This is a tongue in cheek guide to how to organise a major terrorist scare. Its purpose? To show how easy others are organising it themselves. Worth a read and worth thinking about the next time you hear about a terrorist scare…
1. The politicians don’t want to know
Have confidence that the government really doesn’t want to know what it is you’re getting up to, as long as the effect benefits them. By their very nature, secret police intelligence and espionage organizations operate in secret and often do, “in the national interest”, illegal things or stuff which ordinary folk would regard as grossly unethical — things that would embarrass the government if they were to be exposed…
2. Keep things on a need-to-know basis
Keep your security organization compartmentalised and discourage specialist sections from talking to each other. You can plausibly plead security reasons for this…
3. At the right time, get the president or prime minister involved
When you’ve decided on the optimum time for your security scare and sorted out who your “plotters” will be, it’s important to involve the head of the government. He’ll want to broadcast to the nation, taking credit for keeping the people safe from the terrible plot…
4. “Prove that we lie”
Always remember: it’s breathtakingly easy to claim you’ve “thwarted” something horrible and almost impossible for sceptics to prove that you haven’t. This applies especially if you “thwart” the plot in its early stages…
5. Don’t worry, they’ll all play their part
Complex conspiracies involving lots of people are entirely unnecessary. All that’s needed is for your close knit, unaccountable group to order those lower down the chain to act on “information received”. They don’t even have to know what the information was. They just have to know the addresses to raid and who to arrest…
6. Feed the chickens
Keep information in official news releases to an absolute minimum. There’s a plausible excuse for this: more information will harm ongoing investigations and might prejudice the case when it gets to court. In place of any hard attributable facts, provide a steady stream of small leaks “under condition of anonymity” to selected journalists from politically reliable mainstream news organizations. These people are carefully selected for political conservatism and journalistic “responsibility”…
7. Politicians who aren’t 100 per cent with you are friends of terrorists
No politician enjoys being attacked as “irresponsible” or accused of being unpatriotic or soft on terrorists. Very few will dare question the allegations in case they’re proved wrong…
8. Don’t worry about proving links to real terror groups
Once upon a time, not so long ago, it was felt necessary to show that your local “terrorist cell” was recruited by, and in communication with, al-Qaeda, or some group with actual form some time in the not-too-distant past. This requirement brought its own problems, since evidence of the links often failed to convince, or, worse still, unearthed shady figures with a track record of collaboration with the CIA, MI6 or Mossad…
9. It doesn’t really matter if a court finds them innocent
Your victims won’t get their day in court for months, maybe years, and if you’ve organised things well, you’ll be operating under laws that ensure that the public and your tame media are prevented from reporting key details or even excluded from court altogether. By the time your victims get to court, the scare you used them to create will have done its job…
How to organise a major terrorist scare
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