How To Create Terror

You could strap a belt full of sticks of C4 and a detonator on your waist and blow yourself up on a crowded bus. Or, you could do what the London Metro Police have done: under the rubric of the so-called “Section 44″ anti-terror law, London police stopped and searched more than 170,000 people in 2008. Of those 170,000 stopped, only 65 were actually arrested under suspicion of terrorist activities. However, apparently nobody at New Scotland Yard, the Ministry of Justice, or the Home Office was able or willing to say if any of those 65 arrests resulted in convictions, which almost assuredly means that NONE of those 65 people were convicted of being terrorists.

A couple of years ago, I ranted a bit about the random bag searches that the MBTA police were conducting as an “anti-terrorism” measure, and what I said about the T cops then applies to the London police now. By abusing their powers for the sake of creating a good show of things, or by misapplying the law as a catch-all to deal with any situation that doesn’t neatly fit into a category of actual crime, not only do the London police diminish the value of actually looking for real terrorists, they are creating their own version of terror through the intimidation of the general public. The people of the U.K. do not have the same broad set of constituional protections of civil liberties that we have in the U.S. in the first place, and modern Britain seems particularly fond of an astonishingly high degree of state coercion in the lives of its citizens, from “ASBO” laws to the vast network of CCTV cameras constantly surveilling the public and now to capricious application of broadly-drawn “anti-terror” laws. About the only thing America still has over Britian in the brutality and opression race is throwing more people in prison.

During the 2008 election season, much of the overblown adoration for Barack Obama came from an assumption that immediately upon assuming office he would sweep away all the encroachments on American civil liberties that Bush (whom my daughter has dubbed “George Asscrack Bush”) and Cheney shoved through the Justice Department under the guise of “anti-terror” policy. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a recent Salon article, though, BarryO hasn’t exactly been in all that much hurry to undo things, and has even maintained the previous administration’s assertions for things like wiretapping anyone and everyone. That change we were supposed to believe in still hasn’t found its way off the campaign trail, I guess. What this particular bit of news out of London does, though, is act as a reminder on a couple of levels: first, it reminds us that our own civil liberties are not nearly as curtailed as they could be, which is a good thing. Second, it reminds us that the path from freedom-loving society to ham-fisted police state is a short one with only a few easily-abused justifications, and that even a velvet-covered fist is still a fist. Third, it should scare us all senseless that the transfer of power out of the hands of people committed to abusing it into the hands of people who promised to end that abuse not only hasn’t taken place but that the new administration seems to want to hang on to some of those powers. If you’re a nerd, let me give you the metaphor of Luke Skywalker and his robotic hand and his eventual temptation by the Emperor to destroy Darth Vader as the final push to the Dark Side. Even if you’re not a nerd, I’ll leave you with that thought and the suggestion that Britain is Anakin Skywalker.