Robert Sharp

I did not write about the death of Benazir Bhutto when it happened yesterday, because I did not feel I had anything interesting to say. I still don’t, but it is without a doubt one of the defining moments of this year, and thus deserves a mention. The posts on my front page are beginning to look a little stale, like the left-over turkey in our fridge.

Deaths and disasters are always discordant, inconvenient things, which disrupt the normal order of one’s day. But this is more so at Christmas time, which should be characterized by lighter emotions. You’re surrounded by torn wrapping paper and chocolate papers, and suddenly Huw Edwards is telling you that James Brown or Gerald Ford is dead, or that earthquakes and tsunamis have ripped apart other people’s homes, or that another nameless teenager has been stabbed in our capital. There is nothing to do but continue with Christmas, but now you know that somewhere, people are mourning. The next tangerine is more sour than the last.

Most depressing, in this case, is to watch the optimism die along with the woman. Political momentum takes years, or even generations to build. It colours the air slowly, like a smog, slowly pressurizing a government and a people into action. And then some cretin comes along and blows it all away. The clock is reset, and we start all over again. The last time I felt like this was after the London bombings.

The Bhuttos, Zulfikar and Benazir, took two generations to build a following and a reputation that could hold a military dictator to account, in the way Benazir did with General Musharaff earlier this year. Her death now, at the moment of a new victory, is a waste, the classic ‘tale told by an idiot’. She is suddenly gone, and in place of the political pressure, there is a vacuum, and no-one is optimistic about what will fill it.

Congratulations, dear brother of mine, on your recent ’swearing in’ as a Police Constable. You are now officially an agent of the state, and we have given you power over us so you may act as our protector, an enforcer of our laws.

It is natural that you will wish to do the job with which you have been tasked in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Without doubt, it is this noble sentiment that has led some of your colleagues to call for more powers: To detain suspects for longer without charge; and to retain our DNA on a database. It must be frustrating when we prevaricate over such requests.

Remember that there are two kinds of freedom that we strive for. The first of these is freedom from the harrassment of other individuals. By enforcing laws and catching crimminals, you are ideally placed to offer protection against the people who would do me harm and steal my laptop. However, we also require freedom from harassment from the machinery of state, a machinery of which you are now a part. It is therefore much more difficult for you to protect us against this threat, and you may only be able to do so through inaction, rather than the more proactive approach that you will be trained in.

In the week that you take up your duties, you might find it offensive for me to talk about state harassment and abuse of powers. Please remember that when we make laws, set bench-marks and draw moral lines on the pavement, we must do so for all time, and all situations, for all citizens. I know I can trust you, and I hope I can trust the men and women you will be working with next week. But we already know that not all those who join your service are worthy of that trust… and to trust all politicians would be foolhardy!

Read Matthew Parris on ID Cards:

I just don’t want to give government — any government — that much control … I oppose them because evasion, deceit, even crime, and the irregular organisation of one’s own affairs, are part of a citizen’s weaponry of last resort against State oppression. They are weapons I may never need, but I need to know they are there.

Read David Eastman on Anonymity:

Its when computers talk to other computers that liberty disappears. Because a computer can correlate countless bits of data and create new records that would take many humans exponentially longer to do. And that gap, or grace period, is actually where anonymity lies, or did.

… or, for that matter, on civil liberties:

The outgoing Mr Blair bemoans how hard it is for the authorities to fight terrorism and maintain civil liberties. That to me seems a reasonable balance. Terrorism and road accidents are comparable; they are bad and sometimes preventable, but are a result of modern urban life.
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Civil liberties on the other hand are the glue that allows trust between those who govern and everybody else. Without that trust, modern life is impossible. There is little point in being protected from one set of arbitrary beliefs only to be subject to another.

I’m afraid the obstacles we place in your way, and the high-standards of proof we set, are all necessary. Yes - it is a problem that the two types of freedom, the two types of protection, are often antagonistic. It is a paradox that giving you more powers to protect us in one way, will actually end up harming us in another. It is a paradox that your occasional failures might demonstrate the success of our system. In striking the balance between the two, we are in effect asking you to do a job, and then willfully hampering you in your efforts! Its a devil of a task… which is precisely why we respect you for taking on the challenge.

I’m sure elsewhere in Blogistan the wags are enjoying the news that all the recent terror arrestees worked for the NHS. No doubt someone will suggest that working under Patricia Hewitt was enough to drive anyone to extremism; no doubt others will quip that the doctors turned to terrorism after failing to secure a job through MTAS. Some might try to suggest that the obvious ineptitude of the terrorists proves what poor quality personnel the NHS is employing these days…

Listening to the radio reports just now, I noticed the repeated use of the phrase ‘linked’. Usually, we hear it as part of that nebulus catch-all, “groups linked to Al-Q’aeda”. To hear instead that the men were “linked to the NHS” manages to portray our Health Serivce in a rather sinister new light.

