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Terrorism Bill

My Lords, in the light of the July attacks in London and the knowledge that we have acquired about terrorist methods and networks, a Bill such as this is needed and I have no general difficulty with it. But I do have four sources of unease and I should like to spend the next five or so minutes articulating them. I have some difficulty with the whole idea of detention without charge for 28 days or more. This kind of detention could traumatise the individuals involved and, as the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, pointed out, it could lead to an enormous amount of injury and psychological damage to the individuals involved. It could also lead to false confessions and to unreliable convictions, as we have known in several cases in the past. There is also the danger that this part of the Bill might be seen as directed at or against Muslims and might therefore alienate them and make intelligence gathering that much more difficult. On this question of intelligence gathering, there is one point that we might need to bear in mind. There is a lot of talk about training a large number of Muslim informants who would act as a source of reliable information about what is going on within the community. I hope that we will tread that path very carefully because, if we are not careful, we could easily create deep areas of discontent and incoherence within the community and even promote violence between Muslims. If we do decide to go ahead with 28 days of detention without charge, then I hope that we will bear at least the following points in mind: the conditions under which people are detained; the methods of interrogation that are employed; the right of appeal and even compensation in cases where the detention turns out to be utterly unjustified; regular and close judicial scrutiny; and, what is just as important, periodic review of how this policy is working out. The second difficulty I have with the Bill is with this whole idea of glorification. Whenever it is defined within the Bill, it talks in terms of praising terrorism, celebrating terrorism, inducement or incitement to terrorist attacks or encouraging others to emulate. These are only four or five words in terms of which the idea of glorification is defined. It is too wide and too vague. Hardly anyone in your Lordships’ House has pointed out that we have precisely this legislation in the Indian penal code. While sati was abolished a long time ago, in the mid-1980s there was an act of sati; lots of women in India got terribly worked up and the Government had to give in to pressure—the kind of thing our Government are doing now—and do something. They enacted a law against the glorification of sati. That was about 18 years ago, and not a single prosecution has taken place. In one case, when a prosecution was mounted, no conviction was secured because the case was easily shot down on questions such as what was glorification and whether the utterances by a particular individual amounted to glorification. So if there is any lesson to learn from India, that is it. I am not sure what it means to talk about praising, celebrating, or inducing people to engage in terrorist attacks. If I were to argue that, in certain situations, the use of violence, even terrorist violence, was justified, now or in the past, could I be said to have induced anyone to engage in similar acts in the present? What am I to do if my listener or my reading public were to draw that kind of conclusion from what I have written? This is not just a hypothetical example. About two years ago, I delivered a lecture at Harvard University on a very technical philosophical question; namely, what are the limits of rational debate and at what point in time may I be able to tell someone, ““There is no possibility of arguing with you””? At what point does such a dialogue break down? As an experiment, I imagined a dialogue between Osama bin Laden and Mahatma Gandhi. This article was published a few weeks later in Prospect. I was told that the publishers, who eventually published it in the Harvard University collection, were deeply uneasy just in case it got me into trouble, and even when it appeared in Prospect, I was told that if I were to go to the United States—and I go often, when I am invited to give lectures—I might be detained at the airport. I have a feeling that the Bill would catch that kind of article. In order to make my argument philosophically as convincing as possible, I tried to make Osama bin Laden a better philosopher than he is, trying to marshal arguments in his favour which the man would never have dreamt of making. Of course, I made Gandhi just as strong, refuting every point that Osama bin Laden was making. But my conclusion was that in matters of moral absolutes, no compromise, no rational resolution of disagreement, is possible. I am afraid that if I were to write more of this kind of article, I might get into more trouble than I seem to have done. I have a similar difficulty with Clause 2 which refers to handling, distributing or circulating terrorist material. I do that all the time. As a university professor, whose job it is to teach all kinds of things, including the possibility of justification of terrorist violence, I recommend books by Bakunin, Kropotkin and Nachaev—all kinds of anarchists—who all gloried in terrorism, sometimes mindlessly. Am I to be told that for duplicating these articles or books and circulating them to my students, I will be hauled up before Her Majesty’s court and told that I am guilty of ““handling””—whatever that may mean in an academic context—material of this kind? We need to be extremely careful. When I teach courses on theories of violence and of revolution in history, or whether the concept of innocence makes sense in a political context, because that is important to a definition of terrorism, I might be told that they would not be caught by the Bill because all the Bill intends to stop is incitement to terrorist attacks, and this is not what I am doing. But I do not understand ““incitement”” in this context. What I do when I teach is to help my students understand that in certain situations, terrorist violence might be condoned and even justified. In other words, the dividing line between inciting and condoning terrorism is pretty thin, and I do not think that the Bill quite captures it. Those are the three specific points I wanted to make. They concern me very deeply, both as someone from within an ethnic minority but, more importantly, as a philosopher whose job it is, as Socrates said, to act as a sting fly, making people think. I have a larger point, on which I should like to end. Terrorism is certainly a security question, but it is not only that—it is also a moral and political question. We need to address why people are drawn to it. No one wants to die and, contrary to what some of your Lordships said earlier, even those seeking martyrdom want to reassure themselves that that is consistent with the central principles of their religion. In fact, when the first suicide bombers appeared in Lebanon in the early 1980s, there was an intense amount of debate among Muslim theologians about whether that was acceptable in the context of the Koran. Only a few years later, a view was reached in certain circles that it was an okay thing to do. We need to ask why people were persuaded to read their religion in this way and what cultural and political factors precipitated that reading. We might also ask ourselves why Britain has not been subjected to an Islamic terrorist threat until recently and why it has come under it only now. For all these reasons, I suggest that while addressing the question of terrorism as robustly as we have done, we also need to look at the larger factors. The battle against terrorism cannot be fought within our country alone; it is a worldwide phenomenon and will not disappear in a few days or a year—it will come up again and again. Political wisdom requires that we should be thinking about long-term factors in our country, about our relations with the Muslim world and about the larger sense of grievance that Muslim societies seem to have. If we can apply our minds to creating a sensible kind of world order, that might in the end be a better way of addressing terrorism.