UK politics – Page 70

Don’t Trust Your Bank Unless It’s A Piggy

Published on February 16, 2007

Proof that the Blair government and Gordon Brown as Chancellor knew all along that the Bush administration was snooping through British citizens’ bank accounts without any due process comes via The Register.

UK Treasury knew of US hunt through British bank data
EU investigation closes in

By Mark Ballard Published Friday 16th February 2007 13:12 GMT

The Bank of England told HM Treasury about the secret US surveillance of international banking transactions as long as five years ago.

The US’s eager pursuit of terrorist financiers, begun within weeks of the 11 September attacks, involved a trawl through the world’s financial transactions through subpoenas on the firm that handles them for private banking clients – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Communication (Swift).

European authorities, including the UK’s Information Commissioner, have since declared the US operation “illegal” and have begun to press financial institutions to put a stop to the warrantless and unprotected transfers of private banking data to the US authorities.

This programme remained a secret from privacy watchdogs – even from those people whose data was being handed over to US investigators – until the New York Times unearthed it last June. Yet HM Treasury knew about it for some years.
A spokesman for the Bank of England told The Register: “Swift told us in 2002 that it had agreed with the US subpoenas. We told Swift it should tell the government. We told HM Treasury. We felt they should know.”

[…]

But the ECB had decided not to warn “other relevant authorities” about Swift’s decision to give US authorities access to its international banking transactions because it believed its own responsibility for “professional confidentiality” among its members was more important.

[…]

HM Treasury said in a statement: “On the financial stability point/impact on business confidence, we say that there is no greater risk to the financial system that the criminal abuse of or a terrorist attack on the system.”

“As you know this is a US project, and we don’t comment on this or any other security matter,” it added.

[…]

As the ECB was reprimanded for failing to tell privacy authorities when it first learned of the Swift subpoenas, and no banking clients are thought to have known that their private financial data was, via Swift, been pawed by the US Treasury, this concession appears to indicate some progress for campaigners like Privacy International, whose complaints to watchdogs across Europe lent the EU reaction to the Swift subpoenas some vigour.

Yet it only looks good on paper, as the ECB pointed out: “Payment orders from natural persons who do not consent to the use of SWIFT will not be processed.”

So if you want to use European banking services you must acquiesce to having your private financial affairs spied on by the Bush adminsitration.They’ll carry on blithely just as they did before and say it’s OK, they have our permission because we didn’t choose not to use the banks.

Fuckers.

This investigation meant nothing and does nothing except to tell us our supposedly democratic government is in breach of it’s own data protection regulations and our human rights – again.

It’s enough to make you start changing currency into gold and stashing it under the bed.

Oi!

Published on February 14, 2007

British citizen?

Opposed the War on Iraq?

Then sign this.

If bloody roadtax can get a million signatures, surely this petition to get Blair to stand trial for his crimes can get a few more…

(Thanks to Many Angry Gerbils.)

Comment Of The Day

Published on February 12, 2007

Comes from ‘Someone’ in comments to my post on Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson and ‘domestic extremism’.

Heh. Indeed.

I Suggest They Question Jeremy Clarkson

Published on February 7, 20078 Comments

When is a bombing campaign not terrorism? When it’s likely to be white people doing it. Duh.

Funny how I’ve read lots of the reports of these bombings and pretty much all that I’ve read scrupulously fail to mention the word terrorism.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Letter bomb injures DVLA worker

Police have placed a cordon around the area
A woman has been injured by a letter bomb which exploded at the main DVLA centre in South Wales, police say.

The attack, which happened shortly before 0930 GMT, is the third of its kind on motoring-related companies in three consecutive days.

Police said the latest blast happened in the post room of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea.

An accountancy firm in Berkshire was targeted on Tuesday, and the central London offices of Capita on Monday.

I guess the ‘T” word only applies when it’s brown people and non-Christians doing the bombing. White drivers’ bombs are just an annoying inconvenience. Apparently these incidents are being investigated by something called the ‘Domestic Extremism Unit”. What were the tube bombings then, if not domestic? Or did I misundetsand that the bombers were from Yorkehire… like er, Jeremy Clarkson?

