Driving through Hampshire this week I heard the Hampshire police announcing the re-launch of an anti-terrorist hotline for members of the public to telephone in and report suspicious behaviour that they feel might be connected with terrorism. Given that the last terrorist attack in Britain (so excluding Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, but not Great Britain) was in July 2005, this seems to be an incredibly tardy response from the county which has the major port and rapidly developing airport of Southampton, the port and naval base of Portsmouth, numerous Army regiments housed across the country and the major Army base at Aldershot.
In 2006 Hampshire Constabulary set up its Special Branch Contact Unit and has been whining recently that no-one is calling its hotline and clearly felt that the public needs a new jolt of warnings about terrorism? Local authorities have been criticised by the Local Government Association and by the House of Lords Constitution Committee for abusing the powers they were granted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which gave them the ability to put members of the public under surveillance. Not finding any terrorists, local councils have used these powers to keep people under surveillance suspected of applying to schools from outside the catchment area or allowing their dogs to foul the highway or putting out their dustbins on the wrong day for collection. In total 794 bodies including 474 councils as well as health service trusts and fire service can use the powers and apparently across Britain there are over 1000 covert surveillance operations (it is important to note the use of the word covert here, because for example, the used of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) is overt surveillance) being mounted each month. The most criticised council is that of the town of Poole in Dorset (a county bordering Hampshire) which used the powers to monitor people for all kinds of suspected things in most cases they were found not to be breaking regulations, e.g. on school applications, let alone the law. Its representative Tim Martin admits that the council has put 50 such covert operations into effect since RIPA was introduced in 2000, though it is clear usage has stepped up in the past couple of years.
So being stymied in its development of our authoritarian society through the means of what previously seemed to be legal covert surveillance but is now being challenged, a new approach has been adopted which is to get people to start reporting their neighbours. The radio advertisement which has followed the announcement says 'if you are suspicious, report it'. It features the sounds of a busy nightclub saying that it is only like this because the bomb that would have been planted here was prevented by someone reporting the theft of chemicals which could have been used to make a bomb, presumably this means fertilisers, so there seems a danger thay any Muslim or Irish people shopping in a garden centre better watch out (though I advise not looking at the CCTV cameras, the reason why you will see below). It then follows with a sound of a busy shopping centres, saying that a bomb was prevented by someone reporting a person looking at the CCTV cameras in the centre. The two locations are probably intended to remind the listeners of real bomb attacks, such as the Bali nightclub bomb of October 2002 and the bombing at the Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996. The implication is however, that we are currently under constant threat of bomb explosions across Hampshire's town centres and it is only the hard work of the Hampshire Constabulary and its informants that is preventing carnage. Where is the evidence for this high level of threat?
Informants never need encouragement. I have worked for three branches of the civil service and every day in every office in which I have been employed we received about twenty letters from informants 'shopping' (i.e. reporting them to the authorities) their neighbours who they were sure were committing some offence. The usual accusations are that the person must be committing benefit fraud or not paying their tax. Certainly where I worked the number of genuine cases were less than 1% of the ones reported to us. If I worked for 5 days x 48 weeks per year, that meant that I saw say, on average 2000 informant letters per year and that was at just one office. In one job there were three offices of the same branch of the civil service receiving coming on for 6000 informant letters per year and I imagine the Inland Revenue offices, Social Security offices, Job Centres and the police all received similar volumes of information. These days with email it is probably even easier.
It is interesting to note what the suspicious behaviour Hampshire Constabulary want you to look out for and this comes from their website: observing security procedures and routines (such as the regular marches of regiments through Winchester, home to five regiments which seem constantly on parade?), taking photographs or video (a very unusual activity in historic Winchester and Portsmouth or the New Forest also in Hampshire and basically anywhere someone might be with their family), note taking (I will make sure not to amend my shopping list or do any train spotting in Hampshire and will advise all teachers not to send their children to do projects in town) and repeat visits to a location (so I will buy my newspapers and groceries for a different shop each week and not be a regular at any pub in Hampshire and suggest that people try not to go daily to their workplace if it happens to be in Hampshire). This is utterly ridiculous. What they do not add, but is assumed is that these things are suspicious if done by a man of Middle Eastern appearance or with an Irish accent. The ironic thing is, that in Hampshire the most active terrorists are people like the Real Countryside Alliance campaigning to reinstate fox hunting and Motorists Against Detection which burns speed cameras and are made up of the middle-aged, middle-class white males that both make up the senior ranks of Hampshire police and are presumably immune from such suspicion.
To add to the paranoia that there are terrorists lurking in every shopping centre, the Hampshire police are running a seemingly unrelated poster campaign asking 'Who's walking down your street?'. The poster tells you to keep an eye out for burglars and advises you that they may be of different age, ethnic, social or gender groups to what you might expect. So the implication is to spread the paranoia far and wide and not just suspect what young, white workling class man of being a burglar but also that elderly Asian woman too. How long is it before we have checkpoints at the end of each road where you have to show your identity card and explain why you want to walk down that street before being permitted to do so. Has no-one heard of the block wardens that the Nazis introduced to their residential areas?
Parts of the government has been trying, especially since the Bradford race riots of 2001, to try to bring communities, especially those of mixed ethnicity. Yet in one of Britain's largest counties we seem to have a policy which seems to be encouraging citizens to turn on their neighbours no matter what their background. As it is, British society is incredibly insular with people closing their front doors and only looking out surepticiously to spy on happenings in the street. This is why children get abused and the corpses of elderly people lay undisturbed for weeks. This approach is the wrong one, it will simply encourage vigilanteism and hounding of people who look a little different or are simply new or disliked or are just behaving in one of these ill-defined 'suspicious' ways. This kind of reaction does nothing to make our towns safer in fact it makes them inhospitable and dangerous. Yet, the urging of some, influential in British society, if we are not sufficiently paraniod and not reporting the suspicious people the authorities assume must be active in our towns (even though the police and Security Service cannot find them), we are being unpatriotic and of course it is a short step to lacking patriotism being seen as suspicious itself. I once read a science fiction short story in which everyone in a community reported each other to the authorities and the whole village was taken away, but I will simply return to the Del Amitri song, 'Nothing Ever Happens' (1990), which reached Number 1 in the UK: 'They'll burn down the synagogues at Six o'Clock/ And we'll all go along like before/ We'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow.'
P.P. 30/03/2009 - I notice from radio advertisements that the Hampshire initiative seems to have spread nationally very quickly. Also interesting to note is that the government has been saying that anti-G20 summit protests this week will be violent and police are saying they will have to use anti-terrorist legislation. This is an unsurprising public behaviour as agents provocateur. Clearly the government wants no protest so they are seeking to provoke a violent response and scare off peaceful protestors. Next time anyone wants to do some peaceful protesting they can say 'no, look what happened last time' and ban it. Despite the shift from Blair to Brown, the step-by-step move towards an authoritarian state in the UK is continuing. These tactics are not new and you can easily find examples from European, African, Asian and American history of the past 80 years of them all being used.
P.P. 23/07/2010 - Being unemployed I currently look through all kinds of vacancies that I would not normally have encountered; this is increased by the fact that I look for work right across the UK not just in my local area. I was struck when at my local Job Centre Plus by the three separate advertisements on their job search computer, posted by the University of Brighton. They were seeking recruits who have previously served in the Security Service, i.e. MI5, to work for the university at three locations in southern England, only one of which seemed to be Brighton itself, vetting their students. Clearly this university alone (or perhaps it is simply more open about the fact than the others) believes it runs the risk of having terrorists among its intake and thinks it needs skilled people to check them out. The salary seemed pretty desultory for the kind of skills they are seeking, but I guess that is an implication of cutbacks in higher education. The radio advertisements encouraging paranoia may not be currently running, but the outlook they have fostered seems to be living on in various corners of UK society.
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Sunday, 19 October 2008
Dropping the 42 Days Detention Without Charge
I was pleased to read that finally the UK government has shelved its plans for people to be able to be held without being charged, the so-called 'pre-charge detention' which seemed so much like 'protective custody' of the Nazi regime. Of course people can still be held for 28 days without being charged which seems wrong (as Monica Ali has noted, the next closest to us is Australia with only 12 days detention without charge), but at least we have not taken another step to indefinite imprisonment without charge. Neither fortunately have we simply returned to anything like the policy of internment used by British forces in Northern Ireland August 1971 - December 1975 under which 1,981 people, predominantly Catholic (only 107 Protestants were held and none before 1973) were detained without trial on suspicion of being associated with terrorists. Often the wrong person would be arrested; 104 were released immediately when they were found out not to be the suspects. All those interneed received harsh treatment such as beatings. The reaction in terms of strikes and protests by the Catholic population forced the abandonment. The British had a record of internment going back to The Boer War (1899-1902) during which they interned the families of Boer guerilla fighters in concentration camps to put pressure on them to end the war.
The UK has these examples from its own history of imprisonment without charge, even if it is not well known by many people especially outside Northern Ireland. It is one of those files of 'secret history'. Why did the government think that moving towards such a policy in the UK again would not radicalise Muslims and other people in the country in just the way they hoped to combat. The USA blunders on in its policies on terrorism but the British who have dealt with terrorist groups from Malaysia to India to Palestine to Kenya to Ireland over the past sixty years should be better equipped. Either the collective memory of the state suffers from Alzheimer's disease, or, I imagine, many in office like the power over the lives of individuals that such legislation gives them. It might be targeted at activists but it also cows the general population. The inheritors of the Blair legacy like a compliant, obsequious population and get irritated when we are insufficiently humble. Interestingly Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said that the 42 days would be introduced in future 'if needed'. Does that mean, when the British interrogators prove to be 3.5 times less effective than Australian ones rather than 2.3 times less effective as at present? More likely it means when the government wants to look tough and aggressive or prove it is a friend, to say, a President McCain led USA. It is interesting that since the credit crunch fear of terrorism on the part of the government seems to have evaporated on both sides of the Atlantic as the economic problems have provided a different way to show how robust the government is.
'The Guardian' yesterday carried an interview with Stella Rimington, Director General of MI5 (Britain's Security Service dealing with internal threats) 1991-6 and her comments have appeared across British newspapers. I was glad that she spoke out in the way she did, though, unsurprisingly she is still a supporter of the British Establishment and its confidentiality, she does have a somewhat liberal tone (going beyond the simple libertarianism found in some British Conservatives) which one can see as the basis of Dame Judi Dench's portrayal of the character of M, head of MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service dealing with external threats), in the James Bond movies since 1995.
I can imagine many British people were glad when she said that the USA's response to the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 were a 'huge overreaction'. The USA behaved as if no-one had suffered terrorist attacks before or that somehow these ones were more evil than any other. As Rimington (1935-) noted she had been living in a country experiencing terrorist attacks for decades. You could argue that the British response in Northern Ireland, notably internment and shoot-to-kill policy of the British Army in 1982 bear similarities to what the USA is doing in Iraq. However, the British could or would not sustain an invasion of another country. The more I write this, the more I see in fact, there is less difference between the British policy in Northern Ireland and the post-2001 US policy in its 'war on terror'. I think it is basically that we see a difference because the British did not publicise it so widely nor adopt that moral tone which the Americans have forced not only on the people they are attacking but also on their allies and on neutral states. The UK is constantly being asked to prove that it is committed to the war on terror, for example, through adaptations to our passports and backing off when the USA detains British citizens at Guantanamo Bay.
You want to say to the USA 'get over it'. It is clear that the Bush administration was in fact waiting for an incident of the kind that happened on 11th September 2001 to introduce harsh legislation and larger funding for the security service. By adopting a very high moral tone it allowed the administration to excuse anything on that ground. This is why they keep re-emphasising the issue of the attacks even seven years later as that is what has allowed them to introduce torture as a method in the US legal system and to invade Iraq in order to secure its oil and keep it out of the hands of the Chinese. If 11th September events had not happened then the USA would have found something similar in order to give this legitimacy to their own actions, which even they knew were morally dubious so had to be trumped by something that they at least could suggest was some kind of ultimate evil.
Whilst the Bush administration used the 11th September attacks in this moral way, they have also commodified the attacks. This is partly as the viewing public of the World, especially the USA has no time to absorb complex messages and forgets them quickly. I always think it debases the deaths of the people in the Second World War to reduce it to 'WW2' and in the same way, if people really respected the victims, from many different nations who were killed on the 11th September 2001 they would not simply term it '9/11' which sounds like a lot number in a auction or simply an address in a building or just like the term '24/7'. It is a quick term which seems to be a key to unlock any form of policy behaviour however widespread and violating of civil liberties it is. Of course, the USA now as in previous decades sees itself as special as having the so-called 'manifest destiny'. I have mentioned the desire to exempt US soldiers from war crimes charges as if what they do will always be 'right'. This harks back to the medieval concept of 'holy' war (both from the Christian and Muslim perspectives) and that carrying it out in fact rather than leading to punishment in the afterlife as other violence would, improves what the warrior will receive when they arrive there. The US soldier who tortures, in George W. Bush's view of the World, as long as he does it to the 'bad' people, is to live forever in the glory of the 'Heaven' of a Conservative USA.
The use of the 11th September attacks to legitimate extreme policies, I feel, is Rimington's key concern. She believes it actually worsened the terrorist threat in the UK by alienating intelligent Muslim men from British society as we can see in the failed attacks on Glasgow airport carried out by doctors. I get angered by how the USA has behaved, its horribly self-righteous, patronising and myopic view (it paid no concern to what other people across the World have suffered, at times at the hands of the USA, just asked the Vietnamese) and how the UK has followed so closely in its footsteps to bring widespread suffering to so many more people. However, I am not a young man filled with anger at life anyway, and not believing in the afterlife I can only see the potential to suffer in detention by MI5. Others will have viewpoints which will give them the courage to discard those concerns for a chance to make their anger heard. If Rimington is not surprised that this is happening in the UK, why should the rest of us think it unusual that it is occurring, and not to see, like her, that the war on terror policy is worsening rather than improving things.
