Fran O'Sullivan: The sad irony of preserving freedom

It's damned if you do and damned if you don't - that is the reality for Western political leaders such as Britain's Tony Blair, US President George W. Bush and Australia's John Howard as they try to protect their citizens from yet another Islamic fundamentalist terrorist onslaught by bringing down tough anti-terrorist laws.

That those same laws run counter to the basic freedoms that distinguish Western democratic nations sticks in the craw of many of their citizens, as it does with many New Zealanders, who fear the Clark Government will inevitably follow suit when it next moves to step up our anti-terrorist laws.

But the intention of such laws is to pre-empt attacks - not deal with the human wreckage which follows a successful terrorist onslaught.

Terrorists do not give their victims a second chance or the ability to debate the claimed injustices which they are fighting. They just strike and kill.

Their victims have no chance to appeal to their relatives for help - they just get the body parts. No explanations either.

Just imagine the outcry from those same critics if governments - or federal police and intelligence agencies - failed to take a pre-emptive strike in the face of clear warnings of an attack.

But there are still issues. These new laws are to some extent Kafkaesque, particularly powers that allow law authorities to detain suspects without laying charges, or to prevent those detained from seeking assistance from family and friends.

What democracies must insist on, at the least, is that their politicians should be allowed to debate such anti-terrorism laws on behalf of us all and decide whether to approve, reject or modify them if they wish.

It makes sense for Western nations to try to prevent terrorism. But in practice it is very difficult.

Blair and Howard had differing experiences in the last week when trying to tighten their own laws.

The Kafkaesque element - coupled with frank mistrust over the reliability of British intelligence, which over-stated the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - led to Blair's comprehensive defeat in the House of Commons when he tried to tighten Britain's anti-terrorism laws.

It is ironic Blair's defeat came after the loss of life in the terrible July bombings. But Blair is fighting with a losing hand - the defeat was personal as much as political.

Howard's case is different. He successfully gained Opposition support for a snap tightening of Australia's anti-terrorism laws, and has been vindicated by the roundup of 18 alleged terror plotters.

Australian Federal Police and Asio (Australia's intelligence agency) had worked for 16 months with state police to infiltrate and crack the alleged terror cells.

The distinguishing factor is that Howard managed to form a consensus with his political opponent, Labor leader Kim Beazley, before moving legislation. Blair didn't.

There is a lesson in this for New Zealand politicians.

The Zaoui affair - where a suspect Algerian renegade has been deified by civil liberties groups - is a moot point.

What is often overlooked by those using Ahmed Zaoui's predicament as testimony to human rights abuses by our Government is that Helen Clark ensured her opponents were briefed on the potential security risk Zaoui posed.

There are protections built into New Zealand's legal system - which Zaoui's lawyers have capitalised on to make their client's case a cause celebre - which ultimately mean his case does not parallel Guantanamo Bay, whatever the fantasies of his legal representatives.

The new Supreme Court provides a counterpoint to the politicians' judgments. But both major parties have been in agreement on our anti-terrorist laws to date.

The US is in a different space. Right now controversy is brewing over revelations that top al Qaeda captives are being held in CIA-run prisons in at least eight countries, counter to moves Senator John McCain is promoting to stop human rights abuses of captives.

The problem is that we have yet to debate what constitutes a threat to national security, and what the response of Western democracies should be.

That the war on terror pits governments against individuals - rather than other governments as in conventional war - runs against traditional modalities such as the Geneva Convention for dealing with war.

Australia has begun to debate such issues within elite circles. The Centre for Independent Studies' recent Consilium in Coolum discussed the potential for the war on terror to be a much longer conflict that anything in recent memory.

Speaking in a personal capacity, David Kilcullen, a former adviser on counter-terrorism to the US Defence Secretary, pointed to two trends that drive the new global warfare: globalisation and US military dominance.

Kilcullen maintained this new war will be large-scale, with many proxy conflicts in many countries and over many decades. This requires a whole-of-society response not just a military or police response, and special forces rather than traditional military forces.

It is a sad irony that preserving human freedoms in this new paradigm means some compromise of those freedoms, but that is the price of the new vigilance in a new era.