Ricin certainties
Andrew Gilligan 

The Spectator
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=6005&issue=2005-04-23

In TV, they call it the ‘guilty building’ shot. When, for instance, you are
making a hard-hitting documentary about the horrors of Sellafield but the
authorities won’t let you inside, you drive along the fence with the camera
running, then dub in some sinister music in the cutting-room later. You know
the sort of thing. It starts with a long, low note, then a long, slightly
higher note, then, as the Sellafield sign or, in extremis, a lamppost comes
into view, a brief, nerve-jangling musical ‘sting’ like that bit in the
Psycho shower scene. 

I confess I’ve used the technique in the odd TV programme myself, but at
least I always had a few guilty people, or guilty documents, to flesh out
the thesis. In the BBC’s extraordinary coverage of the Kamel Bourgass ‘ricin
plot’ trial last week, all they really had was the buildings. 

‘It is a story that can only now be told ...of how al-Qa’eda spent years
training, planning and preparing for attacks, not just in Britain but across
Europe,’ gritted the corporation’s home affairs editor, Mark Easton,
sinister music playing in the background, bodies piling up on the Paris
Métro. ‘A series of co-ordinated chemical and biological strikes which could
have left hundreds dead and millions in fear for their lives.’ 

This effort appeared on, of all places, Newsnight, normally the home port of
the raised eyebrow and the cynical smirk. It tried everything: the
slow-motion reconstructions, the tendentious location shots from around
Europe (Lyons, Bratislava, Thetford), the library clips of those al-Qa’eda
blokes running round Afghanistan, and that inevitable harbinger of a scare
being well and truly mongered, David Blunkett. But all the tricks in the TV
locker could not save it from one essential truth: that it was blatant,
shameless bollocks. 

‘By day, he sold chocolates. By night, he helped Kamel Bourgass make
poisons,’ said Mr Easton of the key prosecution informant, Mohammed
Meguerba, bravely striding through a suspiciously dusky, foreign-looking
crowd as he delivered this line. Meguerba never actually gave evidence
against Bourgass, but he was the sole, if slender, thread connecting this
banal Islamic thug and murderer to a far more exciting world of Afghan
training camps and international WMD conspiracies. 

Sadly, according to defence sources, Meguerba told the authorities that he
and Bourgass attended their al-Qa’eda camp, where they met Osama bin Laden,
in the summer of 2002 — nine months, in other words, after al-Qa’eda had
been kicked out of Afghanistan, the training camps closed and bin Laden had
escaped on a donkey. The unreliability of Meguerba’s supposed confession can
perhaps be explained by the fact that it was obtained by the Algerian
security services, almost certainly under torture — not something Mr Easton
troubled to mention. 

There was so much in this report that could have been a Chris Morris parody:
the uncritical acceptance of police and political spin, the failure to
include a single sceptical voice, the police video tour of the Wood Green
apartment of death (‘Everything was as Meguerba had said. There were the
industrial scales,’ as the pictures showed a small set of household scales.
‘There was the coffee grinder.’ Could the plotters have been coffee
drinkers, perhaps?) 

But, of course, these are all secondary to the main point: there was no
ricin, and even if there had been, it could not possibly have ‘left hundreds
dead’. Ricin is not a weapon of mass destruction; it is an instrument of
one-to-one killing, just like a pistol, a knife or indeed a kettle of
boiling water. What there was found in the flat was nicotine — which,
according to Meguerba, Bourgass planned to smear on car-door handles in the
Holloway area. 

Nicotine, however, is even less of a terror weapon than ricin. According to
the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, you have to swallow it in fairly
substantial quantities to get ill. So the intended millions of victims would
probably have had to lick their car-door handles for several minutes in
order to suffer the desired deadly effects: not an especially common
practice, even in Holloway. 

Essentially, therefore, the story of this particular plot, at least, is the
exact opposite of that told by the media: if anything, a rather reassuring
picture of amateurishness, isolation and incompetence, a success for
effective police work but a serious failure of journalism. Have we learnt
nothing from the experience of Iraq? Can’t we recognise an agenda when we
see one? The authorities may tell few direct lies in cases like these, but
they are very good at pointing journalists in the wrong direction, then
letting us charge off down the path under our own steam. That is exactly
what appears to have happened here. 

Despite serious disquiet in parts of the organisation about Mr Easton’s
report, the BBC has remained quiet. One BBC film-maker, Adam Curtis, was
bold enough to speak out: the reporting, he said, ‘was not in any way
justified’. Mr Curtis repeated this at the Bafta awards ceremony earlier
this week, which was being televised by the BBC; but by the time it came to
be broadcast, his remarks had been edited out. 

None of this is to say that there is not a real threat against us; or that
there will be no serious attempts to kill us in future. There is, and there
may well be, perhaps even before the election. That is why the failings of
the Mark Easton approach are so important: not merely because they are bad
journalism, but because they actually, if unconsciously, abet the
terrorists. 

The truth about Islamic terrorists is that they can kill us, but they cannot
do it very often. In three and a half years, there has been only one Islamic
terror attack in the West. Terrorism’s most effective weapon is not
explosives, conventional or otherwise; it is fear. It is not what it can do
to us; it is what it can persuade us to do to ourselves. 

By stoking that fear, politicians and journalists are playing entirely into
terrorism’s hands. 

************************
Eddie Truman
Press Officer
Scottish Socialist Party
07919 868463
[log in to unmask]
http://www.scottishsocialistparty.info/
************************ 

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