Freedom fighter

[Briar]

British civil liberties are under attack by the authoritarian Bliar government (for more, check out: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article332149.ece; http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article331782.ece; http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article332161.ece) but here's an interview with one of the "good guys". It's good to reminded there are some good guys, sometimes!


Freedom fighter

Stuart Jeffries meets Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty

Shami Chakrabarti is trying to imagine what she would have said to dissuade the suicide bomber who blew up six innocents and himself at Edgware Road tube station on July 7. "I've thought a lot about what Mohammad Sidique Khan said in the video he recorded before the bombings. It's particularly chilling to me as a British Asian. He was about 30 years old. I'm 36. He's got a broad Yorkshire accent and I've got a London accent. But he's as British as I am - fish fingers, Blue Peter, the whole thing.

"He pushes the liberal's buttons by saying you've tortured and murdered my Muslim brothers and sisters and now you too are going to taste the reality of this situation. I imagine being in a living room with him and how I could answer his arguments. I would say: Because innocent lives have been taken in Iraq, that doesn't mean you're allowed to take innocent lives in London. If that word terrorist is about anything it is about people who say the ends justify the means. That's why we can't compromise our values because if we do we rob ourselves of the ammunition in the propaganda struggle against terrorism."
For Chakrabarti, the director of the civil rights group Liberty, the government since July 7 has frequently taken away that ammunition. "I'm as much an ideologue as a member of al-Qaida. I believe as strongly in the rights framework as any member of al-Qaida believes in goodness knows what they believe. It just so happens that the framework contains a lot of respect for other people. That's the great irony for democrats: you have to stick up for the rights and freedoms of people who would do you down.

"But when Blair says that the rules have changed, he's wrong. Human rights is about saying that democracy is not just about majority rule, not just about elections every five years. Democracy is about elections plus fundamental rights and freedoms and the rule of law. That package gets you democracy and if you dump the rights and freedoms and rule of law, democracy descends into mob rule."

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1664002,00.html


Bush and Bliar have completely ignored rights, freedoms and the rule of law, and have indulged in gratuitous torture (only in trash tv does torture work and justify the "hero's" barbarity) - that's why we are more in danger now than we were before 9/11.

[Kipling]

1. Blair is having a hard time of it.

The Law Lords have ruled that torture is illegal, and he has been denied the right to Guantanamo-style internment camps. I hope that good will win through.
How's it going in America?

[SongOfTheRayne]

2. So it would seem.....

that Britain is less fcuked up than us?