So BAE systems is to appoint an ‘independent ethics committee’ headed by Lord Woolf.
Well, that’s all right then, everything’s sorted and we can all stop worrying. What Al-Yamamah deal? What corruption? What slush fund?
I await the inevitable BAE clean bill of ethical health with interest; I’ve been looking for a new fiction bliockbuster for the beach.
Coverups, coverups everywhere you look.
This morning we’ve got the UK Association of Chief Police Officers – tasked to investigate allegations that the UK colluded with the CIA in extraordinary rendition, specifically through Scottish airports – giving their investigation’s findings.
Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd, the chair of ACPO who delivered the findings, is also currently a member of the ACPO Terrorism Committee and the ACPO Media Advisory Group.
No conflict there then.
And bear in mind this report comes after the decision of the ‘independent’ police complaints authority that the police did no wrong in shooting the innocent Jean-Charles de Menezes in the head 7 times on the tube 2 years ago.
Can you guess what they reported yet? Bingo!
“A statement released by Acpo said: “The issue of rendition has been aired extensively in the media and has featured prominently in official reports over a recent period of months.
“Mr Todd has now examined all of the information available relating to this issue and has concluded that there is indeed no evidence to substantiate Liberty’s allegations.
Chief Constable Michael Todd responded to Liberty’s complaint“There was no evidence that UK airports were used to transport people by the CIA for torture in other countries.” [My emphasis]
I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again (and again no doubt) -yeah, right, and I’m Marie of Rumania.
Here’s your bloody evidence, Chief Constable, you tosser.
These are not even very good coverups, most of them; blow on them with a breath of publicity or poke them with an established fact and they collapse. But still public servants and politicians utter untruth brazenly and blatantly, even though both we and they know it is a lie.
It’s that blatancy that really winds me up. To say something isn’t so when it patently is and there’s plenty of credible evidence to show it is is treating us, the public like mugs.
Do they really think we are that stupid? That we can’t read or google? The evidence that EU governments, including and especially ours, colluded in US rendition and torture is there online for everyone to see that wants to.
Chief Constable Todd and his colleagues have obviously been watching too much Life On Mars. They’ve grown nostalgic for the 70’s, when all these little annoying political difficulties were smoothed over, with a nod, a wink and a drink at the 19th hole or the lodge. Nothing to see here, move along, get back to your Tescos and your gas bill.
I’ve no doubt that when challenged ACPO’ll have a nice pat answer. I bet these findings rest on a fine, jesuitical interpretation of the words ‘available evidence’ and what exactly the meaning of ‘rendition’ is. But arguing language and technicalities is what people with no subtantive moral argument do and if they think we can’t see that then they they’ve woefully underestimated us.
This report is ACPO spinning, hand in hand with No.10 and the MOD. Independent investigation, my left tit.
No doubt this is payback to New Labour for all the lovely new powers and money they’ve poured down the insatiable, gaping maw of the authoritarian, greedy UK police. Mr. Todd himself is a big fan of tasers:
Video: Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd invites his fellow officers to taser him…
Or maybe it’s something darker behind this maty complicity. New Labour came to power 10 years ago pledging to clean up a corrupt police force:
Nearly half of all police forces in England and Wales have officers facing charges of corruption or dishonesty, according to a survey by The Times newspaper.
Altogether 105 police officers in 19 out of 43 forces are under investigation.
They include high-ranking officers such as superintendents and detective chief inspectors.
London’s Metropolitan Police has by far the greatest problem with 51 officers suspended.
The survey results come days after Home Secretary Jack Straw warned senior officers that a “corrupt few” were damaging the reputation of a majority of honest members of the force.
A lot of dirt came out in those investigations, but did we ever hear any more about it? No wonder No.10 and ACPO are such good friends these days.
Hmmm. Wonder if we’ll see be seeing any ACPO members named in Tony’s resignation honours list?
Connecticut ‘Porn Popup” trial teacher Julie Amero has won a retrial, with the help of geekdom:
A US judge yesterday ordered a retrial of a schoolteacher found guilty of computer porn charges after a sustained campaign by internet specialists proclaiming her innocence.
Julie Amero, 40, was convicted in January of being responsible for a series of sex advertisements that popped up on a classroom computer and were seen by pupils, in a case that has caught nationwide attention and raised important questions about content control on computers.
The prosecution at the trial in Connecticut had claimed she must have clicked on the websites for the adverts to begin appearing. But after the trial, 28 computer science academics in the state sought to prove that the rapid-fire sequence of pop-up sex advertisements could have appeared automatically.
Common sense 1, stupidity 0.
It’s naive to think that political considerations have no informal influence in governmental hiring, particularly to sensitive posts like the administration of federal justice. But the lengths to which Bushco will go and the blatancy with wihich they blithely ignore due process to do it still beggar belief.
