The BBC has a report on calls to roll back some of the more outrageous attacks on civil liberties in the UK and US - Ministers 'using fear of terror'.

A former head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism and trying to bring in laws that restrict civil liberties. In an interview in a Spanish newspaper, published in the Daily Telegraph, Dame Stella Rimington, 73, also accuses the US of "tortures".

The Home Office said it was vital to strike a right balance between privacy, protection and sharing personal data. It said any policies which impact on privacy must be "proportionate".

Dame Stella, who stood down as the director general of the security service in 1996, has previously been critical of the government's policies, including its attempts to extend pre-charge detention for terror suspects to 42 days and the controversial plan to introduce ID cards.

"It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a police state," she told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

She said the British security services were "no angels," but they did not kill people. "The US has gone too far with Guantanamo and the tortures," she said. "MI5 does not do that. Furthermore it has achieved the opposite effect - there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification."

Dame Stella's comments come as a study is published by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) that accuses the US and the UK of undermining the framework of international law.

Former Irish president Mary Robinson, the president of the ICJ said: "Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and to repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years. "Human rights and international humanitarian law provide a strong and flexible framework to address terrorist threats."

TruthDig has an article by Chris Hedges on the possibility that some American laws may be intended for use against restless unemployed locals rather than those hard to find terrorists - Bad News From America’s Top Spy.

We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgänger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington’s new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.

It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. You wouldn’t know this from the Obama administration, which seems hellbent on draining the blood out of the body politic and transfusing it into the corpse of our financial system. But by the time Barack Obama is done all we will be left with is a corpse—a corpse and no blood. And then what? We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.

The United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent.

And we have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been destroyed by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. The government has pledged trillions toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing trillions more to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to somehow spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our imperial project on credit. Let our kids worry about it. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security state’s strategies to crush potential civil unrest and you get a glimpse of the future. It doesn’t look good.

“The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications,” Blair told the Senate. “The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism.”

The specter of social unrest was raised at the U.S. Army War College in November in a monograph [click on Policypointers’ pdf link to see the report] titled “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development.” The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health emergencies” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” The “widespread civil violence,” the document said, “would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”

“An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home,” it went on.

“Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance,” the document read.

In plain English, something bureaucrats and the military seem incapable of employing, this translates into the imposition of martial law and a de facto government being run out of the Department of Defense. They are considering it. So should you.

The SMH reports that Obama is making a good start to erasing the stain of the Bush presidency, ordering the close of the Guantanamo Bay camp - President Barack Obama signs order to close Guantanamo Bay. Obama has also outlawed CIA torture practices and called on Israel to open the border with Gaza to allow humaitarian aid through.

On his second day in office, US President Barack Obama has made good on his campaign promises to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year and end the practice of torture by the spy agency the CIA immediately.

At a ceremony this morning in the Oval Office, witnessed by a dozen former military officers, Mr Obama signed four presidential orders including the much-anticipated order to close the controversial detention facility within 12 months.

The Guantanamo Bay order sets up a commission to look at options for relocating the remaining 245 inmates of Guantanamo Bay. This is likely to include asking allies such as Australia to take inmates.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has already rejected similar overtures from the former president George Bush, but Portugal and Switzerland have indicated they may be willing to take some detainees.

Other options include moving inmates to US military prisons, returning some to their native countries, and finding third countries to take them.

The President also signed an order saying that all interrogations conducted by the United States would abide by the army field manual, effectively banning the CIA from using "enhanced interrogation" techniques including waterboarding.

"The message we are sending around the world is the US intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism but we are going to do so consistent with our values," he said.

"As I said during the inauguration, we are not going to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals," he said. "We are going to win this fight but we will win it on our terms."

The order also sets up a process to review rendition practices, where prisoners are sent to CIA prisons in countries without any human rights protections.

Glenn Greenwald says the signs are encouraging for civil libertarians, even if they have conservative bed-wetters wringing their hands with fear and suffering frequent anxiety attacks - The newest fear-mongering campaign from the Right and the media.

The latest fear-mongering campaign in the U.S. -- this one devoted to scaring Americans that they will be slaughtered if Guantanamo is closed and Terrorism suspects are brought into the U.S. for real trials -- is now in full swing. The New York Times today prints a front-page article claiming that a detainee released from Guantanamo last year has now become "the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch" (it's always amazing how bureaucratically structured Al Qaeda is alleged to be and how well we can discern the structure: "Deputy Leader, Yemen Branch"; do they have business cards and organizational charts?).

