http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,248-2001365460,00.html

TUESDAY OCTOBER 23 2001
Democracy and justice are casualties
LIBBY PURVES
Those who are inclined for a lugubrious game of I-Spy this autumn could do worse than start a scrapbook of endangered values. Every day brings some new indication of the way that the acid fog of war can corrode shiny modern virtues in a matter of hours. Liberty, dissent, free speech, the right to mock, judicial process, democratic debate and the presumption of innocence may seem unassailable — are, indeed, billed as “what we are fighting for” — but they become alarmingly soluble in the heat of conflict.

For a start, Western democratic governments do not as a rule sanction political assassinations. But President Bush has done so, with the clear direction that Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants may be killed rather than captured and tried.

This overturns a 25-year ban on government-sponsored assassinations: no such instruction was issued regarding even Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. I have to say that being only a middling peacenik, I cannot really find it in my heart to be appalled by the President’s decision. If putting a bullet through Osama bin Laden shortens the hideous suffering of ordinary Afghan families, let’s do it. All
the same, we can start the list of soluble taboos with this one.

Next comes the report in The Washington Post that the FBI, frustrated by the silence of its principal al-Qaeda suspects, is starting to daydream about torture. “We are known for humanitarian treatment,” said one glumly. “So basically we are stuck.” At the very least they would like to use sodium pentothal, the truth drug; or with more Machiavellian cunning, the Pontius Pilate option of extraditing the
stubborn suspects to other countries — such as Morocco — which are less scrupulous about the use of extreme discomfort in interrogation. At this point unease deepens. While sharing the frustration of the FBI (I am haunted by that man who took flying lessons in Minnesota but showed no interest in take-off or landing) you have to remember that the world’s worst torture regimes — from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia to Pinochet’s Chile — were run by people who were just as convinced of their rightness as we are now. What distinguishes us from them is our rejection of indecent methods, and our reluctance to maim people who
might be innocent.

After these sombre US dilemmas it feels almost like light relief to turn to our own UK demonstration of the fragility of Western values. But they belong in the same scrapbook. For the first time in modern history, a law not yet presented to
Parliament has been announced with the rider that it is retrospective. The seven-year sentence for hoaxers who send fake anthrax letters will not be law for at least a month, if then, but is declared effective as from this week. Again, the
intention is good: if anyone deserves a good smack it is the idiots who waste police time and panic the feeble-minded (and the press) by posting spiteful envelopes of talcum powder.

Yet the proposal shows startling contempt for centuries of democratic tradition, and for the stated values of a Government which brought in the Human Rights Act only a few months ago. Indeed, the contradiction in its position is dramatised by the fact that anyone actually reading through the European Convention on Human Rights might have spotted Article 7. It says: “No one shall be held guilty of any
criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time it was committed.”

At present, hoaxing about biological or chemical weapons is not a crime in the
United Kingdom: our bomb hoax laws cover only items purporting to “explode or ignite”, not infect. The crime of wasting police time, which does exist, carries only a piffling six-month sentence.

So the Government may run into trouble with its own human rights legislation over this matter; likewise over the series of threats made by David Blunkett to get tough with “unhelpful” jokers (how chilling that word is) and, more seriously, with foreign terrorists living in the UK. “Our moral obligation and love of freedom does not extend to offering hospitality to terrorists,” said the Home Secretary grandly, ignoring the fact that he cannot legally deport or intern suspects because both the Human Rights Convention and the UN Convention on Asylum prevent it unless the judiciary agree; and they probably won’t. (People must never face “inhuman or degrading treatment”, says the law, and extradition to a country with the death penalty, such as the United States, counts as such. There is one suspected
American matricide living in Britain to this day because the European Court won’t let him be sent home for trial.) The Government is angry about the situation in which it has inadvertently landed itself, and appears naively shocked by the gap between grandly signed-up ideals and the dirty pragmatism of war. Lord Rooker, the Home Office Minister, insists that the Human Rights Act will not be allowed
to impede the fight against terrorism: “Just because we are a tolerant, liberal democracy does not mean we are going to have people wrecking that, by using the very instruments that mean we are a tolerant and liberal democracy,” he splutters,
adding a cross aside about “the legal trade” abetting our foes. But precisely how we are going to wriggle out is not clear. Nor is there any guarantee that when they do find a formula, the baby will not be hurled out with the bathwater and all our freedoms sacrificed.

Panic is the enemy within. The final I-Spy to paste in the album today concerns the grand guignol spat between the Labour MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, Paul Marsden, and the choleric Chief Whip Hilary Armstrong. Mr Marsden openly
opposes the bombing of Afghanistan, and keeps saying that Parliament should have been consulted before our Armed Forces were sent into action, and that the UN not the US should be leading the battle. It is a legitimate point of view, and he
is an elected representative of the people. His defiance, however, led to a meeting with his whip so bruising that he emerged, wrote down every word he could remember, and gave it free gratis to a Sunday paper. In his account the whip says:

“War is not a matter of conscience! Abortion and embryo research are matters of conscience, not war ... it’s a government policy that we are at war.” Marsden
argues back, and the conversation rapidly attains the level which my old boss used to call “low-down-mad-and-personal”. It culminates when the MP sneers: “You are losing it, Hilary!” to which she replies: “You wait till I really do lose it. It was
people like you who appeased Hitler in 1938.” This last overblown simile, by the way, was echoed by the Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram on Sunday, so it clearly has Millbank clearance. The MP replies: “That’s the official line now is it? We are all appeasers if we don’t agree with everything you say?” — and the encounter ends with Ms Armstrong spitting: “The trouble with you is that you are so clever with words that us up North cannot answer back” and Marsden
shrieking: “Do you mind? I’m a northerner myself. I was born in Cheshire! I spent four years at Teesside Polytechnic . .”

Well, that’s his version, and we can’t prove it. But there is something awfully familiar in the whip’s tone, that conviction of rightness, that panicky, lashing-out fury when faced with dissent. It is not a democratic instinct, nor a sign of settledconfidence. It is reminiscent of the desperate shroud-waving about frightened little children which the Prime Minister gave us in his overrated conference speech, and which came again from a No 10 spokesman at the weekend who snapped that anybody critical of the Government’s wisdom “should focus on the image of those two planes flying into the twin towers and remember the phone messages of those
trapped inside”.

We do, mate. We all do. But those who watch and worry as governments grapple with the problem also remember something else. We have other twin towers: the invisible edifices of justice and the democratic process. They took far longer to
build, and they shelter millions of innocents from suffering and untimely death. Al-Qaeda must not be allowed to bring them down too