A Tale of Two Cities

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Get a grip, old chap, we need to know

August 5, 2005

Oh, sod off, you British whingers.

Ray was only reporting what he knew.

Which, apparently, is an unfamiliar communications strategy for the

obsessively closed-mouthed London police.

Yesterday, law-enforcement officials in Britain were grumbling loudly

about their counterparts in New York. The New Yorkers, they said, had

spoken way too freely about the July 7 train and bus bombs in London.

Way too freely as in ... revealed a few basic facts about what

happened that day.

Bloody shocking, eh?

To hear the London groans, you'd have thought the New York police

commissioner had boarded a Virgin flight himself and showed the

terrorists where to plant the bombs. The Brits were that apoplectic

at 's remarks.

" Unhelpful! " Andy Trotter, deputy chief constable of the British

Transport Police, harrumphed to reporters in London.

" Not the sort of thing we would be releasing right now. "

And what highly sensitive information had the NY PC and his

counterterror underlings released? Actually, not all that much.

They'd held a briefing at One Police Plaza on Wednesday and gave a

straightforward report on the London bombings to an audience of

private-security professionals.

This wasn't a bunch of nose-against-the-glass, terror-groupie

dilettantes. These were people who work on the front lines of New

York terror-fighting, corporate square-badgers mostly, who really do

need to know what scary stuff is happening elsewhere.

The details shared were so rudimentary that had the bombs gone

off in New York instead of London, they'd have been on 1010 WINS and

the NYNewsday.com Web site five minutes after " ka-boom! "

He said the bombers didn't use military-grade explosives, as London

police had originally thought. He said the bad guys used a

home-brewed explosive called HMDT, made from citric acid and hair

dye. " It's more like these terrorists went to a hardware store or

some beauty supply store, " the New York commissioner said.

Sheehan, 's deputy commissioner of counterterrorism,

added that the London bombers had stored their unstable mixture in a

restaurant refrigerator at a flophouse in Leeds, then carried the

deadly brew to the outskirts of London in a medium-sized cooler in

the trunk (that's " boot " over there) of a car.

The bombs, the New Yorkers reported, were most likely triggered with

cell phone alarms set for 8:50 a.m.

Basic information? Sure.

Important for other law enforcement professionals to know? You bet.

Already common knowledge in Britain? Strangely, no.

And given the uproar the New York coverage generated, this must have

been pretty embarrassing to the police - and the journos - over

there. Their people had to learn the most fundamental information

about this huge London story from the New York police shack!

Even some British commentators were noticing yesterday that this was

kinda strange.

" For those who have worked as reporters in the UK, it comes as no

surprise that little information is coming out from here, " said

Reynolds, world affairs correspondent at the BBC.

" There is a basic assumption by many British public bodies that the

public does not need to know and that therefore the public will not

be told. Information, often of an innocent or harmless sort, is often

hidden under a blanket of secrecy. "

No, they don't have a First Amendment in British law. Yes, they could

obviously use one.

Most reporters in New York were surprised to learn this week that

anyone, anywhere, would consider the NYPD overly free with public

information. Things have loosened a bit from the paranoid days of

Rudy Giuliani. But " no " and " comment " are still the two most familiar

words on the police beat.

Pressed about all this yesterday, Browne, 's closest aide,

did his best to smooth the ruffled British feathers.

He said New York police believed on Wednesday that the Brits had

cleared the info. Apparently, they hadn't. " I was mistaken, " he said,

noting: " This was all declassified information which had come from

open sources. ... I do not believe we compromised the investigation. "

Of course, it didn't compromise anything.

Except maybe a little British pride.