I APPLAUD the Evening Press for steering well clear of the warmongering journalism that has spread through the press in the wake of the recent tragic events in America.

Media hacks have jettisoned any semblance of balanced coherent judgement in favour of cranking up the hyperbole to inflict lurid and deluded worst-case scenarios on an already shell-shocked public. The only 'winners' would seem to be those astute individuals looking to make political capital from the resultant climate of mass hysteria.

The Identity Card brigade were the first, trotting out the same old tired argument, whose only practical application would be the apprehension of the small-time shoplifter or under-age drinker. The likes of the sophisticated assassin, for whom forgery represents just one small part of their stock-in-trade, would not be remotely fazed by the imposition of such a scheme.

Brussels were not slow either to jump on the bandwagon, in this case straining to rush through emergency legislation providing for EU-wide arrest warrants, ostensibly to help track down suspected Arab terrorists.

Such laws will bring them a step closer to their avowed implementation of corpus juris, the controversial single system of criminal justice for the whole of the EC. The warrants will mean that any British subject will be able to be arrested by police from other EU countries, taken abroad without use of any extradition procedures, and thrown in jail for an indefinite period. As no mainland European country possesses habeas corpus this person will, under the proposed laws, be denied the right to a public hearing; there will be no onus on the prosecution to produce any evidence, and the presumption of innocence will be overturned.

Such over-reaction prompts the inevitable speculation as to what the hidden agenda might be behind all this.

Dr K Davis,

Mason's Court,

Cockermouth, Cumbria.

Updated: 11:20 Monday, October 01, 2001