From the BBC’s Have Your Say. on what’s inevitably being called Discgate:
So they used the Dutch postal service. I could have told them from personal experience that they would have gone missing. Wait till they try the complaints procedure…..;-)
stuart young, Netherlands
As the British government once again attempts to prove the futility of borders in a globalised economy, let’s see how other countries are getting on, shall we?
Video shows Polish traveler dying after Canadian police use Taser
US guards prevent Canadian volunteers from answering an alarm call just over the border because one of the firefighters has a funny name.
Croatian Serb arrested for war crimes on US/Canada border: Goran Pavic, a 42-year-old Croatian Serb, was crossing the Ambassador Bridge from the Canadian town of Windsor enroute to Detroit when he was stopped.
Shoppers complain customs posts are overwhelmed and allege victimisationas the declining US dollar sends Canadians on a US spending spree.
The charges of smuggling illegal immigrants made by Canada against Janet Hinshaw-Thomas, an American refugee rights worker arrested in September at a Quebec border crossing while helping 12 Haitians seek asylum, have been dropped.
A Cold War chill is descending on academia, according to Wired:
FBI Calls on Universities to Guard Against Spies
By Kim Zetter November 07, 2007 | 3:43:23 PMCategories: SurveillanceThe FBI’s relationship with university students and academics has never been one of wine and roses — see the agency’s covert campaign to discredit Albert Einstein. Therefore, it might be a bit surprising to know that some university presidents are now embracing the agency and are perhaps even willing to become its eyes and ears on campus.
The National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, launched in 2005, consists of 20 university presidents around the country who are working with the FBI on matters of campus security and counter-terrorism to identify threats to students and staff. But the board is also being asked to guard against campus spies who might be out to steal not-yet-secret secrets. According to this report from NPR, the presidents are being advised to think like “Cold War-riors” and be mindful of professors and students who may not be on campus for purposes of learning but, instead, for spying, stealing research and recruiting people who are sympathetic to an anti-U.S. cause.
Speaking this week at Penn State University, FBI Director Robert Mueller told an audience that universities need to guard against spies who are out to acquire bits and pieces of technology and research and said he’s worried that “pre-classified and pre-patented” technologies could fall into the wrong hands.
“Pre-classified and pre-patented” technology – WTF? Does that mean they’re giving patents to things that haven’t even beeninvented yet, just in case they are? The mind boggles.
It’s sad to see universities succumbing so easily to becoming government enforcement agents, but it’s not very surprising – academic, economic and defence interests often co-incide: many universities’ science departments wouldn’t exist at all without defence funding and there are revolving doors between private military technology companies, government and academia. There’s profit to be made from technology and many are doing very nicely out iof it, thanks. There’s no such thing as a free exchange of ideas in a corporate state. Ideas are worth money.
The joke is the US government warning universities against foreign spies, while it’s the government that’s mostly doing the spying.
So said Diane Feinstein yesterday. I ask again, what has the NSA got in her file?
The positions of Senate Democrats like Schumer and Feinstein are becoming harder and harder to justify. How either can possibly have been said to have done their duty to the constitution or the electorate in approving Mukasey is a mystery: both senators’s said their stickling point on his approval as Attorney General was what Mukasey defines as tolrture and specifically one point: whether or not he thinks waterboardiong. is torture.
But why?
Why did they make that the pivotal issue, when there are much bigger stumbling blocks ro appointing Mulkasey to to be the nation’s lawyer? Things like Mukasey’s belief that there are few limits to executive power: for example this is the man who held that the arrest and indefinite detention of US citizens withoiut charge or trial by the military was legal:
On December 4, 2002, Mukasey ruled that “the President is authorized under the Constitution and by law to direct the military to detain enemy combatants in the circumstances present here, such that Padilla’s detention is not per se unlawful.” Instead, Mukasey ruled only that Padilla could “submit facts and argument” to challenge whether there was “some evidence” supporting President Bush’s finding that he was an “enemy combatant.”
