It doesn’t take much more than common sense to realise that whenever one needs to take a decision it is important first to ensure that one has got the facts right. After all, if you are working with incorrect information, or assumptions, then the decisions you make, whilst technically correct for the problem you are dealing with, do not necessarily provide an adequate, let alone optimal, solution to the real problem.
That principle is not just true in engineering but in all walks of life. And it is no more important than when politicians look at revising legislation or executive powers that encroach upon civil liberties in order to deal with a perceived threat to national security.
This post might, so far, seem like stating the “bleeding obvious” but the trouble is that sometimes the apparently obvious might not actually be true.
Defense analyst, Andrew Gilligan’s column “Gilligan on Monday” in the Evening Standard sadly takes several weeks (or even months) to appear online. This is unfortunate as last Monday’s edition, which I am unable to link to contained erudite analysis showing that much that had been popularized in the media about the recent London bombings was at best unsubstantiated and, at worst untrue. There were two parts to his analysis that stuck most in my mind.
The first conclusion that Gilligan implies is that the 7 July and 21 July bombings were seperate attacks that were not significantly linked (other than the obvious ‘copycat’ nature). This was interesting considering that much fuss had been made recently about “Londonistan” being rampant with organised “Al-Qaeda” operatives. Intriguingly this has now been picked up by the Independent today. In a front page article they report that an enquiry involving MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police has found “no evidence” of “an Al-Qaeda mastermind operating in the UK” or of any link between the two bombings.
The other Gilligan claim that I found interesting was that the evidence pointed to both the 7 July and 21 July bombings not being (attempted) suicide attacks. Gilligan pointed to New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s astonishingly frank security briefing on the London attacks. Kelly revealed that police believe the 7 July bombs were set off by automatically timed mobile detonators linked to mobile phones, implying that they were not suicide attacks as these are normally manually detonated.
Today’s Independent seems to be building on the theme and has put up a small listing of what it believes are common myths associated with the London bombings.
I’m not sure I know what version of events to believe. I’m acutely aware that the police investigation is on-going and that we need to wait to see what actually comes out of it.
My concern is politicians jumping on a bandwangon and making legislation that unnecessarily impedes on civil liberties. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not a libertarian junkie. I fully accept that, to some degree, individual freedoms need to be curtailed for the greater good and that at times of high risk to national security. But in doing so, the acid test has got to be, “is this really going to help?” Politicians can argue but the question can’t really be answered until the facts are known and indisputabe.
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