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Flight 93

I have always worried that a movie titled Twin Towers would become inevitable at some point. A woman working in Tower 1, say, with her fiance in Tower 2. Together with his brother the fireman, they hurry up the steps when everyone else is rushing down… starring Ben Affleck, and an array of computer generated reconstructions of the destruction.
Flight 93 is a different sort of film, I hope. It is the story of the people who overcame the hijackers of the plane which was on its way to Washington and the Capitol Building. However, The Daily Dish thinks it is too soon for a movies about their actions:

Sometimes, the greatest deeds, like the most monstrous acts, are best left unrepresented. They stand alone. They demand to be left alone. One day, commemmorate. But do not so swiftly represent. Shakespeare often left the greatest moments in his plays off-stage. They have more power there.

I imagine that one impact of their actions is that it is now virtually impossible to use a passenger aircraft to perpetrate an act of mass terrorism. This is not because of increased security on the planes, or better, tougher surveillance at the airports. Rather, it is because the fact of 9/11 changes the attitudes of the people on board hijacked planes. While the passengers of Flights 11, 175 and 77 believed that they might escape unharmed if they sat tight, the passengers on Flight 93 were under no illusion as to their fate. Using aeroplanes as a weapon of mass destruction became obsolete at half past nine that morning, while Flight 93 was still in the air.

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Kings Cross United

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*

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Thank the Lords

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.

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Legislate for the whole country

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.

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Many unthinkables

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.