But then you're still left with the question of "what would they have arrested him for". As was said before, they had a legal justification to arrest Col. Henderson and could have provided that justification had anyone challenged them. They had no legal justification for arresting Sen. Clarke. And Clarke would absolutely not have gone with them quietly, so now you have a scene in a public airport with a group of MPs trying to arrest a senator who is loudly protesting the action, drawing attention to what's going on, and the MPs would not be able to provide any legal reasoning for their actions were they to be challenged to do so. They had already pushed their luck to the limit by unofficially keeping him held at the base, and that was when they were able to deal with the matter privately. Plus, it absolutely would have instantly alerted those who were to be the subject of the planned coup that something was definitely wrong. The wall of plausible deniability had been slowly thinning down until that point but MPs being witnessed arresting a senator in broad daylight in a public place with absolutely no legal justification to do so would have completely obliterated that wall.
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