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Thursday 21 August 2008

If we don’t bug a conversation between Khan and Ahmed, who do we bug?

Rod Liddle says that discussions between a radical Muslim MP and a man suspected of facilitating terrorism overseas are fair game. Extradition is a much bigger worry

We have come too far, surely, for this to be the case. We are too weary and old and cynical to allow our MPs such latitude these days. It would be convenient to argue that Mr Khan’s conversations with Babar Ahmed were an exceptional case, that it was not the MP who was under suspicion, but a man accused of supporting overseas terrorism and indeed helping to facilitate it. But part of me wishes that all of Mr Khan’s conversations were bugged, despite the apparent infringement of his civil liberties. Mr Khan is a lawyer, for a start. More to the point, though, he acted as legal adviser to the Muslim Council of Britain for quite some time.

Now, I fervently hope that there are more bugs in the MCB offices than there are in a Burmese whorehouse, much though I respect some of the people who run that organisation. The MCB is an umbrella group and living beneath its sheltering arms are several little groups of people who wish to — now how can I put it? — change the way in which the rest of us live our lives, by force if necessary. I don’t want these groups made illegal, I believe in their right to hold whatever views they wish. But I would feel slightly more reassured to know that someone else is keeping tabs on them, watching what they get up to. If you were to ask most individuals what they think the role of the security services and the surveillance police should be these days, my guess is that most would say: ‘Keep an eye on the radical Muslims, huh? Don’t actually shoot them, just keep an eye on what they’re up to.’ Indeed, looked at pragmatically, it is hard to think of a conversation it would be more useful to have bugged than that between a radical left-wing Muslim Labour MP with long-standing connections to radical campaigning Muslim organisations and a bloke who is suspected of having somehow facilitated Muslim terrorism overseas. If we won’t let them bug that conversation, then what exactly do we consider is worth bugging? No conversations at all, might be the reply from some on the Left. But not from me.

As a liberal, I flounder around whining about civil rights; the truth is, 9/11 left me and my kind in as much of a confusion as it left the scary neocon Right. I don’t worry so much about the infringement of civil liberties occasioned by longer police detentions, though; I worry about the radical Muslims who are instead convicted and locked up simply for saying stuff. And I don’t worry too much about Sadiq Khan’s sensibilities — I worry more about the ease with which British subjects are extradited to the US, on the scantiest of evidence. My sympathies are with Ahmed, rather than Khan.

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