FREEDOM MATTERS

State Executions

2012-01-17T06:21:00.000-08:00

I am always depressed, and overwhelmed at Christmas. It is a sad time of the year. This year I can't walk properly, which does not make things any better.

However, I must post a link and comment on an outstanding article in the Guardian today. It is written by Mehdi Hasan, described as a Senior Editor on the New Statesman.

It is timely because the British government has just lost the case for deporting Abu Qatada, a fundamentalist Muslim whom the government would dearly like to get rid of.

He cannot be deported but it would be OK for us to assassinate him? Does that make sense?

See Hasan's striking article in full at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/16/iran-scientists-state-sponsored-murder?INTCMP=SRCH

And think about these issues in the light of the very recent assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment programme.

".... western liberals who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers – who have, incidentally, had the benefit of lawyers, trials and appeals .... fall quiet as their states kill, with impunity, nuclear scientists, terror suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands. Yet a "targeted killing", human-rights lawyer and anti-drone activist Clive Stafford Smith tells me, "is just the death penalty without due process".

Cognitive dissonance abounds. To torture a terror suspect, for example, is always morally wrong; to kill him, video game style, with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone, is morally justified. Crippled by fear and insecurity, we have sleepwalked into a situation where governments have arrogated to themselves the right to murder their enemies abroad.

Nor are we only talking about foreigners here. Take Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist preacher, al-Qaida supporter – and US citizen. On 30 September 2011, a CIA drone killed Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another CIA-led drone attack killed Awlaki's 21-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman. Neither father nor son were ever indicted, let alone tried or convicted, for committing a crime. Both US citizens were assassinated by the US government in violation of the Fifth Amendment ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law")."

Police and the Frailty of Truth

2011-10-29T12:38:00.000-07:00

"Britain's most senior police officer," (Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan police commissioner) "has defended the practice of undercover officers using fake identities in court."

He claimed, when he appeared before the Metropolitan Police Authority, that "there's no law that says it can't happen."

That was, according to Lord Macdonald, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, "a bold assertion."

It is stupendously, horrifyingly, cretinously, unbelievable that a senior police officer can suggest for a moment that committing perjury in open court is OK if you happen to be a policeman.

And this amazing statement was not made headline news by the supine, stupid, lazy, wicked people who run our newspapers and other media.

I did not see it mentioned in Metro, the Evening Standard or on the news on Radio 4 or BBC tv. I only found out about it from the Guardian (28th. October, main section, page 8).

Even the Guardian did not put this most revealing comment on the front page.

What's wrong with people now?

Don't they see the creeping corruption that is infecting and has infected our society?

To assert that dishonest police behaviour, if tolerated and authorised by senior police officers, should also be tolerated by the courts, means that ALL our standards have gone down the path of dishonesty well trodden by the fat cats of the city and British industry, where bosses' salaries have risen hugely in the past few years while ordinary workers salaries have been rigidly controlled or even diminished.

Is that the country we all want to live in?

I don't understand why it is so difficult to shout these simple truths from the roof tops and get people to listen.

Morality is important.

Lying is wrong.

Greed is not good, it is intolerable and the invidious distribution of wealth in our society will be paid back in blood.

Probably soon.

The Protests at St. Paul's

2011-10-28T23:51:00.000-07:00

St. Paul was a tent-maker.

St. Paul's Cathedral, in the heart of the City of London, is currently surrounded by tents occupied by protesters opposed to capitalism and the greedy excesses of capitalism which the City now represents.

"Greed is good," said the (fictional) icon, Gordon Gekko, in a movie made in the '80s.

It seems otherwise now, as Western capitalism starts to collapse in upon itself like a dying star.

The cathedral has been closed "for health and safety reasons" for the last week. The police are about to be called in to evict the tent-dwellers by force.

It is sad, says the Canon Chancellor of St. Paul's, who has resigned from his post on this issue, that the protesters "came to occupy the Stock Exchange but ended by closing a cathedral."

But what do the protesters want? What are their demands? What answers do they propose?

"Answers?" wrote an anonymous commentator on the Guardian's internet column. "They barely have questions."

"Why should they have all the answers," retorted another, "There is no such thing as all the answers."

"It's pretty obvious what people want first off," wrote a third. "To show how damn angry and frustrated they are with the status quo and how much they want change. It will take a long time, longer even than a winter's camping on St. Paul's cobbles, but this is as good a place to start as any."

(Sources: Guardian 29th. October, G2 p. 15 and main section interview.)

Britain is best .... but at what?

2011-10-04T12:03:00.001-07:00

UK has 'worst quality of life in Europe'

Survey of 10 developed European countries puts UK at bottom of the pile due to high costs of living, while France takes top spot

Mark King

Thursday September 29 2011

The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/sep/29/uk-worst-quality-of-life-europe

The UK has been named the worst place to live in Europe for quality of life, behind countries with damaged economies such as Ireland and Italy, according to the latest uSwitch [http://www.uswitch.com/" title="uSwitch website] quality of life index.

The UK emerged as having the second lowest hours of sunshine a year, the fourth highest retirement age, and the third lowest spend on health as a percentage of GDP.

Despite above average household income ? the fourth highest in Europe ? Britons have 5.5 fewer days holiday a year than the European average and endure a below average government spend on education.

UK households also struggle with a high cost of living, with food and diesel prices the highest in Europe, and unleaded petrol, alcohol and cigarettes all costing more than the European average.

As a result, more than one in 10 Britons (12%) said they are "seriously considering" emigrating, with "broken society" the biggest concern for 59% of those questioned, followed by the cost of living (49%), and crime and violence (47%). Just 5% of those questioned are happy in the UK.

(A later report, a few days later, from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, seemed to suggest the opposite of this, that Britain was rather popular with its inhabitants, but few details were published and they did not seem very convincing. When I tried to look up the report on the OECD's web-site, I could not find any mention of it. Did it ever exist? Was the newspaper 'story' about it just that, a story?)

Another thing I love about Britain - hypocrisy!

2011-08-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

Politicians have waxed lyrical about the "evident criminality" of the rioters and looters who took part in disturbances in London and many other English cities last week. They have also demanded the most severe penalties.

The legislature and the judiciary are (supposedly) separate bodies in the U.K. It is not, as one columnist put it, for politicians to cheer or boo the decisions of the supposedly independent judges and magistrates. This did not seem to constrain anyone. Indeed, Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service went out of its way to clarify the position:

"Sentencing is a matter for the independent judiciary," it said. (But) "... justices' clerks and legal advisers in magistrates courts have a responsibility to give advice to magistrates on sentencing guidelines .... Accordingly magistrates in London are being advised by their legal advisers to consider whether their powers of punishment are sufficient in dealing with some cases arising from the recent disorder."

So that is clear then. The judiciary and magistrates are independent. On the other hand all their professional advisers are telling them to ratchet up the sentences they give and send offenders to the Crown Courts if magistrates' powers seem insufficient. This advice reflects the vengeful ambitions of the politicians (led by the Prime Minister).

From the Guardian, 16th. August: "The Chair of Camberwell Green magistrates' court, Novello Noades, went so far as to claim that the court had been given a government "directive" that anyone involved in the rioting be given a custodial sentence. She later retracted her statement and said that she was mortified to have used the term 'directive'."

Whatever you call it, the 'directive' has had its effect and the results of this advice from the politicians have been ludicrous. It would be a laughable situation were the sentences imposed not so extreme that they will wreck the lives of some young people and incite rather than deter active expressions of protest and dissent.

A youth was sent to prison for six months for stealing bottled water valued at £3.50. Two others were sent to prison for four years each (FOUR YEARS) for posting riotous suggestions on Facebook (though absolutely no one responded and one of them took the suggestions down as soon as he sobered up.)

The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, was - for once - completely right when he stated (before he came into office) that austerity policies and excessive deflationary pressures would lead to riots. These were his words before the last election, which Gary Younge recalled in an excellent article in the Guardian on Monday 15th. August:

"Imagine the Conservatives ... get an absolute majority, on 25% of the eligible votes .... They then turn around in the next week or two and say we're going to chuck up VAT to 20%, we're going to start cutting teachers, cutting the police, and the wage bill in the public sector. I think if you're not careful in that situation ... you'd get Greek-style unrest."

The Tories got 23% of the eligible vote.

Nick Clegg and his party have actively supported cutting teachers' pay, cutting the numbers of the police and axing the wage bill in the public sector.

Result? Unsurprisingly?

".... Greek-style unrest."

Given how much politicians pocketed before the expenses scandal and the autocratic disdain with which they paid back the money (without remorse) when forced to do so, it does not behove them to call for poor people to be sent to prison for ludicrously long periods.

Most of the politicians stole much more than £3.50.

The riots and the death of Mark Duggan

2011-08-13T23:51:00.000-07:00

It seems a long time since Murdoch and the News of the World were the most important things going on in the world - yet it is only a few weeks. In the last seven days, Britain has been rocked by the unexpected and amazingly destructive riots that have taken place in many English cities.

The riots started in Tottenham in London where a young black man was killed by the police in circumstances which the police and the Independent Police Complaints Commission have successfully made suspicious. The first accounts of the incident were (probably deliberately) intended to mislead. This was the Guardian internet headline, over an article by Paul Lewis and Sandra Laville dated 13 August:

Mark Duggan death: IPCC says it inadvertently misled media

Police watchdog says it led media to believe shots were exchanged but Duggan was carrying gun that was never used

The text of the internet version of this article is at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/12/mark-duggan-ipcc-misled-media?INTCMP=SRCH

It is very convenient, if the police shoot a man hastily, mistakenly or by accident, to discover a gun in his pocket or near his cold dead fingers. American cops used to carry unidentifiable 'throwdown' weapons for just this purpose.

The weapon that Mark Duggan is said to have been carrying has variously been described as a converted starting pistol or a replica gun converted to fire real bullets. There was, it has been said, just one bullet in it.

If Duggan was, as the police allege, a major drug dealer and pusher, could he not have got himself a more impressive weapon? And should he not have been in a luxurious Range Rover rather than a mini-cab when he was shot?

The whole thing stinks. And it was to find out what the police would say about it that a protest march led by Duggan's family members went to the police station on Friday 6th. August.

They were kept waiting for, it seems, five hours. No one would come out and tell them what was going on, what the IPCC were doing or why the police had shot Duggan. Instead, the trail was muddied into obscurity by the misleading statements about Duggan opening fire on the police which are reported above.

That was when a peaceful demonstration turned into a riot; when supporters of the family of a man murdered or at least killed by the police sought a peaceful explanation for his death and, failing to find it, tore bits of their own community apart in protest. And a ready well of frustration in other areas, in other cities, flooded the streets with copycat violence as a result.

As I texted to a friend later, when a Cabinet full of millionaire old Etonians informs a whole nation that it is to be impoverished, that the young now have no hope and the old have no security, it is hardly surprising when mindless mob violence born of anger and frustration erupts onto our streets.

P.S. To my surprise, I find the Daily Telegraph's Chief Political Correspondent, Peter Oborne, expressing views very similar to those in my last paragraph in an excellent recent 'think piece'. You can read his views at this addresss:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/

She knew - she knew all the time

2011-07-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

from the Guardian, 17/7/11

"... (The Spectator's) current issue also carries an illuminating anecdote by the columnist Toby Young, who recalled Lis Murdoch's hen night before her marriage to Freud, when she and Rebekah Wade (then editing the News of the World, and not yet Mrs Brooks) were in a party of "boozed-up ladies" being ferried around London in "a white stretch limo". Noticing they were being followed by a Ford Mondeo in a way that suggested a paparazzo pursuit, Wade "called her picture desk and rattled off the Mondeo's number plate. In less than a minute, she had the name and telephone number of the car's owner, a notorious paparazzo." She rang the number and, Young says, told him: "If you don't stop following us, I'll personally see to it that you never work in this town again." Cue an immediate U-turn by their pursuer."

OK - very amusing.

So Rebekah Wade KNEW eight or ten years ago, how to get her staff to hack police or phone company data bases?

HELLO! Did you all hear me?

Rebekah Wade KNEW eight or ten years ago, exactly who to phone, on her staff, who could hack police or phone company data bases? In real time?

And how to use that information to threaten retaliation?

Well, blow me - what a surprise!

She seems to have forgotten that this was part of her range of talents ..... her ruthlessness, her aggression, her disregard for the legalities and, of course, she had no knowledge whatsoever of her staff doing similar bad things in the years that followed.

Wow!

The sheer cheek makes you blink and recoil.

The casual incompetent arrogance of News International is (please God) going to kill them dead!

I cannot wait.

What I love about Britain (1-7)

2011-07-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

What I love about Britain (1)

That an unknown Australian with a lot of his Daddy's money could come here 30 or more years ago and buy up three of the most influential newspapers and bankrupt a respectable and properly regulated satellite television company and gain monopoly control of all the satellite broadcasting in this country.

What I love about Britain (2)

That when the same Australian transformed himself into an American we let him go on owning all that stuff.

What I love about Britain (3)

That is was only when his staff tried to hack the Royal Family's phones that his Evil Empire started to collapse.

What I love about Britain (4)

That in 2009, when the Guardian accused Murdoch and his staff of bad stuff like this, the Metropolitan Police rubbished the Guardian in a report which its author, Assistant Commissioner John Yates, yesterday described as "pretty crap" in a remarkably frank Sunday Telegraph article.

