Robert Sharp

Six months on from 7th July, Rachel from north London and her friends demonstrate how to combat terrorism:

The bomber hated us all, he didn’t care who died, he wanted to kill as many as he could. The more I know of people from my train, the more I look at strangers - anyone - and see in them a fellow passenger on a journey. One man on a train with hate in his heart and a bomb on his back, seeking to divide and kill, versus dozens of passengers drawing together, caring for each other, comforting each other, remembering the dead and injured and bereaved - and celebrating life with new friends.

Out of such terrible darkness, light has come.

As we said in the pub ‘Take that, terrorists. Cheers’

*clink*

Common sense and decency prevails, as the House of Lords rules that evidence gained through torture cannot be used in court.

Lord Carswell

The duty not to countenance the use of torture by admission of evidence so obtained in judicial proceedings must be regarded as paramount and that to allow its admission would shock the conscience, abuse or degrade the proceedings and involve the state in moral defilement

The ineffectiveness of torture as a tool for anything has been well argued… but a couple of quick observations. First, the “ticking bomb scenario” is an unhelpful hypothetical construct. As David Luban says in the Washington Post, we give it credence only because we see so many examples of it in Hollywood. (via Clive). If it gets to the stage where a bomb is about to go off, and the only way we can discover it is by electrocuting a terrorists testicles… then I would say we’re already pretty much fucked anyway.

The other problem with the “ticking bomb” hypothetical is that it ignores the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into torturing people. If the CIA really are scheduling flights across the atlantic in order to torture their prisoners, then their intelligence gathering is clearly not being done with any sense of urgency.

Update: The New Republic carries Andrew Sullivan’s fantastic article against torture, a response to Charles Krauthammer’s apology for it. Over at Great Britain, Not Little England, there are links to further discussion, referencing Craig Murray and the Uzbekistani example.

Rachel from north London was on the tube from Kings Cross to Russel Square that was attacked on 7th July 2005. During this week of political hand-wringing over whether to intern people for 90 or 28 days without charge, she has published some very pertinent posts, the most recent on the folly of legislating in the name of the terror victims:

And how I wish The Sun, and Tony Blair and Charles Clarke had remembered that, before they start screetching ‘It’s for the Victims!’ when trying to drive through panicky Terror legislation… You don’t cobble together any legislation on the back of feeling sorry for people who were hurt or killed by criminals in one particular incident.

That’s not democracy, that’s a PR and media strategy.

On BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers today, a caller pointed out that the erosion of civil liberties is a one way street, so it is important the laws we do make are considered properly.

Laws should be made in a more sober and detatched manner, not to be populist, or out of panic and fear like this one.

I don’t usually read the Daily Mail, but I’m in a pub by myself and there is a copy of the scottish edition on the bar. And there’s more: not only do I not usually buy the Daily Mail, but I don’t usually find myself in agreement with it either.

In the aftermath of the defeat of the 90-day terror bill, the Daily Mail editorial has a stab (definitely the operative word) at criticising Blair’s leadership style. It rightly highlights the inconsistency whereby he cites public opinion as a reason for action - it did not stop the invasion of Iraq. However, I disagree with the paper over the assertion that the Labour MPs have “tasted blood [and] have an appetite for more.” (Surely that is a more likely metaphor for the pro-hunting Tories). Instead, what we are seeing is Tony Blair reaping what he has sown, two years later. He may have survived the Hutton Inquiry, and the decision to go to war in the face of massive opposition and no UN sheild. But the legacy of the bogus WMD-claims is that he now finds that people do not trust him on matters of national security.

Indeed, recent events mean that the police have lost that trust too. After the rightly publicised shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes, and the ridiculous spectacle of an aged Labour party member being arrested under the Terrorism Act for heckling, it is legitimate and patriotic to ask whether we should grant every power the police ask for. Public perception plays a huge part in political decisions.

On the opposite page, Colette Douglas Home has some sane advice: Go against the grain.

Our best chance of beating terror is to hug the Muslim population so close it perceives its first loyalty to be to its fellow Britons - making it impossible for terrorists to infiltrate undetected. We will not do that by plucking people from their midst and effectively interning them.

These are tactics however. What about the moral argument? That habeus corpus should be preserved is a notion that has flown the nest, after MPs agreed that a 28 day sentence without charge is acceptable. A veritable outrage, yet no-one flaps an eyelid in response. The implied argument is that protection of our citizens is ultimately more important than the protection of our civil liberties, our freedom… the same freedom for which we wage the war on terror in the first place.

Freedoms will be destroyed in this so called war on terror. Better they be destroyed by terrorists, as they kill, maim and disrupt, than by the police, our agents of the state. We should play by the rules we have followed for centuries, even if that increases the risk of our being attacked. That is the price we pay for being better than them.

I’m glad to see that this is not such a taboo opinion. Chris at qwghlm makes a similar, difficult point. He links to a supporting post on Where There Are No doors too, which I noticed was also quoted on Tim’s Britblog Roundup, along with this amusing version from Fair Vote Watch:

This lot [militant commenters at Harry's Place] remember, like to bill themselves as Muscular Liberals. Muscular in the sense of Complan-drinking surrender monkeys that happily ditch 700 years of common law precedent as soon as some twat blows up a bus.

Exactly.

I turn my back for a moment, and the world goes crazy. All I did was watch The Ring Two for an hour or so, and three crazy events have hit the headlines at once.

