Persecuted Public, Tomorrow's Terrorists?

Larry Miller Wonders If Letter Bombs In Britain May Signal The Terrorism Of Tomorrow





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(CBS) Letter from London is Larry Miller's weekly look at news from across the pond.

In the 1976 film 'Network,' the TV anchorman says, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Before long, people across the country are opening their windows and shouting the same thing. These are the people who have had enough, finally finding their voice.

I'm reminded of this because here in Britain, motorists have been taking it on the chin and they're beginning to say something similar. They are over-charged to park and caught by roadside semi-hidden speed- cameras at every turn. Put a wheel into a bus lane and that's $200... Drive into downtown London and that's a $16 toll, which goes up to $200 if you get home, get distracted, and forget to pay the $16.

You can even get a ticket when you buy a pay-and-display sticker because it came from a machine on the wrong side of the street.

The latest gadget to catch speeders is a reflector embedded in the road with a computer controlled self-cleaning camera.

Hugely unpopular is the government plan for road-pricing. That's when you are charged for every mile you drive. Much would be determined by when you travel and on which roads you chose; more for the fast lane, less for the slow back roads. When hundreds of thousand of motorists sent their objections to the Prime Minster's office, the response was,
"tough".

Listen To The Letter

Officials insist these measures are necessary to both cut accidents and discourage people from driving for ecological reasons, but a growing number see them as an abuse of power designed to take their money by stealth.

Even the staid Royal Automobile Club says drivers are justifiably angry.

The leader of the lobbying group "Motorists Voice" complains that every time he gets in his car, "I feel targeted, I feel victimized, and I feel picked on by the government. Everywhere I go there is a camera pointing at me."

The roadside speed cameras are called Gatsos. Dedicated to their destruction is an underground group led by someone only known as Captain Gatso. His group, Motorists Against Detection, or MAD, admits pulling down and blowing up $40 million worth of driver-catching cameras.

The Captain says: "What we are looking at now is a war on the motorist, and the motorist is fighting back," adding, "It's payback time."

It is against this backdrop that this week three letter bombs were sent to those linked to the perceived persecution of car drivers.

The first went to the company collecting the London toll, or congestion charge, the second to a firm involved in selling speed cameras to the police, and the third to the British motor vehicle department. All three exploded when opened and a number of people suffered minor injuries. The National Coordinator for Domestic Extremism is investigating, but says the letters were not designed to kill. Inside were pyrotechnics. In this case, fireworks are the intended medium and the message.

The letter bombs are widely condemned as a sick and dangerous form of protest. Even Captain Gatso isn't condoning this new level of domestic extremism. We've had it before. Animal rights people attacking scientists, bombing labs, even digging up a grave and stealing the bones of a woman whose son owns a research facility.

It's against this backdrop, that we consider a report this week from the EastWest institute. This think tank warns: "The threat of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons is real and the first nuclear terrorist may be American or European, reflecting a likely evolution away from al Qaeda-style Islamic militancy toward eco-terrorism."

A big leap you might say from letter bombs to nuclear bombs, but one that's now being taken seriously. While focusing on international Islamic terrorism, the eye is perhaps being taken off something a bit more homegrown. Simmering not that far under the surface, there are those shouting, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"





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