I’m still morbidly fascinated by the rate we’re inflicting involuntary euthanasia on our old people. When he opened the Independent yesterday, Osama bin Laden must have whistled with envy. Six and a half thousand. It’s a bodycount he can only dream of.

If he’s got any sense he’ll be ordering his footsoldiers to infiltrate hospital cleaning companies so Al Qaeda can grab themselves a slice of the action. These old people are dying needless, pointless deaths so somebody might as well try get some benefit out of them.

Where does Mohamed ElBaradei get off with his mock outrage and indignation over the Israelis bombing something or other in Syria and the US covering it up? It’s got to be for show, surely? He can’t be genuinely surprised. Where’s he been for the last six year?

Hey, Mohamed, two words: Hans Blix. Don’t tell us you don’t know what the score is, mate. If ‘being treated like a dick by Republicans’ isn’t in your job description you need to have a word with the UN’s Human Resources department and get it sorted.

ElBaradei wants to be careful. Much more of this and he’ll be getting a visit from a bunch of thickset gentlemen commenting what a nice International Atomic Energy Agency he’s got and what a shame it would be if it got broken. Just ask the likes of Jose Bustani. The worst thing you can do in that kind of job is your job.

Ken Livingstone on security at the 2012 Olympics:

When we get the 200 Olympic teams here with presidents and prime ministers we must be very firm that diplomatic protection must be provided by British police officers rather than goons you might bring in who might shoot a member of the public just for getting in the way.

From that can we assume that Sir Ian Blair and the squad who shot Jean Charles de Menezes are going to be given Summer 2012 off?

The former U.S. Attorney General and middle-ranking demon John Ashcroft on mock executions:

When you’re strapped to a bench, there’s a big difference between water being poured and forced into you. I’d quite like to try this ‘waterboarding’ as described by its supporters. Sounds like just the thing for a warm spring day.

Is your MP on this list? Then Write To Them.

We might not like it, we might not condone it, but it’s being done in our name. We give it euphemistic names like ‘waterboarding’ so we don’t have to think about what is really going on. It is a mock execution. It is torture. It is part of our ‘Western values’. Where does it fit in the war on terror’s manichean struggle of good against evil?

Unsubscribe from it.

It’s all about making the hard choices. Here’s an object lesson from the Minister of Justice:

Jack Straw, the justice secretary, has privately expressed doubts about Gordon Brown’s determination to insist on 42 days because he fears it could lead to further tensions in the Muslim community and paradoxically could lead to less intelligence being supplied to the authorities from Muslim sources. Straw, who has a big Muslim community in his Blackburn constituency, will be publicly backing the policy and voting for the government, a source said yesterday. But this does not mean he agrees with the necessity to do it. He has remained conspicuously silent in public in pushing the policy.

Hmmm. Further tensions in the Muslim community, less intelligence being supplied to the authorities, or his job. What’ll it be? How to weigh a possible terrorist outrage against Straw’s contribution to the country? How many dead commuters equals one man of destiny?

Ever since I was caught up in the London bombings of July 7, 2005, I have tried to learn more about terrorism. To understand is not to condone, nor to forgive. But I believe that by studying the roots of radicalisation, we have a better chance of preventing atrocities in the future.

Read the rest

When do we get an Olbermann?

…make sure it’s this by Rachel North:

I watched the video in an annexe to Kingston Crown Court with some of the bereaved families and it made me want to weep, because there was such love, and such hate, which became such murderous poison, as he cradled a sweet pink rose of a child, amongst his laughing friends.

The temptation is and has been to see the 7/7 bombers as less than human, as pre-programmed agents of unthinking evil. Rachel, someone with forgiveable reasons to see it that way, does not.

To process these events in black and white would be the easy, comforting and understandable way for someone having had her experiences and yet she resists that temptation. There are some in power who should be showing the same subtlety.

And then there’s this:

For two years, conspiracy theorists have been saying there is no CCTV of the 7/7 bombers save one grainy shot, (which they say is faked). There is, I have seen it played in a public court. They could have seen it too, if they had bothered to come. It is real, it was always real. Why do they peddle their lies about it?

Go and read.

A heads-up from CAAT:

We thought you would like to know that the judgement of the CAAT / Corner House Judicial Review of the Government’s decision to stop the Serious Fraud Office investigation of BAE’s Al Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia will be announced at 10am on Thursday 10th April.

Set your alarm.

