Public Enemy #1

It's been a long haul.  After the best part of 15 years on the FBI's Most Wanted List, and nearly 10 years at the top of the chart, so to speak, Public Enemy #1 has been taken out.

He and his organization (or network of organizations, according to many security experts) certainly had a hell of a track record - Embassy bombings in Africa way back in the last century, when Slick Billy was US President; night-time attacks on US warships in Yemeni harbours; a failed attempt to blow up the World Trade Centre from its underground car-park.  Then sponsoring the carnage of 9/11, and years later, in London, 7/7.  Successfully evading capture when bottled up in Tora Bora after a massive military operation and seeming to disappear off the face of the earth for the next several years. 

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He and his associates managed to change travel irrevocably, for millions of passengers world-wide.  The era of being able to rock up at the airport half an hour or so before flight time, stroll through passport control with your bag and hop on your flight are long gone, permanently replaced by hours queueing to go through increasingly rigourous and intrusive security screening before getting anywhere near the departure gate - sometimes multiple times at the same airport just to change flights (Frankfurt springs to mind here....).  It's the same at the Eurostar terminals, although the lines are shorter.  I never expected to have to go through an x-ray machine before catching a train but now if you travel from London to Paris or Brussels from St.Pancras it's a must.  The pleasure of long-distance travel has almost disappeared as a result. 

Even kids are not immune to the security measures....every year when we go on holiday we have to submit the kid's push-chair to the same security procedures.  We've even had to open jars of pre-packed Gerber baby food and taste it in front of the security people, just to prove it really is Banana and Apple Dessert and not some kind of poison or explosive.  We've had to argue and plead to be allowed to take through pre-mixed bottles of baby milk, for God's sake.  It's incredibly frustrating, even stupid, but I can understand the authorities' insistence - better safe than sorry and all that guff - but still.......I don't expect there are too many six month old terrorists out there, and I don't believe for one minute that Islamist (or any persuasion) fundamentalists are likely to be travlling with babes-in-arms: most of these killers are misguided and angry single males.

Will the demise of Public Enemy #1 change any of this?  No.  Not in the foreseeable future.  The one thing he has undoubedly given the world (besides death and destruction, and giving Islam a possibly undeserved Bad Name) is an excuse for every fruit-cake with a grudge to masquerade as al Quaeda and make ludicrous threats, bringing airports and entire transport systems to a grinding halt.  The Hoax Caller has never had it so good.  Unfortunately every such warning has to be taken seriously, and fully investigated before any all-clear is given, with its consequent delays and unpleasantness for everyone.  The internet and "social media" play a significant role here, since it's relatively easy to find all kinds of recipes for mayhem.   Build a bomb? Sure, look at this web-page.  Poison gas?  Yep, that too.  Forum for nutters to exchange ideas and co-operate in planning atrocities?  Plenty of them.    You can't close the web down, since our entire lives are closely wound up in it - the majority of people, once they've "discovered" it would be completely lost without it (even if no-one likes to admit it....).  Communications of all kinds depend upon it, government depends upon it, security depends upon it, health and safety depend upon it.  Our entire global economy depends upon it to function properly (or, given the economic crises of the last couple of years, improperly).  It's gone way beyond a Fun Thing, it's now a quite literally a way of life.

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Whatever you think about the way in which the US went about taking out PublicEnemy #1, it was probably a job that needed doing and in the event was well done.  The world is probably a better place without him (as it's a better place without Saddam Hussein, Uncle Joe Stalin, Corporal Hitler and a whole host of undesirables).  Whether it's a safer place remains an open question.

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One final thought.  The compound in Pakistan where the man was caught and executed (or shot while resisting capture, if you prefer) is being universally described as a "luxury development".   Which just goes to show you how people's ideas of luxury differ in that part of the world.  I've been to a few "luxurious" developments around the world, and that compound, despite the wall around it, looks more like the type of slum I saw in Beirut on the way out to the airport, the sort of place that in most places in Europe or the West generally would be condemned and pulled down.  

Horses for courses, I suppose.  But a fitting place for a bastard like Public Enemy #1 to spend the last miserable months of his existence in.