We must defend our God-given rights or risk losing them forever 
The Universe
(March 20, 2005)
Strong, reasonable and enforceable security laws are necessary to defend society from terrorists. No one argues with that.
The threat is there and even if the American Empire's greed for world economic domination has provoked it, it has to be defeated. We all suffer because of the abuse of the few.
A strong defence is vital and the duty of governments, but not at any cost and certainly not at the cost of fundamental rights. However in protecting society, government agencies can become intoxicated with power and abuse it. They can harm the very people they are mandated to protect.
That is why civil society cannot relax its vigilance of government and must resist the passing of laws that give excessive powers that can be easily abused.
Some legislators want to limit the fundamental right of people to due process. The most important right is of life and freedom and when those rights are being threatened by accusations, one must have the right to know the charges, challenge the accuser, examine the evidence and defend oneself in a court of law.
Those who have never been victimised by security forces and had their rights swept away will not be sensitive to the dangers behind excessively strict laws. The less you have suffered or seen, the less vigilant you will be in guarding fundamental rights and human dignity.
If you are unfortunate enough to be innocently mingling with the wrong people in the wrong place, you can easily be arrested on the suspicion of being a terrorist sympathiser and jailed indefinitely as is the practice in the US. The detention of hundreds of suspects in Guantanamo Bay has be declared illegal by a US court.
It really is a frightening thing to be told that there could be as many as 200 Osama Bin Laden trained terrorists in the UK especially at a time when the government is trying to get support for a Draconian anti-terrorist law that could do untold harm to the human rights and freedoms that the law is supposed to protect.
I don't feel scared at the possibility of 200 terrorists being around, I feel scared because of the scare tactics themselves. They seem underhand, unworthy of a true democracy, more a manipulation of the public's vulnerabilities and exploitation of fear.
Desperate measures for desperate times, we are told. To protect and enjoy freedom we have to sacrifice it, they say, but does that make sense? How can we enjoy it when it is denied us?
That cant be answered because the level of real and present danger is classified at any given time and therefore the amount of freedom taken away will likewise be unknown. The small print of the law will be ambiguous. You will know it when you loose it. In other words, when a b van pulls up besides you and bundles you in, claps you in leg, hand and body irons, pulls a sack over your head and throws you on the floor you know you have lost your freedom. Yet you and your family may not know it.
The scare tactics used effectively by the Bush administration used different colour-coded danger alert levels that ratcheted up the fear factor week by week. The message of the Bush administration is that we alone can save you.
The tendency of the people is to gravitate towards government and allow freedom-eroding laws to pass that normally they would resist. This gave US security agencies licence to abduct, torture and even kill and has plunged the Country into its darkest period since the Vietnam war (part two next week).
