Knives, Cameras, Terrorists

So it’s been a busy week of politics both here in London and also back home.  Hillary Clinton’s big speech, etc.  Maybe I’ll write about that sometime but it seems a bit done to death at the moment.  What is there left to say?  In any event, the talk of London politics nowadays comes on two topics: 1) knife crime and 2) the proposed 42-day limit on government detentions.

As an American, both of these debates are rather charming and quaint.  Knife crime.  Isn’t that what Americans were concerned about in the 1700s?  We are SO far ahead of the Brits on this one.  What they need to do is legalize guns and then BANG!  Your knife crime problem is gone. 

In all seriousness, this totally puts the lie to the National Rifle Association’s arguments in the States that if you ban guns only criminals will have guns.  They won’t.  They’ll have knives.  And between you and me, I’d rather face someone with a knife than a gun (although I’d rather face someone with a tray of cupcakes than either).  Now, knife crime is definitely a problem here and I don’t want to belittle that.  It’s actually quite shocking, some of these stabbings that are reported almost daily.

In that story linked above there was reference to the CCTV cameras that are a mainstay of the fight against crime and terrorism here in the UK.  I myself actually don’t have a lot of problems with the CCTV, which is funny because if they were put up in America I would likely go nuts.  But, it’s funny that when you move to another country you open yourself up to all kinds of different possibilities.  That being said, doesn’t this Transport for London poster seem a trifle Orwellian?

Still, it seems like this debate about extending the detention of suspected terrorists from 21 to 42 days has perhaps stretched public credulity to the limit.  Yesterday I saw the Home Secretary on the Andrew Marr Show and he tore her a new one.  Her arguments essentially fell back on the ‘infinite security’ argument, whereby the Government needs all the tools it can think of to fight terrorism.  When confronted with the fact that cops don’t actually think this is a good idea she just steamrolled right through.

So what’s quaint about this?  The fact that you’re debating it (I say you, because I’m not allowed to vote).  Brown should have taken a page from President Bush and just instituted it.  If Brown loses this vote, he’ll know he should have just followed the Bush plan: flout national and international law and just keep it all a secret.

Un-Extraordinary Rendition

Today the Guardian broke the story about the US practice of keeping prisoners from (as Borat put it) the ‘War of Terror’ imprisoned onboard US naval vessels.  Of course, the US denies this, but given the US government’s track record denying their well-documented practices associated with extraordinary rendition, I think it’s safe to say that at least the main thrust of the story is probably true.  It even makes intuitive sense – as the US has been trying to wind down Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay because it is a public relations disaster, they have to keep the prisoners somewhere (since it’s not like the US is actually conceding the point that detentions are illegal and immoral).

Why make the shift to the ships?  Well, as Derek Gregory has argued, Gitmo offered a place in which the US was not technically sovereign (since the land is leased from Cuba) but in which the US had full jurisdiction.  This ’space of the exception’ gave the US a space to contravene international law.  Denied this, it makes sense for the US to fall back on US navy ships, which are technically sovereign territory of the US but nevertheless have nobody around to rat them out (at least nobody who is outside the chain of command).  It’s worth mentioning that Diego Garcia, the island in the Indian Ocean mentioned by the story, is itself something of a ’space of the exception’.  It’s British territory, leased by the United States.  The US wanted it for a naval base in the 1970s so the local population was forced from their homes and since then the island has been used as a refueling site for US flights of extraordinary rendition.

The sad thing is that this story is so totally non-shocking.  We’ve arrived at a point in history where we expect this out of the United States.  It’s shameful.  This isn’t even on CNN.com’s main page at the moment.  Who cares?