Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
Does anyone have any idea what might be done about the pointless blob of white space above this paragraph? It seems to be resistant to all my efforts. Update haha, it succumbed.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Disappearances
Apparently, two suspected terrorists who were the subject of control orders (Americans; this means that the police and security services strongly suspect them, but don't want to show their evidence to a court) have disappeared. This means one of two things:
1. They have "disappeared" in the sense that our surveillance on them has broken down and they are currently at liberty to do whatever they like.
2. They have "disappeared" in the Latin American sense; they are currently in an unofficial or secret prison being tortured.
The first possibility is, of course, very frightening. The fact that the UK is now a country in which the second possibility certainly cannot be ruled out (it would currently be illegal for the UK to do this, but only just, and it would not be illegal for us to hand them over to the Americans who would be able to do it legally), is in my opinion a lot more frightening.
A note: of course, this is a "conspiracy theory" rather than a "cock-up theory", and as a result I am sure a number of my readers will take my entertaining it as de facto evidence of lunacy. It is not. It is a plain and undeniable fact that authoritarian states carry out disappearances of their enemies. If you're going to take seriously the concerns of Liberty, etc, about the direction in which UK civil liberties are going, it has to be because you are worried about something like this happening. I have no evidence that the missing terrorist suspects have been disappeared, but this is because I have no evidence about them at all. Which means in my view that the only reason to rule out the second possibility above out of hand would be a belief that the UK state security authorities operate under an absolute and effective prohibition against such things, which is a belief I no longer have with sufficient degree of certainty to build other beliefs on it.
posted by the management 10/17/2006 02:35:00 AM
|