Bush, the Democrats and the London "Terror" Scare

(Editorial Note)

The “war on terror” has been ratcheted up yet again after British authorities arrested some two dozen British-born Muslims on August 10, claiming that they had engaged in a conspiracy to blow up airplanes flying to the U.S. The record of British security in combatting “terror” includes the July 2005 killing of Brazilian-born electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who police later admitted had nothing to do with the London bombing that month, and the shooting of a young Muslim in his London home this summer, then releasing him and his brother without charges. The criminal 2005 subway bombing was carried out by individuals of whom British security had never heard. So why should anyone believe anything issuing from the Blair government about the latest arrests?

The current scare comes at a very convenient time for both Tony Blair and George Bush. Each administration has faced growing popular opposition to their neocolonial occupation of Iraq, as that country plunges ever downward in a bloody spiral, as well as increasing skepticism over demands to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of “national security.” So now they’re grabbing at a new opportunity to try to ram through more draconian measures.

New York Times Magazine (20 August) writer Christopher Caldwell noted that even before the arrests, Blair had stated that “civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong as just made for another age.” Caldwell chillingly laid out Blair’s meaning: forget about “the rights of defendants”—the British state will no longer even pretend “to build bridges between communities and classes.” Blair’s New Labour government had already enacted laws allowing “terror suspects” to be held for 28 days without charges. Following the arrests, Bush’s Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff, lauded Britain’s “ability to hold people for a period of time” as “a tremendous advantage,” and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called for a “side-by-side review of American and British counterterrorism laws” (New York Times, 15 August). Of course, Britain doesn’t have a Constitution. No doubt Gonzales & Co. would find it more convenient if Bush were simply made King.

The Democratic Party seized on the London events to grab the mantle of “national security” for themselves in the run-up to the November Congressional elections. As the New York Times (11 August) reported, “Democrats attacked Republicans as failing to improve airline security and, most of all, argued that the decision to invade Iraq had been a distraction that depleted United States resources and allowed the world to become more dangerous.” In fact, the terrorist followers of Osama bin Laden—Washington’s Frankenstein’s monster—and the like are responding in their own distorted way to the ravages of U.S. imperialism.

The “war on terror” is nothing but a pretext for imperialist wars abroad and for a war at home against the rights of not only immigrants, but also the black population and ultimately the working people as a whole. Immediately following the August 10 arrests, U.S. police and customs officials manipulated the hysteria to not only hassle passengers—even seizing orthotics and lubricated condoms!—but also to treat workers in the airline industry as potential “enemies within.” Already subject to union-busting attacks, airport workers suddenly faced new rules and restrictions, some of which were dropped after airline executives screamed they were costing big bucks. And the Bush administration received a setback when a black federal judge in Detroit ruled on August 17 that the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional.

As we pointed out at the onset of the “war on terror,” what the capitalist rulers get away with will be determined by class and social struggle. What is crucial is to mobilize the social power of the labor movement to fight against the rulers’ imperialist military adventures abroad and their attacks on our rights at home.