Seriously, they really should question Clarkson under caution, scour his newspaper columns and subpoena Top Gear’s message boards: every week on national television and in the columns of a national newspaper Clarkson notes examples of ‘direct action’, like blowing up speed cameras, wiith smug approbation. Let’s face it, Clarkson’s objectively in favour of terrorism.

Send him to Gitmo.

With Friends Like These…

Published on February 6, 20071 Comment

It’s come to something when a Murdoch paper does a public service , but for once The Sun’s has, by publiishing the sickening cockpit video of US forces casually opening fire on UK ground troops in Iraq resulting in the unnecessary death of 25-year-old Lance-Corporal Matty Hull. The US Defence department is refusing to disclose the recordings to the British coroner overseeing the enquiry into Hull’s death.

See the video for yourself:

Video
Transcript

Rumours abound that the US forces who did this were high on drugs, or over-fatigued and overstretched, or all three together. You can make ytour own mind up – US pilots certainly admitted they were off their heads on amphetamines when they killed Canadian troops in Afghanistan:

The pills, which are illegal in the US, are given to combat pilots who are involved in long eight or nine-hour sorties in small controlled doses, say the military.

The Air Force stopped prescribing the ‘Go’ pills, as they are known by the pilots, in 1993 after reports that crews using them during the Gulf War became addicted.

But the drug has been quietly reintroduced in recent years.

But no one knows for sure, because the evidence has been withheld by the Pentagon. For an inquest to get the full picture and reach a true verdict requires all the evidence and the inquest has heard all but the crucial recordings of the pilots responsible.

The US Defence department has dissembled, obfuscated and outright lied about the recordings: first there was no tape, then there was, then they couldn’t find it, then it suddenly it existed but had been classified… and Blair’s government, being the spineless poodles that they are, have done nothing to bring pressure on the Bush administration to disclose the evidence that’s so crucial to the determination of how this soldier died. The coroner is, understandably, outraged that the government refuses to uphold British law.

So well done the Sun for once. Normally I consider it a rag I wouldn’t wipe catsick up with, but today? A bang-up job. Nevertheless, this video is of absolutely no evidentiary use except in the court of public opinion. We can see it, but the inquest can’t: despite the video now being in the public domain, it’s provenance can’t be verified because the US refuses to release an official copy. That means that although it’s plain as day to the world that the American pilots were acting like cowboys, the Coroner and the inquest jury are forced to be absurdly, officially blind.

This whole shabby episode is emblematic of the hollowness of the ‘special relationship’. Our troops must blindly follow orders to impose US foreign policy abroad and die needlessly at their supposed allies’ hands for the privilege, but no reciprocal sacrifice is required, not even the common courtesy of disclosing to this soldier’s devastated parents just how their son died.

We’ve come to expect the US government to cover up, sweep under the rug and lie, it’s the modus operandi of most government departments under Bush. The Pentagon just takes it to extremes.

But you’d think a British government would protest, however weakly, when it’s partner-in-crime kills British soldiers and covers it up.

Too many of our soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan not by the hand of the amorphous ‘enemy’ but by the ineptitude and bull-headed aggression of the US military, and this government is too supine and too obsessed with its own internal political troubles to protest, even in the weakest, most milquetoast terms.

I’ve never thought British troops should be in Iraq to begin with: this is and always has been an illegal war. But conversely I don’t think that that circumstance merits their casual annihilation by a bunch of gung-ho pilots, off their heads on jingoism and who knows what else.

Downing St and the Pentagon’s casual treatment of friendly fire incidents shows their contempt for servicemembers and their families and demonstrates that just as the average worker is to the multinational corporation, to the warmongers servicemen and women aren’t real people but just so much fodder for the free-market meat-grinder.

UPDATE:

Just to clarify: the MOD has had possession of the recordings for 3 years. What they didn’t have was Pentagon permission to release it. But now the government and MOD have said that as it’s now in the public domain, it can be admitted.

Good.