// Then please tell me jim what would your answer be, the other side sends over hundreds of planes to bomb our people, should we have just sat back and said "ah let it go, we are not going to sink to their levels"'? //
Hmm... I'm glad I was not in charge at the time. I don't really know what I would have done. Still, it seems to me that the guiding principle ought to have been doing what was necessary to defend our country. In the dark days of 1940, and in particular if the Germans had ever got a full invasion going, then frankly I'd have supported pretty much anything it took to defend the country, even if it were futile, no matter how horrible -- I suppose this shows that every man has his moral breaking point.
The point is that it's not clear how bombing the crap out of civilians in anyway helped to defend our country. Many of the worst incidents took place in the later days of the war, when victory was a matter of time and the threat to our own shores was diminished. In those circumstances it's harder to justify crossing the line, surely?
In terms of the debate at hand, as above I've said that there is a line somewhere beyond which I too would support "circumventing the rules" as CD puts it. I suppose in that case I'm just far from convinced that we are anywhere near it at the moment. Terrorism is nasty, vicious, evil and a threat to security, but the threat is at a level that, no matter the hyperbole, cannot be said to threaten our nation in the same way that an all-out war on the scale of 1939-1945 would. The tragedies of Dave Hennings, Lee Rigby, the victims of 7/7 and 9/11, are all horrific, shocking, terrible, inexcusable, and we must work hard to minimise them. But at the same time I don't think that they are big enough tragedies or threats to justify crossing that moral line yet. Given that we also seem not to trust our leaders all that much, it does seem surprising that people seem willing to accept so easily that they've got it right on an issue as massive as this.
It's important to hold our security services, be they police, soldiers or intelligence agencies, to high standards. In that sense the publication of this report is worthwhile, because it shows that we do have standards and can at least recognise when we're breaking them. I fear that lately we have been doing so too quickly.