What I love about Britain (5)

That Yates worked really closely, on his "crap" 2009 report with Ken Macdonald, then Head of the Crown Prosecution Service.

What I love about Britain (6)

That Ken Macdonald, now Lord Macdonald, is currently retained by News International to "advise them on their dealings with the police."

What I love about Britain (7)

That you couldn't possibly make it up.

PS - What I also love about Britain:

The Guardian correction this morning.

Lord Macdonald "has given some advice to the company (News International) about the ... issue of allegedly corrupt payments to police on the part of News of the World journalists."

Which sounds like he is advising them on their newspaper's dealings with the police?

He has not been "retained" but he does "give them some advice."

Now, does he give them this advice for free?

Or, can we assume, he invoices them accordingly?

The advice of somebody of Lord Macdonald's legal standing should be worth - what - 500 pounds sterling per hour? 1,000 pounds or more for a written opinion? I am not a lawyer - I am guessing - but that is probably in the appropriate scale of charges. He may be able to charge much more.

In other words, Lord Macdonald has been paid to help News International as it wriggles and jiggles and squiggles inside the British body politic which is trying (like the old lady who swallowed a fly) to rid itself of this parasitic, cruel and mischievous organization.

I think Lord Macdonald would do well to review his choice of clients.

British Police - and how they behave

2011-07-05T03:09:00.001-07:00

A terrible, shocking story - which you all ought to read and remember:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/03/football-fan-attacked?INTCMP=SRCH

Last year, returning from a football match, student Tommy Meyers was savaged by a police dog while being arrested for assault. Now, following his acquittal, he and his family talk about the incident

Why Do They Lie To Us?

2011-05-06T02:51:00.000-07:00

British atrocities against the Mau Mau in Kenya, in the 1950s

The murder of Blair Peach by a British policeman in 1979

The unlawful killing of Ian Tomlinson in 2011 ...

What can these petty British events have in common with the successful U.S. military raid on an unspectacular compound near the Pakistani Military Academy which resulted in the long-awaited death of Osama Bin Laden a few days ago?

Set aside the callous triumphalism with which Americans greeted the news of the execution …..

Set aside doubts about the legality of pursuing and executing Bin Laden when he was unarmed and therefore incapable of resisting arrest and resident in a sovereign state with which the U.S.A. was not at war …….

What Bin Laden's death and those British events have in common is that the U.S. and British governments lied about them. Blatantly, obviously, stupidly.

They have been lying through their teeth.

These governments did not simply withhold information or mislay information or put the best spin on information - they lied openly and very very stupidly to their own people, to their own newspapers, to public opinion and in the plain sight of their ultimate authorities, the peoples of their democracies.

The Bin Laden affair is hot news, as are the U.S. government's "mis-statements" about the circumstances of the terrorist leader's death.

Associated Press has, this morning, written at length about it. I found the bulletin at:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110506/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_bin_laden

It is reproduced in full below.

British lies about the Mau Mau freedom fighters in Kenya who were tortured and killed in hideous and utterly illegal ways, are now becoming clear but, in the late Fifties it was obvious to me (a schoolboy) that this was happening, that British soldiers and officials and administrators had colluded in murder, torture and rape. It was obvious to me, as a young man, that Blair Peach had been struck over the head by a policeman wielding an illegal weapon, that this caused his death. It is now completely obvious, after the obfuscations and lies he produced at the inquest, that PC Simon Harwood 'unlawfully killed' Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests, attacking him, from behind, when his hands were in his pockets and he was moving away from the police lines, with such severity that he fell and was fatally injured. Tomlinson was 47 years old.

PC Harwood's identification badge was missing at the time and his face covered with a balaclava.

His attempts to explain these facts away would have been very entertaining if it were not such a serious matter.

From evidence at the inquest, it appears completely clear that Simon Harwood did not intend to kill or even seriously injure Tomlinson, who might easily have survived the assault if he had not been a sick man with a badly swollen liver.

It is also completely clear why Harwood would want to lie or tell less than the truth when he found out, to (it seems) his complete surprise, that the man he had thrown to the ground had, in fact, died.

But what motivated the press office at New Scotland Yard to issue clear and completely false statements that Tomlinson had died from a heart attack, that police officers going to his aid when he fell had been assaulted by a rain of bottles?

What motivated the White House to state without equivocation that Osama Bin Laden was shot while shooting at the U.S. 'Seals' (Special Forces soldiers), that he was using a woman as a human shield to protect himself when he died?

Does it not occur to the incompetents, the lying incompetents, who govern Britain and (it seems) America that telling lies is not only wrong, morally and in every other way, but incredibly stupid and inept, that a democracy that uses grossly tainted means to achieve honourable or laudable aims makes those same aims not merely unattainable but intolerable, worthless and disgusting to its own citizens?

Why do they lie to us?

Why did the White House not decide in advance that nothing should be said until everything could be said, that nothing would do except the truth, the plain unvarnished truth.

We have been lied to for long enough. For the whole of my long life, the British government and others have not simply been 'economical with the actualite', they have laboured energetically to deceive their own citizens.

Truth is important. It is an ultimate, an absolute. It is not negotiable.

Morality is important.

If the democracies can not be trusted with the truth, they can not be trusted with our futures and the futures of our grand-children.

5th, May, 2011

ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORT - found at:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110506/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_bin_laden

Only single bin Laden defender shot at SEALs

By ROBERT BURNS and PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Robert Burns And Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press – 1 hr 32 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The Americans who raided Osama bin Laden's lair met far less resistance than the Obama administration described in the aftermath. The commandos encountered gunshots from only one man, whom they quickly killed, before sweeping the house and shooting others, who were unarmed, a senior defense official said in the latest account.

In Thursday's revised telling, the Navy SEALs mounted a precision, floor-by-floor operation to find the al-Qaida leader and his protectors — but without the prolonged and intense firefight that officials had described for several days.

By any measure, the raid was fraught with risk, sensationally bold and a historic success. U.S. officials said some of the first information gleaned from the scene indicated that last year al-Qaida was considering attacking U.S. trains on the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The officials said they had no recent intelligence indicating such a plot was active.

The compound raid netted a man who had been on the run for nearly a decade after his terrorist organization pulled off the devastating attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Even so, in the administration's haste to satisfy the world's hunger for details and eager to make the most of the moment, officials told a tale tarnished by discrepancies and apparent exaggeration.

Whether that matters to most Americans, gratified if not joyful that bin Laden is dead, is an open question. Republican House Speaker John Boehner, for one, shrugged off the backtracking to focus on the big picture: "I had a conversation with the president, and the president outlined to me the series of actions that occurred on Sunday evening. I have no doubt that Osama bin Laden is dead."

[ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ]

President Barack Obama's visit to New York's ground zero on Thursday was a somber and understated event, and he avoided mentioning bin Laden by name. A day earlier, he said the government would not release images of bin Laden's body, a decision taken in part to avoid the perception that America was crowing about killing him.

"We don't need to spike the football," Obama said. He plans to go to Fort Campbell, Ky., on Friday to meet aviators from the mission.

The senior defense official spoke to The Associated Press anonymously because he was not authorized to speak on the record. He said the sole bin Laden shooter in the Pakistan compound was killed in the early minutes of the commando operation, the latest of the details becoming clearer now that the Navy SEAL assault team has fully briefed officials.

As the raiders moved into the compound from helicopters, they were fired on by bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who was in the guesthouse, the official said. The SEALs returned fire, and the courier was killed, along with a woman with him. The official said she was hit in the crossfire.

The Americans were never fired on again as they encountered and killed a man on the first floor of the main building and then bin Laden's son on a staircase, before arriving at bin Laden's room, the official said, revising an earlier account that the son was in the room with his father. Officials have said bin Laden was killed, shot in the chest and then the head, after he appeared to be lunging for a weapon.

White House and Defense Department and CIA officials through the week have offered varying and foggy versions of the operation, though the dominant focus was on a firefight that officials said consumed most of the 40 minutes on the ground after midnight Monday morning in Pakistan, Sunday in Washington.

"There were many other people who were armed ... in the compound," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday when asked if bin Laden was armed. "There was a firefight."

"We expected a great deal of resistance and were met with a great deal of resistance," he said.

"For most of the period there, there was a firefight," a senior defense official told Pentagon reporters in a briefing Monday.

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan originally suggested bin Laden was among those who was armed.

"He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in," Brennan said Monday, before the administration announced bin Laden actually was unarmed although there were weapons in his room.

The success of the bin Laden raid gave the White House a spectacular story to offer without any need to dress it up.

The revelation on Thursday that the raid scooped up valuable intelligence was another positive note. A Homeland Security intelligence warning sent to law enforcement officials around the country said that as of February 2010, al-Qaida was considering tampering with an unspecified U.S. rail track so that a train would fall off at a valley or a bridge. The warning, marked for official use only, was obtained by The Associated Press.

Some of the inconsistencies in the U.S. accounts seemed designed to score extra propaganda points. Brennan, for one, using information that turned out to be flawed, portrayed bin Laden as a man "living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield."

Officials soon dropped the contention that bin Laden tried to hide behind women. They said what really happened is that bin Laden's wife rushed the SEALs when they entered the room. They injured her with a shot in her calf.

The issue of who among the bin Laden group was armed can be a matter of interpretation. To a soldier — and particularly in the case of the SEALs confronting the world's most wanted terrorist — an empty-handed person with a weapon nearby can be considered an armed threat.

The gaps and flaws, while striking, do not seem to approach the level of exaggeration and error in some other cases, such as the 2003 capture and eventual rescue of a female Army supply clerk in Iraq at the outset of the war. Initial military accounts of Jessica Lynch's resistance to her captors were part of an effort to rally public support for the war, and were factually wrong.

It's taken as inevitable in military circles that initial reports of combat operations are almost always imperfect. Sometimes major details are wrong in the first telling, due either to misunderstandings or errors. As a result, the armed forces generally take the time necessary to double check key pieces of the story before making it public.

In the bin Laden case, the Pentagon was not the lead provider of information for an operation led by the CIA and followed in real time by the national security team and by Obama, who gave the order to proceed late last week. And the bin Laden killing stood head and shoulders above most other military operations in the demand for fast details.

The U.S. account of what happened inside bin Laden's Abbottabad compound is so far the only one most Americans have. Pakistan has custody of the people rounded up afterward, including more than two dozen children and women. Differing accounts purporting to be from witnesses have appeared in Pakistani and Arab media, and on the Internet.

Pakistan's army on Thursday called for cuts in the number of U.S. military personnel inside the country to protest the American raid, and threatened to cut cooperation with Washington if it stages more unilateral actions on its territory.

In the Pentagon's first on-the-record comment on the raid, defense policy chief Michele Flournoy said Thursday that the U.S. has no "definitive evidence" that Pakistan knew that the targeted compound was bin Laden's hideout. Regardless, the Pakistanis must now show convincingly their commitment to defeating al-Qaida, Flournoy said. Anything short of that, she said, will risk losing congressional support for continued U.S. financial aid to Islamabad.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, who supports withholding aid to Pakistan until it demonstrates such a commitment, was among those who found it hard to believe that authorities there were unaware of bin Laden's presence in a military town with a military academy.

"Bin Laden's hideaway was just a stone's throw from Pakistan's West Point," he said. "That's like John Dillinger living right down the street from the FBI and the FBI not knowing about it."

Once elements of the official version began changing, and in an effort to slow the demand for more details, White House press secretary Jay Carney referred reporters to the Pentagon for more information, even though the Pentagon had already said it would say no more. The Pentagon canceled its daily public press briefings each day this week.

"The nature of the mission, the nature of what happened Sunday, combined with the effort to get that information quickly, resulted in the need to clarify some facts," Carney said aboard Air Force One en route to New York. He said the administration should be given credit for correcting mistakes when it found them.

___

Associated Press writers Donna Cassata, Stephen Braun, Calvin Woodward, Adam Goldman and Eileen Sullivan in Washington and Chris Brummitt in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

Great Speeches

2011-01-17T03:20:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, in Tucson, Arizona, a young man went out to buy a gun. He was a disturbed young man, someone who scared the people around him. But he got his gun, a Glock machine pistol, a brutally effective rapid-firing semi-automatic widely used by American police forces.

No one asked about his mental health or his intentions.

"This is America," said - or thought - the salesman, "he is entitled to carry arms."

A few days later, he went to the local mall and shot a politician, a member of Congress, called Gabrielle Giffords. The bullet traversed her skull but did not kill her.

Then he turned his gun at random on the people around him, shooting a judge, a nine year old girl and many others.

In hospital, yesterday, Gabrielle Giffords opened her eyes and moved her arm again. She is not dead but will probably never live a normal life again.

Barack Obama spoke about this outrage the other day.

It was, by all accounts, a great speech. Even a Fox TV commentator called Glenn Beck congratulated him. Beck is rabidly opposed to Obama and what he stands for.

In his speech, the President talked about the lives of those who had died and of those who were injured by the gunman.

He talked about the heroism of the passers by who had disarmed and subdued the gunman.

Above all, thinking, perhaps, of his own young daughters, he talked about the nine year old girl who died, Christina Green. This is what he said:

"In Christina we see all of our children. So curious, so trusting, so energetic and full of magic. Christina was given to us on 11 September 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called Faces of Hope."

"On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child's life. 'I hope you help those in need,' read one. 'I hope you know all of the words to the national anthem and sing it with your hand over our heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles.'"

