‘Very big’
On April 9, about the arrest of 12 people in the north west of England, Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had this to say…
We are dealing with a very big terrorist plot. We have been following it for some time. There were a number of people who are suspected of it who have been arrested. That police operation was successful.
All 12 men arrested over a suspected bomb plot in the UK have now been released without charge by police.
The Prime Minister’s response to this news, is not yet recorded.
Oh, and despite 11 of them – Pakistani nationals – being ‘here lawfully on student visas’, they have ‘been transferred to UK Borders Agency custody and face possible deportation’. Well, you wouldn’t want them hanging around embarrassing us all, would you?
Posted on April 22nd, 2009 at 11:57am under T.W.A.T., The home front
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Don’t forget (because I’m sure most of the media will) that Quick’s innovative leaking strategy moved the timetable up not one bit, and HomeSec herself has confirmed didn’t affect outcome
Presumably Mr Frown’s response would be something along the lines of:
“Previous expectations of the impact of intelligence-led, counter-terrorist actions have now been tightened in the light of direct physical evidence and processed using the latest fiscally-adjusted, annual median uplift quotient algorithm.”
Fuck it, those pictures of armed raids and the Prime Minister Standing Strong and Decisive in Times of Crisis made great telly, didn’t they?
Their crime is having been born in the wrong place. Pakistan is a country where for most people each day is a struggle to survive. They overcame everything to come here to study even if it meant traveling half way round the globe. They complied with all the arduous and lengthy requirements of immigration procedure to enter and remain legally. To do this they will have had to pay student fees about ten times the going rate for domestic students. They have spent almost two weeks detained, uncertain of whether they would ever get out, treated like criminals, with no trial, no charge, no jury and as we now know, no evidence.
They are entirely innocent. We know this, not because their lawyer says so (he would, wouldn’t he) but because unlike the average citizen about whom we can’t be sure, each of these nine has had his entire living quarters, his computer, and his mobile phone searched and has been interrogated for an extraordinary two weeks, every day in all likelihood, by the British counter-terrorist police and not a scrap of evidence has been found with which they could be charged, nor even with which they could be smeared in the media. They will have had to account for themselves and every detail of their movements in a way that is consistent with all the available data including internet activity and the penetrating apparatus of surveillance, much of it hidden, which surrounds us everywhere we go in public. How many of us have been subjected to that level of scrutiny? That is how many of us can really guarantee the public of our innocence. These people have broken no law.
To do this to nine innocent men, any decent police officer would surely feel embarrassed and contrite. What do they take their job to be? How do they imagine themselves worthy of a salary? But the police as an institution are incapable of apology. That would be to acknowledge mistake or even guilt. Instead of offering apology or even compensation for this grotesque act of state bullying and this violation of human rights motivated by a self-serving need on the part of the executive to distract public attention from other abuses of power, including the vile manslaughter and attempted cover-up of another innocent man in London exposed by the footage of a passing public-spirited merchant banker, and the widespread expenses cheating by our representatives, the government now proposes to tear these unfortunate students from their lives completely and return them brutally to their native land, denying them the freedom we all enjoy to pursue our dreams, by dint of the simple fact of where we were born.
What justice is there in this? The executive is now punishing people without regard to law or a jury for the simple reason that they committed the grave error of being innocent. It is no longer permitted to embarrass the Home Office by remaining within the constraint of the law. What gross misconduct is this by our servants and deputies! What an abuse of power! How the legitimate public interest stands diminished before us in this cynical and petty spectacle carried on by those who, we need to remind ourselves, have the sole duty of applying our laws, not judging and punishing to suit itself! How the authority of the government in this ever-more ridiculous pantomime is reduced to a travesty!
The emperor has no clothes, so he kicks the most powerless individuals in his immediate environment to make himself feel better. How petty these tyrants have become! What a disgrace to decency! What an abomination and desecration of the sovereignty and long tradition of freedom into which every native of this land was born!
The excuse for this is the ever more weary reason of “national security”. How convenient that nothing more need be said to support this opaque formulation. But in truth no nation is secured by this conduct. As a people our unity is destroyed by the usurpation of the legislative function by an executive determined to take on the power of sovereignty which rightly belongs to us all.
It falls to Winston Churchill to remind us from the grave of those freedoms the Home Secretary claims to protect. Let’s hear it once again from the old imperial war dog, speaking in a time of immeasurably greater stress, when this country really did face an existential threat: 1943.
“The power of the Executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.”
How long must we continue to be subjected to these tyrants who wage war among us all, just as they wage war against the people of the world, in the service of their corporate masters?