First, we hear that an 82 year old man has been ejected from the Labour Party Conference for heckling Jack Straw over Iraq. Now I welcome this sort of vocal exhibition of democratic rights, prompted by the party’s failure to have a proper, cathartic debate about this problem at any point in the past two and a half years. However, I do understand the need to keep some sort of decorum: noise-mongers should be ejected.

What is totally unacceptable is the idea that terrorism laws were used to prevent the pensioner from returning to the conference! Need I ask what threat this man posed? Terrorism powers should be used sparingly, on the basis of evidence gathered carefully and methodically by the security forces. Applying them to what was obviously nothing more than a public order issue is dangerous, offensive, and bordering on the totalitarian.

The news that Simon Harris, the suspected murderer of Rory Blackhall, had been facing sex offence charges, has led to calls for yet another reform to the crimminal justice system. This time, it is suggested that we add people who have simply been accused of sex offenses to be added to the sex offenders register until their trial. This idea of pre-emptive justice inevitably reminds me of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, who died at Stockwell tube station on 22 July.

Then as now, the argument centres around the idea of public protection. Those in power declare that it would be crimminally negligent of them to allow innocent people to die. For them, to ‘err on the side of caution’ is to neutralise potential threats, and ask questions later. Menezes is simply a tragic casualty of war. Likewise, depriving a potentially innocent man of his civil liberties is a price worth paying, to reduce the treat of harm to the Great British Public.

However, we must admit that people will kill and abuse each other, whatever the actions taken by the State. If they are doing this in numbers that society deems unacceptable (for now, 52 people dead on the London Transport system fits that criteria, in this country at least) then the problem is not necessarily a failure of policing, but a failure of society and a failure of political decision-making. Locking people up, putting them under surveillance, or even shooting them seven times in the head (and then once in the leg) is a simplistic policy answer.

The fact that these crimes occur highlights the fact that the security services are not all-powerful. The State simply cannot protect us from everything. It is crucially the role of the State which is under scrutiny here. Not only the State’s to deal with such threats, but where the State exists on the moral plane. We must be very clear about this point, and at present the waters are muddied.

The State is not a person. It cannot make snap decisions based upon the ‘facts on the gound’. Instead, the State is a collection of people, all of us, and we have to make decisions in advance, which are then applied equally throughout the country. They are our laws, and we must stick to them. There can be no special circumstances when these are flouted. If there are, then they become unfair, unjust, and ultimately meaningless.

Many people have said this before, but often they conclude their argument at this point. However, respecting the rule of law, and our civil liberties, has some very unpalatable consequences which we must nevertheless admit to ourselves if we are to have any chance of improving our society.

Perhaps it is better for another child to be murdered, than for an innocent man to have his life ruined by false imprisonment or even a false accusation. Perhaps it is better that a dozen innocent people die on a tube train by terrorism, than it is for one innocent electrician to be wrongly murdered by the State. Whatever the choice made, someone will die. In the case of a true suicide bomber or a child murderer, the killer is an individual. But in the Menezes case, the killer was the State. It was us. There is a moral difference between allowing a death that even the police are powerless to prevent, and proactively causing the death of an innocent person.

The choice is of course a Devil’s Alternative, but when our agents made our choice for us on 22 July, we all became murderers. To absolve ourselves of this sin, we must ensure that it never happens again. Some of our laws make it harder to catch terrorists. Better that we allow innocent people to die by terrorism than to become murderers, terrorists, ourselves. Altering our laws can no longer help us win the battles against terrorists, sex offenders or indeed any other crime. We need to begin altering our society, and the way we conduct our political debate, if we are to stand any chance of winning.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was… Terror. Our war began on or around 14th September 2001, when George W Bush asked for a ‘unity’ against terror that quickly became a ‘war’. Heads of States flocked to their press conference microphones to join the war, and soon an airborne armada was bombing Afghanistan.

What a shame, then, that our enemy doesn’t exist.

The word ‘terror’ means to be really, really scared of something. Common things to be scared of in this county range from being stung by a wasp, to being blown up in an aeroplane, and everything in between. But whatever, you are scared of, your ‘terror’ is an emotion, something within you. The only way we can eradicate terror is to annihilate our species… something we seem to be on course for at the moment.

When Dubya made his speech to the nation on that grief stricken Friday, he misused the word ‘terror,’ and in doing so dammed a generation to meaningless conflict. The word has now become a catchall phrase to describe any attack, for an reason, on Westerners. Almost three years later, the same man describes ‘terrorism’ as the new Nazisim. He talks about the ‘terrorist movement’ as if it were a political party, and vows to defeat it. What he fails to realise, and what will ultimately cause hundreds more deaths before the end of his presidency, is that terrorism is not an ideology, or a group, but a weapon. For all his bravado on the anniversary of D-Day, the President is fighting a battle he cannot win. It is as if he said he was going to declare war on guns. Or tanks, or stones. Though it pains me to ally myself with Dubya’s buddies at the NRA, terrorism doesn’t kill people; People kill people.

To eradicate terrorism, you need to stop people hating you, and if you want to do that, the last thing you need is a war. Instead, George W Bush sends in his troops equipped with rifles and ray-bans, and every shot they fire creates another American-hater who will pick-up terrorism, the only weapon they have, in order to fight back. The ideology that is ‘anti-Americanism’ now sees its ranks swelling to numbers that the Nazis could only dream of.

A terrifying thought.