"If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today."

His words move me to tears.

I hope his words will also move Americans to take actions against the bilious hatred which has dishonoured their political discourse in recent months and the naked racism which has helped to fuel the disrespect which some Americans have shown to their properly elected leader, Barack Hussein Obama.

America, as a country and as a society, is a mass of contradictions. It can throw up political and spiritual greatness more often than Britain. But it sometimes wallows with relish in its own ignorance, spite and bile.

Yet the idealism of the founding fathers is still available and their spirit can invoked to refresh the libertarian impulses to which America was originally dedicated.

I cannot remember when I heard a British politician make a speech that either inspired me or moved me.

What a disappointing country mine has become when great events (and there have been great events in my lifetime) produce no tears, no ideals and little or no hope for the young.

Christmas - a time for taking stock

2011-01-14T02:18:00.000-08:00

Overwhelmed again. I always seem to be at this time of the year.

Is Christmas a time when I notice more injustice, more incursions into the shrinking stock of personal and social liberties which we used to think we owned?

Or a time when more injustices are reported (in the hope that they will remain un-noticed because we are all drunk and stupefied with preparations for Christmas)?

First, there is the curious case of the undercover policeman who went by the name of Mark Stone and who spent seven years, no less, at an estimated cost of £250,000 per year infiltrating environmental movements and buddying up with Green activists.

He helped them with money and transport and to organize their entirely peaceful protests, all the while reporting back as much as he could to the shadowy and sinister National Public Order Intelligence Unit to which he had been seconded by the Met.

When six of the activists were charged with conspiracy, his evidence would have made it clear that they were not conspirators in the legal sense, that this particular group of six (out of some 146 people who were originally arrested) did not know the target of the planned non-violent demonstration.

It seems that he offered to come forward and reveal this and the case was immediately dropped.

What is truly shocking is that the Crown Prosecution Service either did not know about or chose to ignore his presence within the movement and his possible testimony.

The CPS would happily have fought to convict six innocent people if he had not crawled out of the woodwork in time to upset the legal applecart.

Indeed, it successfully convicted 20 people previously, from the same group, without revealing the existence of the police informers or appearing to take their prejudicial activities into account. These 20 people are appealing their sentences.

It all reminds me (as some newspaper columnists and correspondents have also pointed out) of GK Chesterton's novel, The Man who was Thursday, first published in 1908.

Seven bearded Anarchists meet each week to discuss plans for the violent overthrow of Britain and neighbouring states.

But, it transpires, every single one of them (including the Big Boss) is a plain clothes policeman working undercover.

If the British police spend millions of pounds on surveillance of peaceful and non-violent protesters, it seem that we are all, as I have often suspected, continually under surveillance and in danger of active repression or persecution if we attempt to defy the wishes of the government or the prevailing orthodoxy.

Certainly a group of letters in the Guardian on 28th. December, written in the wake of student protests about the huge proposed rises in university tuition fees, confirmed this feeling.

One correspondent, who lives in France, went so far as to suggest that British police are now even fiercer and more out of control than the notorious (and rightly feared) French riot police, the CRS.

"The police need to be made truly acccountable to prevent them turning into brutal bullies."

Other correspondents thought that it was too late, that the police already had turned into bullies - and worse.

A student writer drew attention to the police's 'kettling' tactics, confining peaceful demonstrators in a small area for long periods until the crowd's frustrations and the cramped conditions provoked exactly the types of disorder that the police were, in theory, there to prevent.

"People just wanted to go home and instead were crushed, left screaming and, in some cases, gasping for breath."

"This is not democracy, but repression." wrote a third correspondent. "The police are clearly being used for political ends. I look forward to .... the restoration of our right to protest without intimidation and violence."

Well, so do I.

But I don't think I will hold my breath.

And is 'restoration' the right word?

Did such a 'right' ever exist?

Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian in June 2008, made the following comments when discussing the proposal to make it possible for terror suspects to be detained for 42 days (seven weeks - just think about it - in a 'free country') without any formal charge.

"Let us be clear. Our liberties are under threat from two sides. They are threatened by terrorists, especially takfiri jihadist ones, exploiting new technologies and open society in order to kill, maim and terrify the innocent. And they are endangered by the overreaction from the state, eroding those liberties in the name of defending us against these threats. Taken to the extreme, that means strangling freedom to save it."

Repression and surveillance can have humorous aspects. This next letter made me laugh.

Liam O'Farrell to the Editor, the Guardian, December, 2009:

"I was stopped and searched twice near London City airport - for watercolouring! I was not even facing the airport. I was painting the Tate and Lyle sugar factory opposite. They said they saw me on a camera and thought that "no one would want to paint a factory." I explained that L.S. Lowry did loads. Then they said I could be an anarchist and I was carrying "suspicious paraphernalia" - this being a flask of coffee and an IPod. Oh, and a box of watercolours.
Once they had all my gear out, rummaged through what identity documentation I had and double-checked it on a few radios, they were satisfied that I was just "weird" and left me to it. Until the next week, when I went back to finish off the picture and had to go through the same rigmarole again.
I have painted in Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam and plenty of other "controlled" states and have never been questioned about watercolour anarchism."

Note: "In 2004/5, stop -and-search powers under Section 44 (of the Terrorism Act 2000) were used 33,000 times; the figure rose to over 117,000 by 2007/8. People were being stopped at random - children, tourists, photographers. Moreover, no one knows of a single conviction for a terrorist offence that arose as a result ..... The police were out of control." David Allen Green, New Statesman, 17th. January, 2011

Freedom or License - about burning books

2010-09-17T05:59:00.000-07:00

Pastor Terry Jones's plan to burn 200 copies of the Qur'an in Florida on 9/11 was widely condemned. But the unique symbolism of book-burning has a long and sinister history.

by Jon Henley - The Guardian, Friday 10 September 2010

On the night of 10 May 1933, a crowd of some 40,000 people gathered in the Opernplatz – now the Bebelplatz – in the Mitte district of Berlin. Amid much joyous singing, band-playing and chanting of oaths and incantations, they watched soldiers and police from the SS, brownshirted members of the paramilitary SA, and impassioned youths from the German Student Association and Hitler Youth Movement burn, at the behest of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, upwards of 25,000 books decreed to be "un-German".

.......

The volumes consigned to the flames in Berlin, and more than 30 other university towns around the country on that and following nights, included works by more than 75 German and foreign authors, among them (to cite but a few) Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Lenin, Jack London, Heinrich, Klaus and Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Karl Marx, John Dos Passos, Arthur Schnitzler, Leon Trotsky, HG Wells, Émile Zola and Stefan Zweig. Also among the authors whose books were burned that night was the great 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine, who barely a century earlier, in 1821, had written in his play Almansor the words: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" – "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people."

Pastor Jones, in Florida, abandoned his plans. But they had been greeted with world-wide revulsion and helped fuel anti-American, anti-Western feelings in several Muslim countries. The damage had been done. Even the threat to burn the Koran was enough for that.

In other parts of America, people did go ahead and burn copies of the Koran. The news media hardly recorded their activities at all, deciding (despite the American reverence for free speech) that inflammatory rhetoric and self-publicising are not worthy causes for which to risk American lives and American principles.

Thank goodness for self-restraint. It matters. There are few absolutes in anyone's life and that is as it should be.

It is worth noting in passing that Jesus is honoured in the Koran, as a prophet equal to Mohammad.

Also that Jews, the people of the book, receive similar respect.

What the Police say and do

2010-09-17T03:03:00.000-07:00

The British police seem uncertain whether their activities can or should be governed by the law of the land and by all the ethical considerations and considerations of honesty which ought to be upheld by everyone, even policemen, in a civilized and democratic society.

They target minorities of various sorts at various times (just as the Jews were targeted in Hitler's Germany). They oppress minorities of various sorts at various times, sometimes in ways that may be as punitive and as destructive as actions against the Jews before the Second World War.

Muslims are one of the principal current targets.

From the Guardian, 27th. August, 2010

Police chiefs misled Birmingham city council over Muslim CCTV, inquiry told
Sir Paul Scott-Lee, former West Midlands chief constable, and Stuart Hyde, his assistant chief constable, face disciplinary action after telling Birmingham councillors the CCTV scheme for Muslim areas was not terror-related

Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk, Friday 27 August 2010 20.26 BST

Two police chiefs could face condemnation and disciplinary action after an inquiry was launched into claims they deliberately misled councillors about surveillance targeted at Muslim communities in Birmingham.

The £3.5m initiative to ringfence two Muslim suburbs with automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras was shelved in June after an investigation by the Guardian.

Sir Paul Scott-Lee, who was West Midlands chief constable until April 2009, and Stuart Hyde, who was assistant chief constable, stand accused of deliberately misleading councillors over the true motives behind the monitoring programme. Several councillors who attended a meeting about why the cameras were being installed in their wards say they were told they were part of a Home Office scheme targeting antisocial behaviour and vehicle crime.

A network of 169 ANPR cameras was erected this year to form "rings of steel" around Washwood Heath and Sparkbrook, two largely Muslim neighbourhoods. There was no public consultation before the project, which also included the installation of additional CCTV and covert cameras.

Paul Lewis reported again in the Guardian on 1st. October, 2010. For some reason, this article is not available on the Guardian web-site. But it began like this:

"A secret police operation to place thousands of Muslims living in Birmingham under permanent surveillance was implemented with virtually no consultation, oversight or regard for the law, a report found yesterday .... police had misled residents into believing that hundreds of counter-terrorism cameras installed in streets around Sparkbrook and Washwood Heath were to be used to combat vehicle crime and antisocial behaviour.
In fact the £3m project was being run from the West Midlands police counter-terrorism unit with the consent of security officials at the Home Office and MI5."

"Police devised a "storyline" that concealed the true purpose of the cameras. Counter-terrorism insignia was removed from paperwork as part of a deliberate strategy to "market" the surveillance operation as a local policing scheme to improve community safety."

So it's OK to lie then? Officially? If you're a copper?

The Rule of Law

2010-09-17T02:59:00.001-07:00

Thomas Bingham (Lord Bingham of Cornhill) died this month. His obituary in the Guardian, published on 11th. September, included the following remarks:

"He was also to the fore in promoting a strong, independent judiciary. At a time of growing executive power and a diminishing influence for parliament, and in particular following the terror attacks of 9/11 in New York and 7 and 21 July 2005 in London, the Labour government adopted an increasingly authoritarian approach. This included the power to detain certain foreign nationals indefinitely without charge, and the right to use evidence that may have been obtained by torture in certain legal proceedings. The government also argued for a strong role for the executive, with which the judiciary should not interfere.

In two seminal decisions, in 2004 and 2005 in the two cases of A & Others v Secretary of State for the Home Department, Tom wrote leading judgments rejecting the government's arguments. In so doing, he advanced the rights of all individuals, while recognising the reality of the threat presented by certain forms of terrorism. He rejected – with characteristic firmness, clarity and authority – the government's approach to the judiciary. "The function of independent judges charged to interpret and apply the law is universally recognised as a cardinal feature of the modern democratic state, a cornerstone of the rule of law itself," he wrote in 2004. While the attorney general, on behalf of the government, was entitled to insist on the proper limits of judicial authority, he was "wrong to stigmatise judicial decision-making as in some way undemocratic"."

The Tomlinson case

2010-07-26T01:09:00.000-07:00

On July 23rd., the director of public prosecutions announced that no charges would be brought against the policeman who, with his badge covered, attacked Ian Tomlinson who afterwards died.

Ian Tomlinson was attempting to walk home from his job as a newspaper seller in the City of London. The attack was recorded on video. There was no scuffle or surrounding struggle to justify or account for the aggression.

The reason for inaction given by the DPP is that pathologists who conducted the (three) autopsies on Mr. Tomlinson's body did not reach identical conclusions. The Guardian's editorial included the following paragraph:

"It is clear from the report of the Crown Prosecution Service that efforts were made to reconcile the findings of the postmortems. Its inability to do so, however, is not some catastrophic misfortune. It is a symptom of an institutional failure. The problem is this: there is a climate of impunity among Britain's police services that is fostered by the reluctance of the CPS to bring prosecutions. It was clear in the events surrounding the death of the teacher and activist Blair Peach more than 30 years ago; it was clear in the events surrounding the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 for which no one has been prosecuted; and it is as clear now in the response to Ian Tomlinson's death. Things may have improved since the Cass report into the death of Blair Peach, finally published earlier this year, which found members of the Metropolitan police (none of whom was ever charged or even disciplined) telling "easily recognisable lies". How, after all, could police officer A deny that he had hit Mr Tomlinson when the world had seen him doing just that. Yet the sense of impunity is unchanged. This was never acceptable. Now it is unsustainable."

In the letters column of the Guardian, on the next day, a doctor reflected that he did not fear crime or terrorists, which do not impinge on his daily life.

"However, I now hesitate to express my freedom of speech by attending political demonstrations, for fear of the violence and intimidation of the police ..."

Another correspondent wrote:

"It is impossible to imagine the Crown Prosecution Service taking the same decision if a police officer had collapsed and died minutes after being struck by a demonstrator. That says it all."

Many years ago, in 1957, the great American writer, Norman Mailer, wrote the following in an essay called "The White Negro", published in Dissent Magazine. I was in my late teens when I read these words and they have stayed with me ever since:

"A man knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis."

