Judging by the exceptions he recently proposed for altering the Miranda warnings, even Attorney General Eric Holder believes that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” a truth first stated in 1949 by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, and made new again in our time.
Meanwhile over in Britain, this week they have a new Prime Minister. They also have a Queen. They have Big Ben. The have, in Chelsea, a world-class soccer club owned by a Russian oligarch. They have an honorable tradition of tolerance, free speech and fair play. But they do not have a constitution.
Recently, though, a British judge, John Mitting, signed a suicide pact between his nation and violent Islamic extremists when he ruled that two Pakistani men, one a known al-Qaeda operative, could not be deported due to the possibility of their being harmed if they were sent home.
The private reaction of many British citizens has been fury and dismay. From the right-wing newspapers, the same. Let us for this story turn instead to the left-wing, “insurgent”-accommodating Guardian newspaper, just to assure readers new to Big Journalism that this is not a “stretcher”:
Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy was thrown into turmoil today when a judge ruled that two Pakistani students posed a serious threat to national security but could not be deported because of the risk they would be tortured or killed in their own country.
A special immigration court ruled that Abid Naseer was an al-Qaida operative who remained a serious threat, while his friend Ahmed Faraz Khan had been radicalised before coming to the UK and was willing to participate in terrorist activity.
One notes here that Britain quite recently, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, may not have been so shy about the harm caused by aggressive interrogation.
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In the meantime, the UK is in a fix since they are unable to jail the two terrorists without a trial, and yet to reveal the evidence against them obtained secretly would breach security:
Naseer and Khan, both 23, were among 11 men, all but one Pakistani, arrested in April last year amid fears they were planning a bomb attack in Manchester. They came under suspicion because MI5 believed Naseer, a computing student at John Moores University in Liverpool, had links with al-Qaida, and that emails he sent, in which he mentioned a nikkah, or Muslim marriage contract, were a signal that an attack was imminent.
“Hi Buddy,” one email read. “My mates are well and yes my affair with Nadia is soon turning in to family life. I met with Nadia family [sic] and we both parties have agreed to conduct the Nikkah after 15th and before 20th of this month.”
The court accepted, from evidence heard in secret, that the recipient of the emails was an al-Qaida terrorist. “There is a longterm continuing threat [to Britain] and this is part of the narrative of that threat,” a senior security source said.
The arrests were brought forward after the assistant commissioner, Bob Quick, the head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command, was photographed in Downing Street clutching clearly visible secret documents revealing details of the investigation.
Throughout history Britain has served as a refuge for a many and varied lot seeking refuge from political upheaval. During the French Revolution, the remaining French royal family moved to Buckinghamshire. Karl Marx, fleeing Germany after the failed 1848 revolution, made his way to London’s Soho, where he set about writing the Communist Manifesto. Lenin dodged the Tsar’s secret police by hiding in the metropolis before making his way to the Finland Station en route to hijacking the socialist revolution in Russia, once the hard work had been done, for his even more hard-line comrades.
And in the fall of 2001, when a government was overturned in Afghanistan, refugees from that country arrived at Heathrow seeking political asylum… Wait, someone at immigration finally asked, aren’t these in the debarking lounge the people we were just fighting against?
Yet, so far no one in the judiciary or in the Tory/Lib-Dem alliance government has publicly grappled with the implication of John Mitting’s decision: that any and every al-Qaeda operative on the run will want to head to Britain, where he or she will be guaranteed, pari passu, safe haven.
At moments like this the well-meaning, decent people of our mother country look like a suicide cult. Suicide cult, meet the death cult. Death cult, suicide cult.
I fear… I fear… I fear you two are a match.
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