Won’t someone give the argument for 42 days internment some soup or something? It’s looking very sick. I’m worried it won’t last much longer. When you look at the calibre of some its carers, no wonder it’s looking neglected.

Take Home Secretary ‘Jacqui’ Smith for instance, I’m not sure I’d trust her with a goldfish let alone national security. This following is an exchange from yesterday’s the debate on the Counter-Terrorism Bill. It’s also a welcome example of the Opposition doing some, you know, actual opposing.

One of the reasons Smith wants an extension to internment powers is because terrorists encrypt data on their computers which can take time to decrypt…

Jacqui Smith: My hon. Friend has considerable expertise in information technology, and she is right of course—not just in the examples that I have given but in other ways—to say that technology is becoming more sophisticated. Notwithstanding the changes that we have made to the law to help investigators to crack encrypted information, it is becoming more complex, and terrorists are learning lessons and using that technology.

David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con): To deal with this problem, in 2000, a criminal offence of withholding passwords and encryption keys to hard drives was passed into law. The offence of using such things for terrorism has been increased recently. How often has that offence been used in terrorist cases?

Jacqui Smith: I do not know the answer to that question, but I will make sure that the right hon. Gentleman gets a response. However, what I was saying was that notwithstanding that change in the law, my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) was making an important point about the development of technology. What we know about terrorists and their plots is that they are increasingly making use of those developments in technology.

David Davis: I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way a second time. Her argument is that the terrorists are using more and more complex techniques, which are difficult for the state to deal with, yet she cannot tell us whether the state has used the proper legal apparatus and criminal charges to overcome the problem. If she cannot make that judgment, how on earth can she judge how many days she needs?

Jacqui Smith: I am sorry that I gave way to the right hon. Gentleman again.

Not as sorry as she’s going to be, one hopes. Still, with a level of debating skills like that you can see how she’s risen as far as she has. Sleep easier, Britain. Get well soon, 42 days. You’re in the best hands.

(Via Simon Carr)

While having a click around the web this morning, I found this account of some the tactics the South African police would use during the Apartheid era. It certainly stirs ugly feelings:

Farrah was arrested with her husband, who was also held for allegedly possessing documents connected with terrorism. She was not allowed to speak with her family for four days. Eight days had passed before the police disclosed the reason she was being held.

On the day she was arrested, Farrah was at home with her family. The police came to her house, searched the property for three to four hours then arrested her and removed her family from their home.

…

Exercise consisted of walking around in a circle in a small yard behind the station for five minutes while officers held guard dogs in each corner. Farrah said: “I was frightened of the dogs so rather than getting any exercise, I just found these exercise periods really frightening.”

She became unwell, suffering from diabetes, and a doctor was called on numerous occasions. He confirmed that an existing condition had been exacerbated by the stress of her arrest and detention.

Farrah claimed the guards were constantly rude and aggressive when dealing with her. She was effectively held in solitary confinement and not allowed to communicate with or pass another prisoner when being taken to and from her cell between questioning.

Hang on. Did I say ’some the tactics the South African police would use during the Apartheid era’? What I meant to say was they are some of the tactics the British police use during the The War Against Terror. A school boy error. Sorry.

Say no to 42 days.

Where to start with this? In this brave new world, due process starts at 35,000 feet:

On a fateful day in this war, airmen delivered justice to the al Qaeda terrorist Zarqawi, in the form of two precision-guided, 500-pound bombs. (Applause.)

Justice takes many forms, my friends. We like the ones that go bang the best. I love the way the transcriber included the applause as well. The rest of the speech, as usual, reads as if it was beamed in from a parallel universe.

What Zobaie wants is for the U.S. military to hand over full control of Fallujah. He believes Iraq’s current leaders are not strong enough. Asked whether democracy could ever bloom here, he replied: “No democracy in Iraq. Ever.”

“When the Americans leave the city,” he said, “I’ll be tougher with the people.”

Read the rest

Via the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns

There are known to be 39 refused asylum seekers from Iraq in detention and facing forced removal to Iraq tomorrow Thursday 27th March; 30 in Campsfield, 5 in Colnbrook and 4 in Oakington. We suspect the actual number detained is much higher.

5 years on from the invasion of Iraq, at a time when violence is rising in Baghdad and “heavy fighting” is being reported in Basra, the UK’s Home Office is making plans for a very special anniversary present for one group of Iraqis - an ‘Ethnic Charter flight’ to return refused asylum seekers to a country now deemed ’safe’.

