The Tragedy of the UK Terror Bill

[Teddy Bear]

The Tragedy of the UK Terror Bill
By Carol Gould
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 10, 2005

It is vitally important for those outside the United Kingdom to understand both the implications and the complexities of the defeat by Tony Blair’s government of the gravely important Anti-Terror Bill in Parliament today. What is crucial for the world to know is that 72 percent of the British public in various polls this week said they wanted the 90 day rule passed.

Shockingly, Parliament – including many opposition Conservatives – defied the British people and voted against the Bill at a time when ordinary citizens are fearful of further Jihadist attacks and of a nationwide Intifada akin to the one unfolding across the Channel in France.

Tony Blair has been defeated in the Commons live on national television on a major Bill for the first time in his Prime Ministership. The Bill provided police and security services 90 days to process and interrogate terror suspects in the UK. Defeat of the bill effectively means that police have only 28 days to process and begin unraveling terror plots and plotters. More significantly, it is a defeat of Tony Blair by a House full of MPs who seem to think they can overrule the wishes of the British public because of their anger at Britain's Iraq commitment.

Even more significantly, those outside Britain will not know how the BBC handled today's tragic vote. The barely-disguised glee amongst television anchors and commentators was breathtaking even by West-bashing BBC standards. After the vote, the BBC wheeled in an endless stream of Muslim leaders, mosque activists, human rights activists and ultra-Left-wing MPs (in the UK, ultra-Left means to the Left of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky), but not one ordinary Briton was interviewed. Not one MP who voted for the Bill was interviewed.

The dreaded "Sir" Iqbal Sacranie – who was an activist years ago in the Fatwa against Rushdie and publicly refuses to criticize suicide bombers and who wants Holocaust Memorial Day removed – was on air for what seemed an eternity and his joy could barely be contained. The BBC set up a mobile studio outside the main mosque in Bradford and kept repeatedly interviewing two young men who were clearly ecstatic that the anti-Terror Bill had been defeated. On various street corners, microphones were thrust in front of Muslims who were numb with happiness that the Bill – and "Bush's puppy dog Blair" – had been quashed.

Despite my ability to change minds and inform the public as a journalist, I feel powerless and helpless as a British voter. Seventy percent of us – registered British voters – wanted the House of Commons to approve the Bill and lock up suspected terrorists in our midst for a minimum of ninety days, but our elected representatives chose to cave in to the relentless browbeating we receive every day from Islamic radicals who are given endless media exposure, not to mention my fellow journalists who write daily diatribes against the United States, Israel and Blair’s attachment to the American war on terror.

During the debate today in the Commons, a member of the Loyal Opposition shouted at the Prime Minister, "Are we to live in a police state?" Blair was nonplussed and visibly shaken. His anger could barely be controlled. There we were: a member of the House repeating the refrain of every media outlet in Britain that – despite July 7th – Britain risks becoming a ‘police state’ or a ‘fascist state like the USA’ if we crack down on home-grown terrorists. Instead, we must wheel out every permutation of Islamic spokesperson to tell us how evil our culture is and how Britain has become a lapdog to Washington Zionist neocons. We must, they shout, not listen to the police and security services but let terrorists go back out onto the streets after twenty-eight days in custody.

One BBC reporter breathlessly expressed her view that this vote "will be a supreme embarrassment" for Prime Minister Blair. How is it embarrassing, if the majority of British voters, watching a bloody Intifada exploding in the rest of Europe and having seen fifty-two of our own blown up on July 7th, want the 90 day rule adopted? The BBC and the Left-wing media, who now dominate Great Britain, inform us that Blair is ‘embarrassed’ when in fact the general public is dismayed and alarmed that he could be defeated on such a pragmatic position. The fact that every Muslim activist interviewed on television tonight is filled with happiness indicates that the United Kingdom is headed for a sorry future. If anything, Europe needed a Patriot Act long ago.

Imagine if the French Intifada happens here in the UK and the already-overburdened police are saddled with processing hundreds of suspects with a 28-day limit?

It is a dark day for Europe indeed.

[steevo]

What can be said? The Left has sold the free world out.

I go through the same frustration seemingly every day in the US. Fortunately, since the early 90s we've had some counter to the dominant liberal press establish an alternative and we can more easily be informed, collectively vent, and to a lesser degree effectively act.

