[JURIST] British Prime Minister Tony Blair [official profile; JURIST news archive] said Sunday in an op-ed [text] published in the Sunday Times that the country has chosen to protect the civil liberties of foreign nationals over national security and therefore could not blame the government for last week's reported disappearance of three terror suspects [JURIST report]. Pointing to a series of court rulings favoring foreign suspects, he wrote:

Over the past five or six years, we have decided as a country that except in the most limited of ways, the threat to our public safety does not justify changing radically the legal basis on which we confront this extremism.

Their right to traditional civil liberties comes first. I believe this is a dangerous misjudgment. This extremism, operating the world over, is not like anything we have faced before. It needs to be confronted with every means at our disposal. Tougher laws in themselves help, but just as crucial is the signal they send out: that Britain is an inhospitable place to practise this extremism.