From my book "Not In My name" published 2011 - part 2, the new politics is being waged online where it is far more vicious and bloody...
"Joe Bloggs’ Blog, London, July 8th 2006
The view from the top of the Clapham Omnibus
A year
to the day. Plus one. In order to honour the memorial ceremonies passing off
with due dignity.
But I
can hold my peace no longer. Today I can ask the question, was that it??? A one-hit wonder? Is that the
sum total, one atrocity?
Admittedly
well-planned and co-ordinated, but where’s the sustained follow-up campaign?
Apart from the four stooges who couldn’t even make a chapati, much less a bomb.
And didn’t one of them, possessed with the courage of a lion, make his bolt by
draping himself head to foot in a burka? How double-edged does the veil seem
now?
It’s a
bit of a well-worn tradition apparently. For I’m told as much as protecting
female modesty, the veil can also help a vulpine lover secure access, to his
off-limits but willing love in the harem.
Still,
how we were all gripped by the thrill of the chase for a couple of weeks. CCTV
footage of them plastered everywhere, rivalling a bad taste Benetton campaign. Blanket media
coverage, till they were being led away under blankets. Extradited, locked up
and forgotten about. News blackout.
About
time they were coming to trial I’d say. How much more evidence do we need to
gather? Caught red handed on camera. Up in the dock, so we can all see you for
the pathetic specimens you really are! You’re nothing! We can’t even recall
your names. Your prolix, unBritish sounding names, more verbose than any
meaningful ideology you care to spout.
And,
undaunted we’re still using the Underground aren’t we? Our wheels of commerce
grind on. The fear and anxiety have diminished, cos you haven’t been able to
repeat your heinous deed. Of course not, your top boys took themselves out in
their one act. Your second top boys...are just languishing in our prison cells.
I think you're done don't you?
So it
showed that you could. Big deal. The Met Commissioner had been warning us for
three years, with his mantra that it was a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’.
Well, ‘when’ has come to pass. And past. In theory the threat must still
persist. But London has shrugged its broad shoulders and got on with life.
We’re battle hardened, first from the Blitz, then the spud-munchers throwing
blazing fertilizer at us. Such outrages only firm up our sense of community and
togetherness. A sense of belonging you can’t possibly penetrate.
When
all’s said and done, ultimately you were no more than a mosquito or a gnat
bite. A knee-jerk into the groin. Enough to make our eyes water, but no need
for an overreaction of the body politic.
Since
there’s been no lasting terror beyond the one-off incident, therefore it had to
have been an act of vengeful spite. A token. A hate token to the country of
your birth. Not even your adoptive or foster country, but where you were born,
brought up and educated. A single act of bloody bloodymindedness.
Rather
than play out your destructive oedipal fantasies on our bodies, you would have
been better off blubbering on a shrink’s couch, except that is rooted in the
other bunch of Semite cousins you claim to abhor. Hatred is always
non-negotiable. Like prejudice.
One of
you only ended up on that bus cos you neglected to charge the battery. Still,
how redolent was that image, with its roof ripped off like a sardine tin?
Powerfully symbolic, but symptomatic of not very much at all. Except your lack
of understanding of our way of life, both marooned up there in Yorkshire and
holed up in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.
Only a
tired old strategy of economic dislocation, targets the transport system. But
every Londoner knows any three Tube lines are out of commission on a daily
basis. Signal trouble usually. The bus ought to have been your cue, seeing as
it’s our culture you’re at war with anyway.
For our
part, we may not be able to win a war on a word called ‘terror’. But you can
triumph even less through war against a culture. Does Grozny or Gaza feel any
more liberated by your act of derring-do? No, thought not.
So it
remains a stifled howl. The yelp from kicking a three-legged dog. A petulant
display from infantile minds. No matter how downright angry I may be after what
you’ve done, I’m still civilised enough not to be coming after your kith and kin. An eye for an eye? My
eye more like. And I’ve got it trained on you."
Comments:
"I
heartily concur with the sentiments expressed from the top of the Clapham
Omnibus. Though I believe there is a little more behind the motivations of such
men, other than petty vindictiveness. I would refer you to the dedicated
network, small as it is but dispersed worldwide, as represented by a myriad of
sites on the Web. Where exist hundreds of webpage bomb-making cookbooks and
footage of IED (improvised explosive device) attacks from the Middle East, shot
from the vantage of those pressing the remote control for the bomb. There was
even, in English, a Powerpoint
step-by-step presentation of how to construct a homemade device, till the URL
was spiked.
So, in
similar vein, I thought it about time the arsenal ranged against this network
was laid out in turn. To wit, the eyes and ears of entire nations. If the
requisite information can be got out, to you the public, then there stands more
chance of thwarting the bombers. The Authorities want the populace to keep eyes
and ears open to help in the fight against terrorism, but they don’t want you
to open your mouths and question what lies behind such actions in the first
place. So as with your Blog host, I can hold my peace no longer. I will furnish
you with all the information you need to know. To hell with the Official Secrets Act. If they
haul me over the coals for whistle blowing, so be it. At least what I have to
offer will already be out in the public domain. This is what you truly call a
civil service. Below are my credentials.
