LONDON: Osama Bin Laden’s achievement was not to mastermind the flying of jets into the Twin Towers, not to franchise his brand of terrorism to a lot of young men, not even to inspire the invasion of Iraq. No, it was to spook the West and to fill the minds of westerners with fear so that they let security oppress liberty and turn them away from the abuse and torture occurring in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
When the Australian television programme Dateline broadcast photographs of Iraqis tortured by Americans, evidence, by the way, which has been seen by members of Congress but suppressed by the Bush administration as too inflammatory, the reaction was markedly less of shock than when we saw the first, less horrific, images from Abu Ghraib 18 months ago. At best, there was impotent rage; at worst, a shrug of the shoulders. We have got used to these things. We are evidently content to let men suffer in what the American military lightly calls ‘Gitmo’, isolated from justice as the inmates of the Soviet gulag were, abused for, as much as anything, religion and race.
We have failed to grasp that when we do not protest and demand an end to atrocities committed in our name, something trips in the deep-brain cynicism of the governing psyche, which takes heart from the passivity it finds and devises more ways to control and enforce its will. It is no coincidence that the abuse of rights on foreign fields has led now to the suspension of rights at home; no accident that our plausible Prime Minister Tony Blair spits out the words ‘civil liberties’ as he bristles with the high purpose of his protective mission.
The genius of Osama was to strike at the West when its leaders were so callow, so unread, so lacking in wisdom, so unversed in the democracies they eagerly sought to lead, in the culture of rights and liberty which they so hastily dismiss. George W Bush and Tony Blair have the arrogance of the generation that grew up in the Sixties — and the ignorance. Nothing that happened before has impinged on their actions since 9/11. They have come to consider themselves as divinely empowered to take all necessary action. They have both deceived their peoples and are bent on stripping them of ancient and hard-fought-for liberties.
It is worth remembering that Tony Blair’s mandate derives from just 35 per cent of the votes cast in the last election. This may indeed be the price we pay for having a careless and inexact parliamentary system, but no prime minister in the past 100 years has taken so much power for himself and with such an awesome sense of entitlement.
The attempt to make it a crime to ‘glorify terrorism’ is quintessentially Tony Blair. It is first of all silly. Every act prosecutable under this new offence could have been dealt with by existing legislation. Blair’s new law will contribute nothing in the fight against terrorism, but, crucially, it will limit what we can say. Should I wish to make the case for Basque separatism, or celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, or explain some distant liberation movement, I might expose myself to prosecution. One man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist.
Blair says everyone knows what glorification is, but in a court, the definition would quickly disintegrate. He says it sends a signal to Al Qaeda and it is worth giving up this sliver of free speech to do so. Is he deluded? No terrorist is going to take the slightest notice of this piffling but dangerous law.—Dawn/The Observer News Service
