Sun, Scares and Surrealism

This post is by Bensix, originally posted at his blog Back Towards The Locus.

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On 23rd of this month, England’s most Ballardian paper offered a psychosexual fantasy with a source as lurid as its claims. Yes, the Sun’s “news” section warned that “Al-Qaeda was last night claimed to be fitting women suicide bombers with fake breasts that explode“. Plopped alongside was a pair of swollen mammaries, thoughtfully noted to be “explosive“*.

I can find no evidence for this tale – just articles linking back to the Sun – so who’s the “terrorist expert” that they claimed “confirm[s]” their fears? Why, Joseph Farah: the fevered brain behind America’s World Net Daily. His report held that the MI5 have “hand-picked” a team to probe explosive breasts, but how, one wonders, could a spittle-soaked U.S. rag learn what no other outlets have? In short, there’s sod-all evidence for this claim, which hasn’t stopped Fox, the Telegraph and Jihad Watch lustily regurgitating it.

This is the paper that gave a boost to an “anti-terror expert” who created his own stories. This is the paper that screamed about the finding of a “bomb part“: sugar. This is the paper that claims upholding civil liberties makes one a “TRAITOR“. This is not a newspaper: this is the surrealist arm of the “War on Terror”.

(In the comments of Ben's original post, Richard Bartholomew notes that this, in fact, is an old Mail story that he debunked last month. One suspects that the Sun’s reporter went scavenging in LexisNexis; searching for “tits” and “bombs“.)

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More about this from Richard Bartholomew here.

*Since Ben originally posted, the picture has been changed to show a pair of implants with badly photoshopped sticks of TNT and a clock inside. Presumably from Acme.

Whose side are you on?

BenSix has already had a go at the esteemed Con Coughlin for his response to yesterday's ruling by the Court of Appeal concerning the seven paragraphs, but there's another contender for the prize title of "worst journalist in Britain" in the form of whoever wrote today's Sun leader column:

IN Afghanistan, our troops fight al-Qaeda. Here, the battle against the terrorists is undermined by judges.

Except they're not fighting al-Qaida, they're fighting the Taliban and various other insurgents, but who's being picky?

How, pray tell, is the battle against terrorists being undermined by judges? Yesterday's ruling should in practice affect absolutely nothing, as MI5 and MI6 are meant to have already changed their rules when it comes to handling British detainees held by other authorities. Or have they?

That is the ludicrous position we are in after yesterday's ruling over ex-Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.

Mohamed claims America's CIA tortured him.

America shared information about Mohamed's interrogation with Britain on terms of strict secrecy.

As a refugee here, he used our courts to force details to be released.

The Sun has belittled Mohamed's account of his torture in the past, as well as said that it didn't want him back, along with other various degrees of heartlessness about his treatment. Unfortunately, considering that the American judge Gladys Kessler backed his account of how he was tortured and rendered (PDF), it now seems to be fact rather than anything approaching fiction. It's true that Mohamed is only a resident here rather than a citizen, but that should have no bearing on his access to the courts, especially when it was our security services that were actively involved in his detention. As for this idea of strict secrecy, or the "control principle", as David Miliband described it, when such information contains details which make clear that even residents of this country are being mistreated and that we are complicit in that mistreatment, it stops being need to know and starts becoming an issue of legality, of our international and indeed national obligations.

The liberal judges who backed him have damaged relations with our greatest ally.

If America now decides we cannot be trusted with security secrets, we will be at greater risk from al-Qaeda.

Yes, the statement from the White House that they were "deeply disappointed" with the ruling is bound to set our relations with "our greatest ally" back years. The Americans don't care a fig about this for the simple reason that they've already willingly released far worse information about what they did at the time; they're just for once prepared to go along with Miliband's attempts to block publication most likely as some obscure favour. Even if the Americans suddenly decided to stop sharing intelligence, which they won't, as we give them just as much as they give us, it's still pooled with other intelligence agencies which would. The idea that this will make us less safe, because we've finally found that our security services are liars and blackguards is absurd. If anything, it's likely to make us safer, not less.

The ruling is also a purely political gesture. Mohamed's claims have already been aired in the US.

A purely political gesture? If the Sun really believes that uncovering the true nature of what our security services have been involving themselves is just a "political gesture", then it's even more jaded and dismissive of any abuses of power than ever before. Mohamed's claims were aired in the US which is exactly why there was no "secrecy" and therefore they could be released, and why the arguments made the paper and the government are so bogus.

