Ok
So London has been attacked. Now I’m going to go into various issues here. I’ve waited a while to write this in light of the thousands of blogs and so on and so forth blabbering on uselessly about it.

So what will be different about this blog? Nothing really or maybe a lot more. I’m going to try and consider the situation in light of how it happened and how it got past our security services.

First I want schmucks like O’reilly to think and I mean seriously to just fucking THINK that maybe you can’t stop terrorism easily without encroaching on peoples civil liberties. I’m talking about constant surveillance and monitoring, giving people in governance even more power over us. That is, in my honest opinion, bloody dangerous and tantamount to living in a police state.

You have to remember 3 of the 4 people who were involved in the attacks were not flagged by the intelligence agencies. The only outward sign of their affiliation was that they were Muslim. That is it. Apart from that these people had no criminal records, they weren’t flagged by the intelligence services and they weren’t even on our damn radar.

The one man who was flagged by MI5, we simply didn’t have the resources to mount a year long operation on a man who was peripherally connected with a person of suspected terror links. When you’re in charge of a government department and you have to balance the budget how do you decide on who needs to be monitored or not? It’s an issue of these people being completely blank slates and thus they slipped through.

So what could we have done about it or in the future do about it?

Good questions but let’s look at the possible answers that the government is currently trying to bring up.

First of all is the issue of a National ID Card scheme which the government has quite intelligently kept quiet at the moment in light of the attacks. They do not wish to be seen as to be using the attacks in a manner that would be construed as taking advantage of the situation to push their agenda. The National ID Card scheme is wildly unpopular and, well, it wouldn’t have worked to stop them because the attackers were British, an ID card that the government would have issued to them would really have stopped it. Nope.

Secondly the Met (which is an abbreviation of the term Metropolitan Police Service) has been accused by various Muslim groups of being hypocritical after Sir Ian Blair the Chief of police asked for help in policing and informing the police of suspicious characters. They have accused the police of not listening to them or either treating the people who come forwards to the police as if they were suspects themselves. This kind of reaction from the police, if true, in reaction to people who are willing to come forwards with information is not helpful. But I reserve judgement on that accusation.

On to the new laws now.

First there is the law in which the offence is an “indirect incitement to terrorism�. Now I do not claim to be a lawyer nor do I claim to be a legislator. But one can see that such a term is open and rife to misinterpretation and confusion. In my honest opinion this is a knee jerk law which is rather badly written and poorly thought out.

Secondly, whilst I admit this law is well intentioned I believe again it is flawed. In that it is an offence of “acts preparatory to terrorism”. I won’t say anything here but it’s obvious where that one could fall apart. To the people in charge a little tightening up of the language please.

Finally this law is a very nice idea in which one could cover people going to terrorist camps overseas or finding out how to build a bomb through the internet, but I would like to understand why, how or in what way shape form or manner could this help in preventing an attack? This laws only purpose would be to capture if possible any terrorists who were still alive after an attack and thus increase their prison sentences. I would also like to ask how we would know exactly that certain people had been to a terrorist training camp abroad. I mean it’s not exactly like Butlins holiday camps where we can go over to the front office and check if their names are down for a place, now is it?

I’m tired of knee jerk laws which come about and wish they would improve things which would actually improve the level of security we have in our nations, without actually impinging on our civil liberties or create horribly written laws which would fall over from a good sneeze. I’ll post up my thoughts about the solutions that would work next post.

P.S. I am reminded of something my old Jurisprudence professor once said in class. “Putting an unenforceable law on the books weakens the whole body of the law.”