The other particularly UK issue that Rimington raises is the playground behaviour that the war on terror has brought to UK politics especially in parliament. Each party and many MPs try to outdo each other in how tough they are in responding to terrorism, pushing for harsher measures. Though Rimington does not develop this theme to the full, this kind of behaviour is very characteristic of what happened under the Nazi regime in Germany with different agencies in that regime seeking to outdo each other in how successful they were in killing Jews. This is apparent if you see reconstructions of the Wannsee Conference of 1942 where agency heads reported how many Jews they had eliminated (see 'Die Wansseekonferenz' (1984) a real time reconstruction, I saw the German version but it is also available in the UK under the title 'The Final Solution: The Wannsee Conference' and in the USA as 'Hitler's Final Solution: The Wannsee Conference'; see also 'Conspiracy' (2001) with British and American rather than German actors, I have not seen this one). This conference is what led to the extermination camps for not only Jews but also Roma, Poles and Russians.
I am not suggesting that the UK is leading to a policy of concentration camps, what I am warning, as Rimington has done, is that when politicians try to outbid each other in terms of showing how tough they are, especially when it comes to 'security' issues, it can lead to the most extreme policies and move a country down a path into areas of behaviour which up until then would have been seen as unacceptable. The 'norm' is shifted even faster by such outbidding, than even the initial extreme reactions would have done. This is because to say, 'I can go one better' tacitly accepts what has already established, without analysing it, and then says, 'well, this is not strong enough'. In fact, of course, the policy already in place may be too strong, but to say that gains no credit for the politican. Though the UK political system is a millions miles away from that of Nazi Germany, many of the same mechanics are in place in any political system whether it is democratic or not. The rhetoric of outbidding has not disappeared, but fortunately (!) the economic crisis has provided a new arena for it to be carried out, and one that impacts less on civil liberties.
The UK has these examples from its own history of imprisonment without charge, even if it is not well known by many people especially outside Northern Ireland. It is one of those files of 'secret history'. Why did the government think that moving towards such a policy in the UK again would not radicalise Muslims and other people in the country in just the way they hoped to combat. The USA blunders on in its policies on terrorism but the British who have dealt with terrorist groups from Malaysia to India to Palestine to Kenya to Ireland over the past sixty years should be better equipped. Either the collective memory of the state suffers from Alzheimer's disease, or, I imagine, many in office like the power over the lives of individuals that such legislation gives them. It might be targeted at activists but it also cows the general population. The inheritors of the Blair legacy like a compliant, obsequious population and get irritated when we are insufficiently humble. Interestingly Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said that the 42 days would be introduced in future 'if needed'. Does that mean, when the British interrogators prove to be 3.5 times less effective than Australian ones rather than 2.3 times less effective as at present? More likely it means when the government wants to look tough and aggressive or prove it is a friend, to say, a President McCain led USA. It is interesting that since the credit crunch fear of terrorism on the part of the government seems to have evaporated on both sides of the Atlantic as the economic problems have provided a different way to show how robust the government is.
'The Guardian' yesterday carried an interview with Stella Rimington, Director General of MI5 (Britain's Security Service dealing with internal threats) 1991-6 and her comments have appeared across British newspapers. I was glad that she spoke out in the way she did, though, unsurprisingly she is still a supporter of the British Establishment and its confidentiality, she does have a somewhat liberal tone (going beyond the simple libertarianism found in some British Conservatives) which one can see as the basis of Dame Judi Dench's portrayal of the character of M, head of MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service dealing with external threats), in the James Bond movies since 1995.
I can imagine many British people were glad when she said that the USA's response to the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 were a 'huge overreaction'. The USA behaved as if no-one had suffered terrorist attacks before or that somehow these ones were more evil than any other. As Rimington (1935-) noted she had been living in a country experiencing terrorist attacks for decades. You could argue that the British response in Northern Ireland, notably internment and shoot-to-kill policy of the British Army in 1982 bear similarities to what the USA is doing in Iraq. However, the British could or would not sustain an invasion of another country. The more I write this, the more I see in fact, there is less difference between the British policy in Northern Ireland and the post-2001 US policy in its 'war on terror'. I think it is basically that we see a difference because the British did not publicise it so widely nor adopt that moral tone which the Americans have forced not only on the people they are attacking but also on their allies and on neutral states. The UK is constantly being asked to prove that it is committed to the war on terror, for example, through adaptations to our passports and backing off when the USA detains British citizens at Guantanamo Bay.
You want to say to the USA 'get over it'. It is clear that the Bush administration was in fact waiting for an incident of the kind that happened on 11th September 2001 to introduce harsh legislation and larger funding for the security service. By adopting a very high moral tone it allowed the administration to excuse anything on that ground. This is why they keep re-emphasising the issue of the attacks even seven years later as that is what has allowed them to introduce torture as a method in the US legal system and to invade Iraq in order to secure its oil and keep it out of the hands of the Chinese. If 11th September events had not happened then the USA would have found something similar in order to give this legitimacy to their own actions, which even they knew were morally dubious so had to be trumped by something that they at least could suggest was some kind of ultimate evil.
Whilst the Bush administration used the 11th September attacks in this moral way, they have also commodified the attacks. This is partly as the viewing public of the World, especially the USA has no time to absorb complex messages and forgets them quickly. I always think it debases the deaths of the people in the Second World War to reduce it to 'WW2' and in the same way, if people really respected the victims, from many different nations who were killed on the 11th September 2001 they would not simply term it '9/11' which sounds like a lot number in a auction or simply an address in a building or just like the term '24/7'. It is a quick term which seems to be a key to unlock any form of policy behaviour however widespread and violating of civil liberties it is. Of course, the USA now as in previous decades sees itself as special as having the so-called 'manifest destiny'. I have mentioned the desire to exempt US soldiers from war crimes charges as if what they do will always be 'right'. This harks back to the medieval concept of 'holy' war (both from the Christian and Muslim perspectives) and that carrying it out in fact rather than leading to punishment in the afterlife as other violence would, improves what the warrior will receive when they arrive there. The US soldier who tortures, in George W. Bush's view of the World, as long as he does it to the 'bad' people, is to live forever in the glory of the 'Heaven' of a Conservative USA.
The use of the 11th September attacks to legitimate extreme policies, I feel, is Rimington's key concern. She believes it actually worsened the terrorist threat in the UK by alienating intelligent Muslim men from British society as we can see in the failed attacks on Glasgow airport carried out by doctors. I get angered by how the USA has behaved, its horribly self-righteous, patronising and myopic view (it paid no concern to what other people across the World have suffered, at times at the hands of the USA, just asked the Vietnamese) and how the UK has followed so closely in its footsteps to bring widespread suffering to so many more people. However, I am not a young man filled with anger at life anyway, and not believing in the afterlife I can only see the potential to suffer in detention by MI5. Others will have viewpoints which will give them the courage to discard those concerns for a chance to make their anger heard. If Rimington is not surprised that this is happening in the UK, why should the rest of us think it unusual that it is occurring, and not to see, like her, that the war on terror policy is worsening rather than improving things.
