Our speedboat of the apocalypse returns, still managing to cause a stir

THE amazing thing is that they did it twice.

The US armed forces had, just a few months ago, scared the hell out of New York by sending the president’s plane, Air Force One, flying low over Manhattan while doing unusual manoeuvres as part of a photo shoot. Fears of hijacking and other possibilities filled the minds of watching New Yorkers. Even those not watching got scared as the media got on to the story.

Last week, on the anniversary of the worst attack on American soil, 9/11, the Coast Guard in Washington generated another wave of fear by undertaking an exercise near the bridge where President Obama’s motorcade was due to pass. CNN and other media, on emotional red alert because of the possibility that Al-Qaida might choose this day to prove to the world that they hadn’t gone away, reported that an attack of some kind was happening. Ronald Reagan National Airport was closed. Flights were disrupted.

Now, depending on your standpoint, this looked like a substantial military movement, or was too routinely tiny to get excited about.

To the US admiral in charge, according to the New York Times: “Friday’s exercise, involving four 25-foot speedboats armed with mounted machine guns, was considered so ordinary that neither other federal agencies nor local law enforcement officials were notified.”

I’m with the admiral. Of course, if four speedboats with mounted machine guns lashed up the Lee or the Liffey, we’d be a bit surprised, but it must happen every day of the week on American rivers. On the other hand, you have to ask if it was wise to do it on the day that was in it?

“I don’t think our operations people saw any reason not to train today,” Admiral John Currier said.

Now, that’s where the commonsense gene seems to have gone walkabout. Since 9/11, the world has changed utterly. Several other major terrorist attacks have happened, several have been foiled, and we’re not allowed to get onto a plane without stripping practically naked and decanting our hair gel into a container the size of a thumb. This was the anniversary of the attack that shocked the world, but, hey, let’s do a routine exercise involving radio transmissions about gunfire. Why wouldn’t we? Anyway, we’re not shooting real bullets. We’re not even going to shoot blanks. Nah. Nuthin’ to be scared about at all. We’ll just have the Coast Guard use an unencrypted radio frequency monitored by any military groupie, and tell each other the number of rounds of ammunition theoretically used, going “Bang, Bang!” to make it clear what they’re talking about. Lovely bit of leisure activity on a sunny September day.

The White House’s PR man got shirty with media, who contributed to the panic by their reportage, suggesting that a little fact-checking before running scary stories might be a good move. Media didn’t take his reproof lying down. “Given the circumstances, it would have been irresponsible not to report on what we were hearing and seeing,” CNN retorted.

To frighten an already tense nation once may be a mistake. To do it twice looks like the military have lost the capacity to consider the end results of their activities, which one would have thought was a basic competence of good management running services like the Coast Guard.

Because the monitored conversations between the four speed boats had American voices talking about what they were doing, and going “Bang, Bang” to indicate explosions they were simulating, the White House PR man’s ire has some justification. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that this kind of communication might be a bit untypical of Al-Qaida in full attack mode. But the story of the four speedboats of the apocalypse probably came under the heading: Too Good to Check.

Now, the military and the media will embark on self-corrective post-mortems, awash in mutual blame and in due course, each will announce that new protocols are in place to prevent this recurring. Ah, the great procedural placebo: new protocols. A fresh set of guidelines to be added to the ever-growing array of checklists to be gone through before anybody does anything, each deriving from the mistaken notion that if you push people into ticking boxes, you prevent disaster. The reality, of course, is that while box-ticking has its place, especially in activities like flying big passenger planes, neither checklists nor protocols develop calm and commonsense in human beings. The pilot who created the “Miracle on the Hudson” didn’t have time for checklists, but he had a headful of commonsense and good judgment. Maybe we should do more study of the bods who get it right, rather than shoring up the procedures which fail to prevent other bods getting it wrong.

The White House PR man obviously thinks, despite the great media savvy of the Obama administration, that media is rational and considered in its responses. It isn’t and never was. The level of competition between media outlets, exacerbated by the economic problems acutely affecting them all at the moment, means that fact-checking and caution are becoming worthy aspirations, rather than immediate priorities.

Which is why the re-emergence of our own speedboat of the apocalypse, Mr Declan Ganley, was being talked about with competitive excitement by media people all last week. Each one of the reporters, correspondents and broadcasters on the hunt for an interview with the man from the west would accept that he may be the quint- essential definition of political failure and lack of judgment. Here is an individual whose candidates, in the European Parliament elections, took pride in stating that, when elected, they would not have to align themselves with any of the existing power blocks within the Parliament. The Libertas folk would be unique, in that so many of them would be elected, right across Europe, as to constitute a power block all of their own.

It didn’t happen. It so didn’t happen. Of all the heavily promoted candidates in one EU state after another, only one became an MEP and he was already an MEP who just switched labels. Understandably, given the scale of the failure, the party leader then said he was getting out of politics and would not be leading anything from now on, especially not a second anti-Lisbon Treaty campaign. Understandably, given Katie Hannon’s Prime Time exposé, not to mention some of the claims he had made during the first campaign, many people didn’t believe him. Understandably, he waited to break his word on this issue until a point of maximum impact.

What is understandable but regrettable is the fact that this coming week, there’s a good chance he’ll be all over all media, all over again. Former leaders of mainstream parties, even if they attack their own party’s current policies or write books in which they attack former colleagues, couldn’t get the coverage he’ll get. Because the media animal can’t kick its addiction to this man. Each journalist who showcases him believes they will be ruthlessly interrogative with him and let him away with nothing.

Other than a boatload of publicity.