LONDON -- At the end of last year, 69 men, it is thought, were being held in British prisons as terrorist suspects. Only 11 of these had been convicted of any offense. Twelve were being held in Belmarsh prison without trial (since then, one has been moved to Broadmoor, a high security mental hospital). This is the most serious abrogation of the basic civil liberty -- that liberty can only be removed by the state after due process of law -- since the height of the "troubles" in Northern Ireland over 20 years ago.
Recently Prime Minister Tony Blair offered a full apology to 11 people imprisoned in 1974 not because their trial was technically flawed, but because they were wholly innocent of the terrorist charges for which they were wrongly convicted.
It seems that civil liberties, so precious in the rhetoric of democracies, have little real value for the citizens of democracies; they are prepared to dispense with them if their lives and property are threatened. Anxious and angry critics of the "war against terror" have been crying out for the last few years that the very freedoms that this "war" is supposedly being conducted to protect are in fact being deftly removed by the U.S. and British governments in the name of protecting the citizens against terror.