Our security services deserve support. The war on terror is not a game of lawn tennis.

Yes, they do, don't they? Because being complicit in torture isn't counter-productive at all, and doesn't undermine our values in the slightest. If only we could truly let rip against these jihadists, then maybe the war on terror really would become a game of lawn tennis. It's the liberals and the mad judges that are holding us back!

Whose side are you on, your Lordships?

You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists.

Get your war on.

All of a day later, and up pops Gordon in Afghanistan with the promise of more troops. Coincidence? Probably, as it's somewhat doubtful, even considering New Labour's obsession with the Sun, that yesterday's paper will have persuaded Brown and his advisers to immediately order a trip to the badlands of Helmand. No, but there might have been something much more conspiratorial at work here: I remember Peter Oborne on Newswipe mentioning that the Sun launched a campaign against asylum seekers back in 2003 with the full cooperation of Downing Street, with David Blunkett's interview with the paper sewn up in advance, where he'd agree with the paper's attacks on one of the most vulnerable groups in our society. Is the same thing at work here? Who knows?

Don't they know there's a bloody war on? Err, yes, I think they do.

Either Rebekah Wade is going out with a bang or Dominic Mohan is intent on being seen immediately as a "serious" editor for these serious times. Today's Sun splash, and an extra long editorial with short comment pieces from various individuals alongside it, all ask the same interminable question: "Don't they know there's a bloody war on?"

My guess is that they do (they being the politicians) and that you (us) also do. It's just that the war in Afghanistan is one which has little overall consequence for anyone outside of the military. We have relatively few troops in the country (around the 10,000) mark, they're all there because they want to be, which makes a major difference to wars where conscription is used, and their presence has no real tangible effects on us back home whatsoever, except for the families of those who return either dead or injured, not to mention mentally scarred. You can argue that this shouldn't be the case, that there should be more than simple passive support for what the soldiers are out there doing, even if this doesn't extend to political support, but what exactly does the Sun expect? For the country to be put on a war footing? For the prime minister to take personal control? It seems they do: they want him to "take charge and take responsibility for the war", and if he doesn't he should be replaced by someone who will. Has it not perhaps occurred to the Sun that the very last person who should be in charge of the conduct of a war is an unqualified politician? Or do they mean something different when they say take charge and take responsibility?

This point matters because the paper is not only not comparing like with like, it seems a little hazy on history as well, as this passage from the editorial makes plain:

Mr Brown has taken the country to war but is ducking responsibility for the conduct of it. The tradition of our country is that in wartime, the Prime Minister takes charge.

Lloyd George led us in World War One and Winston Churchill in World War Two.

Margaret Thatcher led from the front in the triumphant Falklands War in 1982.

John Major took charge in the first Gulf War of 1991. Tony Blair assumed full responsibility when we invaded Iraq to topple Saddam. And he did the same over the liberation of Kosovo.

Except Gordon Brown hasn't taken the country into Afghanistan; Tony Blair did, in 2001. We've been there ever since. Brown as chancellor provided the funds for the war, it's quite true, but was not personally responsible for taking us there. He also wasn't prime minister when we entered Helmand in 2006: the defence secretary then was John Reid, who famously said he hoped that we would leave without firing a single shot. Then there's the fact that we're there in the country, not just on our own, but as part of the ISAF NATO coalition. Additionally, if we're going to split hairs, Winston Churchill didn't lead us into WW2; Neville Chamberlain did. The war in Afghanistan is also not, in any meaningful sense, a war with specific aims like all of those the Sun lists. It's far more comparable to what we were doing in Iraq from the fall of Saddam up until our exit this year: peacekeeping, reconstruction and providing security. Missions, like Operation Panther's Claw, which had the specific aim of clearing out Taliban so that people could vote in the presidential election, have been few and far between. As also argued above, we are quite clearly not in "wartime".

It's perhaps instructive that some of yesterday's front pages screamed that up to 10 British soldiers had died so that a whole 150 people could vote. The message from that was unequivocal: what's the point? The Sun quite clearly believes there is a point, as it has argued in the past, but it certainly isn't suggesting what it is in this editorial. It seems intent instead on kicking people before they've even had a chance:

There is an air of unreality in the country. While Our Boys are dying, a fool who is out of his depth and with little experience is in charge of defence.

