Suspicious Minds

"I was coming home from the Winter Olympics, the first global sporting event to take place in America after 9/11. Various passengers were selected at random to have security staff fine-toothcomb their luggage. Me — and the Italian speed-skating team.

Hey, it could happen. At some time in the 1980s al-Qaeda operatives could have set aside their struggle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and entered into a crash course on winter sports instead. Hacking a rudimentary ice rink out of the rocks of the Panjshir Valley, they could then have become proficient enough to travel to, for instance, Padova where they might successfully brainwash several athletic infants with the ideals of Islamic fundamentalism, on the off-chance they could also groom them into a highly efficient speed-skating unit without their mums knowing....

Maybe what happened in departures that morning, as several young, European, Catholic athletes stared in collective incomprehension as clueless, over-officious security staff unloaded sports equipment (and panicked at a block of wood with a strip of metal mounted in it, until this was revealed to be a standard skate-sharpening device) was just another colossal misuse of security forces. The same type that has taken place every day since War on Terror was declared. Random surveillance, producing random results, so random terrorists cause random mayhem in central London. It was inevitable, we are told. No, Commissioner. Death is inevitable; violent death is not.

Brian Paddick, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, slapped down a questioner who had the temerity to mention Islamic terrorism on Thursday. “As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words which do not go together,” he said. Hence my little story about the Italian speed-skating team. This is what we are up against, at home and abroad. Faced with the Spanish Inquisition, Paddick would find no link to Catholicism and randomly pull in a couple of Huguenots who happened to be passing. Just in case."

Read the whole thing, painfully funny because it's true. I just had to post this for the Spanish Inquisition/Huguenot comparison.