There's a great encapsulation of how bizarre everything becomes in an age of counter-terrorism, running as the main story on the BBC website at the moment [update: it did say this but no longer does] It starts:
Two more of the failed London bombing suspects are believed to have been arrested as police carry out a number of armed operations in west London. A BBC correspondent said they were thought to be the suspected Oval Tube and Number 26 bus bombers.
Weirdness:
1. The BBC have started to quote their own correspondents. Is the BBC implying that this correspondent might be lying? If so, they need disciplining! And how long can it be before a BBC correspondent starts to quote the BBC news?
2. The notion of a "suspect" is merging with the notion of a perpetrator. If they were genuinely talking about 'suspects' it would make no sense to say "two more of the suspects... have been arrested", because there can be no finite number of suspects. According to traditional notions of justice, we're all suspects (while at the same time, all being innocent until proven guilty). There are four perpetrators, but there are any number of suspects.
[This is similar to the argument I had with a policeman last summer, following my house burglary. He said "so did the suspect knock the door down?", to which I replied "no, the burglar knocked the door down - the suspects are all over the place".]
3. The BBC could quite easily have reported that some "suspects have been arrested", because if they weren't suspects, why the hell were they being arrested? But clearly the BBC is uncomfortable with this ellision of 'perpetrator' and 'suspect', so have started to talking about people being "believed" to be suspects. So they are now effectively talking about suspected suspects.
4. The discomfort with all of this is probably not unrelated to the disconcerting truth that the police are now treating all young asian men as suspects. In the interests of maintaining some form of social peace, the authorities have had to construct a higher order of suspect, as in, "the guy who we're pretty sure did it", to distinguish him from the asian public. This suspect - lets call him Suspect - is technically innocent, but only according to some increasingly out-moded liberal precepts. The other small 's' suspects are treated as genuinely innocent until proven guilty, but will have to put up with having their rucksacks searched occasionally. So what the BBC is trying to say is that a "suspected Suspect" has been arrested.
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