...

Bob Ainsworth is an appalling appointment as Defence Secretary, yet he's in charge of the war. General Lord Guthrie, the hugely-respected former defence staff chief, makes devastating criticisms of Ainsworth's shambolic Ministry of Defence.

Is Ainsworth a fool? I doubt it, and at least he was previously a defence minister, unlike some of the other recent secretaries which were put in place and which the likes of the Sun approved of a lot more. It's also hardly fair to blame Ainsworth for the problems at the Ministry of Defence when he's only been in charge for getting on for two months.

Guthrie is most likely integral to working out the Sun's real position. Guthrie was one of the founders of the United Kingdom National Defence Association, an organisation which pushes for a return to the levels of cold war defence spending, a ludicrous position when we face a threat that couldn't be more different to that posed by the Soviets. As also could be expected, Guthrie has interests in pushing for an increase in defence spending: according to the House of Lords register of members' interests, Guthrie is a non-parliamentary consultant to BioDefense Corporation, whose mission is to "play a key role in homeland security and the mitigation of bioterrorism", while also non-executive director of Colt Defense LLC, which supplies the American military with weapons.

As could be expected, the equipment provided, or lack of it, gets it in the neck, especially the lack of protective vehicles. Yet the Americans, who do have such vehicles, have experienced 45 casualties so far this month in the country. Jock Stirrup, the current armed forces' chief of defence staff, writing in today's Guardian has a slightly different take:

Equipment is a subject that has generated much debate, some of it well informed, some of it not. Our equipment is good and improving; commanders speak of it very highly. But the enemy adapt their tactics and techniques to counter our capabilities, so what is "the right equipment" in a campaign changes, and often very quickly.

The Sun isn't willing to acknowledge such challenges or nuances, and just blames the MoD entirely.

It comes to down three immediate steps which the paper demands, which attempt to be reasonable but which are in fact anything but:

First, Mr Brown must take personal charge of the war in Afghanistan and tell the country clearly where we stand.

Second, he must sack Bob Ainsworth and appoint a competent Defence Secretary who will work with the military, not against them.

Third, he must make available whatever money it takes to supply the equipment urgently needed on the ground.

The first step is far enough on the second point, not so much on the former as already discussed. The fact is though that there is no convincing argument for our presence in Afghanistan, hence the fallacious argument (which the Sun supports) that what the troops are doing in Afghanistan is protecting British lives on British streets. The reason why the government is obtuse is because it realises this, however inappropriate that is. The best argument that can be made, whether you agree or disagree, is in Jock Stirrup's piece above. Sacking Bob Ainsworth will solve precisely nothing, especially when the Sun doesn't even attempt to suggest someone who should replace him, just as there is no evidence whatsoever that Ainsworth is "working against them". Lastly, just where does the Sun expect the government to get "whatever money it takes" without raising taxes (which it loathes), borrowing yet more (equally) or cutting services (which?)? In any event, helicopters and armoured vehicles cannot suddenly be magicked out of thin air; they take time to procure.

The Sun, as always, wants things done yesterday, and wants more to be done with less. It's trapped in the fatal idea that we are still a world power when we are not, and demands the sort of military spending that a world power would require. We are instead an island nation that requires defence, but not of the kind which the likes of Guthrie support. Gordon Brown can be criticised quite rightly over many things, including the current lack of dedication and explanation vis-a-vis Afghanistan, but the problems can be traced back to both Tony Blair and John Reid, who had the main hand in the calamity currently occurring in the country. The real way to defend the forces is to call for them to be brought home, and for a realistic defence policy which accepts that the main threat comes not from Afghanistan, but in fact from its neighbour, Pakistan. Undoubtedly though, whoever the editor of the Sun, when the paper barks, politicians listen, and Brown and Ainsworth will be surely mulling over what their response will be.

The "chain of terror" breaks.

It probably says something about the mounting cynicism concerning the war in Afghanistan that even the Sun, by far the most ardent supporter of our presence in Helmand province, has been moved to commission a justificatory article on the "chain of terror". As you might have expected though, to call the arguments made piss poor, utterly confused and easy to rebut would be an understatement.

