Real or Imagined Threat?

I was watching the report by BBC Home Affairs editor Mark Easton on the BBC News last night. I was struck by his language, both verbal and body, that seemed to me to be exaggerating the threat of al-Qaeda. Yes, we can all agree that Kamel Bourgass was a dangerous individual, and it is better for us all that he is now behind bars. But was he a highly-trained individual in an al-Qaeda ring, who manufactured poisons? Mark Easton’s report certainly came down heavily, one might say, unrelentingly, on that side, with his theatrical brandishing of jars of Nivea and his language, which seemed to me to be more redolent of the Yellow Press, rather than sober reporting from the BBC.

Because there are still some awkward aspects in the case that Easton played down or skated over completely:

• Four other suspects in the "UK cell" were acquitted this week of any part in a conspiracy, and the trial against a further four has been abandoned.
• Despite Easton’s jars of Nivea, no trace of ricin was ever found in the flat where the arrests were made – in fact, only recipes were found.
• The recipes themselves are apparently direct copies of recipes concocted by the US survivalist Kurt Saxon, and readily available from an Internet web site based not in Afghanistan, but in Palo Alto, California. 

A much more sober assessment of the facts, written by Jon Silverman, is buried away on the BBC News web site. It probably does not make such good tub-thumping television as Easton’s over-the-top report.

As Duncan Campbell, writing in today’s Guardian, puts it: "I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an Al Qaida-trained superterrorist."