Perhaps the NHS should be more like Al-Q’aeda. Many people have been saying for many years that the individual hospitals and trusts need to behave in a more autonomous fashion. They should be set a target and left to reach it in whatever manner they see fit. Not unlike a terrorist cell.

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After the terror attacks in London and Glasgow, there’s obviously been a lot of analysis and opinions flying around, from the mainstream media, security analysts, bloggers and the general public. Its interesting to see how most people are adhering to the idea that life should go on, and that these attempted suicide attacks should not provoke a draconian curb in civil liberties. To do so would hand the terrorists a victory.

For what its worth, I think Gordon Brown, Jacquie Smith and Alex Salmond have hit the right note, with their calls for unity and calm. Dave Hill seems to agree.

Over at the Devils Kitchen, Nosemonkey makes an interesting, if flippant point in the comments:

I believe in taking the piss when they cock up, and diminishing the status of the terrorist bogeyman. Terrorists exist to spread terror - make them a figure of fun, they fail, even if the occasional success does manage to kill a few score people and freak us out for a bit.

I’m not sure about making jokes about the attack, although I would suggest that the “life goes on”, “I’m not bovver’d” attitude also contributes to the diminishing returns of terrorist attacks in the UK.

A group of Human Rights organisations, led by Amnesty International, have published a list of 39 ‘ghost prisoners’ that have been detained by the US Government as part of its War On Terror.

The US has the duty to detain and bring to justice anyone responsible for crimes but it must do so in a manner that respects human rights and the rule of law.

A few months ago, I saw Clive Stafford-Smith from Reprieve talk very eloquently about this issue. You can read my account here.

A couple of London’s evening papers yesterday published pictures of Yassin Omar, alleged terrorist, caught on CCTV as he escaped London… dressed in a burka.

In the two versions of the story I read, in the Lite and the Evening Standard, there’s a detectable but unspoken subtext, which is that these garments somehow undermine the ability of the security services to keep us safe.

No more than other head coverings. Yet “criminal flees justice dressed in hoodie” (or motorcycle helmet, or baseball cap, or Halloween mask) is not front-page news, because pretty much every criminal will conceal his identity from CCTV cameras in such a way.

If the Burka is sacred to some people, then it is they who should be outraged in such a stunt. Indeed, Omar’s insensitivity suggests that his ideology (whatever it may be) is far removed from mainstream Islam. But “terrorist disrespects Islam” is not the message I get from either the Lite or the Standard.

Racism in the Big Brother house is of course important. It is admirable that 20,000 people have complained about the alleged bullying, that the Indian Government has expressed concern, and that Labour MP Keith Vaz has raised the issue in the House of Commons. We can only hope that the £300,000 appearance fee Shilpa Shetty has received goes some way to cushioning the hard times she has endured.

Big Brother is an illusion. The contestants could click their fingers, and the nightmare will end. This is not so for the housemates at Guantànamo Bay, who wake each morning to a genuine Orwellian nightmare. They have no plush chairs in the diary room in which to relax. Their only solace is the blissful ignorance of sleep, or a final release through suicide.

“It is not ‘suicide’ anymore,” says Clive Stafford-Smith. “It is called ‘manipulative injurious behaviour’ now. That way, the politicians and military men can claim that there are no suicide attempts at Guantanamo.”

Stafford-Smith is speaking at the offices of Clifford Chance at Canary Wharf, on behalf of the Mary Ward Legal Centre. The title of his talk is Secret Prisons and Ghost Prisoners, about the 14,000 people detained without lawyers or a trial in the name of the ‘War on Terror’. There is apparently a certain chauvinism in the military, and it is assumed that women are not militant. Stafford-Smith only knows of three female detainees, but there may be more. Most of those imprisoned remain unidentified, beyond the reach of the media, legal aid, and the rule of law. Guantànamo is the tip of a sinister iceberg.
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Michael Leeden at The Corner, one of the National Review Online blogs:

You can be quite sure that the terror masters saw the election as a great victory, and Rumsfeld’s ritual sacrifice as a moment of glory.  It will encourage them to redouble their efforts, both in Iraq/Afghanistan, and elsewhere.  They believe they have Bush’s number, that they have broken him, and all they must do now is keep the blood flowing to accelerate our retreat.

This rhetoric from the terrorist perspective really annoys me. Why should we care about the terrorists’ opinion of us? Why do we let them get under our skin in this way?

The US mid-term elections were apparently free and fair. Division of power. Checks and balances on the executive. A 219 year-old constitution working exactly as it should. Democracy, working.

The terrorists might think that that they are winning. But by demonstrating a robust democratic system, we know that actually, it is we (or rather, our American friends) who have the upper hand. Doing something that is right, despite what opinion others may have of us, is the true sign of integrity and strength.

The obverse is also true. Doing something that is wrong, merely to save face, is a sign of weakness. This is why George W Bush is essentially a poor leader, lacking integrity, as we saw this week with volte-face regarding Donald Rumsfeld. An infringement of our civil liberties, or human rights, in the name of the War on Terror may well worry a few of those who are planning to do us harm. As we torture and detain, the terrorists may indeed think “Ooh dear, they have struck a blow against us.” But once again, those terrorists would be wrong. Just because these fanatics do not percieve the value of civil liberties, that does not mean such concepts have no place in our own thinking.

