War on Terror – Page 5

So much for that very big terrorist plot

Published on April 22, 2009

All the terrorist suspects arrested two weeks ago are now released without charge. Interestingly, the BBC says it’s 12 men, but the Guardian article quoted below consistently talks about 11 suspects, perhaps out of confusion between the total number and the number of Pakistani suspects.

Greater Manchester Police have released without charge all 11 men arrested a fortnight ago in the north-west of England over an alleged terror plot. The last two men to be released have joined nine others given their freedom last night.

[…]

In a press conference on the steps of the police headquarters, chief constable Peter Fahy said: “These people are innocent and they walk away â€¦ there are constant threats to this country but we totally respect the situation, we respect that they are innocent until proved guilty.”

Fahy denied that there had been a dispute with the security services or that bringing the arrests forward by up to 12 hours had disrupted the investigation. He criticised speculation by outsiders, including retired officers, but added: “I have not conducted any speculation. I do not feel embarrassed or humiliated by what we have done because we have carried out our duty. I don’t think a mistake has been made at all.”

[…]

Nine of the men are due to be deported after being handed over to the UK Border Agency but it was not immediately clear what would happen to the last two men. One of the 11 is understood to be a British national. The releases came after investigators spent 13 days searching for evidence following the arrests from a number of addresses in Greater Manchester, Liverpool and Lancashire under the Terrorism Act.

The police operation was condemned today by a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain. Inayat Bunglawala told Radio 4’s Today programme: “When these arrests took place in very dramatic circumstances with students being pulled from universities and thrown to the floor, we were told by the prime minister, no less, that this was part of a very big terrorist plot. Clearly there just has not been the evidence produced to substantiate such a plot.

[…]

“Now that we learn that actual evidence cannot be gathered to substantiate any terror plot, instead of releasing them with good grace and making clear a mistake has been made, the government is seeking to deport them, citing a very vague national security threat. That is a very dishonourable way of proceeding.”

Didn’t I say it, two weeks ago? This was a complete distraction operation to take away heat from the London police after the details of Ian Tomlinson’s death became known. Unlike previous operations, this largely failed and now these men are released quietly, on Budget Day, when the newscycle is dominated by that story.

To add insult to injury these innocent people now face deportation, despite being here legally. This is standard procedure for any case in which the government is embarassed by suspects being inconveniently innocent after ministers had crowed about disrupting terrorist plots or having arrested an important terrorist. The same is happening in the case of the student who supposedly downloaded a “terrorist manual” from the interwebs, which turned out to have been from an US government website…

What’ll Come Out Of The Tap They Turned On?

Published on April 22, 2009

wiretap Martin posted earlier about the proof emerging that Democrats did know and did approve of the unconstitutional domestic wiretapping of their fellow citizens.

Martin described the Dems’ complicity in the outrages of the War on Turr as a ‘clusterfuck of corruption’. So I thought I’d quote from this post of mine from April 2007, which tried to describe just how big a clusterfuck it actually is. It’s not just the spying or the torture and it’s not just the Democrats. Very few are clean.

“[…]

Do I think key figures in politics, the media and the civil service are being blackmailed? Duh.

Corruption and blackmail are the classic tools of non-violent repression. It’s simple – the one blackmailed is powerless and cannot report the crime for the fear of their own crime or or that of someone close to them being revealed (the latter technique, as in torture, is often the most effective) and is thus ripe for manipulation. The secret doesn’t have to be much: you just have to know which levers to pull. That’s where the spying comes in. One ill-advised phone call from a monitored phone and bingo…

It doesn’t need to be blackmail either. Solve a little problem for someone and they’re beholden to you, too.

There’s also a whole swamp of corruption and favour-peddling, of which the high-profile corruption trials we’ve seen so far are just the stinking methane bubbles on top. There’s a whole lot more of the likes of Dusty Foggo‘s ‘booze, broads and cigars’ parties (a classic spook honeytrap) to come out yet, for example.

Such is the venality of politicians that most involved walked right into what was a classic cold war blackmail ploy – get a bunch of notables in compromising positions and record it for later use. FFS sake, they all knew Foggo was CIA, but they did it anyway. Have penis, will follow.

That happened in Washington and caught some big fish but think of all the minnows at all the other private ‘fundraising’ dinners in state capitals around the country. I expect there’s a fair few county commissioners, state senators and school board presidents with some dirty little secrets they don’t want to come out.

Tax cheating, affairs, drug use, porn, sexual pecadillos, abortions, incest, domestic violence – just think what some of these allegedly upright people have to hide and what they’d do to avoid being publicly denounced by their co-religionists. Cut off from wingnut welfare and the largesse of the religious right, a lot of these people would struggle to survive and they know it. That’s a massive incentive to keep in line and that’s one of the reasons why the government has been stacked with fundies, because there’s so many guilt levers you can pull and sexual buttons to press.