But the real fear-mongering is focused on all of the attacks that American communities will suffer if we imprison dangerous Terrorists inside the U.S. rather than in Guantanamo. House Minority Leader John Boehner wants you to be frightened: "I think the first thing we have to remember is that we're talking about terrorists here. Do we bring them into our borders?" GOP House Minority Whip Eric Cantor warned: "Actively moving terrorists inside our borders weakens our security. Most families neither want nor need hundreds of terrorists seeking to kill Americans in their communities." The always frightened Wall St. Journal Editorial Page shrieks that any place that houses Al Qaeda Terrorists will become a "target" for attack:

The military base [at Ft. Leavenworth] is integrated into the community and, lacking Guantanamo's isolation and defense capacities, would instantly become a potential terror target. Expect similar protests from other states that are involuntarily entered in this sweepstakes.

National Review's Jim Geraghaty spent all day yesterday fantasizing about all the scary things that could happen if we have Al-Qaeda Terrorists in our communities (near nuclear facilities and airports!). Former Bush aide and chief speechwriter Marc Thiessen warned yesterday in The Washington Post that if there is a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Americans will blame Obama because he stopped torturing and closed Guantanamo, and Democrats will be "unelectable for a generation." Today, at National Review, Thiessen, citing yesterday's Executive Orders, declared Obama "to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office." And yesterday, of course, The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt echoed the standard claim that our regular federal courts were inadequate to try dangerous Terrorists.

All of this is pure fear-mongering -- the 2009 version of Condoleezza Rice's mushroom cloud and Jay Rockefeller's "we'll-lose-our-eavesdropping-capabilities" cries. Both before and after 9/11, the U.S. has repeatedly and successfully tried alleged high-level Al Qaeda operatives and other accused Islamic Terrorists in our normal federal courts -- in fact, the record is far more successful than the series of debacles that has taken place in the military commissions system at Guantanamo. Moreover, those convicted Terrorists have been housed in U.S. prisons, inside the U.S., for years without a hint of a problem.

Glenn also notes the polls are showing American citizens (unlike their amoral mass media and a small tribe of conservative blowgards) think that shutting Gitmo and giving terrorism suspects fair trials is a good thing - New poll on torture and investigations negates Beltway conventional wisdom.

One of the most common and most corrosive aspects of our political discourse is the endless assertions -- based on nothing -- about what "Americans believe." It is exceedingly conventional wisdom that Americans generally view the world through the prism of Jack Bauer and therefore want our government to torture, want Guantanamo kept opened, and do not want suspected Terrorists to be tried in civilian courts inside the U.S. It is even more commonly asserted that Americans do not want, and even further, would never tolerate, criminal investigations into the various crimes of Bush officials.

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday negates all of those beliefs. Here was the question that was asked about torture -- note that it's phrased in the most pro-torture manner possible, because it is grounded in the ludicrous, 24-clichéd "ticking time bomb" excuse that is the most commonly used argument by torture advocates:

Q. Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?

By a wide margin -- 58-40% -- Americans say that torture should never be used, no matter the circumstances. Let's repeat that: "no matter the circumstance." That margin is enormous among Democrats (71-28%) and substantial among independents (56-43%). As usual these days, Republicans hold the minority view, but even among them there is substantial categorical opposition to torture (42-55%).

Moreover, a majority of Americans (53-42%) favor the closing of Guantanamo, with large support among Democrats (68%) and independents (55%). Even more significantly, a very solid majority of those favoring the closing of Guantanamo recognize exactly what ought to be done with detainees who the government believes are guilty of terrorism-related crimes -- it's exactly what the ACLU and civil libertarians generally urge be done:

Glenn Greenwald has a look at the sorry state of liberty in the US and the equally sorry performance by the Democrats of not undoing (or even trying to undo) some of the evils initiated by the Republicans - Another brutal year for liberty.

Befitting an administration that has spent eight years obliterating America's core political values, its final year in power -- 2008 -- was yet another grim one for civil liberties and constitutional protections. Unlike the early years of the administration, when liberty-abridging policies were conceived of in secret and unilaterally implemented by the executive branch, many of the erosions of 2008 were the dirty work of the U.S. Congress, fueled by the passive fear or active complicity of the Democratic Party that controlled it. The one silver lining is that the last 12 months have been brightly clarifying: It is clearer than ever what the Obama administration can and must do in order to arrest and reverse the decade-long war on the Constitution waged by our own government.

The most intensely fought civil liberties battle of 2008 -- the one waged over FISA and telecom immunity -- ended the way most similar battles of the last eight years have: with total defeat for civil libertarians. Even before Democrats were handed control of Congress at the beginning of 2007, the Bush administration had been demanding legislation to legalize its illegal warrantless NSA eavesdropping program and to retroactively immunize the telecom industry for its participation in those programs. Yet even with Bill Frist and Denny Hastert in control of the Congress, the administration couldn't get its way.