To begin with, Oliver Harvey seems to be confused exactly where it is and who it is we're at war with. It is Afghanistan or Pakistan? Is it the Taliban or is it the Pakistani Taliban, who for the most part are entirely separate? This extends to Harvey's geographical knowledge: he claims that Malakand is near to the Afghanistan/Pakistan border when it is in fact quite some distance from it. This is an attempt to link Mohammad Sidique Khan and Omar Khyam to the war in Afghanistan and the Taliban; the problem here is that there is no link. Khan and Khyam, if trained by any particular grouping, were most likely trained by individuals with links to al-Qaida. Khan might well have left for Pakistan with the intention of fighting in Afghanistan; he left behind a video for his daughter which made clear he wasn't expecting to return. The fact that he did rather undermines any links he had with the Taliban, who are fighting only in Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than having worldwide ambitions.

Next we have just the word of Gordon Brown and Barack Obama to convince us that somehow British troops in Afghanistan do make us safer:

Gordon Brown made his remarks last week as the war in Afghanistan entered a particularly grim phase, with 17 British soldiers killed already this month.

The PM argued the sacrifice made by our troops - 186 have died since operations began in Afghanistan - was vital and that to stop fighting the Taliban would make the UK "less safe".

Justifying the UK military presence in Helmand, he said: "It comes back to terrorism on the streets of Britain.

"There is a chain of terror that links what's happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the streets of Britain.

"If we were to allow the Taliban to be back in power in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda then to have the freedom of manoeuvre it had before 2001, we would be less safe as a country."

US President Barack Obama agreed, insisting: "The mission in Afghanistan is one that the Europeans have as much, if not more, of a stake in than we do.

"The likelihood of a terrorist attack in London is at least as high, if not higher, than it is in the United States."

Government officials state around three quarters of the most advanced plots monitored by MI5 have Pakistani links.

They said the security service is aware of around 30 serious plots at any given moment, suggesting that at least 21 of them are tied to Pakistani groups.

Again, we're meant to take it that Afghanistan and Pakistan are inseparable. Yet we have no military presence in Pakistan, and nor does the United States. The only thing that comes closest to it is the incessant drone strikes on alleged high profile militant targets. Afghanistan and Pakistan might be connected, but our military offensive is not, despite the recent AfPak change in emphasis by the Americans. The fact remains the al-Qaida doesn't need the freedom of manoeuvre it had in Afghanistan up to October 2001, both because it has something approaching that freedom in Pakistan and because its ideology has gone global, just as it hoped it would. 9/11 was mostly planned in Germany, having been first proposed years before by Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, just as 7/7 was mostly planned in this country. While attending a training camp is still integral to those who go on to become terrorists, most information can now be found and accessed through the internet. Furthermore, the fact that so many of these plots have roots in Pakistan is not always to do with how they can be linked back to the Taliban or al-Qaida there, but simply because so many of the Muslims in this country originate from Pakistan and have support or themselves support relatives back there.

And Afghanistan provides the bulk of the heroin on Britain's streets - with the profits funding Taliban guerrillas.

A staggering 93 per cent of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan - two thirds of it from Helmand, where British troops are fighting and dying.

Taliban chiefs often "tax" narcotics gangs ten per cent for providing security.

Afghan police chief Lt Col Abdul Qader Zaheer, 45, told me last year: "If it wasn't for heroin there wouldn't be a war here. It pays for Taliban guns."

Of course, this omits the fact that the Taliban themselves first almost eradicated the poppy crop. They only turned to it once they needed to. It also fails to acknowledge that solutions to the poppy crop, such as buying it to be turned into medicines have been ignored or rejected. That the Sun also objects to even the most timid moves towards liberalisation of the drug laws also means that the opportunities that legislation offers are completely off the table. Heroin itself though has nothing to do with our presence in Helmand - we're not fighting a war against drugs in Afghanistan - this is just another distraction.

The tentacles of jihad linking Britain and Afghanistan begin on the Helmand frontline.

One dead Taliban fighter was found with an Aston Villa tattoo. The discovery suggested the insurgent was from the UK and followed news that RAF radio spies picked up Brummie accents while listening in on Taliban "chatter" over the airwaves.

These UK-born fighters arrive through the mountainous and sieve-like border from Pakistan - the same desolate, lawless region where Khyam and Khan received their bomb-making masterclass.

We've dealt with these same, unconfirmed and impossible to verify claims before. There probably are some Brits fighting in Afghanistan, but if there weren't fighting there, they probably would be somewhere else. In a way, this actually gives some credence to the claim that we're safer due to our presence in Afghanistan - fight those jihadists who want to do battle with their own countrymen outside the actual country rather than here. This isn't though the government's case - their case is that through defeating the Taliban and preventing al-Qaida from returning they're making us safer, which was dealt with somewhat above.

