Posts tagged al-Qaida

A civilised justice system might have seen Colleen LaRose’s eccentricities as requiring help. Instead, she may face life in prison

Without wishing to undermine her twin commitments to holy war and talking to cats, the self-styled Jihad Jane might be the war on terror’s least effective bogeywoman. In fact, let’s not be gender specific. She might well be its least effective bogeyperson, making “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, as we refer to that chap who couldn’t even set a match to his own trainers, look like the KGB’s deadliest agent.

Jihad Jane’s real name is Colleen LaRose, and in between caring for her partner’s sick father, this suburban Pennsylvanian is alleged to have put postings on YouTube in which she made herself available for any fundamentalist situations vacant. Last year she travelled to Ireland, where she met some people allegedly plotting to kill a cartoonist, before flying home and being arrested on her return. She has been in custody since, according to federal documents unsealed this week – and when the news broke, LaRose’s neighbours forewent the usual cliches about her having “kept herself to herself”, declaring instead that she talked to cats a lot. Mm. As our leaders are given to telling us, tapping their nose in reference to their security clearance: if you saw what I saw, it would curdle your blood.

Even Lars Vilks – the Swedish artist whose sensationally witty cartoon of Muhammad’s head on a dog sparked the alleged plot with which LaRose is accused of being associated – appears dismissively amused, pitching the affair as a caper movie, “with this fantastic name Jihad Jane”. Vilks described his alleged nemeses as not exactly professionals and “rather low-tech”, hitting a note of ironic understatement indiscernible in what we know of his work.

The movie Colleen was presumably thinking about as she settled on her nickname was GI Jane, in which a super-buff Demi Moore trains as a Navy Seal and has to retrieve some weapons-grade plutonium from the Libyans. As a 4ft 11 Christine Hamilton lookalike so luminously inept she’d already been warned once by the FBI before she was finally arrested, you have to marvel at Colleen’s self-delusion. However, I’d prefer for the authorities to conjure up footage of her at one of those terrorist training camps in the Hindu Kush, where disaffected westerners have to scramble under rope nets and suchlike, even though their missions are only ever going to consist of doing something antisocial in an aisle seat. As a rare woman at boot camp, Colleen would be a shoo-in for Jihad Benjamin, a winsome modern reboot of the Private Benjamin franchise.

The trailer line for the Goldie Hawn original was “The army was no laughing matter till Judy Benjamin joined it”, and you might agree that the forces of evil ranked against us were similarly mirthless until a pint-sized cat-lady brought the funny. Yet according to the US justice department, the fact that “a woman from suburban America agreed to carry out murder overseas and to provide material support to terrorists, underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face”. Does it? I yield to no one in my admiration for the calibre of evildoers paraded before us in the cause of justifying ever higher anti-terrorism spending and the systematic erosion of individual liberties, but the LaRose business appears yet another instance of a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut.

Just as in the case of Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon, and on a much smaller level in that of Jack Straw heckler Walter Wolfgang, one has to question the moral wisdom (and the PR nous) of deploying the full force of anti-terror laws against the demonstrably weak or eccentric. A truly strong society would have the sense merely to leave oddballs out there – partly because the world is full of them, and partly to undermine the myth of a crack network of brilliant extremists who walk among us.

Jurists have long been fascinated by the so-called doctrine of impossible attempt, the question of whether someone can really be punished for attempted crimes that have infinitesimal or no chance of succeeding. Classic examples are trying to pick an empty pocket, or an attempt to murder a man by voodoo. It remains to be seen precisely how cackhanded were LaRose’s bunglings in what she imagined to be the world of international terrorism, but it doesn’t exactly have the flavour of the Mossad’s recent trip to Dubai.

What has come to light since the news broke, however, are police records of LaRose’s 2005 suicide attempt, reports of alcohol problems, and friends’ accounts of the depression caused by the death of her father. Presumably all of this was picked up by the FBI during their lengthy surveillance of her, and in a more civilised and intelligent justice system LaRose might have been identified as a person with a case of something or other, who could be reasonably handled by a couple of hours a week with a mental health professional. Yet she now faces life in prison if convicted.

Having said all that, I see I’ve made the textbook error of ignoring the fabled deterrent argument that governments like to advance. Do forgive me. If there are any troubled catwomen out there thinking of auditioning for Ocean’s Jihad, this case will no doubt give them pause.