I have lived my life differently because I read those words.

I have hardly ever dared to express my political views openly (still less loudly) and I have never attended a political demonstration of any sort from fear of the police and the spooks as well as from a well-founded belief in their essential uselessness.

I have lived my life in fear of the covert and overt repression of the British State.

Is that not a sad comment to have to make when your next big birthday will be your seventieth?

What sort of freedom do we really enjoy in this country when a white, thoughful, well-educated person like me carries this burden of mis-trust throughout his life?

Freedom is an empty concept when British police can behave as they did to Ian Tomlinson, when British soldiers become murdererers, as they did on Bloody Sunday and have in Iraq, when the institutions of government and of justice are subverted and distorted, as they have been in the last decade through collaboration with the American-led global "war on terror" and by falsely and dishonourably protecting the "culture of impunity" by which MI5, MI6, the Metropolitan police and others operate in their bizarre and twilit worlds.

The game is almost up .... for the Government!

2010-07-16T13:59:00.000-07:00

The Government has announced a judicial enquiry into the torture allegations involving MI5. As part of the package, they are attempting to persuade the six former detainees who are suing for wrongful imprisonment to abandon their litigation and to abort requests for the documents (some 500,000 of them) which spell out the callousness of Britain's official response to the imprisonment and torture of some of its Muslim citizens.

The Government has failed. The former detainees seem startlingly insistent. It is almost as if they think they have the right to know why their own elected representatives stood by while they were tortured by the Americans, Pakistanis and others.

"Yesterday," states the Guardian, 15th. July, 2010, "the government failed in an attempt to bring a temporary halt to the proceedings that have resulted in the disclosure of the documents. Its lawyers argued that the case should be delayed while attempts were made to mediate with the six men, in the hope that their claims could be withdrawn in advance of the judicial inquiry. Lawyers for the former Guantanamo inmates said it as far from certain that mediation would succeed, and insisted the disclosure process continue."

One of the detainees, when interviewed by MI5, complained of internal bleeding and violent mis-treatment. ".... what kind of world was it," he asked, "where the Americans were more barbaric than the Pakistanis? We listened," wrote an MI5 officer, "but did not comment."

(How very British!)

MI5 did not believe that this prisoner, Omar Deghayes, was telling them the truth.

The officers "proposed disengaging and allowing events here to take their course."

As a result of this official British 'disengagement', Deghayes was rendered to Guantanamo Bay and stayed there for more than five years.

"At one point he was so severely beaten that he was blinded in one eye."

Bloody Sunday

2010-06-16T14:35:00.000-07:00

The Saville Enquiry has reported at last. On Bloody Sunday, 30th. January, 1972, British soldiers committed murderous acts. They fired on unarmed protesters. They continued to fire as the wounded attempted to crawl away and save themselves.

They lied when they gave evidence about these events and what they did. There were no attacks on them, no provocation, to justify their actions.

Thirteen people were killed immediately and one died later from his wounds. Fourteen people were wounded.

A statement by Tony Doherty, whose father, Patrick, was killed:

"When the state kills its citisens it is in the interests of all that those responsible be held to account. It is not just Derry, or one section of the people, but democracy itself which needs to look out." (Guardian 16th. June, p2)

A copy of the 1972 Widgery report, now proved to have been a whitewash, "a travesty", was torn to pieces on the steps of the Guildhall in Derry after Lord Saville's conclusions became public.

"What happened was unjustified and unjustifiable," said the Prime Minister to the House of Commons.

"It was wrong."

The Parachute Regiment has brought disgrace on itself and on all of us.

So who was in charge?

Guardian, 17th. June, 2010

by Henry McDonald

The civil rights activist who led the Bloody Sunday march has expressed his disappointment that the Saville report failed to criticise the man who took the decision to deploy paratroopers in Derry.

Ivan Cooper said "overall responsibility" should have been levelled at the army's most senior officer in Northern Ireland at the time of the massacre, Major General Robert Ford, then commander of land forces.

"I saw General Ford in William Street shouting at the troops 'Go Paras, go,'" said Cooper.

"If you examine the evidence during the tribunal that stated that General Ford wanted action against the so-called Derry Young Hooligans, he is the officer who had overall control of the operation. I firmly believe he should have been held accountable for the action of his troops. After all, it was he who, as commander of land forces, was ultimately responsible."

Cooper, a Protestant, was an independent MP and peace activist at the time of the killings, and was a vocal advocate for Protestants and Catholics to fight together for civil rights.....

Cooper said that Ford should have received the same criticism in the report as Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, the officer in charge of 1 Para on the day. Saville was damning of Wilford's conduct.

"The general ordered the paratroopers into Derry even though they had just returned from operations in Aden where they already had a reputation for being gung-ho and ruthless. They should never have been used and Ford should have known that," said Cooper

The Saville report, published yesterday, concluded that there was "no evidence to suggest that the use of lethal force against unarmed rioters, who were not posing a threat of causing death or serious injury, was contemplated by General Ford".

That assessment, Cooper said, was the most disappointing aspect of what was an otherwise historically significant report.

He also disputed Saville's assertion that Martin McGuinness, at the time the IRA's number two in the city, had probably been carrying a sub-machine gun on Bloody Sunday.

"All my life I have been opposed to Martin McGuinness but on the day I saw him and he was not carrying a sub-machine gun. He certainly wasn't hiding it in his trousers because I would have seen that too. I don't know why Saville said he was probably armed with a sub-machine gun but I certainly did not see him with any gun," he said.

Torture and the British Government

2010-05-24T02:43:00.000-07:00

Will the truth ever emerge?

The legacy of the outgoing Labour administration was so shocking, so intensely anti-libertarian, that it has not been difficult for the new Tory-LibDem coalition to shine by comparison.

In the first few weeks, Cameron and Clegg have announced an inquiry into torture allegations and other measures (to review the extradition of Gary McKinnon and to cancel the ID card scheme) which I can only applaud.

I find myself in the unnerving position of approving and welcoming the activities of a new Conservative Government.

(If only they will take the axe to Trident as well.)

Inquiries in Britain have a habit of taking a long time, costing a lot of money and obfuscating (rather than clarifying) the issues and background of controversial matters of policy.

I hope very much that the proposed inquiry into the well documented activities of MI5 and MI6 operatives who condoned and may even have encouraged the agents of other government to torture Britsh citizens will be different.

On 20th. May, the Guardian listed its own repeated accounts of British intelligence agents involved in torture and summarised the need for the inquiry to fulfill the following objectives:

To establish the full truth, the inquiry will need to discover:

• Who authorised the bilateral agreements with the US, signed three weeks after the 9/11 attacks under article V of the North Atlantic treaty, that led to the UK offering logistic support for the CIA's rendition programme of kidnap and torture.

• Whether any other such bilateral agreements were signed that led to human rights abuses during the so-called war on terror.

• Who drew up, and who authorised, the secret interrogation policy, transmitted in January 2002 to all MI5 and MI6 agents in Afghanistan, telling them they could interrogate people who were being tortured, as long as they did not participate and were not "seen to condone it".

• How was that policy further developed in mid-2004, why and by whom.

• Which ministers authorised these policies.

• What Downing Street knew about the torture of the British resident Binyam Mohamed, and about the torture in Pakistan and elsewhere of several British citizens suspected of planning terrorist attacks since 2001.

• What the last foreign and home secretaries, David Miliband and Alan Johnson, knew about the UK's involvement in torture and rendition, what they did – and critically, what they may not have done – in an attempt to bring it to an end.

The inquiry will also be under pressure to publish the interrogation policy as it has stood since mid-2004 – even though Miliband said last year that this could never be done as it would "give succour" to the country's enemies.

The Guardian also included the following:

Philippe Sands QC, professor of law at University College London, said the inquiry should have happened long ago. "To restore trust in government, both here and abroad, and to get to the truth the inquiry needs to be deep and broad and as open as possible," he said.

"It should address in particular who authorised what and when and why, what the relevant legal advice said, and how it related to any change in US practice in 2002 and 2003."

Whatever happened to probity?

2010-03-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to probity? And are you free, can you ever be free if you live in a society where morality, honesty, probity seem of no value? Where the law is not respected by the lawyers or the rights of little children by corrupt priests and a warped and wicked priestly hierarchy?

The Pope has issued a pastoral letter this week. It concerns child abuse by Catholic priests. How can anyone take this letter seriously when the Vatican has sheltered Cardinal Bernard Law from accusations that he actively concealed child abusing priests when he was in charge in Boston, Massachusetts? When the Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, played an active role, as a young man, in making sure that ten year old children were prevailed upon and frightened into swearing oaths to keep silent for ever about the fact that they had been sexually abused by a priest called Brendan Smyth?

Is it possible to feel anything but disgust not just for these criminal priests and their crimes but for the poisonous hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in covering them up?

It seems now to be normal in Britain for the guardians of public order to lie, to dissimulate, to prevaricate, to conceal their misdeeds without shame, hesitation or any need to explain or excuse their actions.

"Scotland Yard has not disciplined a single police officer for failing to display a badge number at least year's G20 protest" wrote the Guardian on 19th. March, despite the Met Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, promising that officers caught deliberately covering their badge numbers would be sacked.

As for Lord Ashcroft, words almost fail me. Ten years ago, he seems to have assured William Hague, the Leader of the Opposition, that he would become resident in the U.K. and pay tax here on all his earnings and he then re-negotiated the deal (with the apparent help of the Conservative Chief Whip) so that he gained all the benefits of a peerage without conforming to the assurances and meeting the obligations that he had accepted.

Is Lord Ashcroft contrite?

Are he and Mr. Hague in sackcloth and ashes together?

Not a bit of it.

"The intricacies of the (Ashcroft) affair," wrote the Guardian in a leader on 18th. March , "will leave many people lost. No rules, it seems were broken - only carefully walked around. No outright lies were told - only whole truths not spoken."

How very, superbly, British.

It makes me almost embarrassed to accuse Rome and the Pope of hypocrisy. Whitehall and Westminster could teach the Vatican more than a thing or two about concealing the truth and covering things up.

Another example from the Guardian, 17th. March, of the British talent for breaking the law whilst not admitting it, for penalising the whistleblower and not the wrong-doer:-

Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer, a lawyer and professional soldier, drew the attention of the commanding officer of a British regiment serving in Iraq to what his soldiers were doing to their prisoners, which appeared to this senior soldier-lawyer to be illegal under the terms of the Geneva conventions and the European Convention on Human Rights.

This resulted in a "massive" row.

Later, the Lieutenant Colonel "walked out of a meeting between British officials and the International Committee of the Red Cross after being told by a "political adviser" to keep his mouth shut."

"Mercer's protests about the unlawful treatment of Iraqis in British custody were so unwelcome within the Ministry of Defence that his boss, Martin Hemming, head of its legal service, threatened to report him to the Law Society," claimed the Guardian, summarising his evidence to the Baha Mousa inquiry.

How could a senior lawyer like Martin Hemmings set aside his over-riding obligation to probity, to rectitude, to the law itself, seemingly acting as if honesty and morality were simply negotiable commodities, to be used (or misused) in any way that might be convenient to those in charge?

Martin Hemming prepared statements for the Commons human rights committee which Mercer and General Robin Brims, commander of British troops in southern Iraw actually refused to sign because (it seems) they concealed the facts about the unlawful treatment to which Iraqi detainees were being subjected.

(Lieutenant Colonel Mercer is still serving in the Army.

I wonder what his prospects are now of making full Colonel?)

As another Guardian article suggested (also 17th. March), whistleblowers at Lehman Brothers (Matthew Lee) and at British Biotech (Andrew Millar) and at HBOS (Paul Moore) all lost their jobs when they advised their bosses that their respective companies might be guilty of false accounting, unethical behaviour and reckless lending.

Being right (as these three were) is no defence.

Being wrong allows complacency without compunction.

The more wrong you are, the more brass face you seem able to muster.

In this spirit, let us turn to Dame Eliza Manningham Buller, the former head of MI5.

She wrote to the Guardian on 15th. March stating carefully and precisely and very guardedly that she "did not know exactly what had been done specifically to Khalid Sheik Mohammed until after I retired."

In this way, she attempted to rebut the suggestion implied by the Guardian's careful research (published on 11th. March) that evidence of the Americans torturing prisoners (or outsourcing the torture of rendered prisoners) was available five years before Manningham Buller left MI5 in 2007.

Much of this evidence was published in very reputable newspapers, notably the New York Times.

Many of these accounts also suggested the MI5 or MI6 staff were close at hand when such torture occurred and had fed questions they wanted answered to the torturers or collaborated with torturers in other ways.

If Dame Eliza did not know about these accusations and these reports, she had kept herself in ignorance with extraordinary dedication.

Did she not read any newspapers at all while she was in charge of a major British security agency?

Lies, misdeeds and mistrust - the MI5 achievment

2010-02-11T06:37:00.000-08:00

The British Government has shot itself in the foot again. Not only that, but MI5 has been shown to be a lying, deceitful and untrustworthy organization which demeans the democracy that it claims to serve.

1) Determined and lengthy British Government legal initiatives have failed to stop the courts allowing publication of a seven paragraph summary prepared by the Americans that proves that MI5 knew that a UK resident called Binyam Mohamed was being tortured by the Americans and their associates and continued to interrogate him in that knowledge, in clear breach of international obligations and of a government ruling dating from 1972.