NCADC has been reliably informed that an “Ethnic Charter Flight” to Iraq is planned for 19:00hrs on Thursday of this week (27th March 2008). We now know of 39 people in Campsfield, Colnbrook and Oakington, who are likely passengers on this flight.

What you can do:
1) Send urgent faxes/emails immediately to Rt. Hon. Jacqui Smith, Secretary of State for the Home Office asking that all those Iraqi’s currently detained are released and granted protection in the UK. Attached is a model letter Iraqi’sJS.doc which you can copy/amend/write your own version.

Fax: 020 8760 3132 If you are faxing from outside UK - Fax: 20 8760 3132
Email: jacqui.smith@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

2) As this is a general issue, you should also contact your local MP

Please notify campaign of any faxes/emails sent:
Swansea Campaign for Asylum Justice
C/o Flat 4 Brockley Court
103 St Helen’s Avenue
Swansea
SA1 4NW
Tel No: 0845 345 5768
keithmalcolm@ntlworld.com

I’ll tell you who are scum, right? Teachers. Wanting to stop teenagers being killed? Leftist, unpatriotic scum, that’s what they are. They make me want to puke. I tell you, bits of kids going off abroad and losing their lives and limbs, what could me more British than that?

And there was me wondering where the massed ranks of Little England had disappeared to. The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, weren’t it?

But these bastard teachers, passing knowledge onto children to give them better lives and stopping them getting shot, who the hell do they think they are? Isn’t it about time NUT members said ‘enough is enough’ and got rid of this insulting, leftist, unpatriotic nonsense of worrying about their students’ welfare? I tell you, it’s not on. Simple, innit?

So, it’s all kicking off…

Heavy fighting has erupted in Iraq’s southern city of Basra between Iraqi security forces and members of the Mehdi Army, a Shia militia.

Despite there being 4,000 tooled-up British soldiers sitting around just down the road at the airport, they’re sitting tight:

A British military spokesman said the operation was being directed by Iraqi forces and that UK troops, now based at Basra airport, were not involved.

This ‘overwatch’ role we’ve taken offers two benefits. It gives the newly-trained Iraqi army the ultimate in on the job training. It also allows us to observe just how effective our training methods are: if the Iraqi army takes a hiding, well, procedures will just have to be tightened.

This has me foxed, however:

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is reported to be overseeing the operation. On Monday he said the central government had decided to “re-impose security, stability and law” in the oil-rich city.

Hang about, didn’t the British do that already?

Here’s something I learned today via the estimable RickB.

In 1987, Saddam Hussein passed Law 150, outlawing trade unions in the public sector and preventing ‘public sector workers organising or going on strike. Law 150 also changed the status of employees in state-owned enterprises to civil servants, depriving public sector workers of the right to organise.’ Iraq having a small private sector, the law affected 80 per cent of the workforce.

The law has never been repealed.

The US State Department’s Iraq Country Reports on Human Rights Practices has this to say about workers’ rights in the newly liberated and democratized country:

The exercise of labor rights remained limited, largely due to insurgent and sectarian?driven violence, high unemployment, and maladapted labor organizational structures and laws. Union activity is also inhibited by the 2005 Decree 8750, which cancelled unions’ leadership boards, froze their assets, and formed an interministerial committee to administer unions’ assets and assess their capacity to resume activity.

No mention of Law 150 that was left in place in 2003 by US viceroy Paul Bremer when he reverted the Iraqi legal system to that of the pre-Saddam years.

Iraq was going to be different. The US would count its own dead (now close to 4,000), but the toll the war was taking on Iraqis was not a matter the Pentagon or any other US government department intended to quantify. Especially once Bush had declared “mission accomplished” on May 1 2003 - after that, every new Iraqi who died by violence would be a signal that the president was wrong, and would show that a war conducted in the name of humanitarian intervention was exacting a mounting humanitarian toll of its own.

But even though the Americans were not counting, people were dying, and every victim had a name and a family. Wedding parties were bombed by US planes, couples driving home at night were shot at checkpoints because they missed a flashlight warning them to stop, and hundreds of other unarmed civilians were killed for no legitimate cause. In just the last three weeks of April 2003, after Saddam’s statue and his regime were toppled, US forces killed at least 266 civilians - a pattern of overeager resort to fire which has continued to this day.

read the rest

Little Warren Iraq is five today. He’s been something of a problem child. Never out of trouble, always in the papers, some people have said he’s symptomatic of what’s wrong with the world today. He’s something of a talisman to those who want to see a better and fairer society.

