War on Terror – Page 17

Comment of The Day, Belated

Published on November 5, 2007

Martin Kettle’s hateful Guardian opinion piece on Saturday has drawn over 192 comments so far, a preponderance of them hearteningly negative. Kettle’s thesis seems to be, in short, that it’s fine for innocent people to be executed on the streets without arrest or trial if it keeps him, Martikn Kettle, personally safe: Reaction was swift:

Outradgie November 3, 2007 5:05 AM

Kettle has here contributed one of the most poorly reasoned and ill-informed articles seen on CiF, and that is quite an achievement. To pick a few of the more egregious errors:

1. “… the conviction of the Met this week was bad news not good news. The tyranny of the insurance-driven risk assessment culture – which ironically the commissioner would now be negligent to ignore – means you and I will be less well-protected in future by the police than we were in July 2005.” The Health & Safety at Work Act gives no right of civil action, such as pursuing compensation, see in particular s.47 of the Act. Compensation is independent of any prosecution under the Act. The penalties imposed upon conviction under the Act are fines. Under UK law it is illegal to provide insurance against criminal penalties. (Simon Jenkins’ attempts to pontificate on H&S law here have also been greatly undermined by his complete ignorance of this distinction. People injured or made ill at work would still be pursuing civil actions if no H&S statute had ever been enacted and no H&S regulating agency existed.)

2. “The police genuinely thought De Menezes was a suicide bomber.” No, they did not. They did not know who he was, or what he was doing. There was total confusion and incompetence, but they killed him anyway.

3. “Ken Livingstone is wholly correct to say that health and safety legislation was never drawn up for such extreme situations as this. And the law is not just an ass but an outright threat to liberty if this week’s judgment means a future armed officer is afraid to fire at a real suicide bomber in similar circumstances.” It is rubbish to say the legislation does not apply in “extreme circumstances”. Was London under martial law that day? It is very common for those who break H&S law to say there were special circumstances. It’s easy to do a job right when there is no pressure. The law is intended to restrain reckless behaviour especially when it’s tempting to cut corners. There is nothing in this court case that need inhibit any police officer from firing at a suicide bomber. What should be inhibited is firing at innocent people, as an outcome of bungled, incompetent, mismanaged, disorganised and reckless policing.

4. “Londoners are at much greater risk after this ruling.” Pure tosh. There are many more armed police than terrorists in London, and it is vital that they are well trained and responsible. Today we read “Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, who was shot in the shoulder during a raid by police on his home in Forest Gate in 2006, says he and his brother Abul Koyair, 20, were stopped by armed police with one officer shouting “shoot him, shoot him”.” Not so very long ago there was the miserable story of how Harry Stanley was shot dead by police for walking home with a repaired chair leg. This was made many times worse by over 120 Metropolitan Police armed officers walking off the job when an attempt was made to hold responsible the two who killed Stanley. How can people feel safe when armed police refuse to be accountable and put themselves above the law? What makes Kettle think safety means armed police should be free to kill anyone with impunity? Benjamin Franklin might have been thinking of fools like Kettle when he remarked “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

5. There is a threat to liberty from terrorists, and there is a threat from lethally stupid police work. These are linked in a way Kettle has missed. The killing of De Menezes was a failure at every level: tactically, operationally and strategically. Tactically, because even if he had been a genuine threat, he was only intercepted when he was on a train. Operationally, because he was nothing to do with the people being pursued, and while killing him and trying to mop up the mess, there was less attention and resource to deal with the real targets. Strategically, because this killing spread fear and discredited the police, doing the terrorists’ job for them, and helping to alienate ordinary people whose support is vital. Fighting terrorism depends above all on keeping community support. This prosecution is the only real demonstration so far that the UK really acknowledges the gravity of the failure that day; it is a small step to recovering the moral standing and respect that is vital if the UK is to prevail.

That’s just one of many in similarly devastating vein. It’s well worth reading the whole thread, but don’t expect any response from Kettle himself, who’s conspicuous by his absence. Moral cowardice seems to be his bag.