The other particularly UK issue that Rimington raises is the playground behaviour that the war on terror has brought to UK politics especially in parliament. Each party and many MPs try to outdo each other in how tough they are in responding to terrorism, pushing for harsher measures. Though Rimington does not develop this theme to the full, this kind of behaviour is very characteristic of what happened under the Nazi regime in Germany with different agencies in that regime seeking to outdo each other in how successful they were in killing Jews. This is apparent if you see reconstructions of the Wannsee Conference of 1942 where agency heads reported how many Jews they had eliminated (see 'Die Wansseekonferenz' (1984) a real time reconstruction, I saw the German version but it is also available in the UK under the title 'The Final Solution: The Wannsee Conference' and in the USA as 'Hitler's Final Solution: The Wannsee Conference'; see also 'Conspiracy' (2001) with British and American rather than German actors, I have not seen this one). This conference is what led to the extermination camps for not only Jews but also Roma, Poles and Russians.
I am not suggesting that the UK is leading to a policy of concentration camps, what I am warning, as Rimington has done, is that when politicians try to outbid each other in terms of showing how tough they are, especially when it comes to 'security' issues, it can lead to the most extreme policies and move a country down a path into areas of behaviour which up until then would have been seen as unacceptable. The 'norm' is shifted even faster by such outbidding, than even the initial extreme reactions would have done. This is because to say, 'I can go one better' tacitly accepts what has already established, without analysing it, and then says, 'well, this is not strong enough'. In fact, of course, the policy already in place may be too strong, but to say that gains no credit for the politican. Though the UK political system is a millions miles away from that of Nazi Germany, many of the same mechanics are in place in any political system whether it is democratic or not. The rhetoric of outbidding has not disappeared, but fortunately (!) the economic crisis has provided a new arena for it to be carried out, and one that impacts less on civil liberties.
Friday, 15 February 2008
Britain as a 'Soft Touch' for Terrorism
I should keep a log of how many months pass between the UK newspapers being filled with stories about how the country is open house for terrorist activities and thus how we need to have longer terms of imprisonment without charge and we need to bar immigrants and we should all have identity cards. This one seems to be a reaction to thought of cutting back UK expenditure on jobs in intelligence bodies. At the end of the Cold War these bodies found themselves without much of a job so they first hitched themselves to the issue of organised crime and then since 11th September 2001 they have had an ever re-newing reason for the existence and for large expenditure on them. The last major terrorist incident in the UK was the 7th July 2005 bomb in London and the failed attempt to run a car into Glasgow airport on 30th June 2007.
US intelligence bodies invented al-Qaeda because funding in the USA has to be targeted at an organisation rather than individuals. There is nothing like al-Qaeda that is perceived by the bulk of the population, a multi-national terror corporation modelled on the lines of SPECTRE in the James Bond movies. Rather there are individual terrorist groups, usually very small, that sometimes co-operate but often work in contradictory directions. Some of the ones uncovered in the UK engaged in training which even British intelligence officials acknowledged would not benefit these terrorists at all. Many of young men who in the USA would be in the various militia and like running around pretending to be tough because they can achieve very little in their lives. The doctors behind the attack on Glasgow airport also suffered from similar inadequacies. Everyone loves being in a secret club and as happened with the left-wing terror groups of the 1970s such as the RAF in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, it often becomes an end in itself though leading to terrible consequences.
To perceive a global conspiracy is as misplaced as racist warnings against the 'Yellow Peril' in the 19th century. At the same time as governments keep telling us to fear small terrorist cells they are quite happy to go along with the Chinese government which has millions of people under arrest and adds to that number on a weekly basis, supports dictatorships like that in Sudan and habitually uses torture in its system. Surely the world is at more risk for the 'respectable' Chinese government than it is from small groups of hotheads.
So if the UK is now a 'soft touch' for terrorism what was it in the past. In the 1970s-1990s the UK was plagued by bombings by Irish Republican bodies. Suspected Irish terrorists were barred from coming to mainland Britain, the SAS (Special Air Service) operated an assassination policy of these terrorists in Ireland and Gibraltar, there was internment of terrorist suspects often in inhumane conditions not that different from Station X at Guantanamo Bay, and even innocent people like the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six were locked up on flimsy evidence and kept in prison for years. There was censorship of political parties which would not deny terrorism. The British Army was based in large numbers in Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary drove around in armoured cars and were the only part of the British police force in which every officer was armed. Was this approach not tough enough? It certainly did not stop the bombings either in Britain or Northern Ireland. It was only when these things
The latest 'warning' from the Royal United Services Institute about the UK points to all the usual solutions: more money for the intelligence bodies, a strong Cabinet committee (often called a junta in other countries) of the military and political leaders to co-ordinate the reaction and more money to all the Armed Forces. Yet the most alarming element of this report is that supposedly Britain's multi-cultural approach makes Britain more vulnerable to attack. Well, that is fine then, lets move towards segregation, say along the lines adopted by South Africa in the apartheid era or the USA in the 1950s, because that policy did very well in having peace and reducing the number of deaths (this is a sarcastic statement). Britain is already suffering from insufficient multi-culturalism, look at areas where segregation has de facto happened, such as in the Bradford riots in July 2001.
The way to reduce terrorism is to make the people who live in a country feel they have something invested in it. If you exclude them further, then of course many will throw their lot in with those who are trying to make their view of society the dominant one. This is what happened in the 1970s in Italy and West Germany when people felt society and politics was all controlled by the rich and powerful and the only way to counter them was with violence. Of course the buzz of being a terrorist soon takes over, but that was what motivated these terrorists, and more importantly, the support system of hundreds more people that built up around the core of actual terrorists.
The other thing is powerlessness. As I have noted before, anger is really common in the UK because so many people of every kind of background feel that no-one will listen to them. Is it then suprising that some people take this anger further into violent attacks? Terrorism takes many forms and we see it with people attacking speed cameras. The government is reducing the voice that everyone has in the UK and so people are angry. If some sectors of society feels that are also facing prejudice and in particular access to opportunities, then their ears are going to be open to those who tell them there is another way and it can be won with violence.
The other point about these scares is they further erode the things we are actually trying to protect. If we move to a situation with censorship, restricted freedom of movement, segregation of different sectors of the population, detention without trial, detention camps, the use of evidence derived from torture, armed para-military bodies, a junta at the centre of government, then we might as well simply become China or North Korea or Saudi Arabia or Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Taliban Afghanistan because we will have turned our back on democracy and civil liberties and created just the kind of society actually many of the terrorists want. Our government is advancing the cause of the terrorists better than they are doing it themselves. Of course these lords and field marshals want such a structure so they can be in power, but for the rest of us we lose out far faster than even if terrorism becomes as frequent as it was in the early 1970s.