Others have said that Warren shows how we can extend our values to even the the most unfortunate. Educational psychologists have made themselves rich examining the behaviour of this singular boy. He is all things to everybody.

Here, in an exclusive extract, is a report compiled by concerned teachers and parents to the governors of Warren’s school recommending that he be expelled. Questions are also being asked about whether the governors can remain in their jobs after their handling of this affair.

(more…)

Aside from everything else, one of the things that stays with me about the Iraq war is how we’ve become inured, immune, to horror and death and suffering. Maybe it’s always been so, God knows as a country we’ve long been involved in causing and suffering them.

I suppose it’s a natural reaction or else you’d go mad under the weight of it all. I clearly remember getting upset only once, although I’m sure there were other times. It was near the end of April in 2003 when an exploding ammunition dump killed an unspecified number of Iraqis. It was a come-day-go-day story. It was the accompanying photograph that did it.

Reuters: “Kudeir, a 30-year-old Iraqi worker, carries his badly burned nine-month-old son Amir Yas to safety in the Zaafaraniya neighbourhood in the outskirts of Baghdad April 26, 2003. Up to 40 Iraqi civilians were killed and many badly hurt in a series of explosions near Baghdad on Saturday, an Iraqi medic said after an arms dump blew up on the outskirts of the capital.”

My small daughter was asleep in the next room when I read the story. Look at the expression on his father’s face. Maybe you have to have kids of your own to understand, I don’t know. I imagined how I’d try comfort a baby who could not be made comfortable, how I’d feel. I think of Amir Yas often. I wonder where he and his father are today.

When I used to link to such images on my old blog, one or two people would describe them as ‘pornography’ which I’ve always found offensive and suspect. If we’re going to be complicit in these events, then turning away from the consequences is a supreme act of cowardice in my opinion. It’s a moral abdication.

When Ann Widdecombe can tout a video of the treatment of Canadian bears to prick our consciences but we can’t bring ourselves to look at children burnt and blasted in a war we started, I wonder what’s gone wrong.

[W]hat a strange idea that the only true way to support someone is to cheer them into a situation that’s likely to get them killed. If these “supporters” ever find themselves looking up at a tower block, with someone 15 floors up threatening to jump off the balcony as friends delicately try to coax him back, they must shout, “Don’t undermine him – it’s up to all of us to support him – jump, man, jump! Go on – here’s Zoe, 22 from Clacton in a G-string and paratrooper’s cap. She supports you, so dive!”

Inevitably, once the supported boys started returning from war with bits missing, the governments and newspapers that backed them most enthusiastically decide that they’re an embarrassing nuisance.

Read the rest

You have to admire the way this government covers all the angles sometimes. By ‘covers’ I mean ‘papers over’, obviously.

Sending refugees back to Iraq? Don’t worry if it’s not as safe as you claim, get them to sign a piece of paper waiving your responsibility should any of them get bombed, shot, raped or drilled on their return.

Worried about whistleblowers highlighting the failures of government? Don’t fix the failures, fix the whistleblowers.

And now, worried about coroners pointing out the mistakes, incompetence and political mendacity on the part of the Ministry of Defence that led to the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan? Don’t worry about the mistakes, incompetence and political mendacity, just shut the coroners up.

Problem solved. A lack of body armour, or radios, or Snatch Land Rovers led to soldiers’ deaths ? It can’t be the MoD’s fault if nobody says so, can it? If Iraqi militias had dragged Private Jason Smith through the streets of Basra, Des Browne would have gone mental.

He sees nothing wrong however with dragging Private Smith and his family through the courts to spare a few blushes and avoid ‘civil liability’. A liability, let us not forget, which would mean a bit more cash for the families of dead soldiers killed because fat, self-serving Des Browne is more interested in covering his arse than the torsos of his men heading into battle.

(Via Mike.)

As Flying Rodent points out, it was five years ago yesterday that Robin Cook resigned from the cabinet over Iraq.

Here’s how Cook made his name. It’s gripping stuff if you’re a fan of politics. It’s also a timely reminder that no-one is innocent in any of this, no matter how much wriggling they do.

Part two and part three.

(Cook’s resignation speech: part one and two.)