by Ben Hughes

Created on: August 24, 2008

Terrorism is the newest form of crime, panic and fear to grip the world. It's something which knows no boundaries but by its sheer ruthlessness affects and infects society like nothing has done before. So it makes sense to protect the protect the innocent at all costs and give time to gather the information needed to prosecute those we think are responsible for killing or plotting to kill people on such a magnificent scale.

Yet it also doesn't make sense, either common sense or moral sense, to detain terrorists without charge in the conditions known to exist in places like Guantanamo Bay. Legally, there also seems to be very little justification for such detention.

Firstly, it just doesn't make any sense to lock people up without a single charge. Why should these people be imprisoned based on the word of someone else?

In my view, people are innocent until proven guilty. In the case of terrorists, it may take a long time to collect the relevant evidence and build a strong criminal case, but surely it shouldn't take the years that the US government are taking. These prison camps are currently holding innocent people because they haven't been proven guilty, but there's no hurry to release these political prisoners held against their will by an authority who claims to be correct just what the US government have criticised others for.

I think there is also something very wrong, in a legal sense, to be able to detain suspects indefinitely without charge. I wonder how the US government have a legal leg to stand on in the face of the various courts of the world and organizations such as the United Nations.

On the reverse side, what can we do with suspected terrorists? This is a difficult one, but surely the fact that they are suspects must mean that there is some evidence against them which can be used to charge them.

This current situation is both legally wrong and morally wrong, so how have the US got away with it for so long? Is it because they're the most powerful country in the world, or because George W. Bush wants to make a point or prove he isn't wrong about the war on terror?

Whatever the reasons, while the war on terror continues in Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else deemed against the US machine, their government has professed equality, liberation and human rights while imprisoning suspects without evidence or charge. That is not only wrong, it's hypocritical.

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