Love Won't Win This War

As usual, the Greens, our very own lodestar to lunacy, offer a striking example of a September 10 way of thinking. At week's end, as Iraq's security situation was collapsing, Australian Greens senator Kerry Nettle left for a fact-finding mission in Iraq. Before finding the facts, she said the Greens' policy was to immediately withdraw our troops and start sending humanitarian aid instead.

This "all you need is love" approach to Terrorism in Iraq lies at the fairy-floss end of the foreign policy spectrum. Indeed, Nettle makes Pollyanna look like Boadicea. Hers is a world where you can wish away violence.

The Greens' September 10 world does not recognise that our freedoms depend on our security. That without security, liberty is just a slogan. That is as true in Australia as it is in Iraq. Just as Iraqis need more than food packages to bring them Democracy, we in Australia may need some tough measures to guarantee our liberties against the threat of Terrorism.

Given that our political leaders can only do what the public mood permits, it is fortunate that most people are not September 10 thinkers. Most look at the evidence - the horror of September 11 (3000 dead), carnage in Bali (202 dead), suicide bombings in Riyadh (34 dead), five bombs in Casablanca (44 dead), attacks in Jakarta (12 dead), three suicide bombs in Istanbul (more than 50 dead) and bomb attacks in Madrid (191 killed) - and see a real War declared on us by fanatical Islamist Terrorists. Our only choice, as Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday in his National Press Club address, is whether we defend ourselves.

September 10 thinkers treat the War on Terrorism as a figure of speech, little different from the War on drugs or on poverty. That way they can avoid the difficult decisions and unpalatable choices that War requires, such as finetuning the balance between liberty and security.

Sitting on the High Court in 1915, even the progressive justice Henry Bournes Higgins said Parliament was entitled to entrust a minister with "extraordinary powers during the present extraordinary War". On September 11, another extraordinary War began. So, like many other countries, Australia passed laws making it much easier to hunt down and arrest Terrorist suspects. That recalibrated balance between liberty and security has borne fruit.

A month after the Madrid bombings, Spanish Police are holding 16 suspects. Other members of the Terrorist cell were hunted down and chose to blow themselves up rather than face arrest. In London, 700 Counter-Terrorism officers swooped on homes and industrial sites around the Home Counties, foiling a suspected bomb attack on British soil. Between September11, 2001, and January 31 this year, 544 individuals were arrested under the UK's Terrorism Act, a law framed by Britain's experience of Terrorism arising out of Northern Ireland. Of those, 98 were charged with 155 offences.

The same is happening elsewhere. Terrorists are being hunted down and arrested in this first phase in the War on Terror. Now starts phase two - convicting those arrested. Here, more tough decisions may be needed because so far there have been worrying losses.

Pre-September 11 laws about the admissibility of evidence have seen suspects go free. In Germany, Courts have thrown out cases involving two men, Mounir el Motassadeq and Abdelghani Mzoudi, suspected of assisting the three Hamburg-based September 11 hijackers. The critical evidence concerning them comes from a Yemeni, Ramzi Binalshibh, held in secret US custody. US authorities passed on transcripts of Binalshibh's interrogation to German intelligence but on condition the information not be used in Court.

In the US, prosecutors face similar problems in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, charged as a conspirator in September 11. To date, Courts have rejected prosecutors' arguments that National Security should allow rights to access witnesses to be curtailed.

These cases go to the heart of the Security v Liberty quandary. The touchstone of our legal system has always been that we would rather 10 guilty men go free than risk convicting an innocent man. But what if the guilty men are Terrorists, hell-bent on annihilating the West?

Perhaps we need to finetune the rights of some defendants so that sensitive evidence about National Security can be used in Courtrooms without being disclosed. It may mean closed Courts, pre-trial mechanisms for dealing with sensitive information, replacing classified information with summaries for use in Court, using secret evidence against an accused and secret hearings.

The alternative may be that Terrorists go free. There are no perfect answers to these questions, only imperfect options in an imperfect world. Next month, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock will receive an Australian Law Reform Commission report on how best to proceed with prosecutions while protecting sensitive information.

If we do redraw the liberty-security line, safeguards are needed because we simply won't know for many years to come whether we are overreacting. New laws may need sunset clauses so they expire after a set period. Or they may need in-built review mechanisms to keep accountable those exercising expanded powers.

When releasing a British discussion paper on the liberty-security dilemma late last year, UK Home Secretary David Blunkett said: "I am the custodian of civil liberties, but I do not own them." How they are balanced with security is a matter for the people, he concluded. This a debate we have to have. We cannot wish it away by thinking, as does Nettle, that it is still September 10.

The Australian: Janet Albrechtsen

See Also:
The Rising Tide of Islamic Fundamentalism (I)
The Rising Tide of Islamic Fundamentalism (II)
The True Meaning of Jihad
The Holy Qur'an Says...
The Myth That Must Die!
Why We Fight!
Calling Evil By Its Name