At about 11am on Friday (May 28, 2004) the police arrested BSA Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman with permanent residence in Malaysia, under the Internal Security Act. He was issued a two-year detention order and swiftly transported to the Kamunting detention centre in Perak.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said , from Beijing, where he is on an official visit, that Tahir is a chain in the international nuclear blackmarket a Pakistani nuclear scientist, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, had put together. He said the ISA is invoked because it compromises Malaysia's security. The police in a report to the International Atomic Energy Agency in February said Tahir had admitted he was a middleman for this blackmarket, and has given valuable information about it. But Abdullah says he could not be detained then because the police did not have the evidence. They now have it. He is detained. The matter is closed. No one should question this.

But it raises disturbing questions. The ISA is a law designed to be used in extremis, when the laws of the land cannot cope with the emergency at hand, and is for that purpose only. But it is now used by governments with similar laws to remain in power by detaining political opponents and circumscribing political parties they consider dangerous. Worse, the laws are amended over the years to remove the considerable safeguards the laws originally had so those arrested under it could have access to the courts.

In Malaysia, the ISA is often used to threaten the government's political opponents. It is now a catchall law that allows people to be detained without proper investigations. It has over the years become a law that presumes anyone caught in it to be a national security threat. Its reach is so broad that it can be used at will. Even a former deputy prime minister got caught in the ISA maze, during which he was beaten to an inch of his life by none other than the Inspector-General of Police.

Arrests are often made in the middle of the night, initially for 60 days, and once investigations are wrapped up, the detainee is released or sent to detention for two years. It is during this two months he is subject to torture and psychological pressures, is often kept naked in dank, unhygienic, unhealthy cells in between the interrogations, so he would break down and give the authorities what they want. At Kamunting, the detainee is relatively free of what he faced in the first 60 days, but to insist that it is a holiday camp, as many in government insist it is, is a travesty of the truth. They are warned to be on their best behaviour when visitors come acalling, especially cabinet ministers and their deputies, and bodies like Amnesty International and other non-governmental organisations. If they suggest that all is not right, there is hell to pay when the visitors leave.

Some are more equal

But the Tahir case reveals that while all are equal before the ISA, some are more equal than others. Tahir is (or was) a business partner of Kamaluddin Abdullah, the premier's only son.

When Tahir wanted to ship centrifuge parts to Libya for its nuclear programme, he approached Kamaluddin, a substantial shareholder of the stock exchange listed Scomi, to have them manufactured.

Scomi set up a special factory for it in Shah Alam. But the case is treated with kid gloves. The police made every effort, when the scandal broke early this year, to distance the prime minister's son from it, indeed emphatically cleared him. Abdullah could not be in a scandal as the general election approached, and the police helped beyond its duty.

Tahir himself conceded, according to a Malaysian police report, that he sent the centrifuge parts manufactured by the Scomi subsidiary to Libya. It does not matter if Kamaluddin is an innocent party. The ISA makes him culpable. Indeed, if Scomi was not controlled by the prime minister's son, I dare say that whoever owned it and Tahir would not have been so gingerly treated.

The Malaysian government has detained many whose links with the threat are at best tenuous. Innocent links can be fatal. If heroin is found in a room shared by five they cannot plead ignorance. The law presumes they knew about it and, as often, hanged. The same presumptions exist in the ISA. If the ISA is to be on the books and is used in the way it is, the question of innocently manufacturing and supplying parts for a banned nuclear programme does not arise.

In this case, it does appear the police acted on information from foreign intelligence agencies - CIA and MI6 - which is assumed to be correct. It is barely three months ago the Inspector-General of Police Mohd Bakri Omar, cleared the Shah Alam factory of the Scomi subsidiary and its major shareholder, Kamaluddin, of any wrong doing. One must infer, given how the police works, that since Tahir was not arrested then, he was also in the clear.

Why the rush?

Then suddenly Tahir is arrested and taken straight to Kamunting. Why this unseemly rush? Why was he not detained first under the usual 60 days, and the detention order made at the end of it? Was there any untoward compulsion to force the Malaysian government to act so highhandedly?

Why did Abdullah have to explain why Tahir was arrested? Especially since as internal security minister and as Kamaluddin's father, there is a clear conflict of interest. And since the government is now sure it has all the evidence of Tahir's perfidy, why is he not charged in court?

Is it because it cannot afford the scandal of an acquittal or that Abdullah's name, and that of his son, would figure prominently in the trial?

Is it so Abdullah would not face unnecessary questions about this when he prepares to stand for the Umno presidency in September? Or is the police acting on pressure from unknown but powerful sources?

The test of Malaysia's independent judiciary now rests on how it deals with the 'political framing' of the former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim. It does not yet pass muster.

Similarly, the test of Malaysia's ISA will rest on how the police deals with those accused of breaching national security but with close links to those in power.

When the powers that be want some one damned, the ISA is invoked to make that easy. The Anwar Ibrahim case is only the most prominent of that. But its test will come when it acts against someone in the eye of power, like the son of the prime minister. The Tahir case reveals it is not.

It is time, as Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang, suggests, to rethink the ISA, and amend it for the purpose it should be on the law books, and not to rein in the government's opponents. But that, as many good suggestions from him, is for the government, water off the duck's back.