Sunday, April 06, 2008

Blow Up

That a group of terrorists should be standing trial in London accused of planning to blow up a substantial number of people strikes me as being odd. The trial is forecast to last six months and will therefore be a pretty sizeable expense to the tax payer (otherwise referred to as the 'blowupees' as opposed to the terrorists, the 'blowupers' ).
As most of the accused have already made their martyrdom videos which show quite clearly their intentions, surely there is a prima facie case for locking them up without trial and throwing away the key. Thus saving the taxpayer and proposed blowupees a lot of dosh as well as their lives.
But a more humane solution would be, of course, to grant them their wish and let them blow themselves up in some suitable spot such as a remote part of the Yorkshire Moors or even in that blessed plot so admired by Hazel Blears, Milton Keynes.
During the war, you know, the last really, really big one, I was sent to school in England.
It was the time of the big bang or rather the time of many big bangs and I and my chums spent many happy hours trying to emulate our elders. Modern kids, deprived of chemistry lessons, would have found themselves at something of a loss but I and my explosive cohorts had a remarkable degree of success. (my father wisely had me set up my laboratory in a disused Anderson shelter at the end of the garden).
We were, I can safely say, experts on producing sizeable bangs from the simplest household materials.
But had we been asked to produce the results from the materials we could smuggle on board an aircraft, I feel we would have been confounded.
Thus I think that, rather than wasting the time of the court, the accused should be allowed to take their materials on board a disused aircraft parked somewhere out of the way and challenged to blow it up.
Personally, I think they would fail.
But of course the airports would hate to have to get rid of all the jobsworths whose mission in life is to impound your toiletries and generally to make your travelling experience a miserable one..

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