No report on the attack by police on peaceful protesters will be completed by Friday, nor is any promised by the home secretary. The home secretary is however of the opinion that organised thugs infiltrated the protests.
In either case the violence perpetruated by the ruling classes on students and young people — ending of EMA grants, the raise in tuition fees — remains invisible, part of the “peaceful democratic process”.
BBC One: Cars, Cops and Criminals uncritically showing a huge police “crackdown” on “criminal motorists”. BBC Two: Generation Jihad on how the internet is radicialising British Muslims, full of terrorist experts with yankee accents, lots of scary grainy simulated footage and thudding music. Coincidence? Yes, but that doesn’t make this cheerleading for the database driven, cctv enabled police state any less annoying.
Saakashvili may still be popular with Decents and other wingnuts abroad, but his own people are sick and tired of him:
In recent weeks, anti-Saakashvili posters have appeared all over the capital, while the opposition has also been boosted by a television show featuring a popular singer conducting interviews with opposition activists and local celebrities from a specially constructed “prison cell”. The protest singer Giorgi Gachechiladze – known as Utsnobi, or “The Unknown” – has said that he will remain in self-imposed incarceration until Saakashvili steps down.
Earlier this month, Utsnobi held a protest concert near the president’s residence, drawing several thousand. The 9 April demonstrations are hoped to draw far greater numbers.
The Georgian authorities have accused the opposition of accepting money from Russia to fund its anti-government campaign, although no proof has yet been offered. They have also raised fears that mass protests next month could turn violent after several activists were detained last week on charges of illegally buying weapons and plotting a coup.
[…]
The mood in Tbilisi has become increasingly tense in recent days after the authorities released covertly recorded police videos of opposition activists allegedly buying automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
“These tapes show there is a group of people who were thinking of toppling the government by violence, and using the demonstration as the place to do it,” said Yakobashvili.
it all sounds remarkable like the warnings the English police has been spewing about a possible “Summer of Discontent” in general and the G-20 protests in particular…
Jean Charles de Menezes, murdered by police now more than three years ago is once again denied justice, as the coroner in the inquest to his death ruled out a verdict of unlawful killing:
The family of Jean Charles de Menezes walked out of his inquest yesterday as the coroner ruled the jury was forbidden from considering whether he was unlawfully killed.
Sir Michael Wright said he did not believe the testimony justified him allowing them to return a verdict which was tantamount to accusing police officers of murder or manslaughter.
As the De Menezes family and their supporters walked out the coroner said he knew the jury’s hearts would go out to the dead man’s mother, Maria Otone de Menezes. “But these are emotional reactions, ladies and gentlemen, and you are charged with returning a verdict based on evidence,” he said.
And so the establishment once again take care of its own. Can’t embarass the police, especially after they have been so obliging to the government recently. No wonder Craig Murray is furious, especially about this shitty bit of reasoning from “sir” Michael wright:
But he urged caution on judging anything they viewed as lying too harshly. “You must decide whether the person has lied or made an honest mistake. If you can prove that the witness has lied you should bear … in mind people tell lies for a variety of reasons, not necessarily to put their own part.
“Do please excuse the police for not just murdering Jean, but lying about it and covering up their murder almost from the moment his body hit the floor”. Disgusting, but it fits in with how this case has been treated from the start. This has never been about getting justice for Jean, but about exculpating the police for his murder. It’s an old, old pattern in British policing, which has a shameful record of wrongful killings and people dying in its custody and getting away with it. It’s the other side of the same coin that saw antiterrorist police arrest Damien Green MP. Three years ago the government allowed the police their ritual murder to relieve their frustration, last week we saw the police returning the favour through a nicely staged bit of political intimidation.
Both cases sent a message to the British public. In the de Menezes case it’s “we can and will murder you with impunity if we feel like”, in Green’s case it’s “it doesn’t matter how powerful you are, step out of line and we’ll squash you”. With Green, he himself may “only” suffer a humiliating and frightening arrest and questioning, but to everbody with less clout than him this message comes through loud and clear.
Together these two cases are the clearest indication of police state Britain, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. As Jamie said, talking about the Green case:
People have a crude idea that a police state involves a leader ordering the cops to arrest his enemies. It’s mainly an environment where the police have expanded powers over the general administration of the state which they can exercise with a large degree of autonomy. Their turf gets bigger, and is defended and expanded more aggressively.
Which is exactly what has happened under New Labour. From the very beginning they’ve used the police and the justice system as a political tool, unleashing a torrent of ill-thought out, unworkable policies to curry favour with the tabloids, an equally large torrent of dodgy statistics and press releases to show the succes of these policies, all topped with the occasional potemkin showpiece of serious policing. After September 11 these tendencies only worsened. Remember the tanks at Heathrow the day before Parliament had to vote on the War on Iraq? Long before the British establishment finally noticed last week therefore the police had been politicised and the murder of Jean charles de Menezes as well as the arrest of Damien Green are a logical outcome of this. New Labour flacks may not even been lying when they insist Green’s arrest was the police’s own idea, but the responsibility is still theirs.
Remember the scene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where Manny sketches a structure for an underground organization? Now imagine that, done properly. With X-boxes.
— Ken MacLeod
You may already have seen the hype for Cory “Boing Boing” Doctorow’s latest novel, Little Brother all over the internet; certainly I’ve seen it mentioned on a fair few of the blogs I frequent. There’s a reason for this, as it’s not just another science fiction novel, or even another young adult science fiction novel, but an attempt to inoculate a new generation against the phony security mindset that swept America in the wake of the September 11 attacks and arguably the UK some years earlier. We’ve all have had to deal with the results, in everything from having to carry an ID with us at all times to stupid rules about how much fluid you can take along on your airplane trip. But for anybody under twentyone it’s worse and it has been worse for much longer. Every inch of their lives is controlled and regulated these days because it has become so much more easier to do so. As Cory puts it in the preface to Little Brother:
The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood.
So what Cory does is to give them the tools to take their lives back. Little Brother is basically one long infodump on, well, hacking, in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, packaged in a neat near-future thriller. It’s a novel in the best tradition of didactic science fiction –Ken MacLeod makes the comparison with Heinlein, while the title itself is of course a reference to 1984. But didactic doesn’t mean dull, as the synopsis makes clear:
Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works –and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high schools intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where theyre mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
Best thing about Little Brother? It’s not just a book, it’s a movement. And Cory is putting his money where his mouth is and made the book available as a free, Creative Commons licensed e-book. In all, this is a noble attempt at not just making people aware of the encrouching security society, but help them find the tools to fight against it, circumvent it, pervert it.
