The Internal Security Act (ISA) is all-pervasive in the everyday lives of every Malaysian man, woman and child. Like carbon monoxide, you can't see, taste or smell it, but it's in every breath you take.

The ISA is part of the law of the land; the canon by which we abide as Malaysian citizens. No Malaysian is above the law, which means none is above the ISA, and that, fellow citizens, is a terrible thing to bear.

For the ISA's power is awesomely, brutally simple. It's the master switch. It allows the government to arrest without evidence, detain without trial and say not a word about it if it didn't want to.

The ISA allows the suspension of the judicial process, and is therefore the law that deactivates all other laws. It renders the government legally immune to question, and is therefore also the law that deactivates the democratic process.

Devilish genius

To have extracted from the democratic, legislative and judicial processes provisions for their own deactivation was frankly a work of such devilish genius, it's unlikely we could have thought this up by ourselves.

It takes an imperialist authority to be so removed from its subjects as to see the usefulness of a single law that can overrule everything they might presume to decide for themselves. (The erstwhile imperial powers have in fact insisted on carrying this relic of their authority into their vetoes on the United Nations Security Council.) But what a useful tool they left behind.

Potential troublemakers can be hauled away even before they've made trouble. Subversive tendencies and incipient threats to national security can be forestalled.

These tendencies, potentials and threats are defined solely by the government of the day, of course, and records indicate that pretty much anyone can qualify. Students, actors, academics, hawkers, rubber tappers, vegetable sellers, preachers, poets, politicians, poltroons, panjandrums, heroes, villains, whatever.

Abject lessons

The truth is that the detainees don't matter. They are meant as abject lessons. The real objects of the ISA are on this side of the crossed keys; all us 'free' Malaysians. Those of us who are drug traffickers, gun runners and common crooks are well provided for in the Criminal Procedure Code.

Inflammatory loudmouths are covered by the Sedition Act and Printing Presses & Publications Act. Secret-seeking snoops, militant campus radicals, rabble-rousing hotheads, evil religious cults and inconsiderate drivers have whole batteries of laws custom-designed just for them.

For the rest of us - the 'any other business' on this sorry agenda - there's the ISA. After all, as Dr Mahathir Mohamad has observed, these lesser, punitive laws only kick in after bad people have done bad things. The ISA, a preventative, is here to nab them before.

The ISA is designed to provide the government with the maximum possible protection from those who would undermine it. It is the weapon of an insecure and fearful authority. And yet, in a last injustice, we are told the ISA exists and is used to protect us. From whom? Presumably, you and me.

We, the People, the Enemy.

REHMAN RASHID, former editor of AgendaMalaysia.com, is author of the book A Malaysian Journey . He is well-known in the local journalistic and arts fields. This article first appeared in APA mail-group.