COUNTER-TERRORISM, AND NATIONAL SECURITY

ABOUT THE BOOK

The truism is uncontestably trite that an un-attacked disease, an unchecked situation of menace and an unconquered enemy will fester with time, dominate through time and destroy with unimaginable cataclysm over time. In the ensuing contest between counter-terrorism, human rights and national security, the traditional stance of rightness has evolved into contemporary and more nuanced norm of reasonableness. What is the most right is a question now best answered by what is the most reasonable. For reasonableness trumps and determines rightness and what is right and what right is not.

Governmental liberalism in times of grave threats and or culpable emergencies cannot be thought to amount to weakness. It must not be viewed as an open-door policy which paves the way for terrorists' exploitation. At all points where liberalism is perceived as weakness and a medium for exploitation, unreasonable governmental inaction must be questioned. For no sensible government should fold its hands while the lives of its citizens are being mercilessly cut short oftentimes with amazing pomp and pageantry.

Amidst the many contributions suggested in this article, one solution in the legal and political variance between human rights, national security and the interests of counter-terrorism is the two-prong approach of sequence and simultaneousness. The contest and the context between counter-terrorism, national security and human rights draw out a philosophical divide between sequence and simultaneousness. If counter-terrorism will not be self-defeating but self-enhancing in all its forms and outcomes, then securing overall national interests and safeguarding human rights will necessarily follow a sequential order, not a simultaneous action which ever seeks to merge a naturally unbalanced polarity.

In the end, this article, among other things, argues that all successes and all failures follow only one path; it is always the path of choice. Terrorism and counter-terrorism both answer to the questions of choices. How? Terrorism is a choice with the interest of ill-motivation and the intentions of certain ill gains leading the lines. There is a collateral effect however to the interests and the intentions of terrorism, this is equally the sense of choice: that adopting terrorism as choice means also the choice of forfeiting certain rights and freedoms once enjoyed. As was noted above, no sensible government folds its hands whilst its citizens and valued institutions are being maimed, murdered and marmalised.

Therefore counter-terrorism too is a choice. For the failure of safeguarding security is a choice which leads down the lane of cowardice, weakness, relinquishment of responsive and responsible governance and an allowance for utter disappointment to the electorates. For the choice of failing to ensure safety is self-defeating. But responsive counter-terrorism measures designed with the choice to equally insure the rights and freedoms of innocent citizens and valued institutions is foremostly self-enhancing.