I've reported on this blog before how London's police conscientiously followed up an unlikely Guatemala angle on the Canary Wharf bomb.
Yesterday, the front cover of the Guardian sported a pic of Frode's friend David Mery, heading up an 'arrowing account of 'arrassment on the London Underground. Just a week after picking up a copy of the Metro became a capital offence, David found himself surrounded by uniformed officers on the platform of Southwark station, who have determined that his apparent interest in both his surroundings and fellow passengers suspiciously out-of-place down in the zombie-burrow.
"They must immediately notice my French accent, still strong after living more than 12 years in London." This, to say the least, is an understatement; I doubt whether David is consistently intelligible even to his own countrymen. (How I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that interrogation!)
Anyway, just when it looks like he's only being detained so that someone senior can come along and say sorry, he's handcuffed and bundled off to Walworth Police Station for some DNA profiling. Citing the Terrorism Act, David's flat in Clerkenwell is then searched.
The boys in blue don't get enough opportunities to search pads like this - in the movies at least. Not only does David possess what is surely the world's largest man-made panda collection, his line of work requires him to retain prototypes of just about every mobile phone handset ever made. What with all the other geek-chic artefacts proudly on display, the investigating officers must have thought they had stumbled upon something strange but significant, that at the very least would require the immediate attendance of a sexy female agent from the NSA.
Poor David. Such is his gallic sense of style that there are times when OBL himself in full Afghan tribal gear would stand out less in a crowd of London commuters. He does tend to look a bit like some sort of bounty hunter hailing from a dystopic wild west of the future in a Japanese manga comic. And even without the wide-brimmed hat (which he had apparently left behind that fateful morning) you'd have to say he does look remarkably like a Middle-Eastern terrorist from central casting.
Last February I was pulled over at LAX just before boarding a plane to Guatemala and told that the DHS had found evidence of nitro-glycerine in my suitcase. After a brief interview and being made to sign some paperwork, I was informed that it often shows up in shampoo and face-creams. Like David Mery, my biggest concern is how much this isolated 'false positive' may lead to more serious inconvenience in the future.
Airport security in the USA is the archetype of the modern police state. It bulks up as an organised response to a threat that has already manifested itself and moved off elsewhere. Yet my mobile has just bleeped with a text from CNN informing me that a suspect person and package have been detained at Manchester under the Terrorism Act. We shall see if this incident can offer some vindication for the omni-suspicious security screen.
On a separate airport-related matter, I was amused by New York journalist Alexandra Jacobs' comments to CNN after surviving the televised emergency landing of the JetBlue Airbus. "We couldn't believe the irony, that we were watching our own demise on TV - it
was all too post-post-modern." Post-post-modern?! Something similar happened to me many years ago at Nice airport in a Tristar, but luckily it was half of the rear undercarriage that had misdeployed and there was no live TV back then. Still, the scary part for the passengers yesterday must have been when the crew switched off the news just ten minutes before the landing.
No comments:
Post a Comment