LETTER TO THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER IN BRITAIN

Dear Editor,
I generally find the Independent is level-headed editorially but your coverage of the unexploded devices in London exposed a growing media tendency I have come to expect from the media here in the US and not from your newspaper. The initial media response to the discovery of the two devices was a familiar one of over reaction. On cable channels in America there were the “usual suspects” – so-called terrorism experts ready to hype this event as one that could have rivaled the bombing in Madrid. It was yet another example of the fear factor coming into play. No one tried to place the two devices in context by comparing them to the types of devices that cause untold carnage every day in Iraq. Your correspondents claimed this was “the first known attempt to bring Islamist tactics used in Iraq to
Britain, by exploding a vehicle bomb to cause maximum casualties.” Those same correspondents wrote that Scotland Yard had said if the device outside the nightclub had exploded it would have caused “carnage.” On a cable channel in New York the potential death toll in London was being put at over one thousand.
Counter-terrorism experts familiar with explosives knows these were not the types of car bombs that have exploded in Iraq. If the Mercedes had exploded it would not have been a serious shrapnel device. It would certainly have made a very large bang and person standing very close to it could have been badly injured. I am talking about perspective. Scotland Yard’s use of “carnage” represented unwarranted speculation.
Both devices in London showed a lack of sophistication. If they were constructed by Al Qaeda, it was by the group’s student wing. The devices were not those used to kill scores of innocents in Baghdad.
None of what I say is intended to diminish the terrorist threat. Far from it. I believe people in London and New York, or for that matter in Brighton, need to be vigilant because terrorists often strike where we least expect them to and at a time of their choosing. They have determination to learn from mistakes. While the rest of the world is sleeping, or at dinner, they are plotting.
One of the primary weapons is their arsenal is their ability to instill fear in the rest of us. So why are we helping them scare the living daylights out of people in major cities like London and New York? There is a growing tendency within the media on both sides of the Atlantic to respond in a reflex way to events, without carefully examining the facts. There are too many so-called terrorism experts popping up on our television screens as soon as something happens. Their first instinct is to exaggerate. In the United States, many of these so-called experts are academics who would not recognize a terrorist if they bumped into one. Some are members of institutes with close connections to the Bush Administration.
A graphic example of what I call the fear factor was an interview given recently by a Federal Prosecutor in New York following the arrest of several disparate figures that were alleged to have plotted to blow up underground pipelines bringing oil to Kennedy airport. The Prosecutor told the media that if the accused men had succeeded the carnage would have been on a 9/11 scale or great. That was not merely a gross exaggeration of the facts but a familiar way of scaring the population at large. The reality was that the men arrested had no terrorism competence and it would not have been possible for them to set alight the pipeline structure. It has safety mechanism that would immediately cut off the flow of oil within the system once a fire occurred. The reflex nature of the coverage of terror related events means any subsequent clarification, or serious investigation, often arrives too late to reduce the level of fear instilled by irresponsible coverage.
A problem facing the media is an understandable fear that by questioning public statements about terrorist threats one is somehow inviting the charge that one is being cavalier and if something terrible happens one will have destroyed one’s credibility. On the other hand, the media should not be in the business that some politicians and government bodies are in and that is fear mongering. The security industry in the United States provides many of the talking-head-experts for television channels once a terror-related event occurs. It does not take rocket science to conclude that it is in the interests of the security industry to keep us all frightened. In my view, security should be about making us feel safe and not terrified. That can be achieved with perspective and knowledge.
(Published by The Independent on July 2.)