Premature Publication

Once more, the media trumpet a dastardly foreign terror plot on British soil, only for the whole story to rapidly start unravelling.  This time around, the press were all slavering over the idea that the guys arrested near RAF Fairford might be Iranians Hell-bent on attacking vital defence assets.  After all, Fairford had been used by the USAF to launch bombing missions against Iran, so that aspect of the story seemed to be a shoe-in.  Except, except, it turns out that the suspects are all British nationals from London.  Just to add insult to injury, they've now all been released on bail.  Which tends to indicate that they most probably aren't dangerous terrorists.  Indeed, bearing in mind that the three vehicles they were using have been subject to 'extensive examination with the support of military assets and forensic experts', yet there has been no announcement of huge caches of explosives being found in them, it seems, right now, that the only thing that they are guilty of is driving white vans at night in the back of beyond.   It's probably going to turn out that they were driving around looking for a venue for an illegal rave.  Even the reasons behind their arrest seem confused.  On the one hand, we have some local biddy saying that she encountered these vans blocking the road and her driveway as she drove home and the five guys ran off when they saw her headlights, so she dialled '999', (having tried the MoD police first - they couldn't be bothered to answer, which is pretty much par for the course for them).  So, we have her crowing to anyone who will listen that it was her call that foiled a major terror attack, yet, on the other hand, we have the Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, saying that it wasn't that simple and that there were other, unspecified, factors involved.  Then we have police sources telling us that the arrests weren't 'intelligence lead'.

Not to forget the 'Trump Factor', as we had the fat fuck deciding to 'comment' on the arrests, rambling on about how 'they' had been 'watching these guys' for time and 'now we've got them'.  Except, fat boy, you didn't gey them, we did.  Not that we know what exactly it is that we've 'got' them for.  While, taken at face value, Trump's burblings would seem to bolster the idea that the arrests were part of some large scale international counter-terror operation, foiling a major attack, I think that we can safely dismiss anything that he says.  He's clearly senile and spends much of his time fantasising - just look at his claims about being pulled from the rubble by firemen at 'Ground Zero' on 9/11.  Utter bollocks - he was in New York at the time, but nowhere near the Twin Towers.  We know this because he was actually phoning in to a local radio station bragging about how, with the World Trade Centre destroyed, he now owned the third tallest building in the city.  In fact, I'm surprised that he hasn't claimed that it was actually him, personally, who took down the five guys at Fairford - launching himself at them and bringing all five down with a flying football tackle.  But, getting back to the original point, this whole business just underlines (yet again) the perils of the media going off half-cocked with stories which quickly fall apart once some actual facts start to emerge.  They got so over-excited at the prospect of being able to indulge in a bit of xenophobic, Islamophobic panic-mongering, that they suffered the journalistic equivalent of 'premature ejaculation'.  Equally disappointed are the likes of Nigel Farage, desperate to distract from all that stuff about his finances, (which just won't go away), who thought that they could use this 'foreign terror plot' to whip up some more anti-immigrant hatred.  As ever, the moral here is that you really need to keep your powder dry until you are in possession of some actual facts.