A US State Department official, quoted in the Sunday Telegraph:
“There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”
War on Terror
A Man Can Smile and Smile and Yet Be A Villain
It seems the new administration, for all it’s warm fuzziness, considers only Americans human enough to have actual human rights. The rest of us are still fair game for state-licensed kidnap and US torture at one remove.
But Obama won’t torture, he’s said so, hasn’t he? He was a constitutional scholar, surely he’s way too high-minded, moral and gosh-darned exceptional to do such a terrible thing?
But he has a problem: his employees do and have tortured. Over the past eight years the mammoth intelligence and security apparatus built by Bush and Cheney (and no doubt still loyal to them and their neocon associates) has been allowed and even encouraged to use their virtually unlimited power to kidnap, torture, murder and just generally disappear pretty much anyone it wanted, worldwide.
That kind of malevolent power is not easily contained once unleashed on the world, particularly as Bush and Cheney were careful to make sure that those they put in charge of intelligence and security were politically in tune with their worldview.
Those people are still there. I think they’re still rendering people and having them tortured abroad – and I think Obama probably knows it and can’t stop it. The rot is too deep and too wide.
So rather than mar that shiny new presidency with any speck of unpleasantness, he’s going with the flow, banning torture but allowing rendition.
Voila,Americans don’t do torture and his pristine reputation as the Lincoln de nos jours need never be sullied.
Cointelpro is alive and well
In Maryland the police spend years spying on political groups ranign from cyling advocates to Amnesty International:
The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored — and labeled as terrorists — activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.
Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a “security threat” because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.
One of the possible “crimes” in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: “civil rights.”
Back in the sixties, Cointelpro was an FBI led programme to infiltrate and spy on various alleged subversive groups. Not only did FBI agents infiltrate various antiwar and civil right groups, they also attempted to provoke those groups into criminal acts. Supposedly the Cointelpro programme was stopped in 1971, but since the original operation only came to light after the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI office, who knows what’s still going on. Certainly the modus operandum described here sounds a lot like what the FBI was up to:
After trawling the Internet, an analyst reported a “potential for disruption” at both executions. Mazzella dispatched a corporal who needed experience in undercover work to the Electrik Maid community center in Takoma Park, where death penalty foes were organizing rallies.
At a rally to save Vernon Evans Jr. outside the Supermax prison in Baltimore a few weeks later, the woman who said her name was Lucy McDonald asked veteran activist Max Obuszewski how she could learn more about passive resistance and civil disobedience.
The activists recall that she had a genial disposition and refreshing curiosity, and she quickly became a fixture at meetings and rallies of death penalty opponents and antiwar activists. She used a laptop computer at meetings, but the activists say no one was alarmed. “Maybe I wondered what she was typing,” said Mike Stark of Takoma Park. “But you always check yourself. In our movement it’s very important to be outward and not paranoid.”
Bonus: how clueless use of information technology made things worse:
Police had turned to the database in a low-cost effort to replace antiquated file cabinets. The Washington High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a regional clearinghouse for drug-related criminal information, offered its software for free.
But the database did not include categories that fit the nature of the protest-group investigations. So police created “terrorism” categories to track the activists, according to the state review. Some information was sent directly to HIDTA’s main database as part of an agreement to share information.
Putting the activists into the database was “a function of nothing more than the insertion of a piece of paper in a paper file in a file cabinet,” Sheridan wrote. But labeling them “terrorists,” he said was “incorrect and improper.”
The Mumbai attacks: an attempt to spark another Indian-Pakistani war?
Remember this story, about the guy who prank called the Pakistani president at the height of the Mumbai attacks?
A hoax telephone call almost sparked another war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan at the height of last month’s terror attacks on Mumbai, officials and Western diplomats on both sides of the border said on Sunday.
Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani President, took a telephone call from a man pretending to be Pranab Mukherjee, India’s Foreign Minister, on Friday, November 28, apparently without following the usual verification procedures, they said.
The hoax caller threatened to take military action against Pakistan in response to the then ongoing Mumbai attacks, which India has since blamed on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), they said.
Mr Zardari responded by placing Pakistan’s air force on high alert and telephoning Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, to ask her to intervene.
