I’m not sure who to be more pissed at here, the dumb cunt who in April sparked a bomb scare that shut down much of west London by leaving five fake nail bombs in the Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith areas as a so-called artistic statement about terrorism, or the police for opting to bring no charges of any kind against Monica Saieva and instead let her off with a caution for harrassment and causing alarm and distress. (Evening Standard, 23 June, no web link available.)
Large parts of the neighborhoods were cordoned off, and road traffic and Underground lines were interrupted. The operation is thought to have cost the police £100,000, according to the newspaper. Saieva, a 36-year-old part-time assistant at Shepherd’s Bush library who lives in the area with another artist and their three children, was suspended from her job for two months. At taxpayer expense.
Speaking as a U.K. taxpayer, it really pisses me off not just that this moron’s derisory “punishment” is coming at public expense, but also that she’s not being pursued in connection with any of the costs of the policing operation. None of it would have been necessary if not for her asinine stunt, so let her be stuck with at least some of the cost.
The Evening Standard article contains the same picture that’s at the top of this article. (Yeah, it’s the Sun, it’s all that came up on a Google search.) Looks to me like a VCR with nails clearly sticking out of it. The Sun article also contains the following sentence: “Some were cardboard boxes containing soft toys and training shoes with nails sticking out of them.” It doesn’t specify, however, whether the boxes were open-topped.
Based on the picture, though, it seems to me she left at least one object that obviously was studded with nails in a heavily trafficked area of a major city in the post-9/11 (and post-7/7, if you’re a Londoner) era. I find it hard to view this as “outdoor art” of any kind.
I’d have thought that the legacy of the Brixton nail bombs would be far more significant, but whatever… the reason I asked was because the artist’s intent matters here. If she was deliberately planting objects with the intention of having them mistaken for bombs, then I’m fully in favour of her being beaten round the head and shoulders until the stupid dissapears. But if she merely placed objects which were them mistaken for bombs (ok, the VCR I can accept, but a fluffy toy with nails sticking out of it? That does not set off alarm bells for me), then she is guilty of, at worst, failing to think things through. At best, she is merely the victim of a jumpy london and hypersensitive populace.
I mean, look at these objects: they’ve got frowny faces painted on the sides! What kind of terrorist does that, Al-Grumpaeda? Without knowing the intent with which the items were placed, I am unwilling to pass judgement.
Are you saying that the police should only be worried about bombs that look “bomb-like” and ignore anything that has faces painted on it or any level of cuddliness whatsoever? I’m really not quite clear where you’re coming from.
At least now I know how to keep British people at bay if I ever need to. "Oooohhh, watch out, I’ve got a *nail! * Keep back, people of England; tremble in fear at my mighty nail! Boogaboogabooga!"
Take a tip from your cousins across the pond, won’t you? America has had the perfect government-approved solution to domestic terrorism hysteria for some time now: duct tape. Duct tape will solve all your problems. Carry a roll with you at all times, and you’ll never have to fear the sight of nails again. A word of caution though: in order to purchase duct tape, you will have to go into the hardware store. And there are nails in there.
Well, no. No, they’re not. Nails are generally very friendly and useful, which is why people use them to make buildings and such. People in the UK still do that, I presume? It’s not impossible now to purchase nails in Britain without a special license?
Bombs are scary, yes; and I agree that a nail attached to a bomb would be scary by association. Yet it does not follow that every single object with a nail on it is a bomb. I note that the image showing the scary nails in your linked article is in fact an X-ray; my uninformed guess would be that this is because the actual bomb was constructed in such a way that the nails were not visible. By the same token, I can infer that the people who constructed the bomb didn’t habitually go around wearing T-shirts reading, “Kiss me! I’m a Terrorist Bomb-Maker!”
Right, but don’t be obtuse. Some of these objects did look quite bomb-like (I’m struggling to find the picture I’ve seen of the most worrisome one), and in particular, yes, the ones with all the nails sticking out do look quite plausibly like a nail bomb as widely portrayed in the media. What are you expecting, people to crowd round suspect devices and criticise their design before alerting police? “Nah, Bob; this is no terrorist device - the construction’s all orf! Fuck’s sake, they’ve only put nails on one side, they’re barely going to kill anyone wiv this!” Pffft.
So people should only be scared of the nail bombs they can’t see? Another uninformed guess would be that the X-ray is an image of a highly technical piece of terrorist equipment called a “bag”, containing the nail-bomb which is to be removed at a later date. I see a self-contained device studded with nails in the middle of a busy street (not where we Brits usually keep our nails, despite your misplaced scorn), and I am most certainly not going to ignore it.
Ah, here we go. Top image. You tell me you wouldn’t have been even the slightest bit concerned about that, in a city that had very recently been fucking bombed by people who, it transpired, were also planning nail bombings. In a city which has indeed been the victim of really fucking nasty nail bombing. Go on. Say that with a straight face.
If the police only cautioned her in the current climate they must have felt it would have been very hard to get a procecution. I don’t know what the thinking behind the decision was I’m pretty sure that the law would have landed on her head if they could have.
But that’s not the point. I maintain that the vast majority of these packages do not look like bombs. The barrell-shape with the nails sticking out, however, does. Now, if that is just stupidity on the woman’s part, I’d be willing to let her off with a caution (as has been done), and be suprised at the level of jumpiness that caused a cuddly bear with nails in it to cause a bomb scare. But I still can’t find out if they were intentional, or not.
What do terrorist bombs look like? I would think that a terrorist is more likely to achieve their objectives if he somehow tricks people into thinking that the bomb is something else other than a bomb that way people are not evacuated and the bomb is defused or exploded safely.
Yes, because a brilliant bomb disguise (assuming I don’t want my bomb to be noticed) is to have massive nails sticking out of the object my bomb is hidden in.
Well, there were five - we agree on the barrel-shaped one, and I think the square box with nails in the lid looks fairly suspicious too. Granted it’s got a couple of odd details you wouldn’t expect on it, but I still think it’s pretty dubious-looking, and if you’ve already found the barrel one is more than enough to be worth alarm. That leaves the other three, which I’ve been unable to find full photos of; the only other one I’ve seen is the closeup of the one with the message bottles, which was apparently standing on some pillars which are never pictured. Either way, that’s 2 of 5 that are suspicious, and we haven’t even seen proper photos of the rest.
In any case, I do think that there’s no real other way to interpret the barrel-shaped one, stylised though it may be. And I simply refuse to believe that an artist could place their works out in public without considering what the public reaction would be; that, after all, is the whole point of sticking them out there. Granted, an argument by incredulity is nothing to prosecute with, and assuming the artist has made no statement then I think the decision not to go to court is sensible. But I maintain that unless this woman is a moron of hitherto unknown proportions (which is possible, I guess), there is simply no way that she didn’t know what reaction her “artwork” would cause.
Well, according to Terrifel it is, because apparently we’re all idiots for reacting to these plainly-innocuous packages. Bluff, double-bluff…
