kind of thing is deadly and difficult to combat.
My purpose is more limited. To alert you to the enormous,
insidious and mostly unconscious pressure that exists to talk up,
rather than talk down, the efficacy of al-Qaeda. When all the
pressures are to talk up a lethal characterisation of the forces at
work, we need to be supercool in the way we look at these
reports.
You have read much about the threat of one
particular conspiracy. Here is another. There is an unwitting
conspiracy between four separate powers to represent the worldwide
al-Qaeda network as fiendishly clever, powerfully effective and
deeply involved in the London bombings.
First, the news media. Al-Qaeda is a narrative and a gripping
one. Everybody loves a mystery story. Everybody loves a thriller.
Everybody needs a plot. All journalists have an in-built tendency to
make links between things and find unifying forces at work. A series
of random and unrelated facts makes for a shapeless account. Report
without implicit explanation is baffling and finally boring. No
British journalist I know would invent or consciously distort a
report in order to exaggerate the involvement of al-Qaeda; but most
of us are drawn to explanations that, well, explain.
Secondly, the
Government. I would not be so rude or stupid as to suggest that
ministers take any sort of satisfaction from terrorist atrocities.
But leadership is made easier if there is a visible, tangible
threat; and easier still if it can be represented as completely
alien. Us v Them is the narrative a politician is most at home with.
The BBCs The Power of Nightmares made an important point:
fear silences opposition, and governments walk tallest when an
external threat can be identified and they can lead us against it.
Evil is a more convenient opponent than stupidity, inadequacy and
human dysfunction. We hold our leaders hands a little more tightly
in the dark.
Thirdly, the security services. The police, British Intelligence,
and our counter-terrorism apparatus, are all flattered in their work
by headlines that suggest that the enemy is formidable, incredibly
sophisticated and hard to catch. Any failure on the part of our
security services to detect in advance or prevent a terrorist
outrage, or to catch the terrorists afterwards, is easily explained
if the terrorist movement is widely agreed to be fiendishly clever
and well organised. It is not flattering to a counter-terrorism
chief to suggest that his quarry is a muppet. The tale of a police
mastermind calls for a criminal mastermind, too.
Finally, of course, the terrorist himself. A reputation for
fearsomeness and sophistication is nothing but a boon not only to
his self-esteem, but also to his efforts to recruit others to his
cause. Never think that speeches about the wickedness and cruelty of
al-Qaeda do other than burnish the legend.
From a certain point of view, the journalist, the politician, the
police chief and the terrorist can be seen as locked in a macabre
waltz of the mind, no less distorting for being unconscious. We
should not to join that
dance.
The Mulindwas Communication Group "With
Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in
anarchy"
Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans
l'anarchie"
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