Stalinist behavior? Not a good thing

The International Herald Tribune has an article by John Burns about the arrest of a member of Parliament:

Until last week, many in Britain would have had trouble identifying Damian Green, a quiet-mannered, 52-year-old Conservative member of Parliament, much less imagining him as the central figure in a storm over the sovereignty of Parliament that has led to accusations of "Stalinist" behavior by the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. But Green has been front-page news ever since Scotland Yard's counterterrorism squad arrested him Thursday, held him for nine hours of questioning, and raided his House of Commons office, west London home, and another office and home in the town of Ashford. British constitutional experts say that no serving parliamentarian in living memory, much less a front-bench member of the "shadow cabinet" like Green, has ever been subjected to such harsh treatment.
A team of 20 officers from what is officially known as Scotland Yard's "special operations" unit took Green's fingerprints and a DNA sample, seized his cellphone and BlackBerry, and froze his House of Commons e-mail account. They also carried off computers, documents, and even personal letters exchanged by Green and his wife, Alicia, when they were dating at Oxford University 30 years ago. Five days later, none of the seized materials has been returned.
Nobody at Scotland Yard suggests that Green is a terrorist or that he has done anything to undermine national security. His offense, if any, seems to lie in his relationship with a civil servant in the Home Office who is said to have offered himself to the Conservatives last year as a whistle-blower on immigration and other politically sensitive issues. Christopher Galley, a 26-year-old assistant private secretary in the office of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, was also arrested in a dawn raid Thursday. Galley is believed to have helped Green become a trenchant critic of the Labour government's immigration policies, one of the most volatile issues in British politics.
The Conservative Party, which has been ahead of Labour for many months in opinion polls, says that it will make Labour's failure to control the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants arriving in Britain every year - and the resulting strain on health, education and other public services - an issue in a general election that Brown must call before June 2010.
Conservative Party officials have said that it was Galley who told Green that the Home Office was "covering up" information proving that 5,000 illegal immigrants had been given approval to work as security guards in Britain and that one of them was working as a guard at the Home Office itself. The disclosure caused a furor when Green asked Smith about it in November.
The Conservatives also say that Galley's leaks to Green included a list of 50 Labour lawmakers who were expected to vote against a controversial bill to extend to 42 days the length of time terrorism suspects can be detained before being charged.
Critics say that Green's plight has highlighted the range of potentially arbitrary powers available to the government and the police in Britain, an issue that has increasingly engaged civil libertarians.
Although Britain prides itself on being the "mother of all democracies" and the fount of the 18th-century liberal ideas that underpin freedoms around the world, there are many who fear that the modern British state is becoming increasingly invasive of personal liberties. They point in particular to the use of modern technologies like the closed-circuit television cameras that are ubiquitous in British city life. For the moment, though, the central issue of debate here is the sovereignty of Parliament and its ability to hold accountable the government, features of the British political system that evolved over centuries and that were only settled with the Civil War of the 1640s and the execution of King Charles I.
Michael Howard, a former Conservative Party leader, compared Green's arrest to the moment in 1642 when King Charles burst into the House of Commons demanding the arrest of five of its members. "This is the sort of thing that led to the start of the civil war," Howard said. Scotland Yard has said that Green, who was released on bail Thursday night - as was Galley - remains under investigation "on suspicion of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office," a centuries-old offense most often used in cases of corruption. Unidentified Scotland Yard officers were quoted in British newspapers on Monday as saying that Green was suspected of "grooming" Galley to be a whistle-blower. But spokesmen for the Conservatives have said that Galley was not paid, directed, or induced in any way.
Meanwhile, the political storm mounts. Smith, the home secretary whose ministry oversees the police, has said that while she knew that Scotland Yard was conducting an inquiry into the leak of secret Home Office information - an inquiry officially requested by David Normington, the top Home Office civil servant, after a string of parliamentary embarrassments for Smith - the police did not give her advance notice of their plans to arrest Green. Similar denials have been voiced from the office of the prime minister and other ministries that deal with law-and-order issues.
A House of Commons committee has vowed to investigate the events, while officials at 10 Downing Street have said that the prime minister is considering a wider public inquiry into the issue of civil servants leaking information to politicians and the point at which police action may be justified.

Rico says he can only imagine the outcry if a member of Congress was arrested by the FBI on 'counter-terrorism' charges...