It is believed Khan filmed his "martyrdom" video in Pakistan. In it, he glares at the camera with his hatred of the West clearly evident and declares icily: "We are at war and I am a soldier."

Pakistan is the next link in the chain of terror. British jihadis receive not only weapons training there but are also further radicalised by preachers of hate at madrassas or religious schools.

Khan's fellow 7/7 murderer, Shehzad Tanweer, is said to have worshipped at Islamabad's notorious Red Mosque.

This is more nonsense - the idea that jihadists go to Pakistan to be "further radicalised" is specious. They wouldn't have gone in the first place if they weren't already somewhat committed to the cause. If anything, this further undermines the case for presence in Afghanistan: if all the radicalisation, training and hatred is going on in Pakistan, why are we in Helmand province? How does being there make us safer than stopping what goes on in Pakistan would?

We're then treated to some boilerplate rabble-rousing from a cleric whom Harvey had the privilege to meet:

The Islamist radicals in Afghanistan and Pakistan make no effort to disguise their aim to introduce Sharia law to Britain. In the dusty Pakistani town of Kahuta, a cleric was happy to tell me last year of his desire to bring beheadings and stonings to our shores.

Imam Qari Hifzur Rehamn, 60 said of Britain: "Non-believers must be converted to Islam. Morals in your society, with women wearing revealing clothes, have gone wrong.

"We want Islamic law for all Pakistan and then the world.

"We would like to do this by preaching. But if not then we would use force."

The Imam of the town's religious school, where kids as young as nine are taught jihad or holy war, added: "Adulterers should be buried in earth to the waist and stoned to death.

"Thieves should have their hands cut off. Women should remain indoors and films and pop music should be banned.

"Homosexuals must be killed - it's the only way to stop them spreading. It should be by beheading or stoning, which the general public can do."

Again, this fails to even begin to back up the case for our presence in Afghanistan. If Harvey had met this imam in that country perhaps he might have a point - but he didn't. The idea that those taught similar things are suddenly going to be any sort of threat to this country except as an irritant is ludicrous - if they can't even begin to impose their beliefs on Pakistan, how are they meant to do it in a country thousands of miles away?

But the US-led coalition has vowed to stop the radicals from governing the desperately poor nation again and fermenting an ideology of holy war against the West.

The final link in the jihadi chain is a return to Britain.

Khan slipped back into the UK in February 2005. Just five months later he detonated his rucksack bomb at Edgware Road Tube station, murdering six people.

On the sun-baked plains and river valleys of Helmand today, our forces - some just 18 - are locked in deadly combat with a resilient Taliban army.

The prize in this bloody war, and the legacy for those brave soldiers who have returned here to heroes' funerals, is to snap the chain of terror for good.

Except there is no such thing as a Taliban "army", just as there is no such thing as one Taliban. This so-called "chain of terror" cannot be snapped by an army based in just one province, with just less than 10,000 soldiers on the ground, in a country which has been at war for almost 30 years. It would require an army at least 10 times that size to have even the slightest chance of controlling the whole of Afghanistan, let alone Pakistan, which this piece invokes repeatedly. The Soviets had over 100,000 units on the ground post-1980 and they couldn't manage it. How can such a fragmented coalition as Nato currently is even begin to?

The article doesn't even begin to consider any alternatives, let alone any counter-arguments. It can be argued that our very presence in Afghanistan in fact makes us less safe: it makes us a target for reprisals whereas if we were not involved we would not be. 9/11 and 7/7 did not occur in vacuums; they did not happen simply because "they hate us". The chain of terror would have breaks in it if we did not involve ourselves in battles in which we have no dog in. It would not completely remove the threat, but it would decrease it exponentially. That the Sun doesn't even start to imagine the opposing side even exists speaks volumes.

More Algerian anti al-Qaida psy-ops.

On occasion, you fail to see the wood for the trees. Doing my daily pathetic trawl of the Sun's website, I came across Tom Newton Dunn's exclusive "Al-Qaeda in gay rape horror" and just dismissed it as the typical Sun nonsense which isn't worth bothering with or challenging. The excellent jihadica though has joined together the dots:

I would not normally bother with this kind of nonsense were it not for the fact that it sheds light on the recent reports about AQIM’s alleged plague experiments, covered previously on Jihadica. Both stories were broken in the West by The Sun, and both stories relied on Algerian security sources. We are most likely dealing here with an anti-al-Qaida psy-op, and a very poor one at that.