I find iit hard to believe that any thinking person could have written such a fatuous and hollow article and worse, that an editor commissioned it and presumably approved it and paid for it.

Leaving aside his errors of fact, was Kettle trying to provoke, lighting the blue touchpaper and retiring to watch the fireworks? That’s cynical enough with feelings running so high and being deliberately whipped up by politicians.

But if as seems likely he really does think it’s OK for innocent people to be executed ad hoc on the streets by armed squads, on mere suspicion, without arrest or trial, just to keep him personally safe, then he is a disgusting human being.

How’s This for A Comedy Double?

Published on November 2, 2007

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 IPCC

Britain’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]

Kangaroo Courts as Wingnut Welfare?

Published on October 31, 20071 Comment

Bryan Finoki writes at BagNewsNotes and in more depth at his own blog, Subtopia, about the militarisation of public life and public space.

His latest post is about the US’ “Expeditionary Legal Complex”, aka ‘Camp Justice’.

Camp Justice

Camp Justice is a moveable, tent-city courtroom and jail complex that can be dopped down virtually anywhere to dispense American ‘justice’ on the spot, presumably at the barrel of a gun.

Judge Roy Bean would be proud.

It’s currently located at Gitmo and is primed and ready to convict innocent and guilty alike for offences they’ve never been properly charged with using coerced evidence in order to retrospectively justify their kidnapping and detention in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a handy imperial posession now reinvented as a legal black hole for the purpose of hiding and torturing foreign citizens for political purposes. As Bryan puts it:

“In a frighteningly lucid and surgical essay The Vanishing Point geographer Derek Gregory describes the war on terror as a “war on law”, or a “war through law” – through the suspension of law. While emergency is the state’s tactic it is ultimately the law itself that is the most critical site of political struggle, he contends. If I recall correctly, Derek explains how Guantanamo Bay was established as a purposefully ambiguous political space camouflaged in the folds of legal uncertainty. In short, the U.S. left Cuba while still claiming jurisdiction over the base but not official territorial sovereignty, which allowed it to exist in between a place of law and lawlessness – essentially a place of “indeterminate time” and “indefinite detention.” He calls it a “site of non-place” created for a “site of non-people” located on the peripheral edge – or the “the vanishing point” – of the legal spectrum where international law is no longer enforceable (and therefore non-existent), and where American sovereignty has no application. It is the ultimate space of legal oblivion, you might say.

It is neither a legal nor an illegal space and in all juridical dimensions is neither existent nor non-existent: it is – as far as I can make of it – the production of a convenient and sub-legal nowhere.

If that isn’t Kafkaesque and terrifying enough (and we’re only talking about Gitmo here: we haven’t even touched secret prisons in Diego Garcia, Afganistan and elsewhere) now this criminal administration has created a convenient and sublegal nowhere that can go travelling.

This is not the first Camp Justice.Here’s the permanent one on Diego Garcia: there’s one in Baghdad and more are planned:

… let me remind you, according to an older Times story additional complexes have been planned for various regions in Iraq, and I’d be willing to bet that if we took a closer look we might even find similar justice-in-a-can deployments in Afghanistan, Libya, the West Bank, etc. I don’t think it would be difficult to predict the future geographies of portable justice, if you know what I’m sayin’.

I know what you’re sayin’, Bryan.

But what also interests me is who will be dispensing this ‘justice’. There is known to be dissent amongst top-ranking military lawyers about the administration’s continued illegal outrages and I also wonder, on a practical level, if JAG even has enough military legal staff to run these camps, even if military lawyers were prepared to co-operate.

If they’re not willing, then that means outsourcing.

Cue the traditional handing over of plum posts to right-thinking associates of the administration. I predict a rush of applications to be prosecutors, not only from the Bush government’s favourite fundy law school, Pat Robertson’s Regent law school, but also from those good ~~germans~~ fron the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty law school – which is conveniently producing its first graduating classes just at the right time. Even the necessary ancillary staff are being trained as I type, at a Department of Homeland Security sponsored hugh school. The Camp Justice buildings may look temporary, but they’re thinking long-term and long-range here.