And is it just me or are these Bush Barbies all of a cookie-cutter type? Dana Perino and Mionica Goodling – clones of the ur-beneficiary of the looks=competence+decency myth, Ann Coulter? I think we should be told.
You know how it is, as does Bushco – people think better looking individuals are more competent and women are less corrupt, so to cover high crimes, appoint good-looking, photogenic women to commit them. Simple.
But the looks are just a sideshow – we should focus on what these willing tools do, not how they look. That’s playing their game.
From Legal Times, via TPM Muckraker:
Few people in El Paso know more about immigration law than Guadalupe Gonzalez, a lawyer who has prosecuted illegal immigration cases along the Texas border for nearly 25 years. In 2002, after seeing an advertisement, she applied — and was passed over — for an opening on the local bench of one of the nation’s 54 immigration courts. But when two more vacancies arose in 2004, nobody bothered to tell Gonzalez. In fact, the positions were never advertised.
Instead, the Justice Department’s leadership, which oversees the immigration courts, used a little-known power to appoint two lower-level attorneys — both of whom Gonzalez had supervised at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in El Paso — to the $115,000-a-year positions.
The authority used to bypass the competitive hiring process would be employed again and again during the last year of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s tenure and continue when Alberto Gonzales succeeded him in 2005. And according to the immigration court’s former administrator, it also allowed top political aides at Justice, including former Gonzales chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson and former White House liaison Monica Goodling, to fast-track candidates of their choosing — including a number of lawyers with no immigration law experience but strong ties to the Republican Party or President George W. Bush’s election campaigns.
[…]
Though allegations that Goodling had politicized the hiring of federal criminal prosecutors were known by the time she testified, her admission that she had taken political considerations into account in the hiring of immigration judges — who are considered civil-service employees — was not. Nor was it well-known that a discrimination suit filed by Guadalupe Gonzalez led to internal debate within the Justice Department over the appointment process and to a hiring freeze of immigration judges that began in December — a freeze that wasn’t lifted until last month. Justice’s immigration judge selection process is currently being probed by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility for potential violations of federal civil service laws.
Gonzalez’s story illustrates the inconsistent methods used to fill immigration judge positions. As with the replacement of U.S. attorneys, political appointees at the Justice Department appear to have trod upon department norms — and may have even broken federal law — to reward their own people with plum assignments.
Go read the whole thing: the Us attorney scandal and now the immigration courts are not siolated inciodents of polital corruption. Bush minions like Goodling and Paulose and their buddy in Rove’s office Kyle Sampson are like termites – you don’t know they’re there until it’s too late and the damage is done. You might spot one or two but you won’t know the extent of the infestation until the whole edifice collapses into a pile of dust.
Anyone who’s studied any law knows that a functioning legal system is not just about the laws themselves – they’re just words on paper – but also about the people who make and administer them, and their motives for doing so.
If you want to know just how badly political self-interest has perverted Brirish law and just how deep the depths that New Labour has dragged our formerly much-admired legal system to are, you’ve only read this morning’s Independent and its revelations that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith did an Alberto Gonzalez and enabled the torture and murder of detainees by British personnel, ignoring his own army’s senior legal advice in the process, caring little whether British troops committed or would be prosecuted for war crimes.
Lying us into a war with his flip-flopping legal opinions – and probably blackmailed into it by a desperately-sucking-up-to-Bush Tony Blair threatening to reveal his adultery – wasn’t enough; he also allowed himself to be bullied by the known drunk and abuser, then Secretary of Defence (and now Home Secretary, at least for a while, heaven help us), that loathsome, meddling Scot John Reid, into setting aside the Human Rights Act when dealing with Iraqi prisoners.
Good enough for us Brits but not for the ragheads, apprently, being as they are by New Labour’s lights lesser humans.
Cue the beatings, hoodings, torture and murders from the licensed pyschopaths we’ve been training in our foot regiments. They should’ve been kept under tight control by their senior officers, that’s what senior officers are for – but the officers were ordered not to by Goldsmith.
From the White House to No. 10 to Goldsmith to Iraq and Afghanistan – nothing negates the indivual responsibilty for those horrendous acts of violence but those who gave the orders, and those who gave the spurious legal figleaf for them to so so, are the truly guilty.
Goldsmith, like so many of the lawyers British and US government is afflicted with is careerist, weak, self-interested scum. He sold his country’s honour, such as it was, for the sake of position; the price was the maimed and the damaged and the tortured and the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prospect of violence cascading down the generations; but it seemed a price worth paying to him to be Attorney General, and cheap at that.
How big a hypocrirte is he?
Believe it or not, from 1998 until his appointment as Attorney General, Goldsmith was co-Chairman of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute and he was the Prime Minister’s Personal Representative to the Convention for the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Alberto Gonzales at least has the excuse of being an unqualified hick real estate lawyer way out of his depth.
Goldsmith has no excuse whatsoever.
Yes, he’s scum, though that really doesn’t do the depth of my contempt justice.
