When will Rt Hon Douglas Alexander MP, Secretary of State for Transport physically go to Heathrow Airport and sort out the chaos which he has created with the stupid and obviously unplanned and unrehearsed alleged extra "security" precautions involving hand baggage ?
A third of flights from Heathrow have been cancelled on Saturday, and the same is expected on Sunday. There is no excuse for this chaos to be lasting for so many days after the inital alert on Wednesday.
Surely this scenario involving banning hand luggage and liquids had already been planned and wargamed in all the "desktop" paper exercises , like Atlantic Blue, which focussed on international terrorist incident responses ?
If not, then why not ?
Why has the Government not allocated extra staff to help check passengers, in this artifical crisis ? Where is all the supposed the Resilience and Contingency and Civil Defence Planning ?
The claims by Home Sectretary John Reid that the CRITICAL terror alert status i.e. threat of an imminent attack, was somehow justified , even after the arrest of the alleged plotters seems to be more like bureaucratic and political backside covering , than a rational risk assessment.
If the NuLabour government cannot even organise extra security measures with minimum disruption, when there has been no actual terrorist attack, then why should anyone have any confidence in them if an attack actually does happen ?
Incredibly, it now seems that flights have been allowed to take off with passengers' hold baggage on board, but without the corresponding passengers, who have been held up by the "security" bureaucracy.
In other words, there is now no need for terrorists to be suicide bombers at all ! The travelling public have now been made more vulnerable to Lockerbie PAN AM flight 103 disaster type bombs in the hold luggage !
http://www.wondermark.com/d/220.html
According to NBC:
"In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14320452/