Revolutionary_Anti-Fascist
19th December 2005, 12:42
What is your opinion on the counter-terrosism laws?
Well this is my opinion as an english essay I had to do:
Is there any need for anti-terrorism legislation?
There is almost no one on the face of the earth who hasn’t seen the footage of the planes crashing into the world trade centre and the resulting aftermath. Within the next few weeks the U.S senate passed a law that would set the trend for the rest of the world: The Patriot Act.
The Patriot act gives the F.B.I, Police and C.I.A the right to access any personal files held on you ranging from medical records to ,the most controversial, your detailed borrower history from the Library and you don‘t even have to be notified. It also gives them the power to bug your telephone and to seize personal mail. They can arrest people and not have to notify anybody not even their family and the media is banned from covering patriot related arrests.
Many people have seen this as a direct attack upon civil liberties and an attack on the constitution which Americans hold so dear and as a step towards building a police state.
The bill was passed hastily on the morning of the 21st of October written in such a complicated manner that no one could understand it unless they had a very deep understanding of American law and it was printed the night before and handed out to the senators early in the morning and was hardly even debated over in the climate of fear that followed in the wake of 9/11.
Unsurprisingly Tony Blair followed suite introducing 14 day detention periods without trial (which has since been increased to 28 days), he advocated a 90 day detention without trial period but was embarrassingly over ruled during a vote in Westminster.
some would argue that it is a necessary step to protect people from “the terrorist threat” that faces the world, I would disagree with this for a few fundamental reasons.
It hasn’t stopped terrorist attacks in the past with the most obvious example being the 7th of July bombings in London and the subsequent attempted bombings exactly two weeks later which only failed because the detonating charge only exploded leaving the actual explosives untouched alerting passengers on the train.
The last time Britain hastily rushed emergency laws without thinking (during the intensive bombing campaign by the IRA), the miscarriages of justice were tremendous.
e.g. the Maguire seven, a group of men who were held without trial for apparently bombing a pub in 1975 who were later cleared of all charges after their families and anyone who knew them were arrested under the newly passed laws. The most tragic part being the elderly father of one of them being arrested while trying to organise his son’s defence, who later died in prison for absolutely no wrong-doing. They were all released in 1989 and officially pardoned. Do we really want this to be happening in Britain again?
A further reason I do not believe that these laws will curb terrorism is that giving up part of your freedoms in exchange for security has never worked in the past, so why should it work now? One the most similar examples being Hitler and the Reichstag fire, he swiftly introduced similar laws and even worse ones and the whole world saw what happened in Germany, although there won’t be ethnic and political cleansing using the laws like Hitler did, the basic principle is the same, tighter control on the population to prevent a perceived “danger” from attacking.
Benjamin Franklin summed it up with this quote:
“Those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security.” Furthermore I find these laws to have an absolutely massive potential to be misused further they already have been. The period of time when section 60 and 14 were used the most was during the G8. Under section 60 of the new legislation you have to submit to a pat-down police search and can have your bag or vehicle searched for weapons and when used with
Section 44 of the new legislation it means police don’t even have to have a probable cause.
During the G8 the police used these laws against protestors and were detained for not providing a name and address which isn’t even mandatory under section 60 or 44, this just proves that police now believe they have the power to do whatever they see fit with no regard to the legislation of this country, either that or they are receiving the orders from the senior officers organising the G8 ,which proves even more that these laws are an assault on the compromised “freedom” we already had, when the right to publicly protest is compromised.
(Protesting within one kilometre of Westminster has also become an illegal act under guise of counter terrorism. Within the same clause they have a ban against using loudspeakers. Since when do terrorists use loudspeakers? )
The government use these new laws selectively against whom they wish with a dangerous double standard, the only time when the question of improper use has come up in the media was when Walter Wolfgang the 82 year old member of the Labour party who dared to shout “nonsense” when Jack Straw tried to justify the war in Iraq. Mr Wolfgang was manhandled out of the Labour party conference and arrested under anti-terrorist legislation he was detained without being allowed to contact anyone and he also had his passport temporarily confiscated. This is a sure sign of the killing of Democracy in the U.K when an 82 year old holocaust survivor who dares to oppose the foreign secretary is treated as a terrorist.
I don’t think these laws should be emplaced and should be abolished as soon as possible, although there is a need for protection from terrorism the need has been greatly exaggerated by the government and the media. These laws do not protect against terrorism and only serve to curb our civil liberties and push towards a police state. Although calling it a push to towards a police seems melodramatic by the very definition of a police state we are moving towards one: “the police exercise power on behalf of the executive and the conduct of the police cannot be effectively challenged.” Which to me seems sadly what is happening right now. We are apparently living within a democracy and the police should therefore police on those standards. We do not need police blindly stabbing in the dark at the spectre of terrorism which may or may not be there.
(the following sentence could technically have me locked up for 28 days without trial and subject to investigation.)
Living in a supposedly democratic society means the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty and not vice versa, it didn’t work in Ireland, it won’t work here and the only real counter-terrorist measure that would work would be to have a good look at Western foreign policy and to listen to what “terrorists” want and why they are doing what they do because for a young man to detonate himself killing over 30 people in a train must mean that there must be something wrong that needs to be fixed. And not fixed using authoritarian laws that have as much to do with “protecting us” as they do with democracy.