I was sorry to hear of this news, and even sorrier for the helplessness and anger. I hope I'm not breaking a forum rule in saying... if/when there is a next act of terror in the UK, may it be upon the BBC, rather than those who are innocent indeed. Of course, that would require very stupid terrorists.

[steevo]

I just read this from another site which rightly defines this as Orwellian doublespeak.

The Muslim community’s police and security working group report makes clear that many believe the present anti-terror regime is already excessive, and that the measures risk provoking further radicalisation of young British Muslims.

It says the proposal to make “inciting, justifying or glorifying terrorism” a criminal offence “could lead to a significant chill factor in the Muslim community in expressing legitimate support for self-determination struggles around the world”. It could also lead to a fear of using “legitimate concepts and terminology” because of the anxiety of being misunderstood by authorities ignorant of Arabic/Islamic vocabulary. For instance, a speech on jihad could easily be misunderstood as glorifying terrorism, and the “extremely thin line” between empathising with the Palestinian cause and justifying the actions of suicide bombers could not be drawn with any legal certainty.

It fears that a proposed Foreign Office database of “foreign extremists” and a Home Office list of extremist websites, bookshops and organisations of concern will lead to a clampdown that will be seen as “censorship of all those who might criticise British foreign policy or call for political unity among Muslims: ‘This is disingenuous to say the least, carrying the dual risk of radicalisation and driving the extremists further underground’.”

The reports published by the Home Office yesterday said British foreign policy had been “a key contributory factor” in driving extremist groups, and perceptions of injustices inherent in western foreign policy were triggering “radical impulses” among British Muslims.

Ifath Nafwaz, the deputy convenor of the security and policing working group, said: “There is huge concern about the anti-terrorism legislation - that it is excessive and is going to drive people underground. We ask for a dialogue to be opened up with the community.”

politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,15935,1640202,00.htm

[Teddy Bear]

It's time the liberal left understood an important factor, that to maintain their present strategy will eventually cause them great grief in the future. So long as the majority of the public feel that proper steps to combat the real militant Islamic threat are being tripped up by 'apparently' well meaning multiculturalists, the fear that will result, will cause increased prejudice and acts of racism. The very thing leftwingers (pronounced winge-rs) claim their policies are trying to prevent, will be increased.
Melanie Phillips has more on the subject
Britain's moral imbecility

The press have written Tony Blair’s political obituary. After Wednesday night's defeat over the Terrorism Bill’s proposal to detain terror suspects for up to 90 days without charge, the universal view is that Blair now has no chance of getting through his proposals to open up health provision to the private sector and usher in education reforms involving (modest) independence for state schools, both of which are anathema to his party’s left wing. Maybe so. Blair’s famed political brilliance is equally widely said to have deserted him, and his bullish insistence on sticking to 90 days and avoiding the compromise being urged on him by other in his party is being held up as evidence that he has lost the political plot, destroyed his authority over his party and is now so weakened he will have to stand down.

The fact remains, however, that Blair was correct. He was right to say that the police had made a compelling case of 90 days. And he was right to say, after the defeat, that the vote had been grossly irresponsible. As I said on Wednesday night's BBC Radio Four Moral Maze it was an act of moral imbecility which revealed that the British political class is still in a state of deep denial over the changed nature and full extent of the threat we now face.

Those who say the problem is that the police show a high level of incompetence in using – or not using – laws that currently exist undoubtedly make an important point. But true as that may be, it does not address the argument the police have made that current provisions under terror law do not enable them to protect the public against a changed and unprecedented terrorist risk. They may be – indeed have been – faced with situations where they have good reason to suspect someone of being part of a human bomb plot but cannot assemble in time the evidence to sustain any charge because of the time it takes to collect and decipher encrypted information or computer programmes in many languages for which they have to find translators. To take a hypothetical example, if they arrested someone on suspicion of plotting such an atrocity and discovered he had shaved all his body hair – a common rite of preparation for a human bomb – but could find no information within two weeks (or even 28 days) to pin on him because that would require communicating with foreign governments, tracking down computers, cracking their encryption codes and all the rest of it, they would have to let him go.

The counter-argument put up on the Maze by Michael Mansfield QC that in such circumstances a suspect could be held under a control order at home is inadequate. Home detention a) is not totally secure; b) requires resources which the police and security service do not necessarily possess; c) is itself a denial of liberty which the likes of Mansfield would undoubtedly be the first to challenge as yet another breach of human rights.

