'There is no war on terror'

The British Director of Public Prosecutions, , Sir Ken Macdonald, has made an astonishing speech in which he says there is no such thing as the War on Terror and highlights the danger that - in fighting this illusory enemy - we might throw away our very way of life and our democratic safeguards.

As someone who lived in London during the IRA's campaign against the British I have to say that I am in agreement with him here. Terrorists are simply criminals, and Bush and Blair have gravely exaggerated their status by claiming that we are involved in "a war" with them.

Indeed, the greatest threat we face is not from terrorism - which will, in actuality, kill very, very few of us - rather it is from our reaction to that threat.

Sir Ken warned of the pernicious risk that a "fear-driven and inappropriate" response to the threat could lead Britain to abandon respect for fair trials and the due process of law.

I believe this to be true. In the words of Benjamin Franklin featured in the footer of this blog, "Those who would sacrifice a little liberty for a perceived increase in security, deserve neither - and will eventually lose both."

That is essentially the dilemma we currently face. Politicians of all political persuasions are currently telling us that the danger we face is so acute that the world has actually changed and that we must sacrifice certain liberties in order to be safe. You either buy that hokum or you don't. I don't.

I understand every time I get on the London underground that I am taking a risk. This risk is understood by every single passenger. However, I do not believe the risk is any greater than it was when the IRA targeted us and I do not believe that our response should be any different.

The IRA were, rightly, treated as political criminals. The mistake of Blair and Bush has been to elevate al-Qaida beyond their criminal status and talk of them as an army and their criminal enterprise as a war. Bush has further compounded that initial mistake with his setting up of Gulags across the world, but most notably in Guantanamo Bay.

Bush seeks to defend our values by dismantling them. That is a suicidal policy. As he claims that al-Qaida want to destroy our way of life (a claim that I find ludicrous) it is bizarre that he would seek to do their work for them by removing the basic tenets of justice that define our way of life.

One of the things that most defines our way of life is our sense of justice. The right of all of us to be tried on front of a group of our peers. I notice yesterday that Gonzales attempted to argue that all Americans do not have the right to Habeas Corpus. This is the essential difference that defines both camps in this argument, and the terms left and right no longer apply as any indication of where any person will stand on this issue.

Some people believe that we can only defend our freedom by basically giving large portions of it away. I wholeheartedly disagree. We can only defend our freedom by exercising it. And that means treating terrorists as the criminals they are. Putting them in courts of law and presenting evidence against them and allowing groups of their peers to convict them.

The alternative is the nightmare of Guantanamo Bay, where the people who lied to us about Iraq's WMD are allowed to hold people indefinitely simply because they say these people are dangerous. More than half of Guantanamo's suspects have since been released with no charges ever having been brought against them, which must make one suspect about the level of proof which was used to hold them for such a long time in what is, effectively, a legal black hole.

Sir Ken made this point eloquently:

He acknowledged that the country faced a different and more dangerous threat than in the days of IRA terrorism and that it had "all the disturbing elements of a death cult psychology".

But he said: "It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values. I think it important to understand that this is one of its primary purposes."

Sir Ken pointed to the rhetoric around the "war on terror" - which has been adopted by Tony Blair and ministers after being coined by George Bush - to illustrate the risks.

He said: "London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.

"The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement."

Sir Ken, head of the Crown Prosecution Service, told members of the Criminal Bar Association it should be an article of faith that crimes of terrorism are dealt with by criminal justice and that a "culture of legislative restraint in the area of terrorist crime is central to the existence of an efficient and human rights compatible process".

He said: "We wouldn't get far in promoting a civilising culture of respect for rights amongst and between citizens if we set about undermining fair trials in the simple pursuit of greater numbers of inevitably less safe convictions. On the contrary, it is obvious that the process of winning convictions ought to be in keeping with a consensual rule of law and not detached from it. Otherwise we sacrifice fundamental values critical to the maintenance of the rule of law - upon which everything else depends."

He then took a swipe at the Blair government's decision to opt out of the European convention on human rights to pass the detention law - which is possible under the convention only if the "life of the nation" is threatened.

"Everyone here will come to their own conclusion about whether, in the striking Strasbourg phrase, the very 'life of the nation' is presently endangered," he said. "And everyone here will equally understand the risk to our constitution if we decide that it is, when it is not."

The criminal justice response to terrorism must be "proportionate and grounded in due process and the rule of law," he said. "We must protect ourselves from these atrocious crimes without abandoning our traditions of freedom."

Thank God somebody has said it. Bush and Blair have used the War on Terror to govern by fear. To say that we must give them what they want because if we could see the evidence (that they cannot show to us) we would realise the gravity of the situation. They successfully used this line to propagate the Iraq war, and we later discovered that they were practicing deliberate falsehoods.

There is no reason to believe them again.

Please watch The Power of Nightmares, the BBC documentary on the subject by clicking here.

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tag: Bush, Blair, Guantanamo Bay, Gonzales, wiretapping, neo-cons, waterboarding, interrogation techniques, Habeus Corpus, bin Laden, Taliban, Geneva Conventions, terrorists, terrorism, war on terror