The British lawyer Gareth Pierce, celebrated for her defense of miscarriage of justice victims, wrote recently: "Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture, brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence.  

This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name the actions were taken, remained ignorant."  

Referring to the conflict in Northern Ireland, she was drawing a comparison with "our new suspect community," people of Muslim faith, against whom a vicious, sectarian and mostly unreported war is well under way. 

As Pierce points out, "internment, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland" now allows, not 42 days, but "indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him."  

Those snatched from their homes in Britain following 11 September, 2001 have all but vanished into an Anglo-American gulag, which in this country joins Belmarsh prison, where people are consigned to oblivion, with Broadmoor psychiatric prison, where they are sent as they go mad, and with Kafkaesque versions of "home" where others are interred under "control orders." One of these home prisoners, wrote Pierce, " a man without arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact anyone without committing a criminal offense, subject to a curfew and allowed no visits unless approved in advance by the Home Office."  

Going into the garden, arranging a plumber, speaking to a child’s teacher all require permission. The families go mad, too. 

Britain's War In The Cause Of Fear & Ignorance