Personally, I think Lord Carlile got it right. He’s the independent watchdog who produced a report recently which said that he had been persuaded that the police did need a 90-day maximum for interrogating suspects but that the safeguard of a judge to whom the police would have to report every week was inadequate. Instead he thought that a judge should supervise the interrogation. This continental-style idea, although foreign to English legal tradition, seems to me to be a good way of reconciling the demands of security with the need to preserve judicial safeguards appropriate to a democracy.

The government missed a trick by refusing to adopt the Carlile proposal and has paid a stiff penalty. To be more precise, the country has paid a penalty because it has now been left poorly defended in the face of a lethal threat as a result of an utterly irresponsible spasm by MPs. The politics of this were sickening, and none more so than on the Conservative benches. The Tory leader Michael Howard showed he was prepared to sacrifice the security of the country for crass political opportunism in leading his party to oppose the 90-day proposal and then call for the Prime Minister’s resignation. We now have the astonishing political situation in Britain where a Labour Prime Minister represents the country’s overwhelming desire for appropriate laws to protect itself, and as a result loses his authority in Parliament as a result of an alliance between the left of the Labour party and the Conservatives on the grounds that measures to prevent atrocities amount to a 'police state'. What on earth are the Conservatives for if they can’t even defend the country’s security because they now line up with the left in assuming that the police are a conspiracy against personal freedom, and refuse to acknowledge the implications of the changed nature of the terrorist threat? The Tories have now lined up with those claiming fatuously that the 90-day provision would have introduced ‘internment’ or a ‘police state’. Thus does Britain now describe sensible provisions to defend itself.

The importance of this defeat cannot be over-estimated. Its significance can be gauged by the reaction of Britain’s enemies. Carol Gould, who subjected herself to the grim experience of watching the BBC’s coverage, captures the shocking depths of this country’s lethal drive to self-destruction:

Even more significantly, those outside Britain will not know how the BBC handled today's tragic vote. The barely-disguised glee amongst television anchors and commentators was breathtaking even by West-bashing BBC standards. After the vote, the BBC wheeled in an endless stream of Muslim leaders, mosque activists, human rights activists and ultra-Left-wing MPs (in the UK, ultra-Left means to the Left of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky), but not one ordinary Briton was interviewed. Not one MP who voted for the Bill was interviewed. The dreaded "Sir" Iqbal Sacranie – who was an activist years ago in the Fatwa against Rushdie and publicly refuses to criticize suicide bombers and who wants Holocaust Memorial Day removed – was on air for what seemed an eternity and his joy could barely be contained. The BBC set up a mobile studio outside the main mosque in Bradford and kept repeatedly interviewing two young men who were clearly ecstatic that the anti-Terror Bill had been defeated. On various street corners, microphones were thrust in front of Muslims who were numb with happiness that the Bill – and "Bush's puppy dog Blair" – had been quashed.
Despite my ability to change minds and inform the public as a journalist, I feel powerless and helpless as a British voter. Seventy percent of us – registered British voters – wanted the House of Commons to approve the Bill and lock up suspected terrorists in our midst for a minimum of ninety days, but our elected representatives chose to cave in to the relentless browbeating we receive every day from Islamic radicals who are given endless media exposure, not to mention my fellow journalists who write daily diatribes against the United States, Israel and Blair’s attachment to the American war on terror.

One BBC reporter breathlessly expressed her view that this vote "will be a supreme embarrassment" for Prime Minister Blair. How is it embarrassing, if the majority of British voters, watching a bloody Intifada exploding in the rest of Europe and having seen fifty-two of our own blown up on July 7th, want the 90 day rule adopted? The BBC and the Left-wing media, who now dominate Great Britain, inform us that Blair is ‘embarrassed’ when in fact the general public is dismayed and alarmed that he could be defeated on such a pragmatic position. The fact that every Muslim activist interviewed on television tonight is filled with happiness indicates that the United Kingdom is headed for a sorry future.

The pathological and irrational hatred of Blair’s support for America and the war in Iraq seems to have literally driven this country mad.

[Teddy Bear]

Carol Gould links to another article including references to blatantly biased remarks by a former BBC Middle East bureau chief - Tim Llewellyn, in a debate at Trinity College, Dublin.
Blaming America First

...Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East bureau chief, began by charging that in Iraq there have been “more casualties of civilians by Americans than by insurgents.” He announced: “George Bush is a threat to world peace on so many levels we can't begin to discuss it.”