I am and
have been for over thirty years, part of the Intelligence Services of this
country. In the past, we have been all that lay between you and periodic bloody
carnage throughout our sceptred isle. It started with tracking down the Angry
Brigade in the 1970’s. Then outflanking both Irish Republican and Loyalist
paramilitaries (in the interest of balance). Welsh Nationalist firebombers
(remember them? I know, hard to credit Pembroke and Monmouth ever being more
desirable for holiday homes than Tuscany and Provence). Animal liberationists,
(never averse to serving up some slabs of well done human steak). Extortioners.
Arsonists with delusions of grandeur and an accelerant career ladder. Those
mail bombers and nail bombers, letter bombers bearing grudges and misanthrope
purveyors of hate crimes. Oh and Libyans. Most were embarked on prolonged
campaigns of repeated outrages, that it was our duty to stop dead in their
tracks.
We
operated from the painstaking reconstruction of each and every device, plus a
consideration of the psychological cues contained in the targets, to catch our
perpetrators. I could tell you about the fertilizer based bombs favoured by the
Boys from the Bogside, prior to their roaring trade in Czech semtex. Or the
respectable middle class Angry Brigades, who would only blow up property and
institutional symbols rather than target people. Even as government scientists
were simultaneously devising neutron bombs that killed people, but left
buildings standing. However all of this has gone out the blast shattered window
here and now. Our manuals have been ripped up and used for kindling.
For the
current crop of antinomian bombers are radically different. They are not
pursuing a prolonged campaign. Just the one abomination is ample for their
purposes. Lighting the touchpaper but not standing back, seems sufficient to
pass on a flaming baton to the next disciples. Now we have to interdict them
before they ever carry out the dark deed. That is made especially hard, since
my superiors have not seen fit over the years, to establish much in the way of
a network of contacts within these communities. To my lords and masters, most
of these beardy blokes are 'clean faces'.
Made tougher
still by the annealing of the present antagonists. In the past, a bomber, no
matter how adept, would normally only set a device after several practice runs.
And an explosion is the type of ultramundane sound, that prompts people’s
recall, once it has been suggested to them that it bears a greater magnitude
than a car backfiring. However, this lot either have done their training abroad
and out of sight, or they just go for it hell for leather, the first and only
time of asking. I believe that’s what caught out the second quartet of would be
Tube bombers. They’d read their Blue Peter bomb primers, but for the want of
any stickyback plastique, hadn’t been able to put it into any practice. Thank
God.
Nor is
their psychology the same. Most bombers bear a signature hallmark in their make
up, as to why they have particularly embraced the destructive power of
explosives. Some may revel in the intricacies of their constructions, the
timers, trip switches and detonators. They may even want their bombs to be
discovered rather than detonate, so they can pit their fiendish wits with our
expert disposalists. Others may get their charge, if you’ll excuse the pun,
from enchaining the elemental force of the big bang itself. The red hot wind
that for a brief moment, expels and purges the very air itself. Before the
devastation comes cascading back to earth. Collapse of stout party. The bomber
as Hephaestus at his forge. Perhaps Zeus himself hurling his thunderclaps and
leaving huge craters in the earth. Though obviously such association is beyond
the majority of most bomb throwers. For they remain forever, third spear
chucker in a lame production of a modern-day revenge tragedy.
But this
clump are not interested in the finesse of their design, nor the temporary
divine power it may vest them. For they willingly sacrifice themselves
immediately upon such divinity and are consumed by it. They are not around to
relive their handiwork in their mind’s eye, or even congratulate themselves
grimly on a job well done. Ergo no signature handiwork, because it is an act
never to be recreated. For them, the bomb is a means to a singular, solitary
end, pure and simple. Same difference ricin, anthrax or nuclear waste.
Ordination by ordnance. Unlike most bombers who have long-since skedaddled from
the proposed locus of their perniciousness, these men probably do look their
victims in the eyes shortly before triggering their devices. Indiscriminate,
but somehow intimate. This is coffin calculus, at its simplest, most stripped
down algorithm.
Having
said that, like I say there are underlying factors behind the atrocities.
Though I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say they constitute a body of coherent
ideology. You probably all know the mantras of incitement: Palestine/ Iraq.
American/ Crusader imperialism. Other hotspots around the world and corrupt,
unIslamic Arab regimes. There’s a critique of Western materialism and sexual
mores, with which I have a modicum of sympathy, but their solution for which I
find yet more repellent. What this hodgepodge of ideas actually means, is that
the diffuse network that is Al Qaeda, can inspire any local sparkplug to tap
into his own motives. Like a sort of pick and mix of malcontentment. In the
1960’s Buddhist monks protested American Foreign Policy by setting themselves
on fire. Something about Islam insinuates they have to make sure we combust
along with them. Again, Clapham Omnibus has it about right with his positing
that as a one off, they did it because they could. It has a lot in common with
the goalless death dealing of Russian Nihilism of the Nineteenth Century. Just
witness the current bloody insurgency in Iraq. For Shi’a and Sunni, you could
almost read Hutu and Tutsi.
However,
don’t for one moment believe that it has subsided on our Isles with this one
isolated act. Just as a poisoner ought to arouse suspicion with the chemicals
he purchases, we should all be on the lookout for bulk purchases, whether we
are pharmacies, garden centres, catering suppliers or even hair salons. I don’t
think it’s faintly possible to prejudice the case against the second cohort of
Tube bombers, the ones who lived to face up to justice, but I can tell you that
the constituents of their bombs were humble household products; hair bleach,
nail polish remover and chapati flour. All the more terrible for being so
mundane in their genesis. Things we utilise in our lifestyles, repackaged and
spat back poisonously in our faces."
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