2) In an attempt to water down a judicial ruling that criticised MI5 and its behaviour, the lawyer acting on behalf of the government wrote to the courts and asked the court not to publish the following allegations which form a summary of just what the judge thought that MI5 gets up to:

"The Master of the Rolls' observations .... will read as statements by the Court (i) that the Security Service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques ..... (iii) that officials of the Service deliberately misled the Intelligence and Security Committee (of the House of Commons) on this point ...."

The lawyer continues:

"The Master of the Rolls' observations .... constitute an exceptionally damaging criticism of the good faith of the Security Service as a whole. In particular, the suggestion that the Court should distrust any UK government assurance based on the Service's advice ....."

Full details are in reports in the Guardian and other newspapers today.

It is likely that the full text of the Master of the Rolls' observations will become public shortly and I look forward to reading paragraph 168 of the Master's judgement in full and gory detail and adding its text to this post.

Lord Bingham on Liberty and its diminution

2010-02-09T02:52:00.000-08:00

Lord Bingham, Baron Bingham of Cornhill, was Lord Chief Justice and the Senior Law Lord, before his retirement in 2008.

These extracts are from an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian, 8th. February, 2010.

Bingham is .... forthright on the way in which the government is using the threat of terrorism to erode fundamental freedoms. He quotes with approval Benjamin Franklin's dictum that "he who would put security before liberty deserves neither"
.....

Bingham believes we are getting the delicate balance between liberty and security wrong. "Liberty is losing out at the moment. Extraordinary inroads are being made into principles that would once have been regarded as completely inviolate, such as the growing practice of putting material before some decision-making tribunal or judge that the defendant never sees." He worries that the culture of the law, and indeed society, is changing. "When I talk to the young, I'm struck by how, even when they have impeccably liberal instincts on things like torture and the death penalty, they tend to make an exception for terrorists. They've grown up in a world post-9/11 in which terrorism has been seen as this colossally potent threat." The danger is real, but so is the threat to hard-won liberties.

Just before we met, the story that the police were considering the use of unmanned drones had been in the press. He is not a fan. "We are already plotted almost every single inch of our lives. I have a rather bolshie approach to this. Why is it necessary? I was going through customs at Heathrow the other day, presented a perfectly innocent British passport, the lady takes it and puts it into a machine to photograph it. I said to her, 'What –happens to the photograph you've just made?' She said, 'You're not allowed to know.' Why should the citizen not be allowed to know? We have a very noble tradition, and have to battle to protect our rights."

Spooks and Suspicions

2010-01-07T00:55:00.000-08:00

Christopher Andrews recently published an 'authorised history' of MI5. I rather thought, in my naive and trusting way, that this might be a good thing. After all, when I was young, the British Government did not admit that MI5 and MI6 existed, still less that their functions included spying on British people who supported Trades Unions, political reform and/or the Labour Party.

At least now we know we have secret policemen and something about what they do to us and pretend to do for us. And from Peter Wright's celebrated book 'Spy Catcher', we also know that MI5 officers sometimes used to be lawless, corrupt and devotedly fascistic and that the Government (attempting to conceal these truths) would not hesitate to be 'economical with the actualite' as a very senior Civil Servant admitted, under cross examination, in an Australian court.

So far so good - an official and authorised history of a body like MI5 could only throw a little light on secret matters, however discreetly the book was constructed, however many documents in MI5's files had been 'redacted', (the bureacrats' word for concealed, censored, suppressed.)

In a long letter to the London Review of Books, (3rd. December, 2009), Mr. A. W. Brian Simpson writes about Mr. Andrews' book.

Mr. Simpson has written about the detention of aliens and citizens in time of war, both during the First World War and during the Second. These topics are almost wholly omitted from Mr. Andrews' book, although it is known that MI5 was the prime mover in making arbitrary imprisonment normal in Britain.

Some 30,000 aliens and 1,700 citizens were detained without trial in the early years of the Second World War and many remained in prison throughout hostilities. This was almost certainly a pointless exercise in messing up people's lives. "Only one of the aliens, Klaus Fuchs, later - after release - became a spy."

MI5 also contributed to government policy and has successfully influenced successive governments in favour of trials in camera and other impositions on British subjects. "There is not a mention (of this) in the official history."

"Since MI5 was invented, there is no doubt that there has been a steady erosion of civil liberties in Britain, much of it in the name of security ... MI5's input into the evolving policy remains concealed."

MI5 came into being before the First World War so it has exercised influence in Britain throughout the Twentieth Century. It is appalling that the official, authorised history, should not describe at least some of the policies and policy initiatives which it has espoused in the last hundred years.

NB: 'Redacted' is a word I had never heard until five or six years ago and is, I think, a fine example of what George Orwell imagined and categorised as 'NewSpeak'.

'Suppressed' or 'censored' are so much more precise - the advantage of using the word 'redacted' is that very few people understand what it means.

Human Rights against Security - a false juxtaposition

2010-01-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

comments by Gary Younge

extracted from his article in the Guardian, 4th. January 2010

"To galvanise the nation for war abroad and sedate it for repression at home, the previous (Bush) administration constructed a terror threat that was ubiquitous in character, apocalyptic in scale and imminent in nature. Only then could they counterpose human rights against security as though they were not only contradictory but mutually exclusive.

Al-Qaida was only too happy to oblige. In such a state of perpetual crisis both terrorists and reactionaries thrive. Terrorists successfully create a climate of fear; governments successfully exploit that fear to extend their own powers.

"I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it," said former vice-president Dick Cheney.

The trouble is that even by their own shabby standards, none of these "extraordinary measures" have ever worked. No new laws were necessary to stop 9/11. If the immigration services, the FBI and the CIA had been doing their jobs properly, the attacks could have been prevented.

Nonetheless, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the US government undertook the "preventative detention" of about 5,000 men on the basis of their birthplace and later sought a further 19,000 "voluntary interviews". Over the next year, more than 170,000 men from 24 predominantly Muslim countries and North Korea were fingerprinted and interviewed in a programme of "special registration". None of these (measures) produced a single terrorism conviction.

This set the pattern for the years to come: wiretapping, rendition, torture, secrecy. Those who otherwise rail against the inefficiency of government argued for more extensive, intrusive state power even as it produced little in the way of results. When confronted with this lamentable record, their only defence was the threat of the next attack. "The next time, the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud" said Condoleezza Rice, adding. "They only have to be right once. We have to be right every time." Over the last week even once in a while would have looked good."

UK Government Torturing UK Citizens

2009-11-26T03:19:00.001-08:00

Extract from the Guardian, 25th. November, 2009 - by Ian Cobain

"After an investigation spanning more than a year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) today condemned Britain's role in the torture of terror suspects detained in Pakistan as cruel, counter-productive and in clear breach of international law ..... a report published today by HRW – entitled Cruel Britannia: British Complicity in the Torture and Ill-treatment of Terror Suspects – draws upon corroborative evidence received from the Pakistani torturers themselves.

Researchers at the New York-based NGO spoke to Pakistani intelligence agents directly involved in the torture who say their British counterparts knew they were mistreating British terrorism suspects. These agents said British officials were "breathing down their necks for information" while they were torturing a medical student from London, and that British intelligence officers were "grateful" they were "using all means possible" to extract information from a man from Luton being beaten, whipped, deprived of sleep and threatened with an electric drill.

"UK complicity is clear," the report says, adding that it had put the government in a "legally, morally and politically invidious position""

You Couldn't Make It Up! (2)

2009-11-09T00:28:00.000-08:00

from:
guardian.co.uk, Friday 6th. November, 2009 22 04 GMT

'Culture of impunity' at police unit

by Paul Lewis, Matthew Taylor

(Headlined as above in Saturday edition of the newspaper, filed with slightly different heading on the net on Friday night)

Of more than 5,000 complaints against squad, less than 0.18% were upheld

Scotland Yard faced calls for an "ethical audit" of all officers in its controversial riot squad tonight after figures revealed that they had received more than 5,000 complaint allegations, mostly for "oppressive behaviour".
Details of all allegations lodged against the Metropolitan police territorial support group (TSG) over the last four years reveal that only nine – less than 0.18% – were "substantiated" after an investigation by the force's complaints department.
The figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, were described as evidence of a "culture of impunity" that makes it almost impossible for members of the public to lodge successful complaints against the Met's 730 TSG officers.
The TSG is a specialist squad that responds to outbreaks of disorder anywhere in the capital. It is under investigation for the most high-profile cases of alleged brutality at the G20 protests, including the death of Ian Tomlinson.
The unit came under renewed criticism this week after one of its officers was identified as a member of a team implicated in a "serious, gratuitous and prolonged" attack on a Muslim man.
PC Mark Jones, 42, was one of six officers involved in an attack on Babar Ahmad, 34, who was punched, kicked, stamped on and strangled during his arrest at his home in Tooting, south London. The Met paid Ahmad £60,000 in damages earlier this year and accepted its officers were responsible for the attack, during which Ahmad, a terror suspect, was forced into the Muslim prayer position and told: "Where is your God now? Pray to him."
A former Royal Marine, Jones has had 31 complaints lodged against him since 1993. Twenty-six were assault allegations, most of which had been lodged by black or Asian men, but none were substantiated.
........

The TSG has been the subject of 5,241 allegations since August 2005. They include 376 allegations of discrimination and 977 complaints of "incivility". More than 1,100 of the allegations concerned what members of the public said were "failures in duty". However by far the largest number of complaints – 2,280 – were categorised as "oppressive behaviour".
Just over 2,000 (38%) were "unsubstantiated" by the Met's department for professional standards, while the rest were resolved at the police station, dismissed, discontinued or dealt with in other ways.

.........

(original article continues)

You Couldn't Make It Up!

2009-08-30T03:28:00.000-07:00

from:
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 August 2009 19.43 BST

by:
Vikram Dodd

(Published in full, without abridgement or amendment)

Metropolitan police used anti-terror laws to stop and search 58 children under 10

• Terrorism Act used on 2,331 children last year
• Police abusing powers, says Muslim group chair

The official reviewer of terrorism legislation today criticised the Metropolitan police after it emerged that the force had stopped and searched 58 children aged nine or younger using terrorism powers designed to fight al-Qaida.

The children were stopped in 2008 and all were under the criminal age of responsibility, which is 10. None are believed to have been found to have been involved in terrorism.

According to figures from the Metropolitan Police Authority, in 2008 the Met used terrorism laws to stop and search 10 girls aged nine or under, and 48 boys. A total of 2,331 children aged 15 or under were stopped by Met officers using terrorism powers. (my italics)

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 gives police the power to stop and search people in areas deemed by senior officers to be at risk of terrorism. A constable does not need to have reasonable suspicion, and use of the power has been controversial.

Lord Carlile, the independent official reviewer of terrorism legislation, said: "I find these figures uncomfortable. There is absolutely no evidence of children in this country being involved in acts of terrorism." He described the fact that more than 2000 children aged 15 or under had been stopped under section 44 as a "very high figure" and added: "It shows some evidence that section 44 stops may have been used as an instrument of general policing rather than for the special purpose for which they were designed, which is not acceptable."

Carlile, a barrister by profession, said the only "reasonable justification" an officer could have to search a child under terrorism powers was if it was suspected an accompanying adult had concealed something on the juvenile.

He added: "I have consistently urged the Met to decrease the number of section 44 stops and searches. I hope we will see a dramatic reduction of section 44 procedures on adults, juveniles and children."

Last year the Met carried out 175,000 searches using section 44 and earlier this year the Guardian revealed it would scale back use of the power after conceding that hundreds of thousands of stops had damaged community relations and reversed fundamental principles of civil rights.

Corinna Ferguson, legal officer for Liberty, said: "We have always said that the powers given to the police under section 44 are so broad that they are bound to be misused. First it was octogenarian Walter Wolfgang; now children who have not even reached the age of criminal responsibility are being searched.

"It's difficult to see how it could ever be justified to subject a young child to what is inevitably a frightening experience, under the guise of combating terrorism."

Abdurahman Jafar, who chairs the Muslim Safety Forum, which tried to improve police and community relations, said the figures showed that some officers were abusing their powers and that this could damage children.

"Overarching powers are always going to be abused. If I had a child and they were stopped I would be absolutely disgusted.

"It's such a young age and the child is going to fear he or she is being treated as a suspect and that will damage the child."

Scotland Yard said: "Stop and search legislation covers people, not ages, there is no upper age limit and no lower age limit. … There are a number of scenarios in which a child could be searched under section 44, ie if they were with an adult who is also stopped under this power. We recognise the sensitivity surrounding these powers and are constantly looking to improve our use of the tactic.

"The threat to London from terrorism is real and serious and these powers are an important tactic in our counter-terrorism strategy."

MI5 and the Outsourcing of Torture

2009-07-15T01:42:00.000-07:00

On 14th. May, 2009, The London Review of Books published Gareth Peirce's long lecture about the British Government and its apparent 'out-sourcing' of torture in the period between 2002 and 2009.

Two years before that article appeared, in 2007, Peter Kosminsky raised these issues in fictional form in a major two part television dramatisation called "Britz" which took an extremely thorough look at Muslim life in Britain and the tensions which drive some young Muslims to become suicide bombers, others to become MI5 agents. A young British Muslim was shown being tortured to the point of death on a remote airport, by un-named foreign agents, while MI5 agents stood by and discussed what he had revealed and what they still wanted to know.