[…]

Since the days of Reagan, networks and major publishers owned by right wing money have steadily promoted young conservatives through their ranks, and this cadre of journalists has always had an incestuous relationship with their counterparts in the lobby firms and thinktanks, and latterly in the government itself – so much so that at times they’re hard to tell apart. They went to school together, they party and socialise together, their children go to the same schools and they belong to the same same churches. There’s a lot of leverage there.

The questions that the media, and that includes blogs, are failing to ask about US domestic spying are the simple ones – who, what, where, when and why? Yes, we know they spy, but we don’t know the specifics, other than when it’s liberals who’ve been spied on and they’ve sued.

A major figure in the mainstream media would have to be very brave to speak out and say they’ve been coerced into taking a certain line on something. To be honest don’t think there’d be any media figure who has the guts.

Oh, wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was like, all Hollywood and someone big spoke out against injustice and Bush was defeated, yay, and it all came right in the end with liberty and justice and popcorn for all?

Not gonna happen. This is a mess that can’t be tidied away, not with peak oil and a foreclosure crisis and an ecologically-driven depression looming. Even if a Democrat wins the presidency they’re going to want all the tools for repressing a rebellious populace that they can get, when faced with the aftermath of yet more Hurricane Katrinas, for example, or when the ‘lone wolves’ nurtured by the far-Right Turner Diaries and Left-Behind readers go on the rampage when they realise they have a black or a female president.

If the Democrats win the election then a new Administration, faced with the rabid winger IEDs that the Right has placed all over local, state and national government, will want a political purge – and when they realise just what a powerful tool they’ve got on their hands in a politicised domestic spying programme they?ll be just as bad, if somewhat less incompetent, as Bushco.

This is the way it is now. “

Was I right or was I right? I could link back to or repost the many posts we’ve written over the past 7 years about the complicity of Democrats in the corporate coup, but no need, they’re all in the archives over to your right. Feel free to browse and be disgusted.

[Edited slightly for sense and grammar]

Injustice Is Built In

Published on April 20, 2009

bedmi_graffiti

You wouldn’t have seen it in New Labour’s 1997 manifesto, though.

Labour’s deliberate policy of shutting down legal channels to justice for the average Joe and Josephine in order to crush dissent, this from an adminstration of lawyers, is something I’ve been blogging about for a long time.

I was idly rereading the ‘police’ post archive this morning in light of the G20 police brutality reports when I was reminded of this 2000 Schnews article, which made me wonder: how many of those peaceful protestors arrested at Kingsnorth or Nottingham or the G20 or Plymouth or on misapplied terrorist legislation have had, or can get access to legal advice?

Not too many, I’d wager:

Sweeping changes to the legal aid system are going to mean that thousands who find themselves dragged into the legal system are going to find themselves without proper legal advice. Despite the fact that this government has created 6,000 new criminal offences in the last ten years, and is hauling record numbers before the courts and off to chokey, they’re now keen to restrict access to legal advice. All in the name of cost-cutting and reducing inefficiency of course. What is actually happening is a massive erosion of hard won rights and the end of the legal aid system, which helped achieve some degree of parity in court cases. (OK, so SchNEWS is obviously against the system, man, but meantime still not keen to see what few civil liberties we have taken away!)

The changes came in on January 14th. Prior to this, on arrival at the police station you would be offered contact with a solicitor of your choice. From now on you will be directed to the Criminal Defence Call Centre (CDCC). This is staffed, not by solicitors but by accredited representatives who’ve done a training course, many of them actually ex-coppers. You will only be allowed to contact your own solicitor if you pay privately. Needless to say the call centre advice is probably going to be different to that of a specialist defence solicitor.

While I have met at least one accredited representative who was an ex-copper and did a fantastic job, to put so many of them (they’re cheaper than actual lawyers) in charge of dispensing legal advice to the arrested might lead one to think the government’s given the police control of the independent legal process – though no doubt Jack Straw would deny that to his dying breath.

One Brighton-based solicitor told SchNEWS, “Previously we could intervene in the process earlier – warn people to make no comment, not to sign police notebooks and not to answer any questions off the PNC1 form*. We could act as an outside guarantee of people’s rights while they were inside. Now, the system is in meltdown. If the call centre is too incompetent to get hold of your brief then you may end up using a duty solicitor or remaining unrepresented. If you’re not going to be interviewed then you can be fingerprinted, DNAed and booted out of the door without once receiving any independent advice.”

While there was never a Legal Aid golden age Labour’s deliberate blocking of justice and dismantling of low cost legal advice networks and legal aid over the past 12 years has created a legal advice desert. So far it’s only been affecting those nasty, nasty druggies, petty crims, burglars and crusty anarchists, so there’s been little outcry about it from the bourgeoisie. They’re criminals, who cares?

But if there’s no justice for criminals, there’s no justice for anyone. As I wrote at the time:

Should citizens, empowered by knowing what their rights are and how to enforce them, start to challenge the boss, who knows where it might lead?