Britain is no more of a 'soft touch' for terrorists than it was in the 1970s. However, the rush to establish a segregated, authoritarian Britain which seems to be the mission of so many people in power at present, will exacerbate violence and terror of all kinds. A lack of multi-culturalism is to blame for many problems and its true achievement would actually lift a lot of the tensions that these commentators blame. Of course, they want the opposite, for us to be divided against our neighbours and fearful, because a divided and frightened society is much easier for them to control. Britain is a soft touch for would-be dictators.
US intelligence bodies invented al-Qaeda because funding in the USA has to be targeted at an organisation rather than individuals. There is nothing like al-Qaeda that is perceived by the bulk of the population, a multi-national terror corporation modelled on the lines of SPECTRE in the James Bond movies. Rather there are individual terrorist groups, usually very small, that sometimes co-operate but often work in contradictory directions. Some of the ones uncovered in the UK engaged in training which even British intelligence officials acknowledged would not benefit these terrorists at all. Many of young men who in the USA would be in the various militia and like running around pretending to be tough because they can achieve very little in their lives. The doctors behind the attack on Glasgow airport also suffered from similar inadequacies. Everyone loves being in a secret club and as happened with the left-wing terror groups of the 1970s such as the RAF in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, it often becomes an end in itself though leading to terrible consequences.
To perceive a global conspiracy is as misplaced as racist warnings against the 'Yellow Peril' in the 19th century. At the same time as governments keep telling us to fear small terrorist cells they are quite happy to go along with the Chinese government which has millions of people under arrest and adds to that number on a weekly basis, supports dictatorships like that in Sudan and habitually uses torture in its system. Surely the world is at more risk for the 'respectable' Chinese government than it is from small groups of hotheads.
So if the UK is now a 'soft touch' for terrorism what was it in the past. In the 1970s-1990s the UK was plagued by bombings by Irish Republican bodies. Suspected Irish terrorists were barred from coming to mainland Britain, the SAS (Special Air Service) operated an assassination policy of these terrorists in Ireland and Gibraltar, there was internment of terrorist suspects often in inhumane conditions not that different from Station X at Guantanamo Bay, and even innocent people like the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six were locked up on flimsy evidence and kept in prison for years. There was censorship of political parties which would not deny terrorism. The British Army was based in large numbers in Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary drove around in armoured cars and were the only part of the British police force in which every officer was armed. Was this approach not tough enough? It certainly did not stop the bombings either in Britain or Northern Ireland. It was only when these things
The latest 'warning' from the Royal United Services Institute about the UK points to all the usual solutions: more money for the intelligence bodies, a strong Cabinet committee (often called a junta in other countries) of the military and political leaders to co-ordinate the reaction and more money to all the Armed Forces. Yet the most alarming element of this report is that supposedly Britain's multi-cultural approach makes Britain more vulnerable to attack. Well, that is fine then, lets move towards segregation, say along the lines adopted by South Africa in the apartheid era or the USA in the 1950s, because that policy did very well in having peace and reducing the number of deaths (this is a sarcastic statement). Britain is already suffering from insufficient multi-culturalism, look at areas where segregation has de facto happened, such as in the Bradford riots in July 2001.
The way to reduce terrorism is to make the people who live in a country feel they have something invested in it. If you exclude them further, then of course many will throw their lot in with those who are trying to make their view of society the dominant one. This is what happened in the 1970s in Italy and West Germany when people felt society and politics was all controlled by the rich and powerful and the only way to counter them was with violence. Of course the buzz of being a terrorist soon takes over, but that was what motivated these terrorists, and more importantly, the support system of hundreds more people that built up around the core of actual terrorists.
The other thing is powerlessness. As I have noted before, anger is really common in the UK because so many people of every kind of background feel that no-one will listen to them. Is it then suprising that some people take this anger further into violent attacks? Terrorism takes many forms and we see it with people attacking speed cameras. The government is reducing the voice that everyone has in the UK and so people are angry. If some sectors of society feels that are also facing prejudice and in particular access to opportunities, then their ears are going to be open to those who tell them there is another way and it can be won with violence.
The other point about these scares is they further erode the things we are actually trying to protect. If we move to a situation with censorship, restricted freedom of movement, segregation of different sectors of the population, detention without trial, detention camps, the use of evidence derived from torture, armed para-military bodies, a junta at the centre of government, then we might as well simply become China or North Korea or Saudi Arabia or Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Taliban Afghanistan because we will have turned our back on democracy and civil liberties and created just the kind of society actually many of the terrorists want. Our government is advancing the cause of the terrorists better than they are doing it themselves. Of course these lords and field marshals want such a structure so they can be in power, but for the rest of us we lose out far faster than even if terrorism becomes as frequent as it was in the early 1970s.
Britain is no more of a 'soft touch' for terrorists than it was in the 1970s. However, the rush to establish a segregated, authoritarian Britain which seems to be the mission of so many people in power at present, will exacerbate violence and terror of all kinds. A lack of multi-culturalism is to blame for many problems and its true achievement would actually lift a lot of the tensions that these commentators blame. Of course, they want the opposite, for us to be divided against our neighbours and fearful, because a divided and frightened society is much easier for them to control. Britain is a soft touch for would-be dictators.
Saturday, 10 November 2007
Why 'The Siege' is Not a 'Daft Thriller'
I seem to be in a mood for writing about movies at the moment. Inspired by CP's comments on the 'what if?'s around Shakespeare I am currently working on a big posting about covers of lost books, so you will have to be patient for that, but in the meantime I will continue throwing out tablets of lead about movies. This one is a very much eye-to-blog one. Sometimes I ponder over an issue for weeks, sometimes they are even ideas I have had floating around for years, but in this case it was inspired by something I read just this morning in the UK newspaper, 'The Guardian'. I only get time to read one newspaper per week and the Saturday edition of this one is the one I choose. It has a strong section about entertainment media and though I now only watch 1-2 television programmes a week (a sharp contrast to just 3-4 years ago) I like to keep abreast of what is on, plus all the stuff about computer games and movies (which I generally rent on DVD, again in contrast to the early to mid-2000s when I went to the cinema 3-4 times per month). Makes me sound rather reclusive these days, but I suppose commuting 400 miles per week rather than the 50 miles per week I used to do has a large part in that.
Anyway, I generally agree with 'The Guardian' reviews of movies being shown on television. There is a little bit of schizophrenia obvious, because the person who writes the 'Film Choice' section for the television guide often disagrees with the person who writes the little reviews in the programme listings, it is clear their tastes are very different and I tend to agree more with the former than the latter. The listings reviewer, probably because of having less space, falls very much into pat assumptions, they are the kind of person that describes 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' as 'thriller from anti-Semitic author, John Buchan' a line that I have challenged in an earlier posting. Anyway today their comment on 'The Siege' (1999), which is showing in the coming week on British television as a 'daft thriller' is a terrible blunder. In this posting I will say why and if you have not seen it why you should watch it.