Afterwards, a London-based MI5 agent complained to Kosminsky of these scenes - 'none of us would never do that', said the agent.

He or she was quite wrong.

MI5 agents often did exactly that, as now appears clear.

On 8th. July, 2009, the Guardian published a survey focusing on the fate of individual British Muslims tortured all over the world at the behest or with the apparent participation of British government agents. This is a summary, which takes in many of the points which Gareth Peirce was also raising:-

"Today ... there is mounting evidence that torture is still regarded by some agents of the British state as a useful and legitimate investigative tool. There is evidence too that in the post 9/11 world, government officials have been prepared to look the other way while British citizens, and others, have been tortured in secret prisons around the world. It is also clear that an official policy, devised to govern British intelligence officers while interrogating people held overseas, resulted in people being tortured .... Tony Blair, when prime minister, was aware of the existence of this policy ...."

After 9/11, as US and British forces went into Afghanistan and, later, Iraq, officers from a section of MI5 known as 'the international terrorism-related agent running section' were advised that interrogating captured detainees abroad would not impede future prosecutions in Britain but were not warned about the terms of the Geneva convention which ought to be applied to POWs or that, in 1972, the British government had specifically banned five 'techniques of mistreatment' that had been used in Ulster, ie: hooding, stress positions, loud noise, sleep deprivation or food and drink deprivation.

Michael Wood, the FO's senior legal advisor, concluded that it was not an offence in international law to receive or possess information extracted under torture, although it would not be admissible as evidence in court. Instructions to MI5 and 6 officers in January 2002 fell "far short of what is required in international law" according to Philippe Sands, QC, the professor of international law at University College, London, and author of the book 'Torture Team' who has detailed the ways in which the instructions to British intelligence acts implied or implicitly authorised complicity in torture.

"Sir Nigel Rodley, a former UN special rapporteur on torture, says that only 'wilful ignorance' could prevent MI5 from knowing what would happen to individuals picked up by the ISI (the Pakistani Secret Service)."

"Despite this, MI5 repeatedly asked the ISI to detail and question British citizens in Pakistan .... In some instances, MI5 would tell ISI agents where they could find the suspect, and would even ... draw up a list of questions it wanted the ISI to put to the detainee .... there is clear and growing evidence that British citizens, and others, suffered the most appalling torture as a result."

Too Much

2009-06-03T02:34:00.000-07:00

Much too much about freedom, recently, to cover comprehensively - about the sordid and terrible history of the Bush administration in America, about the shocking plans for 24 hour surveillance of all UK electronic communications, about the down-grading of the Titan prison plan (NOT), which will produce five huge prisons instead of three monstrous prisons and is probably what the bureaucrats and politicians wanted in the first place.

Who was it wrote recently that there had been the equivalent of an arms race about prisons and imprisonment, about the punishment of crime in the UK?

'I am tougher on crime than you can ever be' has become the favourite boast of politicians of every party as if more repression, rather than more freedom, is what the UK requires.

Real freedom includes the possibility of considering, discussing, planning, advocating, voting for, social, economic and political provisions outside the extraordinarily limited range of options which current UK parties (and political parties in all the Western countries) represent.

It is repressive not to be able to consider revolution, especially when the collapse of banks and the appalling crimes that have recently been committed in the name of our current 'civilization' proves that everything that we care about most deeply is at risk.

Torture is everywhere.

America debates torture as if it were just another weapon in democracy's armour, instead of a poison which subverts all our ambitions and destroys all our hopes.

Naomi Wolf wrote the comments quoted below in the Guardian a few weeks ago and they summarise and encapsulate many of the writings and opinions and the evidence which have recently surfaced.

It is to the shame of all of us, commentators and the public, that so very little was said about these horrific abuses during the 8 years when they were openly perpetrated.

And have the abuses stopped? And will they stop for ever?

No chance.

There will always be thugs within the police and within the security forces, there will always be ruthlessness amongst their controllers, a willingness to use torture to achieve 'a greater purpose' (defined, no doubt, by those same anonymous controllers) and an apparent inabilty to realise that the 'greater purpose' is so suborned if criminal tactics are employed that it fails to be valuable even if achieved.

Great Britain survived Hitler and the Provisional IRA without regularly or officially employing the techniques of the torturer.

How come we cannot survive Al Qaida with the same sang froid?

But let us be aware of one crucial consideration.

If policemen and spooks brutalise the innocent (or even the guilty) in darkness and in secret, if they surreptitiously sub-contract torture to other regimes, they do not do it in my name or yours - not with my implied sanction or (I hope) yours either. They are criminals when they do it and they must remain criminals, outside the acceptable boundaries of western democratic behaviour.

Like capital punishment, torture destroys what it purports to protect, our liberty, simply by being put into practice.

It can never be sanctioned within a democracy, especially within a country like Britain that claims not just a democratic heritage but to lead the world on these issues.

Naomi Wolf, Guardian, 28th. April, 2009

"Since 2003 it has been fully documented .... that direct US policy for prisoners included electrodes on genitals, suffocation, hanging prisoners from bars by the wrists, beatings, concealed murders, sexual assault threats, sexual humiliation and forced nudity ......., Did our leaders call for investigations? They barely even called for a moment's consideration; tolerating torture ..... made them look tough .... (it) polled well ..... it was overwhelmingly OK with them."

Me and the Guardian

2009-06-03T02:30:00.001-07:00

Every post that I complete seems to begin or end with a citation or a quotation from the Guardian. I am sorry about that. I do read other newspapers, journals, magazines etc. But the Guardian is a libertarian newspaper with a fine tradition of fighting for and discussing the issues to which this blog is dedicated. It provokes thought at the same time that it offers judgements, considerations and facts.

I apologize (but not very profusely) if the continual references to the Guardian get on anyone's nerves.

Erwin James

2009-04-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

Erwin James

A little while ago, exchanges with the writer and former criminal, Erwin James Monahan, were included in this blog.

Since then, there has been a lot of discussion on the net and in the press about his real name, the crimes for which he served twenty years in prison and whether he had falsified details of his experience with the French Foreign Legion in articles published in the Guardian.

Nothing that has been published invalidates or calls into question his comments reproduced in this blog. (or, indeed, most of what he has ever written about criminals, criminology and his own past.)

An article in the Guardian (24/4/9) explained Erwin James' own point of view.

The Guardian Readers' Editor (Siobhain Butterworth) comments in the following terms this morning (29/4/9) and I entirely agree with her conclusions:

"It is never acceptable to lie to - or deliberately mislead - readers, but a sense or proportion about this incident is needed. Monahan is not a trained journalist who falsified news reports; he is a writer who, having pulled himself out of the most dreadful mire, went on to make the mistake of lying about his past to protect an identity he had been concealing for years. He has caused damage to the reputation of the Guardian and given some people reason to doubt his work. He will have to re-earn their trust. I wish him luck."

A personal account

2009-02-25T10:17:00.000-08:00

22 Feb. 2009

So much is currently being written about surveillance, security and the consequences of the British and American governments' approach to terrorism that it is impossible for me to keep up.

As for making sense of all of it here, in these notes, it is impossible.

Anyway, that is not my role. This is a personal account (I almost said a personal 'meditation') on freedom and what it means to me, at this time.

The less comprehensive and the more ideosyncratic, personal, tentative and thoughful this blog becomes, the better and more useful it will be.

Maybe.

Probably.

Perhaps.

Somewhat.

'Up to a point, Lord Copper.'

I am, as you can see, a touch conflicted about these issues.

Anyway, that is how I feel this particular morning in this particular, rather beautiful, place in Scotland at this particular time of day, before I have had my porridge and raspberries for breakfast.

Let me summarise, as briefly as possible, a recent article in the Guardian newspaper.

Seamus Milne was the author and it was published on the 19th. February.

The headline is: "Rimington is right. This is a recipe for creating terrorists."

The article points out, with incredulity, that Dame Stella Rimington, who used to be head of MI5, "has warned that the government has given terrorists the chance to find 'greater justification' by making people feel that they 'live in fear and under a police state.'"

"Rimington went further, denouncing the US for Guantanamo and torture, but reverted to type by insisting MI5 'doesn't do that'"

Milne refutes the idea that MI5's hands are clean and refers to the "chilling" conclusions of the recent report of the International Commission of Jurists:

"The framework of international law is being undermined .... the US and the UK have led that undermining."

Milne goes on to discuss un-published details of new anti-terrorist measures planned by the British government and leaked to the Guardian.

These include "the extraordinary proposal to label 'extremist' any British Muslim who supports armed resistance anywhere ...."

Come again?

" .... supports armed resistance ANYWHERE .... "

Even in other Arab countries with which they may have social, family or religious connections?

This is grossly unjust. In fact, it ought to be a ridiculous suggestion.

Britain and America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and have lavished immense resources on changing the governments of those countries to models which favour British and American interests, especially British and American oil interests.

These recent anti-Muslim wars (because that is how they are perceived) are as rapacious as any medieval Crusade and it would be astonishing if most or many Iraqis and Afghan citizens did not support resistance to the invaders in some form.

How can the British government express either surprise, disappointment or disaproval when British Muslims also feel sympathy for fellow Muslims who have been attacked?

Did not most British people feel sympathy when Hitler marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia and attacked Poland?

Would most British people not have supported armed resistance to Hitler, in those territories and (if he had invaded) in Britain?

Would that not have been very much the right thing to do?

If Hitler had invaded Britain in 1940 a brave few of us, would have fought on, ineffectually throwing petrol bombs at fire-proofed vehicles from behind demure Home Counties pillar boxes and living rough in the Highlands of Scotland to prove our Iron Man credentials.

Many, perhaps most of us, would have sympathised with these hopelessly idealistic Resistance fighters, secretly supporting a plucky British fight back against the oppressors and all the odds. I can hear the stirring music now.

Many more (and sometimes the same people) would have collaborated with the German occupiers, to keep jobs and families safe, to keep themselves and their nearest and dearest secure, to try to survive in a desperate position.

Is the Iraqi or Afghan situation any different from the situation that might have happened in Britain?

Do Iraqi and Afghan loyalties and intellectual freedoms matter less than ours and those of our immediate forefathers?

My father was not a natural military man. He was small, slight, perhaps with something of the air of a Professor about him when he was young. He was also a professional musician.

He volunteered to fight Hitler in 1939 and joined the Coldstream Guards as a private soldier in spite of the fact that his first child, my sister, had just been born.

I am not at all sure that my mother approved - she got very tight lipped when the subject came up - but there was no arguing with him. Hitler had to be stopped, at whatever cost to him and his dependents.

If Germany had invaded and my father had survived, he might have been imprisoned for a while but he would eventually have found his way back into the civilian population, shattered, demoralised, saddened and physically weakened by his experiences.

By that time, the war would have been over but, from the security of Canada, Winston Churchill would have started to transform himself into a British Charles de Gaulle, calling for resistance and for undying loyalty to the British Crown.

My father was never a monarchist but he would have answered that call in his heart and so will the Iraqis.

Every time an Iraqi unlaces his shoes, he wishes he were brave enough (like Muntadar al-Zaidi) to throw them in the face of an American President and call him a dog, a cur, which is a great, great insult in the Arab World.

Every time an Iraqi sees fellow countrymen (and woman, and children) murdered by alien invaders he must feel sympathy or something stronger for those who practise armed resistance and who believe it necessary. That is no crime, that is the only reasonable thing to feel and think and believe when you see strangers killing your own people, apparently unjustly.

Freedom cannot be rationed, it does not belong merely to people of whose aims we approve. It is our birthright, the birthright of every human being - man, woman or child.

The freedom to think wrong thoughts, to be, silly, subversive, even frankly wicked in our thoughts - provided that (as Lord Mansfield laid down in the eighteenth century) these are not transformed into terrorist acts, is very fundamental.

Perhaps I can quote what I put in an earlier entry on this blog, because it is absolutely crucial to my continuing argument:

Lord Mansfield, in the eighteenth century, defended Britons' rights to think or even to intend anything - however horrible or wicked - without penalty. He considered that you shouldn't be sent to prison for having naughty thoughts. But Muslims now are being sent to prison merely because they talk about jihad, they talk about violent revolution and war against Western secularism and capitalism and they even go on the net and inform themselves about what they could do if they had the resources and the nerve to fight these forces. These are not (should not be) imprisonable offences and I find it very frightening to think that they are so. What it would do to any of our lives, to be held with out charge for 28 or 42 days or even more while the police rummaged our homes, dismantled our computers, frightened off our customers or suppliers, lost us our jobs and then took us to court and convicted us because of what we had chatted about, imagined or hoped. Or even - like that silly girl who worked at Heathrow - because we had written verses about glorious martyrs. Anyway, I have made my point. If you do not protest or object or even notice when the Muslims (like the Jews in pre-war Germany) are bullied by state authorities in your name, when are you going to protest or try to defend your remaining civil liberties? And when will the police come for you or yours instead of just for the people who have different colour skins and different habits and very different ideas?

So Many Questions

2009-01-27T02:50:00.000-08:00

'Freedom Matters' is the title of this blog and before Christmas, 2008, there were so many things that raised questions about freedom that I didn't write about any of them. I was overwhelmed.

My list of topics read:

How did America become a country where torture is debated instead of outlawed?

Is the right to commit suicide a necessary freedom?

Is Christianity the most prescriptive religion?

