Osama Bin Laden: A Matter of Trust
by Jonathan Birdwell
Osama Bin Laden is dead. It is undeniably the end of an era. Yet, the million pound question is, what are the implications for the so-called War on Terror? Will it increase or decrease the likelihood of attack in London and does it make us safer? Experts are currently debating these questions, each offering opposing assessments.
Ultimately, of course, nobody knows. However, there are some people who can make a more informed judgement: those in the security services. They have monitored the ebb and flow of al Qaeda-inspired terrorism since 9/11. They saw the numbers of people seduced by the Bin Laden narrative rise dramatically in the run-up to the Iraq War, and likely diminish over the past couple years.
However, we in the public realm are more or less clueless. We are assured the threat of terror is very high, and I personally believe it is significant. Yet the only data on the numbers of British people being monitored is from 2007. A BBC report at the time showed the security services were watching around 2,000 such individuals.
This uncertainty is significant because one of the principal aims of terrorism is to increase fear. In the wake of Bin Laden’s death, Governments warned about the likelihood of revenge attacks. Yet polling from the US suggested most Americans feel safer now he is dead. In the UK there was no evidence about how Britons and Londoners viewed the threat. So Demos decided to do a short poll of over a hundred Londoners in five different areas. The findings of our poll have been published in a short paper, which you can download here.
As part of the questionnaire we asked Londoners if they thought the killing increased the risk of attack in London in the short term and in the long term. We also asked if they were more fearful of riding public transportation. Most feared an attack in the next six months, while 1 in 3 were more nervous about using public transport. Only 2 out of 5 felt the killing of Bin Laden did not increase the risk of an attack in the long term.
Such is the character of modern terrorism that even a victory causes public anxiety. So the security services should consider publishing an annual or even biannual counter terrorism threat report that includes the rough number of people they are monitoring and their assessment of the threat. This type of transparency is not without precedent. The Dutch security services AIVD publish a number of similar reports which can be viewed here.
It’s time the security services shed some light on to the threats we face in the name of building public trust and easing fear.
Graeme Semple
You write about trust, when in this instance, the President of the US lied about having watched the Bin Laden killing live when in fact he did not. The commander of the operation said he cut the feed before his men went in. The fact that doctors in the US hospital in Saudi Arabia said that they treated Bin Laden for a severe kidney disease way back in early 2001 and that no dialysis equipment was found in the bunker is clearly troubling. There is absolutely no physical evidence to suggest that Bin Laden was ever in the bunker at all. Medical testimony from doctors who treated Bin Laden suggests that he actually died as far back as late 2001. You mentioned the fear that terrorists create, and yet the only fear that is being created in our society is the fear generated by our government as to the possibility of a terrorist attack. Personally, I believe nothing that our government or the mainstream media say about terrorism. The BBC have already been caught red handed fabricating stories, ie building 7 in New York collapsing a full half hour before it did and also BBC breakfast TV showing pictures of celebrations in India when telling the viewers that the live pictures were coming from "Martyrs" square in Tripoli. It is about time that organisations like Demos were investigating our government an the media it controls.
Will Davies
I'm not sure that categories of 'risk' and 'threat level' are necessarily very helpful here. The issue is entirely binary: either a bomb is going to explode in a major Western city in the near future with devastating consequences, or it isn't. Any other representations of the problem - be they by terrorism 'experts', security services, 100 people on the streets of London or self-identified extremists themselves - are component parts of the problem, and not the solution. Those peculiar official threat level rankings can hardly be treated as objective facts, not least because no government in their right mind (or any self-identified extremist) would ever declare the threat of terrorism to be 'low'. And yet this isn't to say that a bomb won't explode in a major Western city in the near future with devastating consequences. (Personally my primary experience of this entire circus is via the difference it makes to bag-checking rituals at the British Library).
I don't have an alternative. But if the security services did as you said, and introduced some 'transparency', it is impossible to imagine a) it being done in a credible way, in fact it could just give the whole notion of 'transparency' a bad name, a bit like how the Office of Budgetary Responsibility gives the notion of 'independence' a bad name (the idea of security services being 'transparent' sounds like the Vatican becoming 'democratic') b) it doing anything to improve the psychological well-being of commuters in crowded tube carriages, which ultimately is what you're driving at. All I can say is that I wish governments responded to the 2008 financial crisis with a similar level of paranoia and fear of a repeat!