Obsolete

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

56/8 days dies a further death.

The government's trying to sell more than one kind of cold sick.

Moving on from one abuse of power to a potential other, the plans to extend 28 days must lay even further in tatters following the evidence given to the home affairs select committee by both the director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, and the former attorney general, Lord Goldsmith.

While yesterday saw the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, fresh from predicting new doom to the press having to give evidence in private, believed to have said that it was not his role to comment on whether an extension was needed, which raises the question of why he needed to say such a thing behind closed doors, today's evidence was also expected but no less compulsive for it. Ken Macdonald, who previously made a principled and more than welcome call for the end to the war metaphor when tackling the terrorist threat, one that seems to have been accepted and put into practice, could perhaps have been expected to say that he saw no evidence for a further extension and that the CPS was happy with the current limit.

Lord Goldsmith, on the other hand, the man who rubber-stamped Blair's war through the swift modifying of his legal advice that had previously tied itself in knots, and also gave the OK to the dropping of the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into BAE's slush fund for the Saudis, would have been expected to stay loyal regardless of his departure from government. It's also astounding just because of what else Goldsmith got up to while attorney general, arguably tarnishing the post for good. Why be principled over detention without charge when he has had a hand in the enormous bloodshed in Iraq thanks to our unnecessary joining of the US invasion that his changing of his legal advice permitted? How could he have been prepared to put BAE above suspicion and make the rule of law a laughing stock yet resign over 90 days? Also, in general, to make your point about how you disagree with a government policy if you're a minister is to resign prior before it going before the House of Commons; can Goldsmith really be excused from doing this just because he was a peer? Was he perhaps motivated by the belief that if he did so, and the vote was lost, as everyone expected it would be, that he'd force Blair to resign with him?

It's impossible to know, but his intervention now is still welcome, if only because of the huge embarrassment it will cause Brown, especially at a time when the whole government is under pressure due to its startling incompetence. Revealing also was that he believed he was the only one in cabinet to feel so strongly; an indictment on the illiberal and supine nature of Blair's chosen few, especially those such as Patricia Hewitt and Peter Hain who had backgrounds in campaigning on civil liberties.

The only people now still calling for an extension seems to amount to Sir Ian Blair, a man responsible for the most heinous behaviour dolled out to a man shot dead in an anti-terrorist operation, some chief police officers who previously phoned up MPs' and so annoyed some that they felt they were being lobbied, and the government, with Brown sitting on anyone who betrays a moment's doubt, backed up by the Sun newspaper, the Times, the Express and probably the Mail. Everyone else is completely opposed, although where the public itself stands at large is unknown. In the current climate you can't quite believe that Brown would still attempt to force through the measure, but if all has died down again by next year all bets might once again be off.

Labels: 28 days, 56 days, 58 days, home affairs select committee, Ken Macdonald, Lord Goldsmith, terror, war against bullshit

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11/21/2007 10:48:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Great Grauniad articles and yet more on 28/56/58 days.

The Grauniad tends to go in fits and starts. It publishes the barrel-scrapings of Russell Brand, one of the latest wave of comedians that couldn't carry a laugh in a bucket, alongside such titans as Alan Carr and Jimmy Carr (no relation, apart from their inability to be humourous) which are enough to make you want to try and commit suicide using laxatives, then makes up for it by printing two wonderful comment pieces on the same day that follow a similar theme.

Timothy Garton Ash, who can come across as very much the Oxford liberal, but is always brilliantly readable, gets off the fence he often sits on and calls for the rolling back of the surveillance state, while the novelist Hari Kunzru considers the case of the "lyrical terrorist" and wonders if he too could shortly be raided by the police. Rachel also writes a typically lucid piece on how she believes the case for longer than 28-days detention hasn't been made on CiF.

The government can't even make up its mind on the exact time limit; it now appears to be suggesting 58 days, while Lord Carlile, the man picked to review the terror laws, who seems to have gone native after the security services and police have doubtlessly plied him with their most voluminous doom-mongering intelligence on how the sky is dark and we're all going to die believes there will "one or two people" arrested over the next few years for whom longer than 28-days detention will be necessary. His sort of compromise is that there needs to "better judicial scrutiny," which is of little use, as has already been demonstrated. The police can say whatever they like to a judge to justify continuing detention, regardless of the facts, as they seem to have done in the past, having kept two men for 28-days only to then release them without charge. The other latest proposals are that more than 28-days would only be authorised when "multiple plots, or links with multiple countries, or exceptional levels of complexity" are involved." The police already argue that the cases they've had to deal with involved all or one or two of the above; whenever a "new" plot or otherwise is meant to have been foiled, all that would happen would be an instant appeal for the new powers to be implemented, regardless of whether they were really needed or not.

Carlile rightly argues against the use of the Civil Contingencies Act, which can provide another 30-days of detention without charge if invoked, as the equivalent of declaring a national emergency, but both the government's new and old proposals would do exactly the same thing. Putting through legislation that would allow for 56 or 58 days detention without charge would be the final move from a liberal democracy to an authoritarian one. As Timothy Garton Ash argues, we've moved from being the freest society in Europe to being the most watched, and with it, fearful. We may be tolerant, but beneath it we're increasingly anxious, even frightened, especially by the bloodcurdling speeches by the heads of MI5 and the ratcheting up of security which looks increasingly at odds with the actual threat from terrorism that is posed. Blocking and campaigning against any extension to the detention without charge limit ought to be the first move in the fightback.

Labels: 56 days, 58 days, 90 days, civil liberties, Lord Carlile, pre-detention without charge, terrrorism