22/10/2013 00:00
TW
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by RAY FLEMING
PERHAPS it doesn't matter any longer what she thinks, but it was surprising to read the view of a former Director General of the Britain's spy service
MI5 that the response to the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in September 2001 was “a huge overreaction”. Dame Stella Rimington, DG of MI5 from 1992-96 offered this opinion in an interview in yesterday's Guardian that was presumably not unconnected with the publication of her fourth spy thriller, Dead Line.

The words she used about 9/11 were these:”You know, it was another terrorist incident. It was huge and horrible and seemed worse because we all watched it on television. So, yes, 9/11 was bigger but not qualitatively different. I suppose I've lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was, as far as I'm concerned, another one.” Well, I suppose one does get a little blase as one event follows another but it is surely odd that Dame Stella cannot yet see the qualitative escalation in terrorism that 9/11 represented. If a comparable prestige building in London had been the target would Dame Stella have thought of it as just “another one”? There are certainly aspects of America's responses to 9/11 that can be called an overreaction but that is because too often they used methods which were undemocratic and illegal. But the attacks themselves cannot be seen as just routine. They delivered a message that had not been heard clearly before.