Originally posted by Chico
Surely you must realize by now that the police and politicians abuse and extend the proper limits of every new power they acquire - Don't you recall some delegate being arrested under the terror laws at the Labour Conference just for being near the venue without his ID?
It's not enough to say the police will use common sense, and the delegate in this example was at no risk of internment - You never know what crazy policies will be in effect in twenty or thirty years, and just the existence of internment powers, the fact that habeas corpus has been breached, would be a danger to us all.
BTW, I don't extend this principle to those who the police have credible evidence are planning attacks with true WMDs, i.e. nukes or biological weapons, because given the likely casualties of such an attack the perp literally places themselves in a de-facto a state of war, and outside the Geneva convention, where the legal niceties don't apply.
(I suppose the 9/11 attacks were in a grey area between, but verging on WMD in practice, and given that insurgents are fighting US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan I don't have too much of a problem with Guantanamo Bay and similar internment centres.)
But a conventional bomb on a bus, even a whole string of them day after day, however devastating for a few and disruptive to all, is not a WMD, and any politician who fails to make that clear distinction is a lying hound, deceitfully trying to blur definitions in classic "1984" style.
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