Freedom and democracy
The British government uses terrorism as an excuse to roll back civil rights by a century. The Home Office wants to be able to deport people to countries with strong torture records (apparently, following the lead of America — which has in several documented cases sent terror suspects captured in America straight to police torture cells in Egypt and Jordan). The Home Office also wants European companies to retain emails and records of phone calls for a year, despite the obvious privacy concerns (what stops an ISP employee or a hacker from browsing a year’s worth of your emails?), philosophical concerns (why is every citizen now a suspect?) and practical concerns (who is going to pay for all those hard drives?). Apparently, living in a city of video cameras on every street corner has made some British leaders forget the whole point of freedom and democracy…
(For those who are not aware, reading, retaining, and recording private correspondence was the hallmark of tyrannical regimes ever since France under the Bourbon kings.)
Of course, the freedom-and-democracy situation in Iraq is far worse than in US or Britain. If this blogger can be believed, current democratic Iraqi security forces are as brutal, incompetent, corrupt, and discriminatory as Saddam’s thugs. The story, as Khalid tells it, is the following: Khalid has a beard. He visited some blogs on a computer in the university library (some of which may have had pro-Islamist comments made by visitors; of course, the reader of a blog is under no obligation at all to read or believe a blog’s comments). The university security guard didn’t like Khalid. These three things (beard, computer use, and an angry security guard) were enough to have Khalid brought to the Mukhabarat (Iraqi Lubyanka), where he was repeatedly beaten and held in a cell with 35 other terror suspects, until a technologically literate judge looked at the evidence and figured out that Khalid was innocent. According to Khalid, many of the other 35 suspects were also obviously innocent — they included people who were arrested for insulted a government official, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even those who were clinically retarded. If Khalid’s story can be trusted, modern Iraq’s police are as bad as those of Saddam’s regime — except that while Saddam’s police tortured and killed Shia and Kurds, their successors torture and kill Sunnis. If a guy has a beard and is Sunni, he is a suspect. If a suspect does not confess (and if he is not lucky enought to get a sympathetic judge), the suspect is tortured. If he does not confess after torture, he is considered to have gone through anti-torture training in a terrorist camp, and is therefore certainly a terrorist… Such tactics obviously fail to catch any real terrorists, all the while inspiring the Iraqi population to hate the government and possibly join insurgent ranks. (As an aside, the same could be said of Russia’s behavior in Chechnya.)
Of course, Khalid might be exaggerating, lying, or spreading filthy terrorist propaganda. However, other news from the region somehow make me trust his descriptions…
Anyway, to conclude: in this post-911 world, freedom and democracy are an endangered species — and they are threatened by elected governments rather than by foreign lunatic murderers.