Are current advances in technology, changes in the law or people's attitudes the most frightening and most threatening developments?

What does the virtual collapse of Western capitalism mean for personal and societal freedom?

Each one of these questions could almost justify a short book. I doubt very much if I can deal with all of them adequately.

But the great advantage of blogging (as against writing a book) is that comments are temporary, of their time - some of them may have permanent or long term validity but they are very much of the moment.

I want to start by considering three of the topics together with another great historical question. My headline summary will be rather long and very daunting:

Torture, the technology of repression, the collapse of capitalism and the re-invention of America under Barack Obama

Before I write about these issues, I need to listen to a lecture by a British human rights lawyer called Gareth Peirce who is speaking at the Institute of Psychology in London on the coming Friday (Jan 30th.)

She has a lot of worthwhile things to say about these huge and threatening questions and especially about how what has happened in America relates to Britain and British law.

Watch this space, what else can I say?

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T00:07:00.000-08:00

Note to a 12 year old this morning.

Hi, Sasha, what an exciting day! You will never forget today because if Obama achieves one hundredth of what he has made us all hope for, he will be a great great President. Every so often, America re-invents itself and this is one of those occasions. And you are a witness, you will want to tell your grand-children about it. What a day!

I wonder if Sasha will start to keep a diary.

Prison freedoms - within and without

2009-01-08T03:04:00.000-08:00

I am inherently anti-authority, anti-government. You would, perhaps, expect me to be 'liberal' in all particulars.

So would I.

It was interesting to find myself out of sympathy with a fine writer and commentator called Erwin James. He has been in prison, he educated himself in prison, it could be said that he redeemed himself in prison. He knows a great deal about prison conditions and what has to be done with and to the men and women who have to serve long sentences.

But when I read what he had written about a visit to a prison in Scandinavia, I had to dissent or at least to comment. He suggested that all long-term prisoners should be allowed internet facilities, to help them to communicate, to help them to educate themselves.

Because of a case that had been reported in that particular week, I bridled - rather a lot - about what he was saying and about his tone. After all, long term prisoners (by definition) have committed some of the most horrible and most hurtful crimes. How should they be treated? What sort of 'freedoms' are appropriate if you have put yourself beyond the pale?

excerpts from Erwin James's blog:

" .... prisoners at Skien (in Norway) are allowed access to the Internet via computer in their cells. Access is monitored and firewalls are set up to avoid any embarrassing security breaches. In the UK few prisoners are allowed access to computers, never mind the Internet. A friend of mine, who has been in prison for decades was allowed to have a lap top in his cell four years ago. His mother and I clubbed together to buy it for him. Now the lap top is malfunctioning and needs repairs - but it would be cheaper for him to purchase another laptop. The only problem is the prison now has a different governor who does not like prisoners having computers in their cells. If my friend hands out his lap top he will not be allowed to have a replacement - “no more computers in cells,” says the governor. The Norwegian prison is secure and the prisoners are not going anywhere. But while they are in they are provided with opportunites to improve and feel that they are still connected to the world. Is that such a terrible thing?"

1. John Selwyn Gilbert Says:
November 27th, 2008 at 10:25 pm

Just this week, a mother described the effect of her teenage daughter’s murder to a court. I believe her statement said that ‘it tore the heart out of her family’ and I can well believe it. The man who committed the murder will be in prison for a very long time and, in this case, the need for prison to impose punishment on that man may be held to over-ride the other possibilities of prison, reform, re-education, rehabilitation amongst them. I am against Titan prisons, I believe that prisoners should be treated as human beings and helped to become something less than transgressive. But that particular man has robbed that particular teenage girl of her entire life and her parents and her sibling will never have anything except half a life between them.

Do you really think he should have access to broadband?

Erwin replied, as one would expect, thoughtfully:

" ... The majority of people who go to prison in the UK will be released, one day they will be your neighbour or my neighbour - I want a prison system that lets people out less likely or motivated to cause further harm or distress to others ..... The more we detach prisoners from society - the harsher our attitutes towards them while they are inside - the harder we make it for them to fit in when they get out."

And get out they will, he emphasized. "thanks to the fact that we do not sentence people to death in this great country, he (the prisoner, almost any prisoner) still has his life to live."

3. John Selwyn Gilbert Says:
November 29th, 2008 at 9:03 am

I cannot disagree with almost all you say and I have been struck by the wisdom (hard won) that you bring to these issues. I am old enough to remember - with absolute revulsion - what it meant when a man or woman was executed. Children - I was a child then - lingered by the radio waiting for the eight o’clock time signal that would tell them that a life had been ended. It was horrible. It disgusted me then and it makes me cry now. Capital punishment is not the answer. It is not even the question. The question, the problem, is what you do with a human being who makes him or herself less than human by the actions taken, who ‘tears the heart out’ of another human being or a family. I am aware, though I am not a lawyer, of the saying that ‘hard cases make bad law’, that the case I referred to and that mother’s moving statement should not, must not, overwhelm rational discussion or compassion. Most prisoners are not monsters. They are silly, greedy, drunk, stupid, irrational or just plain unlucky. And some (but relatively few) manage to re-invent themselves in prison and can be helped to do so and can be helped towards a useful life. But are some irredeemable? Is there a point at which society should say - this is too much, this is beyond civic compassion or common sense, this person is beyond help? If so, what on earth is to be done about it? Do you lock criminals convicted of murder up with a jar of hemlock? It would probably be the individuals convicted in error who would be the first to drink it. And there are always individuals convicted in error or convicted because they are mentally unstable or inadequate - that is another issue and another problem and yet another complication.

So - questions and more questions; I am afraid I have no answers, though your comments and the opportunity that blogging offers have made me think a little more seriously about some of my ideas.

I cannot forget that the mother of a murdered child also receives a life sentence of pain, guilt, remorse, anger and regret and that - in spite of a lifetime pretending to be a bleeding heart liberal - there is a bit of me that cries out for vengeance on that mother’s behalf.

What the Election Meant

2008-11-06T00:02:00.001-08:00

"My polling place is at the fairgrounds in Southern Maryland, about 40 minutes from Washington DC...... When we got there, a 97-year-old black man was being wheeled out of the polls in his wheelchair. It was the first time he had ever voted in his life. When he came outside he asked if anyone could give him an Obama button. There were none left at the Democrat booth so I gave him mine. He was so proud and I started crying. He looked at me and said, 'Why are you crying? This is a day for glory.' I am still crying." Kate, Southern Maryland
Guardian, 5th. November, 2008

About America's Election

2008-11-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

Text to Dan this morning: "thrilled about the election - what a triumph for America."
"A new dawn," he texted back.
Dan has American connections.
Later, I went out to get the newspapers.
"I'm always happy," said the big black man on Church Street.
I had been following him along and I'd wondered if he was drunk - he was talking to himself and dancing about a bit as he walked.
Now he stopped and I moved past him.
"I'm always happy," he said to a black lady, "this morning especially."
"Me too!" she said and I suddenly realised what they were talking about .
"And me!" I said as I turned and looked back at them and the smiles on their faces and their words will stay with me for a long time. I hope they remember my smile too. It came from the heart. It moves me to tears to think about that moment.
A black man has become the President Elect of the United States and, as a lady called Linda Slaughter said in America, quoted in today's Guardian:
"The day has come when anybody in America can be who they want to be."
I hope, with all my heart, that the same day will come to Great Britain, in the end.
Even if not in my lifetime.

Only 85 years ago

2008-10-31T03:53:00.000-07:00

Twenty years before I was born, the Manchester Guardian sent a reporter out to investigate this very new-fangled thing called broadcasting.

"Within the last month" he wrote "some important speeches have been broadcasted (sic) ..... seeking to know what the "listener-in" is getting for his money (I) went to a house with a receiving set. There must still be millions of people who have never had experience of picking up news out of vacancy, so I will tell what happened." (29 October, 1923)

From that point to where we are now is an extraordinary arc of transition.

Now I can post this from my boat and could (if I wanted) use the little ordinary computer on which I am writing as a video-phone to communicate with Australia or America - from the boat, without any direct connection with anything at all - even if the boat were on the move at the time.

I can also read, view and download the opinions of extremists, bigots and idiots world-wide, at any time of the day or night and find monstrously grotesque and outspoken comments and materials on YouTube, MySpace and in other recesses of the net.

What happens next? What communication devices will my grand-daughter, Milly Ann, get to see and use? What freedom of expression will she enjoy?

And how will the debate about taste and sensibility in broadcasting be conducted in the future?

Can we control the flood of materials, sometimes unsuitable, which now swills around the world. And should we try to?

At the time I write this, there's been a huge fuss about broadcasting standards and free speech. By the time you read this, it will probably have been almost forgotten but it is important. It raises issues.

What should people be allowed to say on the radio and the television and how should their freedom of speech be rationed, controlled, moderated by their bosses or by the public?

Jonathan Ross (a well known British broadcaster) was at the centre of the affair.

Ross always reminds me of a comedian called Max Miller - loud suits, brash, gobby.

Max is dead now, but he was lovely - great fun to listen to and a lot of mischief in his voice and his patter. He liked putting people's noses out of joint and I always approve of that.

The beloved Max was often in trouble with the BBC. Bureaucrats agonized about everything he said and should be allowed to say, just as they are agonizing this week about what Jonathan Ross and that half-wit Russell Brand have done to the actor, Andrew Sachs (an old friend of mine, as it happens).

Typically, Max Miller would start to recite what appeared to be a harmless comic verse:

"When roses are red, they are ready for plucking
When girls are sixteen they are ready for ...."

And the band came in, playing loudly and suggestively, and the BBC practically had a corporate fit. That was Max Miller at his best, it was always your dirty mind that did it, that transformed his mild-mannered badinage into something naughty. It was nothing he actually said, it was what his words made you think. How could he be blamed for your wicked thoughts? The late and much lamented Humphrey Lyttleton (purveyor of high class filth to the gentry) got away with the same trick for years in a BBC radio programme called "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue".

The genuine revulsion that people feel about Ross and Brand and their un-feeling and cruel and pointless comments on Andrew Sach's answering machine should not blind any of us to some very important issues:

a) "I hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Unfortunately, this applies to Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand as well as to more important people, topics, issues.

b) Everyone is banging on about how witless and unlicensed British broadcasting now is. But it is not, it is extremely tame. We have no equivalent to Spitting Image or That Was The Week That Was or even Monty Python. There is nothing with any genuine cutting edge being broadcast at this point, even if some of it is much ruder than it used to be and there are a lot more four letter words.

c) The BBC Trust is now going to review the 'trust and decency guidelines'. When I worked for the BBC I was unaware of any such things - common sense and enlightened self-interest were used instead. Refer upwards, if in doubt, to make sure that you weren't the one who got sacked if there were a problem. But referring upwards (of course) only works if your boss still possesses some backbone and integrity and is prepared to stand up to a highly paid presenter or performer on a point of principle and to support his or her more junior staff - this is not always the case, either within the BBC or elsewhere.

d) Many of the press comments pick up on Andrew's age - he is 78, which seems extraordinary. I can only remember him as that agile, inept and alarmingly lovable character, Manuel in Fawlty Towers and he will for ever be crawling under a restaurant table looking for a rat called Basil, in my mind at least.

So would the comments about Andrew's grand-daughter, aimed at hurting him and embarrassing her, have been any more acceptable if Andrew had been 48 or 58 and they had been aimed at his daughter or some other member of his family? What has age got to do with it?

The comments were rude, crude, thoughtless, hurtful and unnecessary. Public revulsion has been startling (and welcome). Nothing like that should be said in the first place or, still worse, recorded and broadcast without the explicit permission of the person at whom the abuse was aimed (and, in this case, the permission of the young woman whose name was bandied about). Surely that is clear enough, it is common sense and ordinary politeness. But it is crucial to remember one final point:

e) The presenters thought the remarks were funny and acceptable. So, apparently, did the young producer and at least one of his more senior colleagues. So did the audience at whom the programme was aimed, because there were only two complaints about it before the Mail on Sunday publicised the whole affair more widely. The gulf between Middle England (or perhaps most of England) and some members of the radio audience has never been more clearly emphasized or has led to a greater fuss about very little.

If Ross and Brand are chastened, so much the better. If mindless disk jockey chat is a little more restrained, very good.

But it is worth being be careful about encouraging censorship of any type, at any time - the next Spitting Image or Monty Python could be killed off by administrative caution even before the viewing public gets a glimpse of what might have been possible - Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand brought free speech itself into disrepute when they exploited it totally without regard to common sense or common decency.

In Just One Lifetime

2008-10-11T03:44:00.000-07:00

When I was young, in Britain, if I wrote a play, I was expected to submit it to the Lord Chamberlain for censorship before offering it to a production company for consideration. At that time, the word 'fuck' could not be printed in a newspaper or spoken on television. Homosexuality was illegal between adult males. A man's whole life could be ruined if he touched another man in a sexual way - even if both of them very much wanted it. Lady Chatterley's Lover could not be published. Far too rude. Roman Catholics, in Northern Ireland, were often done out of votes, jobs and housing to which they ought to have been entitled. Blair Peach was beaten to death in the street by a British policeman during the course of a political demonstration in 1979. Before I was a teenager (before teenagers had really been invented), it was a national scandal that the Queen's sister consorted with a man who had once been divorced. When I was very very small, Britain ruled India and huge chunks of Africa and other territories and denied self-determination to most of their peoples. Anyone who advocated free speech was thrown in jail (as Gandhi was, on several occasions.)