The film is about a terrorist attack in New York investigated by FBI officers Anthony Hubbard played by Denzel Washington and Frank Haddad played by Tony Shaloub, who importantly is an Arab-American. It soon becomes apparent that the attack has been caused by muslim militants who go on to threaten other attacks and the thriller element is how the FBI track down the terrorists. However, what gives the film more depth than the usual action thriller is what begins to happen in New York. Regulations become increasingly strict and Arab-Americans in the city are interned, including Haddad's son (this is reminiscent of the USA's interning of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War) and ultimately martial law is imposed on the city under the control of Major-General Devereaux played by Bruce Willis. Hubbard has to resolve the situation without descending into barbaric approaches to respond to barbarism, whereas Deveraux begins personally torturing suspects. In addition there is the interference of the CIA in the form of Elise Kraft played by Annette Bening and it becomes clear that the unit attacking New York was trained by the CIA and feeling betrayed has come to get some recompense for how they have been used.
I have probably given away too much of the plot, but I feel that is important in terms of discussing the film and why it is not 'daft'. The terrorist action does not approach the scale of the 11th September 2001 attacks on New York but in 1999 no-one who predicted such vast terrorist attacks would have been believed in the USA which at the time, despite the earlier bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, still felt itself invulnerable to foreign terrorism (as opposed to domestic terrorism as in the Oklahoma bombing). The film was mainstream, I saw it in 1999 in Leicester Square, the premier location for cinemas in the UK. This partly stemmed from having four big names in the film. However, by being mainstream it was able to transmit and discuss important questions to the viewing public, especially in the USA, (and people who would not pay to see a Michael Moore movie or DVD) about compromising civil liberties when one is seeking to control terrorism and how the involvement of the military can easily escalate. If we look at the USA's approach to 'homeland security' and its use of torture at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, we can see that predictions in 'The Siege' were not out of step with what happened. In addition, an important element, is that the USA has to realise that for decades it has been arming and training people across the world to fight in its interest, and has often lied to them and actually exploited situations for its rather than their benefit and a time has come when it has to face up to such actions. The reason why the Mujahadeen was able to seize power in Afghanistan was because they had been trained and equipped by the USA. Insurgents in Iraq are often using weapons sold to Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s in order to fight Iran.
'The Siege' was not a box office success, probably because it challenged rather than comforted the US audience. If there had been a delay of 3 years in its production I doubt it would have ever been released. It was one of the most rented DVDs following the 11th September 2001 attacks and yet, again, I am sure that many renters were suprised that it did not echo the very simplistic, jingoistic attitudes coming out of the USA at the time. 'The Siege' is not a great movie, but it should not be simply written off as a 'daft thriller', it is entertaining, has genuine tension and more than that, more than the large bulk of contemporary movies, actually connects into current developments in the USA and the wider world in an accessible way.
Anyway, I generally agree with 'The Guardian' reviews of movies being shown on television. There is a little bit of schizophrenia obvious, because the person who writes the 'Film Choice' section for the television guide often disagrees with the person who writes the little reviews in the programme listings, it is clear their tastes are very different and I tend to agree more with the former than the latter. The listings reviewer, probably because of having less space, falls very much into pat assumptions, they are the kind of person that describes 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' as 'thriller from anti-Semitic author, John Buchan' a line that I have challenged in an earlier posting. Anyway today their comment on 'The Siege' (1999), which is showing in the coming week on British television as a 'daft thriller' is a terrible blunder. In this posting I will say why and if you have not seen it why you should watch it.
The film is about a terrorist attack in New York investigated by FBI officers Anthony Hubbard played by Denzel Washington and Frank Haddad played by Tony Shaloub, who importantly is an Arab-American. It soon becomes apparent that the attack has been caused by muslim militants who go on to threaten other attacks and the thriller element is how the FBI track down the terrorists. However, what gives the film more depth than the usual action thriller is what begins to happen in New York. Regulations become increasingly strict and Arab-Americans in the city are interned, including Haddad's son (this is reminiscent of the USA's interning of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War) and ultimately martial law is imposed on the city under the control of Major-General Devereaux played by Bruce Willis. Hubbard has to resolve the situation without descending into barbaric approaches to respond to barbarism, whereas Deveraux begins personally torturing suspects. In addition there is the interference of the CIA in the form of Elise Kraft played by Annette Bening and it becomes clear that the unit attacking New York was trained by the CIA and feeling betrayed has come to get some recompense for how they have been used.
I have probably given away too much of the plot, but I feel that is important in terms of discussing the film and why it is not 'daft'. The terrorist action does not approach the scale of the 11th September 2001 attacks on New York but in 1999 no-one who predicted such vast terrorist attacks would have been believed in the USA which at the time, despite the earlier bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, still felt itself invulnerable to foreign terrorism (as opposed to domestic terrorism as in the Oklahoma bombing). The film was mainstream, I saw it in 1999 in Leicester Square, the premier location for cinemas in the UK. This partly stemmed from having four big names in the film. However, by being mainstream it was able to transmit and discuss important questions to the viewing public, especially in the USA, (and people who would not pay to see a Michael Moore movie or DVD) about compromising civil liberties when one is seeking to control terrorism and how the involvement of the military can easily escalate. If we look at the USA's approach to 'homeland security' and its use of torture at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, we can see that predictions in 'The Siege' were not out of step with what happened. In addition, an important element, is that the USA has to realise that for decades it has been arming and training people across the world to fight in its interest, and has often lied to them and actually exploited situations for its rather than their benefit and a time has come when it has to face up to such actions. The reason why the Mujahadeen was able to seize power in Afghanistan was because they had been trained and equipped by the USA. Insurgents in Iraq are often using weapons sold to Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s in order to fight Iran.
'The Siege' was not a box office success, probably because it challenged rather than comforted the US audience. If there had been a delay of 3 years in its production I doubt it would have ever been released. It was one of the most rented DVDs following the 11th September 2001 attacks and yet, again, I am sure that many renters were suprised that it did not echo the very simplistic, jingoistic attitudes coming out of the USA at the time. 'The Siege' is not a great movie, but it should not be simply written off as a 'daft thriller', it is entertaining, has genuine tension and more than that, more than the large bulk of contemporary movies, actually connects into current developments in the USA and the wider world in an accessible way.
Thursday, 26 July 2007
Brown Begins To Slip
Well, I suppose expecting Brown and his gang to keep up the good news of decent policies for a whole month was a little much to expect. However, the announcement today of the construction of the two largest aircraft carriers Britain has ever owned and the extension of the right to detain people without charge from 28 days (which was iniquitous anyway) to 56 days, reveals that he is no different from his predecessors and cannot shake off the obsessions with war and authoritarian control of the state. If you cannot find sufficient evidence to charge someone within a week of holding them prisoner let alone a month or two months, what is the point in holding them. This policy smacks of the kind of 'protective custody' the Nazis use, i.e. putting people in concentration camps. I could tolerate arms expenditure on the grounds that it has created secure employment for a few thousand people in Portsmouth until 2016 but authoritarian detention policies which have no impact on crime or terrorism are simply unnecessary and show that, unfortunately, Brown shares much of Blair's perverse view of how we should be ruled.
Thursday, 10 May 2007
Combating Terrorism - Responding to whose Agenda?
