Juries 'should hear phone taps' to nail crime gangs

[Owen Lewis]

----- Original Message -----
From: David Hansen <davidh@spidacom.co.uk>
To: <ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Sent: 09 September 2002 10:50
Subject: Re: Juries 'should hear phone taps' to nail crime gangs


> On 8 Sep 2002 at 12:30, Richard Clayton wrote:
>
> > http://www.observer.co.uk/crimedebate/story/0,12079,788274,00.html
>
> > The only way to defeat international terrorism
>
> Another advisor who failed to understand what Canute demonstrated so
> well to his advisors a long time ago. International terrorism has
> always been with us and always will. It can no more be defeated than
> prostitution, theft or anything else.

True. The very concept is daft. But it's a soundbite, so who cares?
>
> What can be done is to control it to a minimum level society feels is
> acceptable.

'Fraid not. We live in a risk-averse society where most people want:

    -    Nothing bad ever to happen to them.

    -    Should something bad befall that someone shall be held to blame and
give them counselling and a pot of money. Or, at least, the pot of money and
damn the counselling.

Terrorists thrive on this since their aim is at the least to damage a
government's support amongst the people and, at best, to render a state
ungovernable so that they may take over in the ensuing chaos..

    An antiterrorist campaign - as opposed to a 'war on terrorism' can be
successful but only at a level of general unpleasantness which is now found
to be unacceptable. Hence the increasing tendency in the last forty years or
so, not to attempt to 'win' a campaign (whatever pap is put into the media)
but, rather, to hold the ring within which often nasty or otherwise
unadmirable opponents struggle for power and to hold that ring until:

        -    They wear themselves out.

        -    The political climate changes sufficiently for the opposing
parties to find an accommodation with each other.

This trade off is at the heart of inteligent discussions
> on the subject.

Look again. It was the Whitehall, Bishopsgate & St Mary Axe bombs and not
Inniskillen and Omagh that set Gerry Adams out on his road to the Presidency
of a United Ireland. And before you even think it, the reason for this is
not that the former were in England and the later in NI. It is the nature of
the acts and not their geographic or 'ethnic' placement per se that
determined their relative effectiveness.

Owen