> But still, and bearing in mind that neither England nor Germany has
> ever had anything like the extremely extensive set for formal civil
> liberties protections we have here, there wasn't the sort of
> relentless, sustained, systematic, and really scary move towards a
> police state anywhere in nonfascist Europe that I know of -- no
> assertion of the power of the state to indefinitely detain noncitizens
> and citizens alike without probable cause or suspicion, to deny them
> the right to be charged or defended by a lawyer, to commit torture or
> ship people off to be tortured, to strip people of their citizenship
> -- need I go on?
Sure that happened.
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/intern/sum.htm
Detain citizens (I'm unsure if they detained "non-citizens" from the Irish Republic) indefinitely without probable cause? Yes. Thousands in fact from 1971-1975.
Deny them the right to be charged or defended by a lawyer? Yes. Again, thousands.
Commit torture? Yes. Read the Guineapigs excerpt on the CAIN site. Read Gerry Adams biography. Read what happened to the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four, who had nothing to do with the IRA and were framed (and eventually release).
And what happened when Irish Republican civilians took to the streets in Derry and marched against this policy of internment? British paramilitaries opened fired and killed 13 of them.