“Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets… Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”

So says an insane nihilistic clown to a severe burns victim with a dual personality. But there’s a certain tragic truth to the Joker’s words in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man accused of trying to blow up an aeroplane en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day, appeared in court yesterday to plead not guilty. But whilst the bomb plot failed, it was, in many ways, a resounding victory for al Qaeda.

The purpose of terrorism, after all, is not really to kill people. Nations don’t go to war with the primary objective of obliterating as many enemy soldiers as possible; it’s just a gruesome means to a more important end. As Tony Blair so succinctly said on July 7^th 2005, “The purpose of terrorism is just that, it is to terrorise people.” And as Western governments scramble to introduce increasingly drastic security measures, turning air travel into an ever worsening nightmare for millions of commuters, the terrorists have succeeded in doing exactly that.

The British government is already rushing in controversial new scanners which threaten to breach child porn laws, the Americans want air marshals on every flight coming into the US, whilst Labour MP Khalid Mahmood has told us that racial and religious profiling is the price we’ll have to pay for our safety.

It goes without saying that everyone wants to feel safe whilst traveling, especially when they’re in a metal tube three miles high. I for one will never forget standing outside King’s Cross on the morning of 7/7 feeling very thankful that I hadn’t woken up twenty minutes earlier. But are there full body scanners at every ticket counter? Are there armed police officers in every carriage? Is every brown skinned man with a beard stopped and searched? Should we fear for our lives every time we get on the underground? No, because for all the millions of people who travel on the tube day in, day out, the four who took bombs on with them have not made us all paranoid with fear.

It is, of course, important to have security at airports, just as it is important to have intelligence services working to prevent terrorist plots. But it’s also important to keep a sense of perspective and not to allow one thwarted attempt to make us lose our minds. Making air travel ever more stressful for commuters for the sake of their safety is one thing. But by introducing measures that attack the human rights and civil liberties free society holds dear, we are doing the terrorists’ jobs for them.

Guest post by Carl Packman

102 Minutes That Changed America, the brave documentary that aired on Channel 4 yesterday, made for very tough viewing.

The camera was very intrusive, and actually seemed to infuriate people, but it did what was best in documenting some very sombre and terrifying moments. People, covered in dust and debris, would wave their hands as if to say I’ve been in there, fuck off with your camera, and against their sensitivities managed to catch both their anger and their vulnerabilities. The viewer asks themselves the important question, definitely on the lips of those commissioning the programme: is watching this programme not tantamount to voyeurism, or, should I be watching these terrified people in their terror climaxes?

The answer should be no, but what is posterity worth? When Kevin Carter, the nobel prize winning photographer, was asked about filming South African necklacing – the act of filling a rubber tyre with petrol, placing it round a victims neck and setting on fire – he replied:

“I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.”

It was in 1993 that Carter took the photograph of a small girl in famine ridden Sudan, that took him to the long road of depression. What should a photographer do, should s/he attempt to help the subject, does art trump life, what moral proximity does the artist have towards his or her subject if any, and should this jeopardise his or her art or commitment?

It was these questions, and many more that Carter suffered before he took his own life at the age of 33 by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window.

Robert Capa, the Spanish civil war photographer famous for his photograph Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, was held in very high esteem for his very graphic and personal display of the other war against fascism. This year a Spanish professor, José Manuel Susperregui, published a book titled Shadows of Photography, which demonstrated that Capa’s photograph could not have been taken where it was alleged to have been, using separate photographic evidence.

Tough as it may be, sometimes, in order to save your corner, you have to come clean on your allies. In order to keep the Spanish Republican message alive, and by saving the right from using it to their advantage, the truth of Capa had to be released. Similarly, two Canadian documentary filmmakers were once making a film on Michael Moore, the leftwing polemicist, from a supportive bent. However, after weeks of specialising in the remit of Moore, they soon realised that much of his work was born out fiction, covered behind the gonzo-esque, perverting the realm of the anti-war movement in America – which obviously needed all the support it could gather. The point of the filmmakers’ – Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine – efforts could not have been better summed up by the title of their film; Manufacturing Dissent.

The above references – if they have any common theme – is to try and communicate a truth, even if using methods that don’t exactly weigh up as such. Kevin Carter’s profile as one who captures a truth haunted him until his dying day, Capa was willing to stage events in order to send a message across the world detailing the horrors of the Francoist regime – even if this event was fictitious. Sometimes the only way an artist can record the nearest representation to truth, is by recreating it, sometimes truth is not real enough. Perhaps Michael Moore could argue this case also, but two leftist documentary filmmakers were willing to spill the beans to save their corner.

