Daily View: Airline bomb plot
Commentators consider the appropriate reactions to the airline bomb plot stopped in the UK on its way from Yemen to the US.
politicians are "twisting" the incident:
"The target may have been an aircraft. The culprits could not have known when or where they'd go off. Why is it that our leaders now react as if a terrorist atrocity has taken place when it appears to have been avoided?
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"Did our wartime leadership go public on every single threat from our German and other enemies? Of course not. So why do they do it now? To ramp up our fear. Do they think this will make us support them and their 'war on terror' policies?"
Director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham Professor , arguing that politicians were downplaying the incident, notably not raising the official threat level from severe to critical:
"One explanation for the weekend's mystifying lack of urgency is that there was no specific intelligence in the UK that indicated a plot might be unfolding. The key intelligence came from the Saudis who had passed it to the Americans, not us. But there is another: it is that the Government and our opinion- formers, for obvious political reasons, have moved far too quickly to dismantle past security measures."
that he thinks talking up confrontation is a "stupid response" and exactly what terrorists want to hear:
"There is another danger we need to be aware of too: the symmetry of self-interest between the would-be bombers and the security services assembled to stop them. Both have a tendency to magnify serious but isolated incidents into one great interconnected global battle. The American military likes to describe the arc of terror that supposedly runs from Afghanistan through Pakistan into Yemen and down through Somalia. The British security services warn us, as Sir John Sawers did in a generally wise speech last week, about 'the plotting of terrorists who are bent on maiming and murdering people in this country'.
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"These people aren't making it up. But they are part of a mentality that encourages us to believe there really is a clash of civilisations under way and that if we don't give them the tools to destroy the other side first, they will destroy us."
The against the continued presence of Nato forces in Afghanistan:
"What this failed attack does illustrate, however, is the threat posed by Yemen, where the bombs were made and sent from. It is clear that al-Qa'ida has spread well beyond the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. The militants now have a base in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. The argument that the presence of Nato forces in Afghanistan is crucial in thwarting terror attacks on Western targets is left looking threadbare. And the idea that military interventions abroad are effective in stemming terror attacks also sounds increasingly implausible - not least because the individual suspected of being behind this attack, Anwar al-Awlaki, was born and educated in the US."
[registration required] that Yemen needs aid as well as military support:
"The danger now is that this limited help is dwarfed by new, much larger packages of security aid. Too much attention devoted, for example, to more military assistance, or to allowing the CIA to operate its drone programme in the country, is likely to inflame the internal tensions that attracted al-Qaeda in the first place."
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