I’ve been thinking (always dangerous). What if that wasn’t a prank, but a real attempt to use the crisis to force the two countries into war? Even worse, what if the attacks were planned to lead credence to this “prank call”, rather than the call piggybacking on the crisis? The relationship between Pakistan and India at the best of times is best described as tense and in a crisis when everybody is on high alert anyway, one small push may just be enough to turn a crisis into something much worse…
Dictatorship: Are We There Yet?
I keep asking that.
But I think finally we are undoubtedly on the cusp of it (or in that annoying phrase that seems to have become hip recently, on the flex), when a squad of not just any old plods, but armed antiterrorist police is sent to arrest legitimately elected member of parliament and shadow immigration minister Damien Green, search his home and office, take his DNA, impound all his personal or business data and hold him incommunicado for 9 hours while the ruling party briefs assiduously against him in the media, on a spurious suspicion of ‘conspiracy to commit public malfeasance in office’ (ie receiving leaks of how incompetent Jacqui Smith, Phil Woolas and other Home office ministers are).
I’m amazed they didn’t taser him for good measure, pour encourager les autres.
But why? What could have posessed them to do such a disgusting, antidemocratic thing? Why would a New Labour prime minister rip up the constitution (such as it still is) and begin arresting the opposition, for all the world like some nascent Mugabe?
It appears that Green was treated like a terrorist simply for doing his job and exposing government wrongdoing and incompetence in the public interest. Since when has that been an offence? Exposing government wrongdoing is what an opposition MP does. That’s why the communications of MP’s are privileged; so that political police pressure like this can’t be brought to bear on the people’s representatives when they are doing their duty.
Privileged communication is the bedrock of the parliamentary system Parliament is said to be jealous of its privileges and ready to fight to the death to protect them; an MP cannot be arrested while in the precincts of the House, for instance.
Why, then, did the parliamentary authorities, the sergeants-at-arms, allow the Metropolitan Police into Green’s parliamentary offices to leaf through privileged communications at will, unless they had political clearance at a very high level – say from a Home Secreteary or PM – to do so?
Labour ministers like that lying little ratfaced sycophant, immigration minister Phil Woolas, are all over the papers, radio and tv this morning, disclaiming any political motivation for this unprecedentedly shocking act. “Ooh no, wasn’t us guv, nothing to do with us. Dictatorial, authoritarian, Stalinesque? Oh no, we don’t accept that. Blame the Met and Ian Blair, he’s retiring, he’s a a handy scapegoat. Jacqui Smith? Who she?”
Bollocks. They can deny it till they’re blue in the face but I’m in no doubt that the order to arrest an opposition MP came right from our very own Rosa Klebb the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, angry at having her own and her colleagues’ mendacity exposed.
Smith has shown herself quite happy to use the law to pursue her political priorities. Smith is perfectly prepared to use the power of the state against the individual for partisan purposes too, and freely admits it. Here she is speaking of manipulating the law and the police against the populace for purely partisan political ends:
I now want the Action Squad to co-ordinate a new drive against the hard core of ‘hard nut’ cases.
That car of theirs – is the tax up to date? Is it insured? Let’s find out
And have they a TV licence for their plasma screen? As the advert says, “it’s all on the database.”
As for their council tax, it shouldn’t be difficult to see if that’s been paid
And what about benefit fraud? Can we run a check?
No stranger to dictatorship she; it comes as absolutely no surprise that Smith concentrated her political studies at Uni on East Germany.
Here she is on the BBC yet again, within the past 5 minutes, still asserting that no minister had anything to do with it and it was all David Normingtonof the Cabinet Office.
In a statement, the Metropolitan police said:
‘The investigation into the alleged leak of confidential government material followed the receipt by the MPS (Metropolitan Police Service) of a complaint from the Cabinet Office.’
Yes, from Normington the highest ranking Home Office civil servant, who of course didn’t even speak to the PM or Home Secretary about something so momentous as the arrest of an MP.
Oh, sure.
But the order for Green’s arrest has to have come from Gordon Brown, if not at his instigation, then at least with his entire approval. They can deny it till doomsday; the order for Green’s arrest came direct from New Labour, no matter how much they dissemble; not only that, it came direct from the Cabinet Office and therefore direct from no 10; and most of all it came direct from our unelected prime minister, Gordon Brown, unless, of course, the police are lying. And I wouldn’t put it past Mandelson to allege that either.