BREAKING: Heathrow normal after incompetent terror attack
I thought I’d just note quickly that I flew home from London the a few hours after police defused a minor bomb in Picadilly Circus and some boob drove a flaming car into a terminal at Glasgow airport.
The impact in London? The cab driver that morning said, “There’s some kind of thing happening in Picadilly, the police have one of those blue curtains up like they do, and the traffic’s all stopped.”
Oh, dear. Traffic disrupted in Picadilly Circus. At Heathrow, I had a completely normal airport experience, including a fifteen-minute trip through airport security. All right, I do cede that I was flying business class.
I can only speculate what the American security reaction would have been had police found an unexploded bomb in, say, Copley Place in Boston the morning I left for London. I doubt my plane would have taken off on time. At a minimum, Logan Airport would have been locked down. It wouldn’t be unfair to anticipate that laptops or paperback books, or toothbrushes, or something equally irrelevant would have been banned from all planes
UPDATED:
The worrying aspect of the British terror-rash is that it’s obviously an amateur effort, inspired rather than organized by al Qaeda. This means we are likely to face more of these things, but that most of them are not going to be massively successful. They can still be deadly, of course, and we should be vigilant. But it seems to me we shouldn’t grant them the capacity to terrify us.
Good heavens, it almost sounds like terrorism might be a form of violent crime! Perhaps it’s a job for law enforcement! We’ve been going about this all wrong!
