The Sunday Mirror claims to have exposed serious security lapses here at the Olympics.
It's a fairly lame and obvious piece of journalism. We talked it over at our editorial meeting last night and decided to play the story down because we had a number of fundamental questions about the investigation by the Mirror -- the paper that only recently claimed to have photographs of British soldiers abusing Iraqis.
Having said that, there's no doubt that a committed terrorist could easily find loopholes here in Athens, despite the massive security operation that has turned the country into what one newspaper has called "Fortress Greece."
I've been waved through security checkpoints at Olympic venues and given cursory body searches -- even though my artificial leg had set the metal detectors off. My prosthesis could just as easily have been a weapon.
And with thousands of contractors working in catering, cleaning and maintenance, I'm sure it would be relatively simple to obtain a job with access to the Olympic venues after only limited background checks.
But this is the world we're living in. Someone determined enough will always find a way to carry out an atrocity -- be it in a crowded city centre, an aircraft or here at the Olympics. Spending hundreds of millions of pounds on security can help reduce the threat -- but it will never eliminate it.
We can either live with the threat or lock ourselves away.
It's a fairly lame and obvious piece of journalism. We talked it over at our editorial meeting last night and decided to play the story down because we had a number of fundamental questions about the investigation by the Mirror -- the paper that only recently claimed to have photographs of British soldiers abusing Iraqis.
Having said that, there's no doubt that a committed terrorist could easily find loopholes here in Athens, despite the massive security operation that has turned the country into what one newspaper has called "Fortress Greece."
I've been waved through security checkpoints at Olympic venues and given cursory body searches -- even though my artificial leg had set the metal detectors off. My prosthesis could just as easily have been a weapon.
And with thousands of contractors working in catering, cleaning and maintenance, I'm sure it would be relatively simple to obtain a job with access to the Olympic venues after only limited background checks.
But this is the world we're living in. Someone determined enough will always find a way to carry out an atrocity -- be it in a crowded city centre, an aircraft or here at the Olympics. Spending hundreds of millions of pounds on security can help reduce the threat -- but it will never eliminate it.
We can either live with the threat or lock ourselves away.
posted by Stuart at 13:46
1 Comments:
I'm sure it's still relatively easy for a determined person to get thru security checks, but what about the undiscovered packages despite "thorough security checks"? It's precisely because we live in this kind of world (familiar to me at least since the IRA bomb threats on UK mainland in the 70s) that I, and the specatators, few tho they be, would have expected better.
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