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The Village War Cabinet

By Patrick Marnham
Posted Friday, Jan. 18, 2002, at 4:34 PM ET

Even as I write, the world coalition against terrorism seems to be unravelling in Tony Blair's fevered hands as protests grow over U.S. treatment of Al Qaeda prisoners at the Guantanamo camp in Cuba. And it is all so unnecessary, as an emergency session of the village war cabinet decided in the pub last night. The American Government wants to capture and punish those responsible for the atrocious attacks in New York and Washington on September 11^th. But the problem has always been the same. How do you prove who did them? The village elders, in their simple way, cannot see the connection between four months of state-of-the-art air strikes in remote regions of Afghanistan and punishing the men responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center. Osama bin Laden has taken personal responsibility for the attack. No doubt his senior staff could also be found guilty. But who is going to believe that membership of the Al Qaeda network entails collective guilt for September 11^th? Most of those held in Guantanamo are probably the Arabic equivalent of Marine "grunts" and should be re-classified as prisoners-of-war and held as such. If Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, could show that the remainder were plausibly suspected of planning terrorism, his unorthodox methods of interrogation would cause less of an uproar over here.

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September 11^th brought real fear to America. For the first time in the country's history, without any warning, the open society came under deadly attack, thousands died (including people working in its most secure institution), and the President of the United States was forced to go into hiding, bundled around more or less under a blanket by his own bodyguards. In response, America "declared war on terrorism". But a "declaration of war", in view of the village war minister, is an illegal act and cannot be directed against an unknown enemy. And "terrorism" is a political term. One man's terrorist is another man's martyr. The semantic nonsense of President Bush's "declaration of war" has been exposed in Guantanamo, where "terrorists are being questioned" or, in the village war cabinet's opinion, volunteers are being mistreated. Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, one of the chief supporters of the world anti-terrorism coalition, the Government has just beheaded three men for homosexuality. The village cabinet is looking forward to hearing World Vice-President Tony Blair's explanation for that one.

In the central command bunker of the Thames Valley Police there is clearly a reader of Slate UK. This morning my heroic campaign against the tyrannical Gatso speed cameras that infest the county of Oxfordshire provoked the first official response. This took the form of a summons for me to appear before Witney Magistrates Court for the alleged offence of triggering a Gatso speed camera. The accompanying photograph clearly showed that the driver could not have been me, unless of course I had been wearing a rather attractive brown wig. But the authorities had thought of that and sent me a form that required me to answer three questions which I paraphrase as follows:.

1. Was I the driver? [No]
2. Will I identify the driver? [No]
3. Why not?

The third question takes the biscuit. Why not?!!! Why should I? Why should anyone "identify"—or shop—someone, possibly a friend or even a member of one's family, on the grounds that they are suspected of committing a piffling offence like triggering a Gatso speed camera? I believe there is rule in English law that a wife cannot be required to testify against her husband, and vice-versa. I will take my stand before Witney magistrates on that excellent law. What I cannot understand is why am I the first person to do so? Are we men or mice? Lunching with a neighbouring High Court judge, I tell him of my plan to defy the Thames Valley reign of terror and the Gatso outrage. A strange alteration comes over his face. He goes red, starts to splutter, and I catch the words "treble the fine, treble the fine…." In view of this unsympathetic reaction, I may sign up with the mice.

Tomorrow I travel to Cambridge to take part in the Arts Picture House Festival of Films about the wartime Occupation of France and the history of the French Resistance. The French Resistance was of course described, quite accurately, by the lawfully-constituted government of France at that time as a "terrorist movement". Its members shot unarmed men in the back, killed innocent civilians, destroyed trains and blew up buildings. There are memorials to the men and women who committed these atrocities all over France, and today historians and politicians are still arguing over the motives and achievements of those heroic terrorists.

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