Published: Thursday, 18th September, 2008 08:00
It hasn't stopped raining since Brown came in
By Maurice O'Brien
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Maurice O'Brien
UNLIKE the Labour Party, they won’t be having a leadership election in Al-Qaeda in the forseeable future.
No matter the price of unleaded in Riyadh, how much credit gets crunched, or which banker finally takes a multi-billion dollar gamble too far, the amorphous Al-Qaeda is never far from the headlines, along with Osama bin Laden himself.
Every so often he releases a new video and we all feel threatened by that now familiar hook-nosed visage.
But is bin Laden still alive? In his dotage? Hiding in a desert cave? Does it really matter?
Even now, we are told, George Dubya’s got his special forces operating inside the Pakistan border to hunt bin Laden down and, in an effort to ensure his presidency ends in a blaze of glory, take him dead or alive.
But since Al-Qaeda entered our everyday vocabulary, the powers that be in Washington and Downing Street have allowed us to swallow a concept of some evil moderator presiding over a terrorist praesidium whose members’ deadly proposals are formally approved, or given the thumbs down, by a committee on which bin Laden has the casting vote. Maybe they’ve even got membership cards, secretaries, pension plans and a group scheme at the local gym?
If Dubya really thinks the capture or death of bin Laden would see Al-Qaeda meekly sell its office block and company car fleet and meekly fade away, then he’s really more stupid than we’ve been led to believe. From the evidence of our own eyes, even if the idea of a structured terrorist bureaucracy were accurate, should anything happen to bin Laden there would be queues of fanatical young apprentices ready to step forward.
Meanwhile, with the hierarchy at Scotland Yard scratching each other’s eyes out in a manner which mirrors the most drawn-out political coup in history, (incidentally, have you noticed it hasn’t stopped raining since Gordon Brown got the job?) something happened a fortnight ago which should concern us as much as any Al-Qaeda threat.
The supine European Parliament approved a new law, fuelled by the war against terror, which says member states must extradite any individual, even if they’ve been tried and sentenced in absentia without a chance to offer a defence, at the request of a fellow member state. With the Mickey Mouse justice systems prevailing in some of the newer EU states, the results of this legislation could be haphazard to say the least.
It probably slipped your notice that the British Government stopped backbiting just long enough to quietly endorse this stunning piece of legislation.
Proof, if it were needed, that if bin Laden didn’t exist they’d have had to invent him.
- CAPITALISM is crumbling and someone pays £9.6 MILLION for a stuffed shark pickled by Damien Hirst. Discuss.
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