Taking liberties

I watched another one of those documentaries yesterday. Yep, the kind that seems to push all the right buttons to send me into a state of rage. It's called Taking Liberties, and it's a documentary about how our civil liberties have been eroded away during the ten years that Blair has been in power to supposedly "protect" us from terrorists. Though as this documentary shows, many of the abuses of power by Blair and the police force have not been used to target terroists, but basically anyone who disagrees with what the government are doing.

The documentary opens with a three coach loads of protesters from London going to an anti-war protest at a US military base only to be stopped shortly before their destination by the police. The police run a thorough search of everyone on the coaches, they find only some toy soldiers, scissors, and dust masks, then they force everyone back on to the bus and forcibly escort them back to London. According to the police, from the items they found they've deemed the protesters as dangerous and might cause a breach of the peace.
So the police put everyone back on the bus and prevent them from reaching their destination to conduct a peaceful protest march. At one point a guy tries to step off the bus to try and talk to the police because what they're doing is illegal and a load of policeman come up to the door and hold it closed so that no one could get off. For the whole of the journey back to london they have police vans and motorcycles with them all the way preventing them from stopping or getting off anywhere.

This is just one example of the abuses of the powers that the government has given the police. Now I've never really been a person who hates the police, and even when I was younger I considered becoming a policeman, but over the last year I have come to have very different ideas to what purpose the police actually serves. If you look at the way the government likes to tackle crime their strategy has always been to invent new laws, throw more police at it, and give the police more "powers" to deal with crime. Powers such as detaining suspects for a whole month without charge, or the power to stop and search someone under the terroism act section 44 without having to explain to the person why you've stopped them and why you're searching them. Recently a few friends of mine have joined the police, and one of them was saying to me how great this law was - admitedly he was joking around a little bit about it when he said it.

The government keeps giving new powers like this to the police perhaps in the belief that they will use it responsibly, but the fact is that the police are human beings, human beings who are given power over other human beings, and you can't trust people to act responsibly when they are in a position of power. So although they may be given these stop and search powers to "protect" us from terroists, what's to stop them abusing this law to stop and search anyone? In the documentary you see examples of police using anti-terroism laws on people who are obviously not terrorists but protesters. This is an obvious abuse of power.

But there are other abuses of power shown in the documentary that are even worse. Such as a man who was a suspect in a terror plot and was found to be completely innocent by a jury, however despite being an innocent man he was still placed under house arrest following the trial and hasn't be able to leave his house for 2 years. An innocent man but still a prisoner.

Or the fact that our government condones torture by allowing CIA "torture flights" to refuel here in England before being sent to other countries such as Uzbekistan and Algeria where suspected terrorists are tortured into answering questions for the CIA. The American government obviously thinks that by not torturing people themselves on American soil they are somehow free from the guilt (nevermind what American soldiers have been doing in Guantanomo bay). However even our government is implicit in the crime as the documentary states that, under international law flying people from a country that doesn’t torture to one that does is illegal. Any government who facilitates this are seen as being complicit in the crime of torture themselves.


Anyway, the other night I had a dream about nuclear war. It's not the first time i've had a dream like this in the past few months. In the dream we're more or less waiting for the bombs to drop. For whatever reason, the people in charge of our country have gone to war with another country and they've launched a nuclear attack at each other. All through the dream I'm terrified of what is about to happen but I'm also feeling angry. I'm angry because I have no control over what's happening. I'm anrgy at the people in charge who have taken the lives of myself and everyone elses in their hands and about to kill us all. I'm angry and helpless. Then the bomb drops. We hear the blast, see the huge flash of light and we're still alive... but not for long. Despite surviving the bomb blast we now have to suffer a slow and painful death from radiation poisoning. The whole time I'm thinking about the people who caused this to happen and how helpless I felt to stop them.

These are probably the scariest dreams I've ever had and I'm not having them because I fear nuclear conflict. I think I have these dreams because of how helpless I feel to affect change in a world that desperately needs sorting out. For a long time I have felt that peaceful protest is not enough. Yes it has had it's victories, but really it's effect is more symbolic. It's just you standing up and saying "no, i don't agree with this!". For me this is just not enough.