UK Establishment: Stupid Buggers
You know that the government’s obsession with collecting data, controlling people and ensuring that New Britain is the most surveilled upon state in the world has gone too far when it leads to the possibility of terrorists and rapists and paedophiles being put back on the streets.
It has happened before, of course, when Charles Clarke was Home Secretary and thousands of prisoners were released to continue their crime sprees in Britain because it was too much bother to deport them, even though that was a condition of their release. John Reid failed to correct this government sponsored crime licence, but these were essentially errors of incompetence. The machinery of state grinding to a halt because nobody could be bothered to fill in the forms and post the letters.
In comparison, the apparatus of New Britain’s banana republic junta of politicians, police and any other penpushing jobsworths is a well-oiled machine.
To put you in the picture of how lowly in the establishment’s administrative food chain you can be and still have the authority to spy on other citizens, The Guardian offers this:
The commissioner’s [interception of communications commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy] report is as loud a wake-up call as this country has ever had about the creeping growth of modern big brother methods. He details how surveillance powers have been handed not just to MI5, GCHQ and the police but also to Revenue and Customs, the fire service, the prisons, the food standards authorities, the environment agency, health service trusts, the Post Office and councils. In all, he says, nearly 800 different bodies have access powers of some sort over our communications. More than 250,000 requests were made in the first nine months of 2007: an astonishing thousand new snoops every day of the year.
So, if you thought it was just mighty ministers and senior police who could open your letters and listen to your telephone calls and then only if you were a seriously suspicious terrorist suspect, forget it. The trolley collector at Tesco is probably scanning your emails this minute.
All of which might be fine if you subscribe to the view that this is needed to fight The War on Terror and you are convinced that any threat the government concocts is worth losing your freedoms over, but would you be happy if it meant real criminal being released from jail?
After it emerged that counter-terrorism officers probably secretly recorded MP Sadiq Khan’s conversations with a constituent - terrorist suspect Babar Ahmad - in the Buckinghamshire prison of Woodhill in 2005 and 2006, it has been claimed that prisoners’ conversations, perhaps with their legal representatives, are routinely bugged.
The problem is, this obsession with monitoring everything everyone does, whether they are still wandering the streets apparently freely or when they are imprisoned, could have severe legal implications, always assuming that New Briatin will remain governed by the due process of recognisable laws for a year or two yet.
Justice Secretary Jack Straw has so far mumbled and bluffed and obfuscated his way through this minefield with all the adroitness of a bull in a china shop.
The BBC has this:
Shadow home secretary David Davis said he was writing to the Justice Secretary Jack Straw demanding a full-scale investigation and said ministers must have been aware.
“It is inconceivable that this action has taken place without ministerial approval,” he said.
“Whilst there can be reasons for eavesdropping on legal meetings, it is such a serious infringement of people’s rights that there has to be a very good reason.
“It can put the trial at risk which means that serious crimes may go unpunished.”
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said if the latest allegations were true, fundamental legal procedures have been breached.
“We need an immediate inquiry into exactly what is going on.
“If that confirms these allegations, I think it’s the most astonishing and foolish policy that is going to prove to be totally counterproductive and quite calamitous.”
‘Furious reaction’
Senior British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said if the claims were true, they could lead to violent offenders being released.
“The end result… is that these cases will have to be brought back to court and in my view the courts will react with such fury as a matter of principle, those whose conversations were bugged will have to be let out,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay said: “The only surprise I have is that people are surprised.
“I and others have tried to draw attention to the abuse of powers by senior police officers over recent years, often only to be mocked.
“In my view this indefensible situation arises from the cocktail of supine ministers and the total absence of any Parliamentary oversight of the security and intelligence services.”
One of the tricks which Nazi Germany used to keep the people cowed and terrified was to ensure that everyone, from children upwards, was informing on everyone else.
Expect the government and police to set up phone lines for you to do the same.
Oh, that one is already covered, apparently.
Impunity For State Sponsored Death Squads
As Homer Simpson said: “Mmm, doughnuts, is there nothing they cannot do!”
As Jacqui Smith might have said: “Mmm, the War on Terror and anti-terror legislation, is there no end to repressive legislation we cannot squeeze unnoticed onto the statute book under the guise of being tough in the War on Terror?”
Apparently not. Now, even coronors courts are to become the emasculated playthings of the Home Secretary, where proceedings may have to be conducted in secret and without a jury or access by anyone other than Jacqui Smith or her successors, not for reasons connected with national security, but purely on whim and diktat, despite the fact that this little piece of spiteful deviousness to curtail even more freedoms is stuck onto ant-terror legislation.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights said:
“On first inspection we find this an astonishing provision with the most serious implications for the UK’s ability to comply with the positive obligation in Article 2 (of the) ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights] to provide an adequate and effective investigation where an individual has been killed as a result of the use of force, particularly where the death is the result of the use of force by state agents.”
