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Originally Posted by Graham F
Those laws might of served us well in dealing with the threats we have had in the past. However how many of the terrorists these laws worked against would consider sucide bombings? or the mass killing of people like 9/11? These are extreme people and extreme measures are needed to deal with them. Unless someone can come up with a better solution that doesn't discriminate against foreigners this seems the only logical step, as the British people would not stand for British nationals being locked up in prision without charge. So the house arrest system seems the only way forward.
Its not nice, but it is a way of dealing with the threat!
What gets me, are organisations like Liberty saying this is outragous keeping these people locked up, but they never give an alternative way of dealing with it. Saying the law is no good, isn't good enough what we need are other ways of dealing with the threat!
Do people think the 'threat' is real or do you think it is overstated by Government?
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The terrorist attacks of September 2001 were of an extreme kind. They took an age to plan and prepare and they cost a fortune to execute. They relied also on extremely lax security on the part of US domestic airlines. The chances of anything that severe happening again in our lifetime are, I would say, remote.
What confuses me is that we lived with the IRA threat for 30 years and at no time did we start throwing away our liberties in the way we are doing now - except for that disastrous experiment in internment whose results are there for all to see. Yet the Troubles in Northern Ireland resulted in some 3,468 deaths between 1969 and 1998 (
source). That is equivalent to those who died in New York and Washington, and a mere drop in the ocean compared to WWII, which, in my opinion, is the last time this country faced an emergency severe enough to justify draconian powers such as those now being contemplated.
The High Court ruled the detention of foreign nationals was 'grossly disproportionate' to the threat, and I see no reason to view house arrest as less disproportionate. Detention is detention, denial of liberty, whether it's in your front room or a prison cell.
And yes, I think the current theat is being grossly overstated for the purposes of political advancement. It makes me sick and with the spineless Tories apparently happy to go along with it, I am now very seriously thinking about voting Lib Dem and taking my chances on beating them in a referendum on their loony ideas about Europe. And coming from me, believe me, that is a seismic shift in personal politics.