The overthrow of New Labour – and that would never do.

Why, such an informed populace might start enforcing their rights on other things too. They might even start to challenge the everyday petty tyrannies of Labourâ€™s incompetent and authoritarian government, like, say, the deaths of children in custody or the illegal invasions of other sovereign nations or the selective imposition of swingeing terrorist legislation on people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion.

Maybe now a few of the comfortable middles at legitimate protests like the G20 have had theirs or their kids’ heads batoned, been kettled by aggressive paramilitaries or arrested on trumped up ‘terrorism’ charges for merely expressing their right to free speech, we’ll see a bit more outrage and a lot more challenge.

Former Harvard Law Review Editor Forgets Law

Published on April 17, 2009

“Only Following Orders” is not a defence to accusations of war crimes. You’d think Obama, former constitutional scholar and Harvard Law Review editor, would know that, wouldn’t you? It seems not. CBS:

President Obama announced that CIA interrogators who used harsh tactics on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration will not be prosecuted… Even as they exposed new details of the interrogation program, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, offered the first definitive assurance that those CIA officials are in the clear, as long as their actions were in line with the legal advice at the time.

Even though it was wrong? Sounds like the Nuremburg defence to me.

The Nuremberg Defence states that the defendant was “only following orders” (“Befehl ist Befehl”, literally “order is order”) and is therefore not responsible for his crimes; it was most famously employed by Nazis during the Nuremberg Trials, for which it is named.

The victorious Allies suspected such a defense might be advanced, and issued the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which specifically stated that ‘only following orders’ was not a valid defense against charges of war crimes.

Let’s just remind ourselves of what exactly it is Obama is condoning, shall we?

With his accession to ultimate power Obama seems to have forgotten all he ever knew about human rights and the US constitution:

….now the world knows that the Obama Administration doesnâ€™t want to fully look back to understand how it could come to pass as a matter of law that our nation would torture. The federal courts cannot initiate there own investigations or cases. So the nation turns its lonely eyes to Congress. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., has said for months that he favors a blue-ribbon â€œtorture commissionâ€ that would truly (i.e., with subpoena power) investigate this matter. Will he now push forward with such a review? Or will he fold like a cheap umbrella the way Spain did today?

For the pro-prosecution gang, about the only bit of encouraging news came from Sen. Russ Feingold, also a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee. He issued a release late in the day suggesting that the governmentâ€™s acknowledgment of immunity and indemnity only extended to the lower-level military officials who engaged in water-boarding and not to the men who drafted those memos, men like Steven Bradbury, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who just two months ago so publicly trashed his fellow traveler, John Yoo, over the matter. If Sen. Feingold is correct, if heâ€™s on to something, then this story may yet live another day. But I wouldnâ€™t bet on that.

Those of us still hoping that the EU will uphold international law and prosecute US and other war crimes (a position so easily and quickly vacated by Obama that one might be led to suspect he never intended prosecution to begin with, but just implied he might to get votes. Oh, surely not.) are shit out of luck too, just as much as those who thought that one day they might see justice in the US are:

Spain wants torture charges against Bush Six dropped
…on Thursday, Spanish Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido said he would advise Judge Garzon to drop the case.

Ironically, Spain’s Socialist government was highly critical of the Bush administration’s policies in the war on terror. But it enjoys warm relations with the new U.S. administration led by President Barack Obama, and some critics have suggested that Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero does not want to risk embarrassing his friend.

“It’s a shame the prosecutor is taking this position, but not a surprise,” Boye told CNN. “They always obey political orders. They don’t want to be in a bad position in front of the Obama administration.”

The author hopes that prosecutor Garzon, who also arrested Pinochet, has the balls to resist the political pressure coming from DC and Madrid. I hope so too – but I wouldn’t bet on that.

‘A Liberal’s A Wingnut Who…’ *

Published on April 15, 2009

Wingut

Remember the police violence at the Countryside Alliance demo and all those formerly rabid Tories who said they’d never trust authority again? Glenn Greenwald has a great post up about the US version of the phenomenon, at Salon:

The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition

(updated below – Update II)

Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing “right-wing extremist activity.” The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism “may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration” and “groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.”

Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they’re on the train to FEMA camps.

The Right’s leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: “Here we go Again,” protesting that “this seems so nakedly ideological.” Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it’s “Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!” Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS — as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) — now considers the Constitution to be a “subversive manifesto.” Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents. Malkin’s Hot Air stomps its feet about all “the smears listed in the new DHS warning about ‘right-wing extremism.'”

[…]

I don’t recall Glenn Reynolds or Mark Steyn complaining that the FBI, for virtually the entire Bush administration, was systematically abusing its new National Security Letters authorities under the Patriot Act to collect extremely invasive information, in secret, about Americans who had done nothing wrong.

Read the whole thing

I see the whiny ass titty baby contingent of the flying buttmonkey brigade are still around, and still whining.

[* “…been arrested“]