The Second Circuit overturned Mukasey’s decision on December 18, 2003, holding that the Non Detention Act (18 U.S.C. 4001(a)) prohibited Padilla’s detention and that the president had not shown that “Padilla’s detention can nonetheless be grounded in the President’s inherent constitutional powers.”
But then Schumer and Feinstein have reason to go along to get along.
The picture the police photoshopped to make an innocent dead man look like a terrorist.
I should be getting on with the comedy double right now- I’m nothing if not a creature of habit – but I just can’t. I’m just too bloody angry.
I missed the de Menezes police health and safety verdict yesterday for the prosaic reason of having gone to IKEA to buy a bed and the first thing I got up to this morning was Ken Livingstone on the Today programme defending overpromoted, self-righteous New Labour blowhard Sir Ian Blair, head of the Metropolitan police, who refuses to resign despite having been found guilty (as the personification of the police corporate body) of endangering the citizens he is duty-bound to protect, by a jury at the Old Bailey. (Listen to interview with Livingstone]
This is what Blair said immediatetly after the shooting:
Sir Ian told Sky News: “This is a tragedy. The Metropolitan Police accepts full responsibility. To the family I can only express my deep regrets.”
What Blair says today:
“It’s important to remember that no police officer set out on that day to shoot an innocent man. As the judge noted, the failures alleged were not sustained nor repeated. This case thus provides no evidence at all of systematic failure by the Metropolitan Police, and I therefore intend to continue to lead the Met in its increasingly successful efforts to reduce crime and to deter and disrupt terrorist activities in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom”
But that’s just it: the verdict does provide evidence of systematic failure. ‘Mistakes happen’, Blair says. Was this a mistake?
Police accused of manipulating composite picture of De Menezes
“Scotland Yard was yesterday accused of trying to mislead the jury deciding whether it made catastrophic errors leading up to the shooting dead of Jean Charles de Menezes. The Old Bailey trial heard claims that the force had manipulated a picture presented to the jury which had been intended to illustrate the difficulties officers faced in telling apart the Brazilian victim and the suspected terrorist they were actually looking for.
Last week police produced a composite of one half of Mr De Menezes’s face placed next to one half of the face of suspect Hussain Osman. But Clare Montgomery QC, prosecuting, told the court that it had been altered “by either stretching or resizing, so the face ceases to have its correct proportions”. The judge, Mr Justice Henriques, told the jury: “A serious allegation has been made that a picture has been manipulated so as to mislead.””
That was no mistake, that was deliberate lying. Even at the trial the Metropolitan Police barrister, Ronald Thwaites QC, continued to smear Jean Charles de Menezes:
… last week, when the Met were in the dock at the Old Bailey, the tone was markedly different. In his closing speech, Ronald Thwaites, QC, the Met’s defence barrister said of De Menezes: “He was shot because, when he was challenged by police, he did not comply with them but reacted precisely as they had been briefed a suicide bomber might react at the point of detonating his bomb.”
Mr Thwaites went on to paint a damning portrait of the dead man: “Not only did he not comply, he moved in an aggressive and threatening manner.” He suggested that De Menezes might have been worried about traces of drugs or a phoney visa. “Did he fear he might have some drugs in his jacket and might want to get them out and throw them away when he was challenged by the police?”
Towards the very end of the trial, Mr Thwaites also tried to make the judge, Mr Justice Henriques, disqualify himself on the grounds that he was “entirely pro-prosecution, unbalanced and totally lacking in objectivity”.
Thwaites also alleged that the victim was a cocaine addict, as though in some way justified his murder.
So much for taking full responsibility.
The murder of Menezes and Blair’s refusal to resign are only the worst in a long list of debacles. The public and the press are calling for Blair’s head, the general consensus being that it’s about time someone took responsibilty for something in public life, and if you can’t take responsibility for sending armed men hyped up on adrenaline to run around on public transport in the rush hour and fire seven bullets into the head, execution-style, of an unarmed, innocent man, on video and in front of witnesses,then lying about it afterwards and smearing the dead man, even going so far as to wphotoshop his picture to make him look more like a terrorist – if you can’t take responsibility for that, then what the hell can you take responsibility for?
