I'm republishing this article in view of the recent arrests of five jihadists in Australia who were preparing a terrorist attack in the name of the Somalian terrorist organization al Shabaab within Australia.
A reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to: Keeping Australia Safe By An Improper Exercise Of Power By Surya Deva
On Line Opinion July 28, 2007
The mechanistic thinking and unimaginative conclusions of this article are typical of someone who has been trained in legal studies and who carries proudly and aloft the banner of the civil libertarians. The latter as yet cannot see the great distinction between a crime committed and a crime prevented and the distinct ways and means that are needed to apprehend its felons in each case.
Everyone knows when a crime is committed. But no one knows when a crime is going to be committed. And it’s much easier to search and find the suspects of the former, but it’s by far more difficult to identify the suspects of the latter. And while it might be easy to catch a felon who committed a crime and bring him/her to justice with the existing laws, it’s almost impossible to apprehend and bring to justice someone who is preparing to commit a crime with the same laws. It’s like in medicine. While one can cure a known and an occurring disease with the current remedies of medical science, one cannot prevent a relatively unknown deadly disease from spreading with the same remedies and one has to resort to hard and drastic measures to stop it from happening.
Likewise in the age of terror to prevent a terrorist action from occurring, one has to take drastic, if not draconian, measures against it, because the conventional existing laws are totally ineffective to stop it. It’s because of this cerebral inability mechanistic thinking of civil libertarians to see the fundamental distinction between a crime committed and a crime prevented and the different “remedies” that apply in each case, that all their strictures and arguments against the incursions of governments on people’s civil liberties, are trite, irrelevant, and intellectually out of depth.
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