Did the Brits Fail to Learn from Our Example?

Given that we've probably done the same, it wouldn't be surprising:

A less openly acknowledged cause for concern is deep disaffection among portions of Britain's Muslim population (about 2 million of 60 million Britons). A 2002 Daily Telegraph poll found that "one in five British Muslims feels little loyalty towards Britain." As for Osama bin Laden, the same poll found that 13 percent regarded his attacks against Western targets as justified, 11 percent had no opinion one way or the other, and 26 percent denied bin Laden's responsibility. It is from this particular subgroup that nearly all of Britain's homegrown terrorist suspects have emerged, including the group arrested last August and charged with plotting attacks in London as well as in New York, Newark, and Washington.

Also relevant is the Labor government's equivocal and inadequate responses to the patent threat of Islamist terror. To take just one example, the British governing class has tied itself in knots over the fate of eleven foreign nationals detained without charges as "terrorists" engaged in "international terrorism" under the Anti-Terrorist, Crime and Security Act of 2000. It was a classic Catch-22 without any possibility of (a) prosecution under British law (without exposing intelligence sources and methods in open court); (b) deportation to the suspects' home countries under applicable European and international law (given "substantial grounds" for believing torture might ensue); or (c) deportation to third countries, with none willing to accommodate these individuals.

Britain rightly sought to justify the unsatisfactory expedient of detention without charges for this handful of manifestly dangerous men by opting out of the relevant provisions of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, which the Blair administration unwisely incorporated into domestic law in 1998. That convention expressly permits suspension of certain rights "in time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation."

Last December Britain's highest court ruled these detentions — which the liberal chattering classes had likened to Guantanamo — incompatible with the ECHR and therefore invalid. According to one of the judges, "Whether we would survive Hitler hung in the balance, but there is no doubt that we shall survive al Qaeda.... The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."

So far Lord Hoffman, author of these irresponsible and insouciant remarks, has not been heard from in the wake of this morning's murderous attacks.