for records purposes:
posting of SDP as at 2007 hours 12.06.2007:
http://www.singaporedemocrat.org/articleisa_terrorism1.html
JI arrests, Colin Powell and Lees ISA
11 Jun 07
The recent arrest of five Singaporeans accused of being Jemaah
Islamiyah (JI) terrorists trained in Malaysia met with a little
problem: Malaysian authorities rejected the claim.
Malaysia police chief, Mr Musa Hassan, announced today that he had
received no reports of JI training camps in his country.
This raises more than a little unease because the intelligence
outfits in both countries cooperate closely when in comes to
security issues.
It already is a problem when the state, especially the kind
constructed by the PAP, claims for itself the power, under the
under the Internal Security Act (ISA), to be judge, jury and
jailer.
But when the Singapore Governments claims are refuted by its ally,
alarm bells go off as they should because the penalty for such
prisoners is hardly trivial, it is indefinite imprisonment.
No one is advocating that terrorist suspects must not be nabbed or
that their actions be dealt with lightly. But there is a way of
doing this without the government itself resorting to terrorism
its called due process.
Even former US Secretary of State Colin Powell under the Bush
administration rejected detention without trial at the Guantanamo
prison: "Every morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian
figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their
own misdeeds.
"
if it were up to me I would close Guantanamo not tomorrow but
this afternoon."
He added that he would not let the terrorists go free, but would
move them to the United States instead and "put them into our
federal legal system."
Given the PAPs record of using the ISA to put away opposition
members, the continued use of detention without trial must be put
under intense scrutiny.
Declassified papers by the British government show irrefutably
that Mr Lee Kuan Yew used the ISA not for security reasons but
rather to crush opposition leaders like the late Lim Chin Siong and
other Barisan Sosialis leaders in the 1960s.
In 1962, Malaysian PM Tungku Abdul Rahman said that Lee "was taking
advantage of an atmosphere of urgency to include a number of
political opponents in lists of [ISA] arrests on purely political
grounds."
Then UK Commissioner to Singapore, Lord Selkirk, added: "Lee is
probably very much attracted to the idea of destroying his
political opponents. It should be remembered that there is behind
all this very much a personal aspect
" (This will be the subject of
another essay that the Singapore Democrats will publish at a later
time.)
In 1987, the Government again resorted to detaining a group of
Singaporeans for security reasons because they were (if one can
believe the idiocy) violent Marxists who were going to chase out
the occupants of a certain palace on Orchard Road.
It should not escape anyone that the PAPs credibility, when it
comes to using the ISA, is in tatters.
Back to the current arrests of these five terrorist suspects (there
are already 34 others in custody). Why the present detentions and
why now? For one thing, it would attract little condemnation from
the international community especially when the United States
government is doing the same.
But the situations between the US and us are as similar as chalk
and cheese. The former has an independent judiciary more then
capable of standing up to the executive (even the military tribunal
appointed by President Bush to deal with the Gitmo prisoners
acquitted a couple of detainees for want of evidence), a media that
remains a vigilant voice, and a strong opposition ready to confront
the incumbent.
In Singapore? Dont get us started.
Second, raising the security bogey to distract the populace is a
tried-and-tested tactic of despotic regimes. The PAP is an old hand
at this.
With the recent pummeling the Government is getting over the
inexcusable raising of the GST and other fees, the grubby
ministerial pay hike, and the embarrassing business failures of
Shin Corp et al, is it not inconceivable for the PAP to be banging
political pots and pans so that people will look the other
way?
This does not, of course, mean that the detainees are not
militants. To ensure that we disrupt their scheming, let us
reiterate what the hard-headed, former US five-star general Colin
Powell said: If you have the evidence dont let them go but put
them through the legal system.
In this way, we stop the terrorist activities dead in their tracks
while preventing the PAP from detaining without trial innocent
Singaporeans.
end of quote