In the 1970s-90s, West Germany and then reunified Germany suffered a series of terrorist attacks from a group calling itself the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction) a group set up in 1970 and commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang after two of its founder members. The group received funds from the East German secret police, the Stasi, and in the early 1970s had training from the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organisation). The group espoused radical left-wing policies though it can be argued that they were really simply spoilt rich people who got excitement from the bank robberies and assassinations, usually of businessmen, that they carried out. The group formally ended in 1998, partly as the world had moved on and they could no longer use the excuse of a need to promote a revolutionary and/or Communist society.
The Gang claimed that many of their actions in the 1970s were about challenging the authoritarian state that they saw West Germany to be. The result was that their actions actually pushed West Germany more towards authoritarianism: people with left-wing leanings, even if not supporters of the Gang, were removed from public sector positions such as the post office; the West German border police and police for the protection of the constitution (as these were federal as opposed to Land, i.e. regional, police forces) were strengthened and anti-terrorist units were created such as GSG9; the law was changed so that lawyers felt to be sympathetic to the gang could be excluded from any trials. When a number of the Gang were captured in 1977 three were murdered in prison and one severely injured. They had been sentenced to life imprisonment, West Germany not having the death penalty, but it was clear that the German state preferred to kill these convicts without any legal process, a so-called 'extra-judicial execution'. Thus, by the 1980s the Gang had effectively made West Germany more the kind of the regime it had argued it was from the start than if they had done nothing. All democratic states face the danger of losing what they seek to defend from terrorists.
One reason why there was bitterness in Europe over the American reaction to the September 11th attacks was that the Americans seemed to think that they were the only people who had ever suffered such things. Britain had been experiencing bombings throughout the 1960s-1980s and Northern Ireland after that too, killing and maiming numerous people. As a child in the 1970s I remember being separated from my mother so that she and I could both be searched, like all the other visitors, for weapons when we went to the Tower of London where there is still a plaque to mark where tourists had been killed by a bomb. I witnessed the Docklands bomb of 1996 from the window of my flat and I have known people caught up in the London bus bomb and Manchester bomb of the same year, this was all before anyone had even dreamed of the term 'al-Qaeda'. Countries like the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain have had such incidents repeatedly over the last few decades from various groups and yet we did not whine and expect the whole world to follow us in using the incidents to go off at a tangent and kill unrelated people. Given how the USA had behaved, particularly in carpet bombing Vietnamese people over so many years (and the mutations of Vietnamese children due to chemicals dropped by the American forces continues even now) it seemed very rich for them to then expect everyone to be so sympathetic to them about a single incident. Do not get me wrong, what happened was tragic, but that does not excuse the Bush regime's subsequent behaviour.
Adopting a sober reaction to terrorism is always hard for democracies. The UK fell into behaviour such as internment and the 'shoot-to-kill' policy of SAS (Special Air Service, the most famous UK special forces unit) against IRA (Irish Republican Army, since the late 1960s usually referring to the Provisional IRA or 'Provos' guerilla group as opposed to the broader organisation of the 1920s) suspects. However, what is apparent is under the cover of responding to terrorism, governments take the opportunity to extend their control over the population. As with the West German example at the start of this post, such a clampdown affects far more than any suspects. In the USA you had the introduction of the Department of Homeland Security, effective censorship of dissenting voices, the suspension of due process for suspects thrown without trial into the concentration camp at Gunatanamo Bay and so on. The UK has adopted similar policies allowing for longer detention without charge or trial, the greater monitoring of the population, the introduction of identity cards and so on.
You may argue that to defend democracy needs harsh measures. However, in turn you are doing more damage to democracy than the terrorists themselves. Even experts argue that things such as identity cards would not have stopped the 7th July bombers in London. Yet, the powers implemented to stop terrorism can easily be turned on others, for example, anyone protesting against the war in Iraq or even about a by-pass being built over a woodland. As has been proven in states like 1930s Germany, by the time people generally realise what freedoms they are losing they are in no position any longer to do anything about it. Defending democracy needs democracy to be strong, its institutions to stand for fairness and democracy, to unite, not divide a people.
So, we have the erosion of democracy in the name of defending it. No-one can deny that there is terrorist activity in the UK, but certainly not of the scale that we have been warned about repeatedly since 2001. A scared population is a compliant one and that is what governments like. To some degree most Britons have seen so much of terrorism in their lives that the 'warnings' just wash over them, in contrast, it seems to many Americans, who have experienced far fewer incidents of this kind. I do not believe al-Qaeda exists, certainly in the form it is portrayed with Osama bin Laden sitting like a villain from a James Bond movie hidded in an underground base, watching a map showing all his cells operating across the world. Al-Qaeda is like a brand that local terrorist groups can attach themselves to; it is a short hand for use by government and the media but one that fails to reflect the complexity and the diverse motivations of those who turn to terrorism. This is why, if we simply focus on rooting out al-Qaeda we will come nowhere near to ending Islamist-influenced terrorism. Watch 'The Power of Nightmares' series from the BBC, it is very good on these issues.
The current governments of the UK and USA, though, have not stopped at simply making their own countries more authoritarian, they have found an additional use for 'the war on terror' and that is, to advance economic and geo-political goals. Everyone knows that Saddam Hussain was no supporter of Islamist terrorism. He ran a secular state and was having to keep the different Muslim sects in his country in check. Support for that kind of terrorism was more likely to come from the British and American ally, Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussain had been an ally of the West during the Cold War and after the Ayatollah's regime came to power in Iran in 1979, but by the 1990s his purpose was over. For the West he was becoming too nationalistic (this is the time when Western powers usually intervene, for example, with Nasser in Egypt in 1956) and of course, as I have discussed in the post 'Oil. What's it Good For? War!' the USA needed to secure a good source of oil for itself that the Chinese were not involved with yet. So, the war on terror was used as an excuse for a neo-colonial war to secure resources, so familiar in the 19th century, but seemingly less common now, or so we thought ...
Back to the UK perspective. I think Tony Blair, poor man, did genuinely believe that he was fighting a major threat in Iraq. He liked the fact that the terror 'threat' allowed him to be stricter in the UK, because, as I noted in '10 Years of the Blair Party', he has always had some authoritarian tendencies. However, he also allowed himself to be convinced, not by his own intelligence services, but by material from them distorted by political players, that Iraq was a threat. In addition, Saddam Hussain was a cruel dictator who needed to fall, but the West had already failed at that once in 1991 and while they actually removed the man this time, they unleashed all the forces that his strength had kept in check, all for the sake, not of countering terrorism because that has increased since the war, but for the oil reserves his regime sat on. In reviews of Blair's career today, Iraq overshadows everything else he did. This is fair, it was his greatest blunder, the blood of thousands of people is on his hands and it showed that despite his charisma and his belief that he controlled events, he was a weak leader, too easily influenced by one of the most brainless politicians a democracy has suffered. It showed, too, at the end of the day, he lacked the confidence in himself to divert Bush's plan. In 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee (unintentionally turning into a bit of a hero on these pages) flew to the USA and successfully persuaded President Truman not to drop atomic bombs on North Korea. Though this is an overlooked historical incident, it no doubt saved the fates of millions and a lot of the Korean peninsula is not a wasteland. Blair would have gone down in history if he could have acted as such a brake on Bush, but instead decided to not only roll over for his objectives but actively support such a foolish, and probably illegal, step.
