The past few days I’ve been attending (and, on Monday afternoon, reading a paper) at an academic conference – “Terrorism and Justice: The Balance for Civil Liberties” sponsored by the Institute of Justice and International Studies at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg. Over the next few weeks I will attempt to report on what I heard and learned at the conference.
I attended a panel session this morning and heard a presentation titled “Counter Terrorism and Civil Liberties: The United Kingdom Experience, 1968-2008” by Jessie Blackbourn of Queen’s University Belfast, UK.
Her assertion was that the “subjugation of civil liberties” in reaction to terrorism had no effect in reducing the threat of terrorism and, instead, contributed to increasing the cycle of violence. As she said, “One IRA man stated that internment [subjugation of civil liberties] was the best recruiting tool the IRA ever had…”
The chipping away of civil liberties, the “slippery slope”, appears to be arbitrary:
…[after 2001] the government [in the UK] then introduced a law that would allow the pre-trial detention for up to 90 days for terror suspects…We’re very lucky that our Parliament thought this was ridiculous and said that, no actually 28 days would be enough to…question people…[then] reintroduced a counter terrorism law requesting that 42 days is actually much more reasonable. And, there appears to be no logic behind these numbers…
In the question and answer session which followed a German scholar [a lawyer with expertise in international law] asked, “Your suggestion is to do nothing?” She answered, “Yes” – and then went on to explain that existing criminal laws were sufficient to deal with the challenges of terrorism. Reducing or doing away with civil liberties had the effect of reducing or doing away with civil liberties – it did not reduce terrorism.
As a person intimately connected to Ireland, I have often tended to view the so-called “war-on-terror” through the prism of the Irish experience. Before the troubles began in 1969, the IRA was a dead-letter in Northern Ireland and when the British troops were first deployed, the Republicans welcomed them as saviors. However, a very short time after the British iron fist was brought to bear with wholesale supression of civil liberties, the terrorist war was on and the more brutal the supression, the more determined the Republican reaction was.
An excellent book on the topic of containing terrorism that I recently read is Louise Richardson’s What Terrorist’s Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat. Richardson , a lecturer in Terrorism Studies at Harvard is Irish and brings her personal experience to bear along with an academic knowledge of terrorists movements worldwide. A NYT review of teh book summarizes her answers to terrorism thusly: