Part Time Terror

You know, as soon as I saw that 'terror alert' last week which led to various UK and US embassies being temporarily closed in places like Yemen, I thought: I bet that sooner or later this will be used to try and justify the NSA's 'Prism' web and phone snooping programme.  And lo!  It has come to pass.  I was reading today of various Republican Senators telling the world how, once again, lives had been saved as a result of intelligence gathered covertly by the NSA.  The trouble with such claims is that they are impossible either to prove or disprove.  Anyone can claim the existence of a 'threat' or 'terror plot', based on 'evidence' that can't be shared for security reasons, then claim their alert was justified when nothing happens as it proves that their actions had defused or deflected the 'threat'.  In the absence of any hard facts, it is impossible to know whether such a claim is true or that nothing happened because there was no threat in the first place.  (Obviously, being a cynic and having worked on 'the other side' and seen how flimsy intelligence is often hyped up for political reasons to justify establishment policies, I tend to suspect the latter).

The other thing which struck me about this recent alert was that, in the case of UK embassies at least, the closures were only for a couple of days over the weekend.  What are our leaders trying to tell us?  That we're now dealing with territorial wing of al Qaeada?  Is the terror organisation, like the UK's own armed forces, now so thin on the ground due to budget cuts, that they are being forced to rely upon their reservists, the part-time terrorists who are only active three or four weekends every year?  Are we now under threat from guys who hold down regular jobs the rest of the year and have to get their employers' consent to take time off to go and blow a few infidels up?  Is this why al Qaeada's terror campaigns have been so patchy in recent years - the lack of availability of key personnel due to work commitments?  "I'm sorry, but I can't make the meat cleaver attack on the US Embassy this weekend - I''ve got a full-time job with Hezbollah as a suicide bomber.  They just can't spare me - I'm on call and could have to blow myself and a bus load of Israeli school children at a moment's notice!"