No real warning was possible before the Bali outrage

The Foreign Office can justifiably be blamed for many things, including its tardy response to the needs of relatives and friends of the Britons who died in the nightclub bombing in Bali. It was slow to dispatch qualified staff to the scene, slow to co-ordinate its operations and slow to assist the bereaved through the logistical and bureaucratic confusion that reigned in a resort area ill-equipped to cope with a major terrorist attack.

So it was heartening to hear the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, offer a straight and simple apology for these deficiencies in the Commons yesterday. Such regrets are heard all too rarely, even though the reluctance of ministers to say sorry causes more resentment than almost anything else.

There are other things for which the Foreign Office cannot reasonably be held to account. These include the absence of a government warning before the Bali attack. It is hard to conceive of an alert, save one that mentioned a specific threat to the specific resort in that specific week, that would have saved the British – or any other – revellers who perished in the attack.

Terrorist acts, as perpetrated in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, and in Bali 10 days ago, are about killing people and keeping the planning as secret as possible. Western intelligence services intercept a mass of information every day. The skill is to distinguish the tiny fragments that are, or could be, useful from the vast amount that is not. Too many alarms, and people soon disregard them as meaningless, while tourist industries in desperately poor parts of the world are destroyed.

There are occasions, doubtless more than we ever learn of, when the intelligence services fail. The Congressional post mortem on 11 September showed US intelligence with a huge backlog of unprocessed information and officers who did not follow up highly specific alerts about young Muslims training at US flight schools. Warnings, such as the worldwide alert issued by the US State Department two days before the Bali attack tell travellers little more than to be careful wherever they go. It is doubtful that anyone would, or should, have changed their plans in the light of such generalised advice.