Not even the most cynical political observer would have believed that it was the ascension of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that would be the necessary catalyst for satisfying Bush's most audacious demands, concerning his most brazenly illegal actions. If anything, hopes were high that Democratic control of Congress would entail a legislative halt to warrantless eavesdropping or, at the very least, some meaningful investigation and disclosure -- what we once charmingly called "oversight" -- regarding what Bush's domestic spying had really entailed. After all, the NSA program was the purified embodiment of the most radical attributes of a radical regime -- pure lawlessness, absolute secrecy, a Stasi-like fixation on domestic surveillance. It was widely assumed, even among embittered cynics, that the new Democratic leadership in Congress would not use their newfound control to protect and endorse these abuses.

Yet in July 2008, there stood Pelosi and Reid, leading their caucuses as they stamped their imprimatur of approval on Bush's spying programs. The so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed with virtually unanimous GOP and substantial Democratic support, including the entire top level of the House Democratic leadership. It legalized vast new categories of warrantless eavesdropping and endowed telecoms with full immunity for prior surveillance lawbreaking. Most important, it ensured a permanent and harmless end to what appeared to be the devastating scandal that exploded in 2005 when the New York Times revealed to the country that the Bush administration was spying on Americans illegally, without warrants of any kind.

With passage of the Act, Democrats delivered to the Bush administration everything it wanted -- and more. GOP Sen. Kit Bond actually taunted the Democrats in the Times for giving away the store: "I think the White House got a better deal than they even had hoped to get." Making matters much worse, by delivering this massive gift to the White House, the House undid one of its very few good deeds since taking over in 2006: its galvanizing February 2008 refusal to succumb to Bush's rank fear-mongering by allowing "The Protect America Act" to expire instead of following the Senate's lead in making it permanent.

Adding the final insult to this constitutional injury, Barack Obama infamously violated his emphatic pledge, made during the Democratic primary, to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity. With the Democratic nomination fully secured, Obama blithely tossed that commitment aside, instead joining his party's leadership in voting for cloture on the bill -- the opposite of a filibuster -- and then in favor of the bill itself. The photographs of the celebratory, bipartisan signing ceremony that followed at the White House -- where an understandably jubilant George Bush and Dick Cheney were joined by a grinning Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman and Steny Hoyer -- was the vivid, wretched symbol of what, in 2008, became the fully bipartisan assault on America's basic constitutional guarantees and form of government.

The FISA fight was the destructive template that drove virtually every other civil liberties battle of the last year. Time and again, Democrats failed to deliver on a single promise. They failed to overcome a GOP filibuster in the Senate to restore habeas corpus, which had been partially abolished in 2006 as a result of the Military Commissions Act that passed with substantial Democratic support and wholesale Democratic passivity. Notably, while Senate Democrats, when in the minority, never even considered a filibuster to block the Military Commissions Act, it was simply assumed that the GOP, when it was in the minority, would filibuster in order to prevent passage of the Habeas Restoration Act. And filibuster they did.

A similar scenario played out with the attempt in February to redress America's torture crisis by enacting an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act compelling all government agencies, including the CIA, to comply with the Army Field Manual when interrogating detainees. The most immediate effect of such a law would have been to impose an absolute ban on the use of waterboarding, along with any other coercive tactics -- torture techniques -- which the Manual does not explicitly authorize.

Knowing that the president would veto the bill, the GOP allowed a floor vote on the Army Field Manual amendment. Signaling what would be his year-long, soul-selling captivity to the far right of his party, John McCain -- despite years of parading around as a righteous opponent of torture -- voted against the torture ban. The bill passed both houses largely along party lines, President Bush vetoed it as promised, and the House then failed to override the veto. The path taken was slightly different, but the outcome was the same: total failure in reining in Bush's abuses. Indeed, by the end of 2008, civil libertarians could point to many defeats suffered in the Democratic-controlled Congress, but not a single victory. ...

For the last seven years, Democrats have repeatedly cited GOP political dominance to excuse their wholesale failures to limit, let alone reverse, the devastating war waged by the Bush administration on America's core liberties and form of government. With a new Democratic president and large majorities in both Congressional houses, those excuses will no longer be so expedient. As dark and depressing as these last seven years have been for civil libertarians, culminating in an almost entirely grim 2008, there is no question that the Obama administration and the Democrats generally now possess the power to reverse these abuses and restore our national political values. But as the events of the last 12 months conclusively demonstrate, there are substantial questions as to whether they have the will to do so.

