Police dogs roamed the space between buildings and lights were played on the windows at night, as if it were a top-security edifice for criminal lunatics.
On that afternoon, Maqtari was standing in a crowd gathered around the city's General Security building — an imposing six-story edifice flanked by guards — when she heard cracking sounds.
The first betrayals would flow quickly as the government began negotiating its way back through tiers of European cooperation: access to the single market; protections for UK workers and pensioners in other member states; cross-border policing and security collaboration; the whole edifice of legal harmonisation that allows people and goods to flow unimpeded from one member state to another.
Thus, the entire edifice of economic security and protection crumbles.
And unfortunately, this has led some to suggest that the entire edifice of European security and prosperity is crumbling," Obama said.
From the mess Sarah walked with friends back to the Wilson Security accommodation block, a brutal three-storey edifice clad in aluminium, set at a remove from the detention compound and ringed by a 12-foot wire fence topped with CCTV cameras.
The conservatism of Ronald Reagan was mainly an attempt to tear down the great edifice that liberalism had built: Social Security and civil rights, Medicare and labor laws, regulation of financial institutions to protect their customers and enhancement of the public welfare.
In the same time, another edifice has arisen from 9/11's ashes, a looming, largely unaccountable national security state -- an amalgam of laws, policies and secret programs mostly developed behind closed doors with little democratic debate or the checks and balances that our constitution demands.
Seeking to rouse European sentiment against the administration's plan, Sergei Ivanov, the head of President Vladimir V. Putin's security council, warned that it would ignite an arms race in space and undermine the entire edifice of arms control agreements.
But these proposed edifices are also intended to be built on the foundation established by Social Security's trustees and actuaries: that there is a financial deficit when projecting over 75 years so perilous that it needs prompt fixing.
