Use and Abuse of Terror

Published today in the UK, The Use and Abuse of Terror, is a welcome addition to the literature criticizing the war on terror. Author Peter Osborne carefully dissects several UK terror scares, detailing the way that police, media and politicians, each with their own agenda, fed the panic. This is an excellent piece of journalism, digging around the story and questioning the official explanations until the truth becomes clear.

But Osborne's conclusions, available in summary here, are perhaps less convincing. In fact they seem to contradict his findings. Osborne argues that Tony Blair is suffering from a "collapse in trust" because "few people now believe what the Prime Minister, the security services and the police tell us about security matters." No doubt true. But to then argue that, "[t]his dissonance is a massive problem [because] Britain today faces a threat from international and domestic terrorism which is far more dangerous and insidious than anything it has confronted before" seems bizarre. Surely Osborne's investigation has shown that this is absolutely not the case. We should not replace one scare story with another.