Liddle America

Are biscuits a terrorist threat?

19 August 2006

Why can’t you take biscuits on board at JFK, when computer games are fine at La Guardia? Rod Liddle, in the US, is mystified

Not that things are very much better in the United States. At the beginning of the week US authorities announced that they had arrested three ‘Muslim terrorists’ in Caro, Michigan. They were paraded on the news, these chaps; swarthy, religious-looking people with shifty expressions. Their plan had been to blow up the Mackinac suspension bridge which connects the north part of the state with its southern section; it is, as you will be told if you dare to go anywhere near the place, the third largest suspension bridge in the world and the biggest ‘in the western hemisphere’. This was, for one morning at least, the lead story on what passes for news programmes over here. It was then revealed that the three men were arrested nowhere near the bridge in question — and the sole reason for their being apprehended was the fact that they had purchased 80 pre-pay mobile phones. The authorities didn’t let on why they were worried about such a purchase; sure, one mobile phone could be used as a detonator — but why would they need 80? Were they planning to irritate us, in the name of Allah, with inappropriate ringtones? The story began to slip from the front pages when the wife of one of the men revealed that they had a job buying and selling mobile phones. Still, another couple of darkish-looking people were arrested somewhere else in the Midwest, again for buying too many mobile phones.

Nothing, though, quite revealed the uncertainty and panic behind the scenes so much as John Reid’s statement that the security services had their eyes on another ‘couple of dozen’ possible terrorist attacks — a little nugget he seemingly dropped into the conversation almost as an afterthought. Did he mean two dozen, i.e. 24? Or was it simply a figure of speech, an approximation?