The SMH has a summary of 2007's most egregious offences against civil liberties in Australia. I suspect we aren't any worse off than our fellow Anglosphere nations - liberal democracy has taken quite a hammering in recent years from the authoritarian idiots in our midst...

OVER the past 12 months there was an impressive list of civil liberties violations in our relaxed and comfortable land. A year ago we published a list showing how our liberties had been whittled, starting with the sedition laws and ending with David Hicks. Now there is a fresh outcrop of abrasions to our rights, although, sadly, there is an eerie consistency about some of the players. Here goes.

10. Trent Smith and all the other public servants prosecuted by the Commonwealth for allegedly leaking. Smith successfully challenged his sacking by the Department of Foreign Affairs after a four-year, $1 million witch-hunt. His case was of quite specific interest to the then minister, Alexander Downer, after a prolonged investigation found Smith had not leaked the minister's loose-lipped remarks to the New Zealand high commissioner that Australia was already committed to military action in Iraq, regardless of what the UN did. Smith was in the gun again, falsely accused of breaching the public service conduct code after providing in 2002 a non-controversial email response to a query from one of Kevin Rudd's staff members.

9. The escalation in police powers. The special APEC laws allowed the police to create "restricted areas … excludable persons … and prohibited items". The onus of proof was reversed, there was a presumption against bail, and in most searches the police were not required to apply for warrants. The Cronulla riots and affray legislation, which was to have expired last month, has been extended indefinitely by the Iemma Government. "Cemented" was the Premier's word. Areas can be cordoned off allowing police to search people, confiscate "offensive" property (including mobile phones and Australian flags). And a "reasonable" suspicion is not required before searches are conducted.

8. Deportations. ASIO is to appeal (again) against the Federal Court's findings that it is obliged to provide deportees with details of their adverse security assessments. This includes two refugees who were held on Nauru for nearly five years as well as Scott Parkin, the protester who was jailed and then kicked out of the country - without explanation. Then there was the case of Hew Griffiths, who was sentenced to 51 months' jail in the US last year for conspiracy to commit copyright infringements against US software companies. Griffiths, an Australian resident, was in jail here for three years while he fought extradition. Even though he downloaded the software in Australia, the courts regarded the offence as taking place in the US.

7. The Pine Gap four. These Christian pacifists were found guilty and fined after gaining entry to the Pine Gap spy base. They alleged that the base was used by the US to help with bombing raids in Iraq. The four trespassers were prosecuted under the hitherto unused Defence (Special Undertakings) Act of 1952. The Crown asked the court to send the four to jail.

6. Dr Izhar ul-Haque. Justice Michael Adams found that ASIO falsely imprisoned, kidnapped and intimidated a Sydney medical student, Izhar ul-Haque. Ul-Haque had been charged with receiving terrorist training in Pakistan. The judge said the records of interview were inadmissible and the trial collapsed. It has been reported that the secretary of the Attorney-General's department, Robert Cornall, has lodged a complaint about Adams with the Judicial Commission. Gerard Henderson accused the judge of acting "essentially on the basis of a whim". Even though ASIO agents gave extensive evidence to the court, the organisation's head, Paul O'Sullivan, complained that they had not had a chance to rebut the accusation made against them.

5. The mounting campaign against a human rights charter for Australia. You have enough rights already, some conservative academics and columnists say. No more rights for you, they argue, while their newspapers demand more freedoms for the media. The complaint is that to have a charter of rights in this country would result in a transfer of power from elected politicians to unelected judges. Underpinning this proposition is that politicians must be good (or wise) and judges bad (or foolish). Yet most other civilised countries have some sort of rights legislation and have managed to survive.

4. Philip Ruddock. Once again the former attorney-general deserves his own special entry in the human rights hall of infamy. This time for his unique conception that an accused person can have a "fair trial" based on hearsay evidence and evidence extracted by coercion.

3. The High Court of Australia. In its own quiet way the highest court has contributed to the shrinkage of our freedoms. In particular, freedom of speech has taken a battering in the recent Channel Seven Adelaide v Manock decision, which deals with the defence of comment in defamation cases. Contrary to longstanding authority, the majority reasoning suggests that for any published comment to be defensible it must be "reasonable". The right of the crank or ratbag to rail in favour of unpopular causes has been severely curtailed, if not abolished.

2. David Hicks and the control order. This was a control order based on outpourings that were up to eight years old. It assumes that in eight years the man has not changed. Certainly, the way some sections of the media and the former foreign minister have hounded and continue to demonise Hicks since his "release", he will not be permitted to change. He remains forever "evil".

1. Dr Mohamed Haneef.

Enough said.