We must defend our God given rights - or lose them
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By: Father Shay Cullen
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 belligerent and aggressive bullying of the American Empirešs greed for world economic domination has provoke it has to be defeated. We all suffer because of the abuse of the few.
A strong defence is vital and duty and purpose of government but not at any cost and certainly not at the cost of fundamental, freedoms and rights. However in protecting society government agencies can be intoxicated with power and abuse it. They in fact 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 power that can be easily abused. Some legislators nowadays want to limit the fundamental right of the human person to due process. The most important right is that to 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 their rights o r those of their friends 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.
All you need to be plunged into a nightmare of abuse are a few powerful individuals without a conscience striving to get promotion or cover up incompetence. So 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 United States. The detention of hundreds of suspects in US base at Guantanamo Bay has be declared illegal by a US court.
It easy for the authorities to abuse their powers. We heard how this happened so easily to the Guildford Four jailed for 15 years for an IRA Bombing of which they were later proven innocent. The prime minister of Britain Tony Blair apologised recently for that abuse of state police power.
It really is a frightening thing to be told that there could be as many as 200 Osama Bin Laden trained terrorists in the United Kingdom especially at a time when the government is trying to get public support for a Draconian new anti-terrorist law that could indeed do untold harm to the very 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 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? And how much do we have to give up to save the rest?
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 surely be ambiguous. You will know it when you loose it. In other wards when a black grey or white 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. That's because the very loss of your rights and freedom itself is classified.
Have we so quickly forgotten the scare tactics deployed to justify the invasion if Iraq? Despite all the so-called 'evidences' of weapons of mass destruction that were ready and aimed at the heart of Britain not even one wet ballistic squib existed after all?
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 being we and we alone can protect and save you. The tendency of the people to gravitate towards government and allow freedom-eroding laws to pass that normally they would resist. This gave American security agencies licence to abduct, torture and even kill and has plunged the United States into its darkest period since the Vietnam War.