Miliband The Reverse Ming

Published on October 23, 2007

The sight of ~~Pitt The Very Very Younger~~ UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband snapping to to stand shoulder to shoulder with the incompetent and clueless (but much more experienced in ratfuckery) Condoleeza Rice over Turkey and Iraq fills me with foreboding, given the potential for a slide into regional war – which could then provide another pretext (if the others don’t work out) for a US nuclear attack on Iran.

Before this the boy wonder Miliband’s experience at high-level international diplomacy was a brief stint as environment secretary.

But the thing is, he’s young, or rather he has a youthful demeanour, and this government is all about the youth, baby, so much so that several cabinet and senior New Labour figures appear to have had makeovers recently, not least Gordon Brown himself.

Ruth Kelly was sporting a softer haircut and actual makeup on Questiion Time recently (does Opus Dei allow makeup?) Jack Straw got contacts and sleek new hair, Brown has had teeth and hair fixed and new suits in softer colours. Hazel Blears is a walking botox ad.

As boomers they fear encroaching age and know the culture of youth they have helped perpetuate will bite them on the ass if they don’t keep up, as it did Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, who was ousted as much for his lack of youthful charisma as much as if not more than for his policies. The new candidates for Lib Dem leader are virtually identikit, white, middle-youth, middle-class Miliband-a-likes and Cameron is a pink-faced public schoolboy.

The Brown government and Labour can’t afford Ming’s fate so they are desperately promoting the inexperienced young policy wonks who’ve never had a proper job, like Miliband and his brother Ed and others, to disguise the fact that this government, after ten years of screwing over the electorate, is old, tired and jaded.

But there are situations when a bit of gravitas and age-acquired wisdom and cunning are required and those Miliband has not got, for all his shiny teeth and hair.

Call it ageism if you like but to me he looks and sounds not only smugly naive but pliable and altogether too impressed with where and who he is. A volatile situation in a region where ancient enmities that could go oiff pop with the slightest provocation is not the time for an ambitious political protege, however well-connected, to be doing on the job training.

Hey! Trutex! Leave Them Kids Alone

Published on October 21, 2007

Via Archrights: first it was the co-option of teachers into fingerprinting every British child, whether they or their parents agreed or not.

Now even the school uniform suppliers are to be drafted into the suburban stasi:.

The chip connects with teachers’ computers to show a photograph of the pupil, data about academic performance and whether he or she is in the correct classroom. It can also restrict access to areas of the school. The radio frequency identification system is being tested at Hungerhill School in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Ten pupils began wearing a chip sewn into their uniforms eight months ago.

The scheme has drawn criticism from human rights campaigners. “Tagging is what we do to criminals we let out of prison early,” said David Cleater, from Leave Them Kids Alone, which campaigns against the finger-printing of pupils. “It is appalling.”

It is, but that’s just a science experiment, Chipped uniforms are on the horizon though and a line of chipped uniform items is apparently going into production, made by Trutex. (Anyone British who has children or who has been a child knows Trutex. They’re one of the biggest suppliers of school uniforms and clothing in the country.)

A school uniform maker said yesterday it was “seriously considering” adding tracking devices to its clothes after a survey found many parents would be interested in knowing where their offspring were.
Trutex would not say whether it was studying a spy in the waistband or a bug in the blazer but admitted teenagers were less keen than younger children on the “big brother” idea.

What, you mean they get a choice?

Nope, didn’t think so.

Even leaving aside privacy concerns this will no doubt add to the cost. It cost over 600 pounds to kit my younger son out when he went to senior school, (and that as ten years ago) because you have to buy specific items in specific colours and patterns by specific manufacturers in specific shops: but if he’d turned up at school in the wrong thing, he’d’ve been a laughing stock, as my sister and I were when we had the wrong brand and colour of games skirts. Thirty years and it still rankles.

That kind of snobbery and financial bullying can drive some children, and some parents, to despair and self-harm. That’s bad enough. How much more is obliging parents and children to pay to be spied on going to cost?