But if there has been a defining leitmotif of the Labour years it’s been this, this constant, mulish refusal to take responsibility for incompetence and error , this wilful blindness to one’s own fault and this utter certainty, despite all the evidence to the contrary, of one’s own rectitude. Anything to justify hanging on to power for power’s sake.
To much of the public it’s simple. Blair is responsible for the safety of the public. He didn’t do that, he did the opposite. He should go. Like his namesake the forner prime minister, Blair argues he’s not guilty of any personal wringdoing therefore he’s squeaky-clean and should stay in the job.
Anyone who gets up in the morning in a crowded city and gets on a metro or a tram or a tube system will have seen that CCTV footage of Jean Charles de Menezes’ extra-judicial murder and will have seen themselves in that blurry video, on the floor, scared out of their wits, about to have their brains very deliberately blown out on the carriage floor.
But Londoners have real cause to fear; their police chief thinks that the deliberate murder of an innocent man by his subordinates is not a serious matter enough to resign over. ‘Mistakes happen’.
When a man in charge of an organisation which has the power to shoot to kill and a paramilitary armoury bigger then some army units at it’s disposal has an attitude like that Londoners are right to be worried.
But if Ian Blair does not resign it has implications for all of us – because to other police forces it says do ‘what you like, there will be no comeback’. It pushes the boundaries of impunity yet further. The less that is taken responsibility for the more wrongdoing can be committed. Eventually the piublic becomes inured and cynical and that lack of truist extends to the lowliest pc. There is no policing without at least some form of consent and without it the police cannot do their job.
So someone’s got to pay for this. We need metaphorical blood to expiate the actual blood spilt on the floor of that dusty rush-hour tube carriage. If Blair stays the public will be justified in having no confidence in the Metropilitan police. If the Met can’t protect the public from the Met itself, what use is it against terrorists? Why should the public co-operate with a police force that can kill anyone at will on the flimsiest of evidence and then just walk away?
But to get back to Ken Livingstone, the self-described champion of the poor and oppressed and the alleged voice of the the average newt-fanncying Londoner, who spent over 10 minutes defending this man. Jesuitical doesn’t even begin to describe it. I’m still fuming and cursing, even though it was over an hour ago.
But then he can defend Blair. Livingstone’s sitting pretty: he may be up for election but his opponent’s that amiable buffoon, Tory Boris Johnson. He thinks he’s secure for life and above accountability in just the same way all of the other New Labour responsibility refuseniks do.
Horribly cynical as I am I do wonder why Livingstone’s sticking his neck out in the face of popular opinion. It’s not like Ken not to go for the populist option whenever available, and the populist option at the moment is that Sir Ian be hung drawn and quartered, or at the very least handed his cards.
So why is he taking the contrarian position and sticking up for this disgrace of a police officer? I have a theory…
Met chief in phone recording row
Sir Ian also recorded calls with senior officials from the IPCCBritain’s top policeman is being urged to explain why he secretly taped a phone call with the attorney general.
[…]
Sir Ian has also admitted taping calls with senior officials from the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
An IPCC spokesman said the taped conversations came to light as part of its inquiry into the aftermath of the shooting.
I wonder – who else has Ian Blair got on record and which other incidents might the Met may be able to shed light on? It’d certainly be interesting to find out. :
It’s obvious Blair can’t be trusted to keep private conversations private and that may well worry some politicians enough to want to stay on his good side. Who knows; hat Blair knows may just have some bearing on whether he stays in his job in the teeth of a gale of public opposition.
That’s the trouble with unstrustworthy senior cops who refuse to take reponsibility for their own mistakes and malfeasance – once you’ve lost trust in them for one thing, you’ve lost trust in them for everything, and no dishonesty seems impossible.
[Edited slightly to add links]
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