Incompetent terrorists meet their match in incompetent authorities

The fastest method of transporting large numbers of people is now one of the slowest, largely because the powers-that-be focus on preventing little old ladies bringing tubes of moisturiser onto flights

GARY was over at the races in Newcastle since Friday. Given a choice, he’d have been at a match involving Newcastle United, to whom he bears a fealty above and beyond the call of sanity. He goes to all their home matches, bringing a bevy of younger addicts with him. Whenever they have a loss like the one they had in the UEFA Cup, he goes into a total decline. For a full fortnight, there’s no talking to him.

Outside of the soccer season, he expresses his loyalty to the city of Newcastle by attending race meetings there, as he did last weekend. It wasn’t a bad trip, in racing terms. He was coming home with the same money he went with. The problem was getting home.

When a burning 4X4 was driven into the terminal of Glasgow Airport, while the immediate effects were relatively minor, the knock-on consequences for travel and travellers were enormous.

The first to suffer were passengers on flights into Glasgow. As the planes landed, their passengers were told they were not allowed to disembark. So, from 3.30pm until 11pm they remained on board, wondering and waiting.

In the first few hours, they were quiescent enough. By tea time, though, they were good and mad. Why weren’t they being allowed into the terminal? An iron bollard had kept the 4X4 outside, so the damage was no more than a scorched exterior. OK, forensics were going to have to go over the vehicle for unexploded ordinance, but Glasgow is a big airport, offering lots of alternatives.

It was surely possible, on a summer evening, to drive staircases out to the waiting planes, get the passengers off, process them, if need be, on the tarmac and move them to the road out of the airport in buses? It was hardly likely that terrorists would have arranged that incoming flights to an airport they proposed to demolish would be filled with allies geared to add to the confusion. But if that was the fear, why wasn’t Scotland Yard all over the parked planes like a rash?

Maybe, the more reasonable passengers thought (the ones who hadn’t recently used the overworked lavatories on the planes and weren’t suffering from nicotine-withdrawal symptoms) Scotland Yard was too busy dealing with the wider threat. The word was that 1,700 people suspected of links to Islamist terrorism were under surveillance and that four more attacks were expected.

Liverpool, Newcastle, Blackpool and Manchester airports were all shut down. So there must have been a lot of fully loaded planes sitting on the aprons of each of those airports.

The people who had flown into these airports were in a worse pickle than the people who wanted to fly out of the same facilities. Not that this was much consolation to the latter.

At the race meeting, Gary considered getting himself to Stranraer and boarding the ferry to Larne. He considered the option without much enthusiasm, firstly because he figured half the world was likely to have the same idea and secondly because he gets sea-sick on even a short trip. Instead of heading to the port, he checked into a hotel in the hope that the airports would open again yesterday, as they did.

WHAT he — together with perhaps 100,000 other travellers — experienced this weekend was an incompetent response to incompetent terrorism.

The footage of the flame-coated 4X4 stuck into the entrance to the terminal was impressive. Impressive because of the primeval fear of flame. Impressive, too, in the speed with which it flashed up on TV stations and websites.

The reality, however, is that the vehicle came pretty close to being the Little 4X4 That Couldn’t. It managed to be spectacular and ridiculous at one and the same time. It didn’t get physically into the terminal, where its hulking presence among families queuing at ticket desks would have been truly terrifying. It got blocked by an iron bollard the terrorists either hadn’t realised was there (inadequate site-sussing, lads) or that they couldn’t drive straight enough to avoid.

It then didn’t blow up the way they planned for it to blow up (inadequate ballistics expertise, lads). It didn’t set the innocents ablaze.

This plan, it is worth pointing out, would have been an act of cruelty running counter to the core values of Islam.

Instead, it set one of the guilty ablaze. The terrorist who went on fire was so hyper, through excitement or drugs, that he attacked a security guard, yelling that a bomb was on board the vehicle, which raises questions about his commitment to killing the largest number of people possible — why not let them crowd close to the lethal Jeep Cherokee?

Humanitarians did their best to douse the flames and security personnel did their best to douse him. When they got him to hospital, it emerged he was wearing a belt stuffed with explosives that, like the ones in the vehicle itself, hadn’t gone off. More incompetence, which nonetheless caused the evacuation of a goodly section of the hospital.

The terrorists were matched, screw-up for screw-up, by the authorities. Ironically, the only smart people seem to have been the innocent bystanders, one of whom, having spent some time in Northern Ireland, warned wannabe belligerents off attacking the 4X4 charioteers on the basis that they were probably clad in incendiary, if not explosive, material.

Terrorism has transformed air travel into a bloody nightmare. The fastest method of transporting large numbers of people is now one of the slowest, largely because the powers-that-be focus on preventing little old ladies bringing tubes of moisturiser onto flights. The innocent are subjected to a series of obsessive-compulsive restrictions out of kilter with realistic risk-management. When terrorists sensibly abandon that potential methodology and do something different, the innocent are subjected to more misery, so badly managed as to rob them of any faith in the powers-that-be. And terrorism doesn’t work?

The problem is that those responsible for protecting us always seem to concentrate on dealing with past threats, rather than present and future threats. So a little industry has grown up, involving sealable plastic bags, bins allowing charitable donations of bottles of perfume, and containers full of half-drunk bottles of Coke. Because of one failed past attempt using liquid explosive.

Yet when the 4X4 charioteers attack the front end of an international airport, there’s no Plan B. No way to get passengers off planes. No well-rehearsed scheme to seal off one section of the facility while allowing other sections to continue to function. Two guys in a 4X4, who can’t reach their target and can’t get their personal or vehicular explosives to work, can paralyse the lives of a quarter of a million people.

And terrorism doesn’t work?