Well this is my opinion as an english essay I had to do:
Is there any need for anti-terrorism legislation?
There is almost no one on the face of the earth who hasn’t seen the footage of the planes crashing into the world trade centre and the resulting aftermath. Within the next few weeks the U.S senate passed a law that would set the trend for the rest of the world: The Patriot Act.
The Patriot act gives the F.B.I, Police and C.I.A the right to access any personal files held on you ranging from medical records to ,the most controversial, your detailed borrower history from the Library and you don‘t even have to be notified. It also gives them the power to bug your telephone and to seize personal mail. They can arrest people and not have to notify anybody not even their family and the media is banned from covering patriot related arrests.
Many people have seen this as a direct attack upon civil liberties and an attack on the constitution which Americans hold so dear and as a step towards building a police state.
The bill was passed hastily on the morning of the 21st of October written in such a complicated manner that no one could understand it unless they had a very deep understanding of American law and it was printed the night before and handed out to the senators early in the morning and was hardly even debated over in the climate of fear that followed in the wake of 9/11.
Unsurprisingly Tony Blair followed suite introducing 14 day detention periods without trial (which has since been increased to 28 days), he advocated a 90 day detention without trial period but was embarrassingly over ruled during a vote in Westminster.
some would argue that it is a necessary step to protect people from “the terrorist threat” that faces the world, I would disagree with this for a few fundamental reasons.
It hasn’t stopped terrorist attacks in the past with the most obvious example being the 7th of July bombings in London and the subsequent attempted bombings exactly two weeks later which only failed because the detonating charge only exploded leaving the actual explosives untouched alerting passengers on the train.
The last time Britain hastily rushed emergency laws without thinking (during the intensive bombing campaign by the IRA), the miscarriages of justice were tremendous.
e.g. the Maguire seven, a group of men who were held without trial for apparently bombing a pub in 1975 who were later cleared of all charges after their families and anyone who knew them were arrested under the newly passed laws. The most tragic part being the elderly father of one of them being arrested while trying to organise his son’s defence, who later died in prison for absolutely no wrong-doing. They were all released in 1989 and officially pardoned. Do we really want this to be happening in Britain again?
A further reason I do not believe that these laws will curb terrorism is that giving up part of your freedoms in exchange for security has never worked in the past, so why should it work now? One the most similar examples being Hitler and the Reichstag fire, he swiftly introduced similar laws and even worse ones and the whole world saw what happened in Germany, although there won’t be ethnic and political cleansing using the laws like Hitler did, the basic principle is the same, tighter control on the population to prevent a perceived “danger” from attacking.
Benjamin Franklin summed it up with this quote:
“Those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security.” Furthermore I find these laws to have an absolutely massive potential to be misused further they already have been. The period of time when section 60 and 14 were used the most was during the G8. Under section 60 of the new legislation you have to submit to a pat-down police search and can have your bag or vehicle searched for weapons and when used with
Section 44 of the new legislation it means police don’t even have to have a probable cause.
During the G8 the police used these laws against protestors and were detained for not providing a name and address which isn’t even mandatory under section 60 or 44, this just proves that police now believe they have the power to do whatever they see fit with no regard to the legislation of this country, either that or they are receiving the orders from the senior officers organising the G8 ,which proves even more that these laws are an assault on the compromised “freedom” we already had, when the right to publicly protest is compromised.
(Protesting within one kilometre of Westminster has also become an illegal act under guise of counter terrorism. Within the same clause they have a ban against using loudspeakers. Since when do terrorists use loudspeakers? )
The government use these new laws selectively against whom they wish with a dangerous double standard, the only time when the question of improper use has come up in the media was when Walter Wolfgang the 82 year old member of the Labour party who dared to shout “nonsense” when Jack Straw tried to justify the war in Iraq. Mr Wolfgang was manhandled out of the Labour party conference and arrested under anti-terrorist legislation he was detained without being allowed to contact anyone and he also had his passport temporarily confiscated. This is a sure sign of the killing of Democracy in the U.K when an 82 year old holocaust survivor who dares to oppose the foreign secretary is treated as a terrorist.
I don’t think these laws should be emplaced and should be abolished as soon as possible, although there is a need for protection from terrorism the need has been greatly exaggerated by the government and the media. These laws do not protect against terrorism and only serve to curb our civil liberties and push towards a police state. Although calling it a push to towards a police seems melodramatic by the very definition of a police state we are moving towards one: “the police exercise power on behalf of the executive and the conduct of the police cannot be effectively challenged.” Which to me seems sadly what is happening right now. We are apparently living within a democracy and the police should therefore police on those standards. We do not need police blindly stabbing in the dark at the spectre of terrorism which may or may not be there.
(the following sentence could technically have me locked up for 28 days without trial and subject to investigation.)
Living in a supposedly democratic society means the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty and not vice versa, it didn’t work in Ireland, it won’t work here and the only real counter-terrorist measure that would work would be to have a good look at Western foreign policy and to listen to what “terrorists” want and why they are doing what they do because for a young man to detonate himself killing over 30 people in a train must mean that there must be something wrong that needs to be fixed. And not fixed using authoritarian laws that have as much to do with “protecting us” as they do with democracy.