Okay, a Little More Politics

The CBC is reporting that seven of Pearson International Airport's twelve duty-free shops have been shuttered, after suffering a 75% drop in business in the wake of security restrictions implemented after last week's terror scare.

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan who's become an outspoken critic of UK and US tactics in the war on terror -- and whom Andrew Sullivan cited in the post to which I linked earlier this morning, expands on the increasing lack of substance surrounding the British plot here.

And I keep coming back to the marvelous "pork pie" speech from Bruce Robinson's "How to Get Ahead in Advertising", where Richard E. Grant's dissolute, miserable but incredibly successful adman Bagley is drawn into a conversation with three other men on a train:

BALD BUSINESSMAN
I see the police have made another lightning raid. "Paddington
Drug Orgy."

PRIEST
I'd Birch the lot of 'em. Birch 'em. Give 'em something to fear.
It's the only way to put a stop to it. I suppose there was young
girls involved?

BALD BUSINESSMAN
One discovered naked in the kitchen, "breasts smeared with
peanut butter". Police took away a bag containing fifteen grams
of cannabis resin, it may also have contained a quantity of
heroin.

BAGLEY
Or a pork pie.

BALD BUSINESSMAN
I beg your pardon?

BAGLEY
I said the bag may also have contained a pork pie.

BALD BUSINESSMAN
I hardly see a pork pie's got anything to do with it.

BAGLEY
All right then, what about a large turnip? It may
also have contained a large turnip?

PRIEST
The bag was full of drugs.

BAGLEY
Nonsense.

PRIEST
The bag was full of drugs! It says so!

BAGLEY
The bag could have been full of anything. Pork pies.
Turnips. Oven parts. It's the oldest trick in the book.

PRIEST
What book?

BAGLEY
The distortion of truth by association book. The word is
"may". You all believe heroin was in the bag, because cannabis
resin was in the bag. The bag may have contained heroin, but
the odds are hundred to one certain that it didn't.

BALD BUSINESSMAN
A lot more likely than what you say.

BAGLEY
About as likely as the tits spread with peanut butter.

How many jobs have been jeopardized by this latest invocation of the boogeyman, just this week? Never mind how many air travelers have been inconvenienced by delays and carry-on restrictions, how many people are actually suffering? And what are the odds of Bush, Blair or anyone else in a position of power ever acknowledging the human impact of these alerts?

Oh, and good luck bringing peanut butter on a plane.

Technorati tags: National Security, Terrorism, Hoaxes for Political Gain, Bruce Robinson was a Prophet