Blunkett Proposes "Anti-Terror" Measures. posted by Richard Seymour

It is often said that when the eyes close, the mouth opens and not for the better. Our Home Secretary invites many dubious puns on his blindness when he tramples so haphazardly over our civil liberties, but any more you detect in this article are entirely unintentional. Blunkett proposes to make it easier to convict alleged terrorists - not, you understand, by actually catching more terrorists and preventing more atrocities. No, he was thinking more along the lines of, "well, once we've nicked them, we've nicked them - why do we have to let them go?" Having made it possible for the police to arrest someone if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that he or she might be involved in some terrorist plot, it now seems Blunkett would like the judge to be able to bang them up, following a secret trial, in which the evidence has not been disclosed to the 'suspect', on a lower standard of proof than would ordinarily apply.

Now, I'm not going to bore you with all that crap about "we're letting the terrorists win if we undermine our liberal values". No, no, no! We're letting the government win! They've been sewing up these measures for some time, or have we somehow forgotten the banning of dissident groups like the PKK (Kurdish group active in Turkey) in this country as a result of the Terrorism Act (2000) , which labelled them a "terrorist organisation"?

We are witnessing here an attempt to insitutionalise a permanent state of emergency , in which any right we assume in a normally functioning democracy may be suspended on the pretext of the external threat at any given moment. So, for example, an alleged terrorist may not be accorded the normal scrupulousness in determining a fair verdict, because terrorists are sub-human, alien automatons programmed for destruction. They cannot be stopped in the usual way - and if a few innocent people rot in jail for their remaining natural lives, we can at least say they are safe and alive. The trouble is, they won't be free - and nor will anyone likely to incur the wrath of the state. Like those protesters against the arms fair, against whom anti-terrorist legislation was used. If you try and stop mass murder these days, the British police consider you a terrorist.