Will British Cops be Allowed to Take DNA from E.G. Jaywalkers???
Big Bruvver wants your DNA, Brits...
Big Bruvver wants your DNA, Brits...
posted by Winston Smith at
3:22 PM
Thursday, August 02, 2007
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8 Comments:
It's the other side of treating this terrorism thing as a civil (i.e., law enforcement) rather than a political or national security matter. New PM Gordon Brown has decided that's how it shall be.
There's a lot going on in the UK (cameras on streetcorners, 45-day detentions [Brown wants 90]) that US citizens would totally have a cow over.
Altho most Britons think it's all fine.
(Go ahead. Click the link. It won't hurt you. It's to The Guardian, the UK's most lefty, I mean centrist, newspaper. Even Glenn Greenwald says it's OK.)
I think you're confused about what's meant by "treating terrorism like a law-enforcement issue." Kerry, for example, meant that we should track down terrorists like we do other international criminals instead of, mistakenly, treating this as if it were a war.
See, Kerry wanted to treat the criminals like criminals...that stands opposed to the position of the Bush administration which wants to, in effect, treat innocent Americans as criminals by conducting illegal surveillance against them.
I'm talking about the UK. One confusion at a time, please.
But they come so fast and furious...
Your dig was at Kerry and liberals. So it doesn't matter whether we were talking about the U.K.
Kerry I'd already forgotten about.
Terrorism can be approached as a civil matter, I suppose, but many Americans would be upset at the cost. There is no free lunch, as the British have acknowledged.
Well, there's your confusion.
'Civil matter' is different than 'law -enforcement matter'.
The idea is to treat terrorists like the international criminals they are.
compare this to waging a "war"...against a *tactic* no less.
Anyway: the Bush administration has basically conceded that this is a law enforcement problem, anyway.
So you're free to adopt that view now, Tom.
Unless that would make you a flip-flopper...
I used "civil" in contradistinction to political or national security. "Criminal" is fine.
However, even The Guardian makes obvious that at least in the UK, traditional law-enforcement methods are deemed inadequate, and measures are required that would make Americans (me, too, I reckon) hopping mad.
We should be able to agree on that.
Opening our mail? At some point, it doesn't matter what you call it if the anti-terrorism tactics go substantively beyond the norm of civil liberties we took for granted pre-9/11.
(It's my opinion that PM Brown's is more a rhetorical flourish than a substantive one: if a war on Islam itself is ever perceived on the part of Britain's [and the world's] Muslims, all is lost.)
So, has Bush acceded in adopting a law-enforcement philosophy? Mebbe you're right. Is putting a law-enforcement tag on it sufficient, or are hopping-mad measures required as well?
We'll see. Congress and the executive are kicking it around right now. These are not normal times, and this is no normal criminal threat.
Hmmm.
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