Unspeak by Steven Poole

Author:Steven Poole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2006-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Terrorist suspects

Such small triumphs, however, go hand in hand with a continuing carelessness even in closely related contexts. In the debate about how to combat the threat of terrorism in Britain and the US, one highly loaded phrase that has so far slipped the net is the very common ‘terrorist suspects’, which has become the norm to describe those who attract police interest. It is used freely both by those who defend detention without trial and by those who argue for the conservation of civil liberties. It appears in apparently innocuously neutral contexts such as the following newspaper report: ‘The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, will also urge further debate on the use of ID cards to track terrorist suspects during an interview on BBC’s Breakfast with Frost programme.’55 Even though newspapers claim that they do not use the word ‘terrorist’ in the supposedly objective authorial voice, they freely use ‘terrorist suspects’. But the choice of this phrase subtly poisons the argument and contributes to a climate of fear.

What’s wrong with it? Well, it’s easy to see if you substitute the alleged crime. To call somebody not yet convicted of any offence a ‘rapist suspect’ or a ‘murderer suspect’ is already to assume the guilt of the person in question, by attaching to them the descriptive label reserved for those whose crimes have been proven in court. In the same way, to use the phrase ‘terrorist suspect’ commits a pre-emptive essentialism: the person is first defined as a terrorist – and remember, a terrorist is a person who is inherently evil – and only then is it grudgingly acknowledged that the basis for such a categorisation is as yet untested. Actually it need never be tested according to the normal standards of criminal prosecution: the whole point of designating someone a ‘terrorist suspect’ is to be able to lock them up without trial. You can be a terrorist without ever having committed an act of terrorism.

You might still think it desirable that anyone accused of a crime should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The widespread usage of the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’, on the contrary, goes a long way towards indicating guilt. It derives from, and feeds back into, an assumption that the lamentably old-fashioned ideal of presumed innocence is no longer appropriate to modern times. It is at one with the fine contemporary tradition of contempt for the courts evinced by Labour Home Secretaries in Britain. In April 2005, at the end of the notorious ‘ricin plot’ trial, Kamal Bourgass, who was already serving life in prison for the murder of a policeman, was convicted of conspiring to cause a public nuisance by planning to smear home-made ricin on doorknobs and cars in north London. His four co-defendants were unanimously acquitted, and a further prosecution collapsed. In response, Home Secretary Charles Clarke said: ‘We will obviously keep a very close eye on the eight men being freed today, and consider exactly what to do in the light of this decision.

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