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That's Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. Her Guardian interview is so packed with good sense that I'll have to quote it at length: A former head of MI5 today describes the response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction" and says the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism. In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others. "That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.

One of Tony Blair's stupider statements was the following: "The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist."Let's call this the Moron Meme: it assumes that people are stupid enough to confuse basic rights to life with others rights to liberty, when in fact they are two quite distinct dimensions. And having made this false comparison, Blair was then able to use false logic to demand a trade-off: if you don't want to be killed by terrorists, then you must give up some/many of your civil liberties.

Apparently: Ce matin, le Parlement européen a enterré la riposte graduée. En France, et dans les tous les pays membres de l’Union. Une « énorme gifle », selon la Quadrature du net, pour les lobbys de l’industrie culturelle et l’administration française. « On ne joue pas comme ça avec les libertés individuelles. Le gouvernement français doit revoir sa copie ! », a indiqué de son côté l’eurodéputé socialiste Guy Bono.