The Gang claimed that many of their actions in the 1970s were about challenging the authoritarian state that they saw West Germany to be. The result was that their actions actually pushed West Germany more towards authoritarianism: people with left-wing leanings, even if not supporters of the Gang, were removed from public sector positions such as the post office; the West German border police and police for the protection of the constitution (as these were federal as opposed to Land, i.e. regional, police forces) were strengthened and anti-terrorist units were created such as GSG9; the law was changed so that lawyers felt to be sympathetic to the gang could be excluded from any trials. When a number of the Gang were captured in 1977 three were murdered in prison and one severely injured. They had been sentenced to life imprisonment, West Germany not having the death penalty, but it was clear that the German state preferred to kill these convicts without any legal process, a so-called 'extra-judicial execution'. Thus, by the 1980s the Gang had effectively made West Germany more the kind of the regime it had argued it was from the start than if they had done nothing. All democratic states face the danger of losing what they seek to defend from terrorists.
One reason why there was bitterness in Europe over the American reaction to the September 11th attacks was that the Americans seemed to think that they were the only people who had ever suffered such things. Britain had been experiencing bombings throughout the 1960s-1980s and Northern Ireland after that too, killing and maiming numerous people. As a child in the 1970s I remember being separated from my mother so that she and I could both be searched, like all the other visitors, for weapons when we went to the Tower of London where there is still a plaque to mark where tourists had been killed by a bomb. I witnessed the Docklands bomb of 1996 from the window of my flat and I have known people caught up in the London bus bomb and Manchester bomb of the same year, this was all before anyone had even dreamed of the term 'al-Qaeda'. Countries like the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain have had such incidents repeatedly over the last few decades from various groups and yet we did not whine and expect the whole world to follow us in using the incidents to go off at a tangent and kill unrelated people. Given how the USA had behaved, particularly in carpet bombing Vietnamese people over so many years (and the mutations of Vietnamese children due to chemicals dropped by the American forces continues even now) it seemed very rich for them to then expect everyone to be so sympathetic to them about a single incident. Do not get me wrong, what happened was tragic, but that does not excuse the Bush regime's subsequent behaviour.
Adopting a sober reaction to terrorism is always hard for democracies. The UK fell into behaviour such as internment and the 'shoot-to-kill' policy of SAS (Special Air Service, the most famous UK special forces unit) against IRA (Irish Republican Army, since the late 1960s usually referring to the Provisional IRA or 'Provos' guerilla group as opposed to the broader organisation of the 1920s) suspects. However, what is apparent is under the cover of responding to terrorism, governments take the opportunity to extend their control over the population. As with the West German example at the start of this post, such a clampdown affects far more than any suspects. In the USA you had the introduction of the Department of Homeland Security, effective censorship of dissenting voices, the suspension of due process for suspects thrown without trial into the concentration camp at Gunatanamo Bay and so on. The UK has adopted similar policies allowing for longer detention without charge or trial, the greater monitoring of the population, the introduction of identity cards and so on.
You may argue that to defend democracy needs harsh measures. However, in turn you are doing more damage to democracy than the terrorists themselves. Even experts argue that things such as identity cards would not have stopped the 7th July bombers in London. Yet, the powers implemented to stop terrorism can easily be turned on others, for example, anyone protesting against the war in Iraq or even about a by-pass being built over a woodland. As has been proven in states like 1930s Germany, by the time people generally realise what freedoms they are losing they are in no position any longer to do anything about it. Defending democracy needs democracy to be strong, its institutions to stand for fairness and democracy, to unite, not divide a people.
So, we have the erosion of democracy in the name of defending it. No-one can deny that there is terrorist activity in the UK, but certainly not of the scale that we have been warned about repeatedly since 2001. A scared population is a compliant one and that is what governments like. To some degree most Britons have seen so much of terrorism in their lives that the 'warnings' just wash over them, in contrast, it seems to many Americans, who have experienced far fewer incidents of this kind. I do not believe al-Qaeda exists, certainly in the form it is portrayed with Osama bin Laden sitting like a villain from a James Bond movie hidded in an underground base, watching a map showing all his cells operating across the world. Al-Qaeda is like a brand that local terrorist groups can attach themselves to; it is a short hand for use by government and the media but one that fails to reflect the complexity and the diverse motivations of those who turn to terrorism. This is why, if we simply focus on rooting out al-Qaeda we will come nowhere near to ending Islamist-influenced terrorism. Watch 'The Power of Nightmares' series from the BBC, it is very good on these issues.
The current governments of the UK and USA, though, have not stopped at simply making their own countries more authoritarian, they have found an additional use for 'the war on terror' and that is, to advance economic and geo-political goals. Everyone knows that Saddam Hussain was no supporter of Islamist terrorism. He ran a secular state and was having to keep the different Muslim sects in his country in check. Support for that kind of terrorism was more likely to come from the British and American ally, Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussain had been an ally of the West during the Cold War and after the Ayatollah's regime came to power in Iran in 1979, but by the 1990s his purpose was over. For the West he was becoming too nationalistic (this is the time when Western powers usually intervene, for example, with Nasser in Egypt in 1956) and of course, as I have discussed in the post 'Oil. What's it Good For? War!' the USA needed to secure a good source of oil for itself that the Chinese were not involved with yet. So, the war on terror was used as an excuse for a neo-colonial war to secure resources, so familiar in the 19th century, but seemingly less common now, or so we thought ...
Back to the UK perspective. I think Tony Blair, poor man, did genuinely believe that he was fighting a major threat in Iraq. He liked the fact that the terror 'threat' allowed him to be stricter in the UK, because, as I noted in '10 Years of the Blair Party', he has always had some authoritarian tendencies. However, he also allowed himself to be convinced, not by his own intelligence services, but by material from them distorted by political players, that Iraq was a threat. In addition, Saddam Hussain was a cruel dictator who needed to fall, but the West had already failed at that once in 1991 and while they actually removed the man this time, they unleashed all the forces that his strength had kept in check, all for the sake, not of countering terrorism because that has increased since the war, but for the oil reserves his regime sat on. In reviews of Blair's career today, Iraq overshadows everything else he did. This is fair, it was his greatest blunder, the blood of thousands of people is on his hands and it showed that despite his charisma and his belief that he controlled events, he was a weak leader, too easily influenced by one of the most brainless politicians a democracy has suffered. It showed, too, at the end of the day, he lacked the confidence in himself to divert Bush's plan. In 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee (unintentionally turning into a bit of a hero on these pages) flew to the USA and successfully persuaded President Truman not to drop atomic bombs on North Korea. Though this is an overlooked historical incident, it no doubt saved the fates of millions and a lot of the Korean peninsula is not a wasteland. Blair would have gone down in history if he could have acted as such a brake on Bush, but instead decided to not only roll over for his objectives but actively support such a foolish, and probably illegal, step.
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