The legislation would mean that if anyone was killed by agents of the New British state or any other country or, in fact, under any circumstances in which the Home Secretary felt that she or he was entitled to interfere for no given reason, then nothing connected with a possibly unlawful killing would ever enter the public domain.
Andrew Dismore MP, the Labour chair of the Committee [Joint Committee on Human Rights], said: “We are seriously alarmed at the prospect that under these provisions, inquests into the deaths occurring in circumstances like that of Jean Charles de Menezes, or British servicemen killed by US forces in Iraq, could be held by a coroner appointed by the Secretary of State sitting without a jury.
“Inquests must be, and be seen to be, totally independent and in public to secure accountability, with involvement of the next of kin to protect their legitimate interests.
“When someone dies in distressing, high-profile circumstances their family need to see and feel that justice is being done, and where state authorities are involved there is a national interest in accountability as well.”
According to The Daily Mail:
Helen Shaw, co-director of Inquest, a pressure group which works with bereaved families, said: “The public will find it difficult to have confidence that these coroner-only inquests, with key evidence being suppressed, can investigate contentious deaths involving state agents independently.”
The group said the proposal could even affect the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian shot dead at a Tube station in 2005.
So, let’s say your son or daughter worked for the state as a civil servant on sensitive issues to do with something like growing vegetables. He or she is then run over and killed by a drunk driver who happens to be a senior policeman.
An inquest is then held in secret with only the coronor and the Home Secretary privy to the details of the case. It is announced later that your child was passing secrets to a foreign power and was killed while attempting to cross a busy road when drunk and high on drugs. The driver of the vehicle involved is receiving grief counselling and will be awarded massive compensation.
So, what are you going to do about it, eh, scum?
War On Terror Becomes War Of Words
We should all choose our words carefully, if only to avoid confusion and to make sure our message is interpreted correctly.
As an example, we should no longer, according to government diktat, use the phrase War on Terror, as this has connotations of violence and, er, terrorism.
The problem is that War on Terror is a catchphrase which sticks in the mind like an advertising slogan and governments are full of such straplines when they launch initiatives which they think will work and lodge in the collective consciousness of the public at large. Think of “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” or “Education, education, education” or “moral compass”.
You don’t hear those bandied about much now. Is that because they all failed?
It is only when the, shall we say, ‘crusade’ starts to unravel that governments want to change their advertising campaign. War on Terror has been replaced, but the problem is that nobody can remember by what. Something like “Telling off Mr and Mrs McNaughty” or “Wagging the finger if disapproval - but with no connotation of blame”. Something catchy like that.
So, it is with no great reaction of surprise that the government publishes an advisory pamphlet on how to deal with terrorist suspects in the continuing War on Terror. The document has been delivered to “key delivery partners” as part of this new strategy.
You might think that “key delivery partners” means people who drive around in vans helping to get you back in your shop or office when you have locked yourself out. In short, a mobile locksmith. Not a bit of it. In government newspeak, this simply means agents of the state.
Anyway, people like the New Britain state police, in their black shiny uniforms which make them look like a Darth Vader impersonators convention which has got lost, will no longer be able to shout “On the floor, terrorist scum, before I blow your brains out!” to an elderly man who mumbles “Nonsense!” at Jack Straw at a New Labour conference.
No, the state stormtroopers are to avoid words and phrases like “jihadi fundamentalist” and “Islamist extremist” (always assuming that they use such sophisticated words anyway) and “scum” because these might be construed as a “confrontation/clash between civilisations/cultures”. It does not, for example, mention Tony Blair’s phrase: “the crescent (which is like a cross to Muslims) of evil”.
The information pack, created by the Home Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government says: “This is not intended as a definitive list of what not to say but rather to highlight terms which risk being misunderstood and therefore prevent the effective reception of the message.”
A government spokesperson also adds:
“The pack is the first of a series of communications intended to brief partners about recent work to develop the ‘prevent’ strand of the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy and help them to identify further contributions they can make to this agenda.
“The ‘prevent’ strand relies on all sectors - public, private, voluntary and community - working with central Government in its aim of stopping people becoming or supporting violent extremists.
“Coherent and effective cross-Government communications are important in relation to countering terrorism. Language is part of this work.”
The document also states:
“No perceived grievance can justify terrorism. But where concerns are legitimately expressed then we must be prepared to debate them.
“We are committed to better explaining existing policies, such as the UK’s foreign policy, refuting claims made about them in the language of violent extremists.”
So, you can expect a government document soon which will explain why New Britain, a secular state, was taken into an illegal war by a Christian fundamentalist in order to extend the oil colonies of America and as a crusade against non-Christians.
Oh, and while you are at it, knock together something to explain why New Britain allowed illegal CIA extraordinary rendition flights to land in Britain, thereby making the British government complicit in torture and human rights abuses and why MI5 allowed people they knew to be innocent to be tortured in ghost prisons and at Guantanamo Bay.
In plain English, so that even George Bush stands a chance of understanding at least some of it.
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