I am writing in response to the letter 'Pearl Harbor and the ISA' (June 13) by Anita Loh. The writer argued that a pre-emptive measure must be taken in order to stop a crime before it happens, and she used the Pearl Harbor incident as an example.

I would like to remind the writer that the United States did take a pre-emptive measure after the Pearl Harbor incident. In order to avoid similar attacks by Japanese sympathisers on the American mainland, over 200,000 Japanese Americans were herded off to concentration camps in California, where they were virtually incarcerated for the rest of World War II.

All these were done without producing any evidence, warrants or allowing any legal access to the detainees. In the name of national security, the United States had neglected the very basic tenets that made it one of the great countries in the world.

Fifty years on, this incident remains as one of the most embarrassing episodes in modern American history. The current incarceration of reformasi activists in Malaysia has many eerie similarities to the incident mentioned above.

The writer naively pinned her hopes on the professionalism of the police and government agents to justify the ISA. Well, if this detention had happened before the Anwar debacle, then many people would probably have been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Since then however, the government and the police have been proven again and again as being corrupt and biased, and the public simply does not have any confidence in them anymore. The public nowadays demand transparency and justice, and the ISA is anything but those.

The writer also seemed to confuse pre-emptive arrests with arbitrary detentions. It is true that the police sometimes arrest potential criminals before they commit crimes. These arrests however, have to be later justified and proven in front of a judge.

Moreover, the detainees are also given legal access. This is completely different than the ISA, where all the normal legal and ethical hurdles are bypassed and the suspects are automatically incarcerated for up to two years based simply on the words of the police.

There seems to be a paradox amongst some Malaysians, who on one hand want to be known as modern and progressive but at the same time still try to find some lame excuses for the evil and uncivilised ISA.

We cannot be stuck in two worlds, either we move forward towards modernism or slide back to mediocrity. An unscrupulous Act, enforced by a bunch of unscrupulous law enforcers definitely does not belong in a country that aspires to be one of the model modern nations of the world.