Here we go again

[redbird]

The "terror alert level" is back up to

If it ever hits Elmo, should I head for the hills? And are we still supposed to believe that the capture of Saddam Hussein somehow made anyone outside Iraq safer?

(That link fetches the current alert level, which presumably will change at some point; when this entry was posted it was at Ernie (orange))

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The Gazette says that the increased security is making border crossing into the US slow. Canada is not increasing security.

This all feels strange to me, it feels subtly off, it feels as if it's being taken seriously only at the wrong level.

I lived most of my life in a country where terrorism happened regularly. Nobody liked it, but people got used to it. To take one tiny symbolic thing, I'm not used to litter bins in railway stations -- they are an artifact of peace, you can only have them if hiding a bomb in them is unthinkable, if nobody would want to do that. There were a lot of bad civil rights things done in the name of Prevention of Terrorism, though on a one year renewable basis, and every year it was a political issue when they were renewed.

But we didn't have terror alert levels, though we did have times when security was increased because someone knew something it was usually quietly. Thinking about why we didn't have IRA terror alerts it's immediately obvious -- it would have been giving them what they wanted, it would have been showing them they were in fact succeeding in terrifying us. It would have given conceded to them a major battle in the psychological war.

You haven't removed your litterbins, and equivalent, and the signals being sent are just weird. The signal you want to send to terrorists is "This isn't going to do you any good", and there are a pile of ways of sending that.

I don't know what they're thinking.

Just that. It could be cynical manipulation with their eye on elections and power at home, and in a way I almost hope it is because that's wicked folly but it's comprehensible. If I don't ascribe to malice, it's even more terrifying -- in the way that people want conspiracy theories because they want to believe that someone really knows what's going on. If this is blundering things look very bleak ahead.