Which I also had covered and dismissed as most likely being complete and utter nonsense. I didn't however note that the story had been officially denied by the Algerians and also the WHO, despite a separate report appearing in the equally authoritative Washington Times claiming that it had been the result of a failed weaponising attempt.

It is indeed, as jihadica suggests, a very poor psy-op. The idea that al-Qaida and its connected franchises have to rape their recruits in order to shame them into becoming suicide bombers is completely absurd; there are, as Iraq and Afghanistan have sadly made all too clear, more than enough willing "martyrdom seekers" without them having to descend to such tactics. This isn't to discount the idea that, like with many other organisations, especially ones where young men spend plenty of time together and are encouraged to become fraternal brothers, even those who thelogically consider homosexuality to be abhorrent, that such relationships might develop, but it doesn't seem very likely. There have been cases where young teenage boys have been suicide bombers, but they still seem likely to be the products of madrasas and careful personal radicalisation rather than sexual abuse.

The Algeria connection does however seem to be the key. Perhaps borne out of the fear that al-Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb is growing in strength, these stories seem to be meant to further demonise them and nip in the bud any support both within Algeria and the outside world for them. Likewise, the idea that al-Qaida is running out of recruits, as "experts believe", is nonsense. In Iraq maybe, where the jihad has fallen on hard times, mainly as result of the other insurgent groups joining the Awakening councils having became tired of the Islamic State of Iraq's brutality, and where the routes which the foreign fighters came in on have been closed, but elsewhere the Taliban is growing in strength, as is the insurgency in Somalia, both now more favoured among jihadists than Iraq.

Again, we have to question why these stories are being passed to the Sun if indeed they are anything approaching accurate. It seems simply that the Sun's being given them both because they'll print them and because no one else with any sense or with an authority they want to keep will. As we saw with the plague story, none of that bothers the rabid jihadist watchers, or the Muslim-bashers who are inclined to take such accounts at face value, and that may be all that matters.

Propaganda or just convenient dead terrorists?

Imagine for a moment you're some sort of security asset. You have a major story: 40 militants linked to al-Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb (formerly the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) have apparently died of the plague. Either they were the victims of diseases inherent to living in the middle of nowhere in Africa, where outbreaks of plague are still reasonably regular, or, more frighteningly, they were possibly experimenting with weaponising plague, and were struck down themselves in the process. Whatever the truth, it's still a reasonably big story. Who then do you leak this to? A well-respected newspaper, such as the Times, Telegraph or Guardian? Or, on the other hand, the Sun?

Silly question, really. As you might expect, the report splashed on today's Sun front page reeks to high heaven. All the signs that it's either propaganda or complete nonsense are apparent: firstly, that it's been handed to the newspaper over the weekend, to go in the paper on the slowest and generally least busy news day of the week, Monday. Second, it seems to be based on a single source. Third, it's a story which is completely impossible to verify: you could try talking to government health sources in Algeria and see if there have been any recent cases of plague reported to them or which they're aware of and go from them, but that's a lot of effort, especially for today's churnalists. Lastly, the actual details are sketchy while the background information is remarkably, for the Sun, rather well defined: it hasn't just described them as al-Qaida fighters but correctly as AQIM, it directly names the area where they were when apparently infected as Tizi Ouzou province, and where they apparently fled to, and names their leader correctly, even using his less well-known real name Abdelmalek Droudkal rather than his nom de guerre Abu Musab Abdel Wadoud.

In short, it provides you with everything except actual evidence. It claims that up to 40 were killed by the plague, yet apparently only one body was actually found, and rather conveniently by the roadside, while the others are meant to be in mass graves in Yakouren forest. There are no photographs, and no confirmation of what type of plague the man had died from. The article claims that plague can kill in hours, but this is only true of the rarest form, pneumonic plague, which if not treated within 24 hours of symptoms developing greatly increases the chances of death. Bubonic plague, the most common, can be treated, and due to its longer incubation period of 2 to 6 days and well-known symptoms is often identified in time. While all forms are increasingly rare in the West, there are still usually a few cases each year in the United States, a recent one of which killed a biologist in the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, apparently contracting pneumonic plague after performing an autopsy on a mountain lion.