So he didn't try. Instead he turned to the topic that really fires him up: Israel. Yasser Arafat, he said, had been correct to reject the offer of statehood made at the Camp David peace summit of 2000 because it was “a pro-Zionist type of approach.” In other words, it would have allowed the Jewish state to survive. He clearly found that a distasteful prospect.

I was not surprised. At dinner prior to the debate, he'd noted that he had heard a BBC host cut off a caller who wanted to discuss Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threat to “wipe Israel off the map.” The caller didn't see what was so terrible about this idea and didn't understand why Prime Minister Tony Blair had felt obliged to denounce it. Llewellyn lamented that there now seems to be a taboo against expressing such opinions.

Charlie was so flabbergasted by Llewellyn's anti-Israeli diatribe that he detoured from the arguments he had planned to make regarding the resolution on global stability. Instead, he attempted to rebut such inaccuracies as Llewellyn's assertion that Israel “was stealing more Palestinian land every day” – pointing out that Israel had just withdrawn from every inch of Gaza.

[steevo]

Llewellyn's assertion our troops caused more casualties than insurgents is grossly inaccurate and not worthy of serious refutal.

I think its always telling to report some of the positive news. Below is a little editorializing on my part from a recent article:

Many Iraqis who couldn't get jobs under Saddam Hussein because of their ethnicity, sectarian identity, or refusal to join the Baath party, are now working. The private sector economy is booming because Iraqis are investing in it, with some of the money coming from family members abroad. Thriving banks, restaurants, and furniture stores now occupy what were abandoned stores last year.

Further: in August, new business startups in Iraq exceeded 30,000. Individual Iraqis are better off financially than they have been for 20 years. According to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, per capita income has doubled since the United States toppled the Saddam regime. There are more than 3.5 million cellular phone subscribers in Iraq, up from zero when Saddam ruled. Internet cafes are thriving in even small towns.

And so, on and on.

blogs.washingtonpost.com/thinktanktown/2005/11/a_cheerier_view.html

[Teddy Bear]

Steevo, you certainly confute John Simpson's recent remarks about the Paris riots posted here What goes around°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°comes around°º¤ø,¸

If you don't mind, I'm going to link your pertinent comment there as well.

[dwbuxton]

Would you trust the police, or the Home Secretary for that matter, to stick to the letter of the law. The police have all the power that is needed. Don't forget the innocent man gunned down by policemen in London. This is Great Britain, our freedoms, once guaranteed, are not up for grabs by the likes of Socialist Tone and Mailboxmouth.

[Teddy Bear]

Welcome Derek,
You write; Don't forget the innocent man gunned down by policemen in London. I say "Don't forget the 57 innocent people who were blown up by terrorists".

Do you worry about soldiers carrying weapons? According to your argument you should worry about their misuse. Power is needed for protection, there is always the possibility of misuse of that power, but if the powers that exist are really corrupt, there is little that you or I will really be able to do about it.

You're security, and therefore freedom, is no longer guaranteed, and there are many twisted souls out there who would just as soon see you dead or converted to Islam. I would rather give those, that have the sworn duty to protect us, the power they need to do the job properly, than tie their hands. This is a new kind of warfare, therefore new powers are necessary to deal with it. What should an innocent person fear from this 90 day detention order? As it is the justice system does not have enough jails to incarcerate proven criminals for a proper sentence. It is hardly likely that the police will want to further overburden an already overburdened prison service, unless they deem it serious enough to warrant it.

If the age you put on your membership details are correct, then I am surprised that you should have any problem with it. If you don't trust your police force by now, then you must never have known real freedom. It is the militants and terrorists who want the spin to restrict powers of action against them, not the average law abiding person who wants to be protected.

[Teddy Bear]

Welcome nakedkafka, I'm not sure if I understood your post correctly or not, as your spelling or terms used makes a little unclear. I'm guessing that you are not a native English speaker, but forgive me if you are. It seems like your questioning.
1. Whether anybody can read the bills put before government before they are debated. I personally have no idea, I daresay you can find the answer to this on a web search.
2. You also ask whether we are discussing the merits of the 90 day detention order as put recently through parliament. The answer to that is not really, although pertinent opinions are welcome. We are more concerned about how the BBC covered this debate, and defeat of this matter.
As to reading other bills put before Parliament; again, you would have to do a websearch to find out where, and if, this is possible.