Scare Tactics

So, terrorists might target the increasingly long queues of passengers at airports which are resulting from increased anti-terror checks. According to a parliamentary select committee, that is. Quite apart from the fact that surely this bizarre observation on their part would seem to confirm that the government's over-the-top response to terror attacks is actually fuelling terrorism, I'm left, once more, marvelling at the overheated imaginations that those in power and the press have in this country. Hardly a week seems to go by without someone, somewhere, speculating as to what kind of outrage those crazy terrorists might commit next. Not that they want to spread panic and alarm, mind you. They're just trying to protect us by identifying credible new threats which the professional alarmists in the security forces might have missed.

Of course, the key question they never address is, what is the likelihood that terrorists would carry out such attacks? Sure, they could target airport queues, but would they? They could try to assassinate Gordon Brown by training wasps to fly up his arse and sting him to death from inside his intestine - but is this really likely. They could replace one of President Bush's suppositories with a miniature bomb and blow his buttocks off - but I don't think they actually would. Still, at least we haven't yet gone as far as the US government and enlisted film makers to speculate on the kind of plots terrorists might come up with. I'm not saying the results were ludicrous, but my favourite was the 'Al Qaeda Pie' plan, in which Osama bin Laden got an HIV-positive gay porn actor to whack off into an apple pie, which would subsequently be smuggled into the White House and served up, with ice cream, to the President.