These are the criteria for infiltrating the truth as its happening, for limiting ones own remit to that of the artist – the bearer of the potentially worldwide message – and not the saviour, or at least not in any immediate sense. Does Channel 4′s 9/11 documentary do just that? I’d risk saying not in this instance, the location shots seemed brave, and there was no fear of tweaking the truth of the events, only it seemed to mostly interfere. For what it’s worth, it did capture emotion fraught with fear, but did this hold the same weight as say Kevin Carter, or was it perversion, a glimpse at vulnerability for a public energised by action? I’d risk an accusation of the latter.

Guest post by Ashen Rues

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is not a name that trips easily off the tongue, but over the past few weeks his name has been mentioned more than any other. There is nothing better during a quiet summer than a small diplomatic row between allies and right now we have one mighty row, which will be over and done with by October, if not September. And Megrahi is at the heart of it.

Not to dwell on the actual terrible incident, but in 1988 a Pan Am jet was blown up over northern England and southern Scotland with most of the wreckage landing on the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. 270 people died. It was a terrible incident and no one can ever forget those images. But now, 21 years later, after a major trial, compensation claims and no clear indication of who actually did it, the wound has been opened up again by the release of a prisoner on compassionate grounds. This is a normal, if not frequent, happening under Scottish Law and would generally go un-noticed if it had not been for the prisoner in question. Megrahi was extradited from Libya and put on trial in 2000, sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole. So he has served 9. UN observers felt the trial was unfair and Megrahi appealed and was refused and further attempts to appeal were delayed by the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal possibly in the hope that Megrahi would be dead before they had to deal with such an emotive case.

Megrahi will now die in Libya with his family, possibly in less than 3 months. The support for the decision in Scotland is based on the principals of Scottish law and Christian morality, according to Malcolm Chisholm, a former Labour minister who spoke in support of this decision in the Scottish Parliament on Monday. The Scots are now being threatened with boycotts by the USA, whilst the Scottish justice minister received a tongue lashing from the head of the FBI in a letter dripping with sentiment and emotion and reeking of hypocrisy.

The USA is criticising Scottish Law and Scottish legal decisions, suggesting that deals were done to secure Libyan oil and other trade deals. Deals may have been done; deals are done every day between nations. In the early 1980s, the USA was selling weaponry and expertise to the Iraqis for a war with Iran. Twenty years later, Iraq was enemy number 1 and Saddam Hussain had to be put on “trial” and die. This is real-politik and it often overrides any real justice or fairness. Fr the US to be bullying Scotland now is ridiculous. Scotland remains part of the UK, so where is the UK response to this bullying? Where are the voices of support from the PM or the Foreign Office? If California had released a prisoner on compassionate grounds against the wishes of Britain and this resulted in a campaign of criticism of and threats of boycotting of California, would we not now be hearing from Obama or Hillary? We need the same from the UK for Scotland. We cannot allow a legal decision (no matter what emotions is stirs up) to become a diplomatic incident between allies. Maybe the Scots don’t need or want defending by Westminster in their stoical independent stance, but when it comes to bullying, the bigger friend needs to step in regardless of how brave the victim feels.

At the end of the day, a man who is dying has been released to spend the last few months of his life with his family, in a process that is totally legal and fair under Scottish law. He is connected to one of the worst cases of terrorism ever witnessed but there it is clear he is a bit player and a distraction from the wider web behind the Pan Am bombing. It was always going to upset someone, but for it to become a huge diplomatic row reeks of smoke screens, secret deals and overreaction in order to placate grieving relatives.

After one of the costliest weeks for British forces in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown argued today that the ongoing campaign is a “patriotic duty” to keep the streets of Britain safe.

“It comes back to terrorism on the streets of Britain,” he said. “If we were to allow the Taliban to be back in power in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda then to have the freedom of manoeuvre it had before 2001, then we would be less safe as a country. There is a line of terror – what you might call a chain of terror – that links what’s happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the streets of Britain.”

I was standing outside King’s Cross on July 7^th 2005. And as the realisation sank in that if I’d been ten minutes earlier, it could have been me, my first thought: how can this be happening here? I campaigned against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the beginning. And whilst I recognise the need to prevent the Taliban gaining influence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we should not be under any illusions. The wars waged by our government have made the streets of Britain less safe, not more.