Late last month, the US Congress approved a bill which would give the President power to ‘reinterpret’ the Geneva Convention with regards to the treatment of detained foreign terror suspects, and authorise interrogation techniques that the convention declares illegal. In the past few days, I have been pondering the implications of this, and the wider moral debate about whether we can, in some circumstances, justify torture.

I wrote last year that I thought that the “‘ticking bomb scenario’ is an unhelpful hypothetical construct.” Clive Davis resurrects this argument with a pertinent, real life scenario from Mark Bowden, at a Carnegie Council symposium:

There was an article in The New York Times about a crime in Germany where a kidnapper had taken a 12-year old boy, and had buried him alive. He went to collect the ransom, and was caught. He was in custody, and refused to tell the police where he had buried the child. The police chief in this case threatened the kidnapper with torture, and he promptly told him where he buried the boy.

A powerful story indeed. However, what Clive doesn’t quote is the insight from the director of B’Tselem, who Bowden mentions later in the symposium. She said she would torture… but expect to be prosecuted for it:

But it has to be that I broke the law. It can’t be that there’s some prior license to abuse people.

I think we should call this the McClane Mitigation. No, that is not a mis-spelling of ‘McCain’, as in Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the presidential hopeful who was tortured in Vietnam. I do mean John McClane, the maverick cop from the Die Hard movies. The Bruce Willis character is the epitome of that brand of fictional policeman, who perpetually have to circumvent normal procedure, in order to stop some catastrophe or other. They of course gets an earful from their superiors, and we assume (though never see) some kind of post-credit inquiry, in which the transgressions are investigated and accounted for. Laws that most certainly have been broken, but the urgency of the situation, and actual lives saved, are taken in mitigation during sentencing. The jury convicts, but the judge is lenient, and some form of justice is served.

But even this is a slippery slope. The ‘ticking bomb’ could first be defined as a long-term threat to national security. “We might prevent another 9/11″ becomes a catch-all excuse for routine torture. What a wonderful legacy for the victims.

There are several other moral objections to the tack taken by President Bush and his supporters. The first is the explicit xenophobia which runs through the legislation. It only applys to non-US citizens… which does beg the question of what would happen if an American were arrested on suspicion of terrorism. Ticking bombs don’t have nationalities.

When we make laws (and indeed, provide services), we expect them to be carried out uniformly throughout the land. This is not possible in the case of torture. The final problem with the scenario as outlined by Bowden, concerns the unreliability of the agent of torture. In his example (above), it was fortuitious that the policeman in question had the nerve to threaten torture at all (it was also lucky that it appears he did not actually have to carry through with his threats, but that is beside the point here). Torture, we are told, dehumanises everyone involved. What if a person, who finds themselves obliged to torture, discovers that they do not have the stomach for it? I forsee a situation where they are sued by the families of victims, on the basis that they did not do whatever was necessary to prevent the tradgey.

We are reassured that torture would be permissible in limited, unusual circumstances. But it is probable that in these same circumstances, those tasked with inflicting pain will have done nothing like it before! There would have to be guidelines, and we would have to endure a sickening public debate over what exactly was allowed (the euphemism-heavy debate in the US is already pretty horrible). Do they try the classic ‘electrodes to testicles’? At what amperage? Or should they opt for the more retro ‘removal of toenails’? What if the pliers are not available? With the state of UK public services as they are, it would be worse still, with the Right Hon. Dr John Reid MP having to declare Britains torture facilities “unfit for purpose”.

I’ve just read an interesting post from Adloyada, musing on the clichés of ‘radical’ chic, after her daughter spotted some Che Guevara curtains in a Highgate shop:

Meanwhile my daughter is now thinking of silkscreening some blind fabric herself with an image of zionist-socialist pioneers…same sort of visual iconography, but with altogether more acceptable associations.

Of course, some people might find those patterns as offensive as Adloyada finds the Che iconography.

I was reminded of that other clichéd expression “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” this morning, listening to an edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Reunion, in which fellow political prisoners incarcerated on Robben Island spoke about their time there. There was a clip from the South African Prime Minister - either Vorster or Botha - taking the moral high-ground, saying they would not negotiate with revolutionaries. Their successor F.W. de Klerk did just that, however. Its heartening to remember that it was negotiation, and not blood-shed, which brought about a change in the system in South Africa.

A final, releated saying is: “Terrorism is the poor mans war; War is the rich man’s terrorism.” German artist Stephan Müller has produced Terrorism… & The War Against It; or: Corporate Design done with Dedication, a book of photograph, which explores the imagery of terrorism. He also created an accompanying icon set, downloadable as a free font set, which includes the logos for such popular armed groups such as Haganah, the IRA, ETA, Al-Qaeda… and the US Navy Seals.