Algeria last had a major outbreak in 2003, where there were a total of 11 confirmed cases and 7 suspected, all of bubonic plague with 2 later developing into septicemia. A later study trapped rats in the area of the outbreak and found 9 of the 95 fleas collected to be infected with Yersinia pestis. Despite this attesting that the country most likely still has such fleas and rats in abundance, especially in the apparent remote forest where the fighters were supposedly training, not to mention the possibility of it spreading from southern Africa where it is even more prevalent, all the far from paranoid self-cast jihad watchers have immediately jumped to the conclusion that this means they just must have been experimenting with plague as a weapon. The Sun has nobly followed-up such speculation in tomorrow's edition, with the paper contacting Dr Igor Khrupinov, of Georgia University, who immediately without the slightest of information further suggests this could be the case.

There are just a few problems with this. Firstly, if al-Qaida was experimenting with biological weapons again as it has very amateurishly done in the past, why would one of the least respected and smallest of its groups have been given the "contract" to do so? Moreover, plague is incredibly difficult to weaponise: the United States never managed it, although the Russians did. Famously, it has been used crudely in the past: first at Caffa and later by the Japanese, who dropped ceramic bombs filled with infected fleas on China in the early 1940s. The idea of weaponising plague, or at least bubonic plague has fallen down the list of feared outbreaks, mainly because of the relative ease with which it is treated. It would cause panic certainly, and some deaths most probably, but nothing on the scale of which al-Qaida would be interested in, especially considering the difficulties in spreading it in the wild. Pneumonic plague would be of more interest, especially if it could be spread by aerosol, but fears of its high infection rate have possibly been exaggerated: a study of an outbreak in Uganda in 2004 found a transmittance rate of only 8%. One of the authors had previously published a paper analysing the risk of person to person infection, which also appears to have come to a similar conclusion. That knocks the idea on the head of "suicide" infected walking around cities spreading the disease merely by coughing, and considering the quick onset of symptoms of pneumonic plague, also greatly reduces the time in which to spread it. That none of those involved apparently sought treatment gives the inclination that they were behaving deviously, but again that's if we believe that there are 40 bodies buried in a mass grave, when only 1 body has supposedly been definitively identified, with again no indication of the plague type.

If there was an outbreak then, and as could have been easily established by using the trusty Occam's razor, the most likely cause would have been our old friend Rattus rattus and his pals the fleas. It doesn't quite answer why they wouldn't have sought treatment, as not all of them would probably have been identified as militants, although they could have been "discouraged" from leaving.

That is of course if we accept the story at all. To return to the beginning, why would the Sun be given such a scoop? One answer might have been pay, naturally, not available from the more respected papers, but it still means that if it is completely false and instead an example of the tabloids being supplied with propaganda, that a significant minority, if not majority, are not going to believe a word of it. Why also has it been supplied now? When we last examined what seemed an almost certainly similar piece of unverifiable propaganda, it came at a time when the war in Afghanistan was going through a rough patch. Likewise, the threat from al-Qaida has been talked down of late, including by the head of MI5 himself. This doesn't suit the agenda of some politicians and security officials, who rely on the continuation of the "war on terror" or whatever name it is now masquearding as for both their own dubious ends and for their own employment. Only last week David Miliband was talking about the phrase "war on terror" being a mistake, something which the Sun itself denounced. It's also doubtless a coincidence that Barack Obama becomes US president tomorrow, and with it new policies on that very same war. Even better if the Sun itself doesn't immediately spin on how they might have been experimenting, with the outbreak being the result of weapons tests; let the jihadist watching blogs and forums do that.

Propaganda or not, the story has of course spread like the proverbial plague itself, all without anyone bothering to check it, although an article in the notoriously accurate Moonie-owned Washington Times is building on the story with another "intelligence source", claiming it was a weapons experiment that went wrong, which is helped by the article referring to the non-existent ricin plot without mentioning it being err, non-existent. Churnalism has done its work again, and because it spreads to more respected sites like the Torygraph, even if the story is based entirely on the Sun's original, it becomes more based in fact that it otherwise would. Either way, it's a good news story. Dead terrorists = good. Dead terrorists messing about with plague = good and SCARY, which is even better. The more you loathe the press, the more you come to respect its potential as a propaganda tool, and this article only furthers that.