{"id":1503,"date":"2006-08-10T09:04:44","date_gmt":"2006-08-10T09:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1503"},"modified":"2006-08-10T09:41:57","modified_gmt":"2006-08-10T09:41:57","slug":"my-sympathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1503","title":{"rendered":"My sympathy"},"content":{"rendered":"

… to anyone who was trying, or planning, to fly today<\/a>. Why the chaos? Well I won’t be believing much of what I read or hear for at least the next week – particularly if it is sourced to “security sources”. After the dust has settled there might be some hope of judging what the threat, if any, was.<\/p>\n

Why the cynicism? Well remember the “sarin” plot, the “blow up Man U ” plot, the “tanks around Heathrow” scare, poor old Jean Charles Menendez, Forest Gate … I could go on.<\/p>\n

And notice how much trouble the Blair government is in: on Iraq, on the Mideast <\/a> (with growing calls to recall parliament), in Afghanistan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That’s not to say that the whole thing is cynically made up – there undoubtedly is some basis there somewhere – but as the non-existent WMDs in Iraq showed, a wide variety of judgements can be applied to “intelligence”, and if the push from the top is all one way, the outcome is almost inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… to anyone who was trying, or planning, to fly today. Why the chaos? Well I won’t be believing much of what I read or hear for at least the next week – particularly if it is sourced to “security sources”. After the dust has settled there might be some hope of judging what the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}