Britain was, in my memory, in my lifetime, a deeply repressive country, in spite of the gloss of liberty and anarchy which came (especially during the Sixties) to lap up over the authoritarian mechanisms on the beach like the tide rising towards high water.

Currently (October, 2008) - the tide is falling again. We are in for another dose of repression, with the added sophistication of computers to accelerate its spread.

The leopard does not change its spots. The British government is an extremely dangerous sort of animal, especially in hard times, which is what we have to look forward to.

Motes and Beams

2008-08-08T07:13:00.000-07:00

080808

The Beijing Olympics open today at 8.8 pm local time; some of the British athletes have written to the Chinese President asking him to brush up his attitudes on human rights. I am not very impressed - and I do not think he will be either. Our capacity to detect motes in other people's eyes while disregarding beams in our own never fails to impress.

It is extremely unwise to preach to Johnny Foreigner about freedom of speech and the need for unfettered political expression when we not enjoy nearly as much freedom as we talk about in Britain.

What follows is the draft of a letter that I did not send to the Editor of the Financial Times in June, 2008. The FT is a very conservative newspaper - I did not think the letter had much chance of being published. Also (let me be straight about it since I am laying down the law about hypocrisy) I wanted to submit a proposal for an article about sailing to the FT and I thought submitting a simultaneous political rant might queer my pitch. But the opinions, the points I am making, remain valid in spite of my own pusillanimous nature.

The Letters Editor,
"Life and Arts" section,
The Financial Times,

Rana Mitter’s excellent review of the Penguin History of Modern China in the Weekend edition contained the following words:

“ ... the killing of unarmed protesters, for whatever reason, tells us something fundamental and disturbing about any regime.”

The suggestion is that only brutal dictatorships commit such acts, as the Chinese did in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Has everyone forgotten about Blair Peach, beaten to death in the street in London by a policeman in 1979? Or about Peterloo a little earlier (1819)? Or about Kent State University and the students shot by the National Guard in 1970? Is it a coincidence that America, the land of the free, is now (as another of your excellent reviewers put it), "a land where torture is debated rather than outlawed"?

Of course we don’t have a ‘regime’ in Great Britain. Our unelected Heads of State are, ultimately, kept in office by unelected military forces but that somehow bears no comparison with the unelected Heads of State in Burma or Pakistan who are also kept in office by military forces. Those people wear uniforms. They serve in the armed forces ....

OK, the Queen wears uniforms and Prince Philip (and Prince Charles) are Admirals of the Fleet or something. And Prince William is currently doing a grand tour of the Armed Forces and used a military helicopter to fly himself to a stag night party. But of course they are not spoiled, opulent, idle, unthinking, insensitive figureheads (apart from Prince Harry). It is just a coincidence that the Windsors have more medals and military ranks between them than any Burmese General or President (ex-General) Musharraf of Pakistan.

No, there’s nothing significant about all that. It’s fine for Britain to have a Parliament full of people recruited from the privileged classes, judges and lawyers who were largely educated at private schools and exclusive universities, surveillance cameras on almost every street corner and a police force that can hold you without charge for 28 (soon to be 42?) days without cause and that managed to shoot an unarmed civilian on a tube train by mistake.

Who would want it otherwise?

Also it’s ridiculous to compare the political turmoil in China in the twentieth century with the turmoil throughout Britain in the Seventeenth Century. Isn’t it? Or the Gadarene rush to industrialisation in Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries with what India has achieved in a fraction of the time during the last 30 years? Or the story of Britain’s colonial enterprises (especially in Ireland) with what China is up to in Tibet? Shipping native Chinese into Tibet? Disgraceful! Almost as bad as shipping Protestant Scots into what became Ulster.

I rest my case.

FreedomMatters

2008-04-01T02:21:00.002-07:00

My (grown up) son, Joshua, very much surprised me the other day because he seemed so unfazed by the idea of compulsory identity cards, ubiquitous close circuit tv and DNA tests for most or all of the population. I have always been very suspicious of the state in Britain and its overwhelming power and ruthlessness. I think we are nearly all horribly complacent about it and our complacency is very dangerous to individual liberty. Can it be right that we bang up more of our population than any other European country? That we have (many) more security cameras on every street corner? I thought a letter in the Guardian a few days ago was interesting. It suggested that we should try compulsory ID cards, iris recognition and centralised personal data stores on the MPs and all the senior civil servants before the rest of us have to endure this extraordinary level of intrusion! I love that idea! But I also remember the opinion of an eighteenth century judge, Lord Mansfield, who defended Britons' rights to think or even to intend anything - however horrible or wicked - without penalty. You shouldn't be sent to prison for having naughty thoughts. But Muslims now are being sent to prison merely because they talk about jihad, they talk about violent revolution and war against Western secularism and capitalism and they even go on the net and inform themselves about what they could do if they had the resources and the nerve. These are not (should not be) imprisonable offences and I find it very frightening to think that they are so. What it would do to any of our lives, to be held with out charge for 40 days or even more while the police rummaged our homes, dismantled our computers, frightened off our customers or suppliers, lost us our jobs and then took us to court and convicted us because of what we had chatted about, imagined or hoped. Or even - like that silly girl who worked at Heathrow - because we had written verses about glorious martyrs. Anyway, I have made my point. If you do not protest or object or even notice when the Muslims (like the Jews in pre-war Germany) are bullied by state authorities in your name, when are you going to protest or try to defend your remaining civil liberties? And when will the police come for you or yours instead of just for the people who have different colour skins and different habits and very different ideas?

2ndRateCity

2008-04-01T02:21:00.001-07:00

I hate not liking London. I’ve lived here a lot, much of my life and although it never feels like home, it always feels that I belong; I never belonged in Paris or Milan, though I spent time in both; or Rome or New York, which I used to love to visit. I never belonged in Bristol, though I lived there. But London ....

Can be so frustrating and disappointing. It is not the big things that are disgusting. Litter, noise, traffic, complexity - these are the characteristics of all cities. But what happened to courtesy? What happened to common sense and competence?

Eight petty examples from one night out:

These all actually happened. All in one evening.

I was in a good mood, too. Before it all started ......

1) I alight from the tube at Waterloo and try to walk to the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Exit to South Bank closed - there are always concerts at the Festival Hall and QEH on a Sunday night but Transport for London cannot be bothered to let people out of the tube station the proper way. The music lover has to go the wrong way, the long way, making an unnecessary detour through the mainline station and across a filthy bridge back over the main road. There are no notices to explain why this is necessary (or that ‘The South Bank’ includes the Queen Elizabeth Hall at all - are people from abroad supposed just to guess these things? Does anybody who writes sign posts and notices up ever read or check them?).

2) I go to collect my concert ticket. Three human beings sit at three desks waiting to attend to me. There is no queue, there is no crowd. I approach the nearest and explain my mission. ‘There’s a machine over there,’ she says, dismissively, ‘for pre-ordered tickets.’ I lie immediately. (It is an instinct for a Londoner). ‘I have no idea which credit card I used,’ I say, grandly. (I haven’t got that many.) Unwillingly, she looks me up on the computer. We sort out which credit card I used and I wave it at her and she hands me my ticket. It takes about 25 seconds. ‘So why,’ I ask her gently,’ did you try to direct me to a machine? I much prefer to deal with a person.’ She seems surprised at my question and even more surprised at my statement. ‘It’s so much quicker,’ she says, without a smile or any apparent irony ‘on the machines’.

3) The foyer is stifling as I wait for the concert to start. I park my coat in the cloakroom but it is still unpleasantly hot. The weather is warm tonight. Three days earlier, the weather had been cold, the foyer and the hall exceptionally cold and drafty. I really regretted disposing of my overcoat. What is so difficult about central heating, aka climate control? Isn’t it supposed to keep temperatures constant inside buildings? It seems to work in other countries. Why not in London?

4) The concert is folk music. Folk music stems from the oral tradition. Folk songs are songs you can sing with friends in the pub or round the dining table. Folk songs are songs that tell stories. At this concert, the musical accompaniments are so loud that few of the words come across. Even the huge Steinway concert grand piano is amplified, for no reason that I can possibly imagine. It could fill the hall with sound without tinny and obtrusive amplifiers between it and the public. I try to work out how loud it all really is - objectively but not in decibels. I play an acoustic (nylon string) guitar. It is a good one, with a concert instrument’s tone and volume. I often play it on my boat, which is a small space. I sometimes (very rarely) play it to visitors or to close, tolerant friends. I reckon that if I played my guitar as loudly as I could, really thrashing it, within two or three feet of my friends, in the confined space of the boat, the sound would still not be as loud or as piercing as the instruments reproduced at the QEH. And, remember, this is not a rock concert (I take ear plugs to rock concerts) this is folk music in a concert hall. And even amplifying the singers’ voices above the (overloud) musical accompaniments doesn’t make the words audible and comprehensible. I miss half the fun of the story telling songs and almost all the jokes whispered into the microphone and I am afraid I sit and think rather ruefully: “if I’d wanted to hear amplified music uncomfortably loud, I could have sat on my boat and put my head phones on and turned the CD player up to its maximum.”

5) I go to the artists’ party afterwards and reach Waterloo station to get the tube at 1145. ‘Closed, nothing going your way,’ says the man trying, quite rudely, to close the gates in my face - and succeeding. No apology, no explanation, nothing to discuss. I resign myself to buying a taxi. So much for the 24 hour city. But of course, it’s Sunday, isn’t it. Everything still stops on a Sunday in London. I wonder why.

6) I trudge upstairs again to find the station taxis, delighted that there is no queue. ‘Good,’ I think. ‘ Thank Heaven for that. At least there’s no problem here.’ But the first cab on the rank has its doors locked when I try to get in. ‘A mistake,’ I think. I try the door again. Still locked. I try again, assuming the driver will open the door when he sees what I am doing. (He isn’t asleep). Still locked. The front window purrs down, as if reluctantly. ‘Why isn’t your door opening?” I ask politely. ‘Where you going?’ he asks aggressively. ‘Lisson Grove,’ I say - resisting the temptation to remind him of his obligations under the Hackney Carriage Act. It is still five minutes before midnight and his duty is to take any fare that is offered, wherever the punter wants to go. ‘Why isn’t your door opening? And what ...’ ‘You’re supposed to ask the driver first,’ he says fiercely. ‘You got to ask the driver.’ I resist the temptation to spit in his eye and move to the second taxi in the rank. ‘Well, I never heard that one before.....’ I mutter emolliently and climb inside wearily. I do get fed up with all this London shit. It seems so unnecessary.

7) In the cab, I get a pen and a notebook to make a note of the cab number. I am still tempted to have a major row with him. I try to switch the light on. Nothing happens. ‘Can you switch this light on?’ I ask, still politely. ‘It’s broken,’ he says, without apology or explanation. 'It doesn't work.' I write his number down anyway, in my diary. 88410 - a driver to be avoided. I carry a small torch in my pocket, for just such an emergency.

8) But I skip the row, when we get there. I content myself with under-tipping. The fare is £18, I give him £20 and accept his offer of a receipt. It would be unpleasant not to tip him at all and I would normally give him at least all the change, probably a few pennies more (the route he followed was quite clever). Instead, I take one pound coin back for myself and dribble the other, reluctantly, into his outstretched hand. He sees it for what it is - an insult. A very deliberate insult. It makes me sad. We part without salutation, just another discontented, discourteous, ill-mannered and ultimately self-defeating couple of grumpy and frustrated Londoners on a typical night out in March 2008.

I am left asking myself some questions:

Why didn’t that taxi driver treat me as he would want to be treated himself? Why didn’t the girl issuing the ticket? Why do central heating engineers not go themselves to check their draught ridden atriums in changeable conditions? Why don’t sound engineers ask their audiences how they like to listen to music? I haven’t even touched on the muddle with my change when I bought a soft drink at the concert hall (I still don’t know if I was under- or over- charged but it certainly wasn’t right) or the tragi-comedy of asking for a receipt when I bought a book that was on offer that night.

The very sweet girl serving me gave me my change immediately and then started to radio for help. ‘We got nothing for receipts,’ she said, ‘we don’t know about receipts’. I stopped her and said I would manage without one. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, the most compassionate response I got out of anyone all night.

‘Oh dear, I hope it doesn’t bother.’

Why on earth do people not test and check the systems that they ‘design’ and the people that they ‘train’, I thought of a close friend who used to run the National Theatre. He checked everything himself; the cloakrooms and toilets, the restaurants and the book stalls. He tested everything and trained all the staff to pay the attention to detail which he does himself. Mark you, he got horribly tired after a few years not only cleaning the Augean stables but making sure they stayed clean. I was very relieved when he went on to help to run Channel Four.

I suppose the senior staff of the South Bank Centre are too grand to worry about the soap dispensers in the gents which are so remote from the basins that you cannot wash your hands properly after micturating? Or the choke point doorway to the gents where every one bumps into everyone else because it's far too narrow? I wonder what the last occasion was when one of the very senior staff had a look round the place behind the scenes or had a personal friend attend and play the part of a routine concert goer and test all the systems? I shall send copies of this petty diatribe to the directors of the South Bank - but I don’t suppose I will get any satisfaction. That's another hobby horse! People who don't reply to letters when they ought to. Not just in London.