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?

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

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

…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.

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.

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?

Baby Jesus and the orphans, it gets worse. If the Taliban have been watching British news channels today they know what fiendish new weapon to bring to bear on our brave boys during the Spring Offensive: harsh language.

If I was an RAF servicemen I’d be absolutely livid tonight. British politicians have rallied round today and worked hard to paint the flyboys as a bunch of pansies frightened of a bit of name-calling.

Listen to Tory Liam Fox, shadow minister for something or other, subtly painting our armed forces as pussies:

We cannot have our armed forces personnel intimidated for wearing the uniform they are so rightly proud of.

Intimidated? These guys are trained to face bullets and bombs, to kill or be killed. Have any of them been crying themselves to sleep or frightened to leave the barracks? If they have, I’d dare to suggest they’re in the wrong trade and should try something else with alacrity. Being a Member of Parliament perhaps?

Why didn’t Fox go the whole hog and send the servicemen’s mums into Peterborough to have it out with the bullies? You know, if he’s bent on stripping these men of their dignity entirely. I’d say that Fox is in politics because he’s too weak to carry furniture but he’s clearly incapable of carrying an argument either.

To be honest, I think discretion is the better part of valour in this instance and the commander has made the right choice in banning RAF personnel wearing uniforms outside their base. Like I said earlier, when you bear in mind what some servicemen will do in a provincial pub at the slightest provocation, I wonder if the commander didn’t have the public’s rather than his men’s interests at the front of his mind.

Defence minister Des Browne is doing his utmost to protect his men from verbal slurs will all due ‘urgency’. Whether this involves body armour and if Des can get it into theatre in a timely manner before someone is hurt or killed isn’t clear.

(See Philip as well.)

Hey you! Yes, you - the one with the Andy McNab novels and the ticket to see Rambo tonight. Put them down and get yourself over to the GCHQ recruitment website. Judging by their new campaign, they’re looking for tossers of your calibre - people dazzled by cloak and dagger bullshit and offensive hyperbole.

Look at this GCHQ recruitment advert, headlined ‘WWI WWII WWW’:

Right now we’re fighting another world wide war. Not on the fields of Paschendale, the beaches of Dunkirk or the streets of Basra. This one’s in cyberspace. Online has become the new front-line.

Paschendale, 750,000 killed or wounded. Dunkirk, 80,000 killed or wounded. Basra, we don’t know how many killed or wounded because we don’t have the human decency to count but lets just say ‘a lot’. How many people killed on the Internet? Not many, but it’s still dangerous on the final frontier. Bollocks to the Somme, if I don’t change the layout of my desk soon I’m never going to get rid of this stiff neck.

And have a look at the flashy graduate recruitment page. If you’ve got a boner for Spooks then this is the gig for you. Just wait a few seconds while the page flashes ‘Threats loading’ at you in blood red letters.

Guns, money, terrorism, laptops, drugs, cybercrime. You’d be tempted to think that a job at GCHQ is a thrilling blend of The Bourne Identity and Tron. If you get the job and your computer doesn’t have a twirly, glittering, beeping user interface like something out of Minority Report, I’d take it to an employment tribunal because you’ll have been lied to.

Here’s the section on arms dealing:

Now, Britain is one of the world’s largest arms dealers but unless GCHQ are plotting some kind of coup d’etat, I think we can be pretty safe and assume they’re not talking about smashing David Miliband’s gun-running racket.

On the whole though, despite the whizzy graphics and breathless ad copy, I wouldn’t get too excited about working at GCHQ. If the games on that recruitment page are anything to go buy, missions seem to consist of interminable variants of Minesweeper and Hangman.

Still, I shouldn’t criticise really, we don’t want another Paschendale do we? Apart from the ten we’ve already had in Iraq. Shame GCHQ couldn’t have used the Internet to fight those battles.

(Via Private Eye.)

There’s an impeccably sourced story in The Sun today. Impeccable in that the sources are anonymous so you have no idea if this is true or just some cloak and dagger bullshit cooked up to captivate the kind of man who enjoys novels about the SAS.

RAF experts eavesdropped on radio traffic in Afghanistan — and heard Taliban fighters speaking in Brummie and Yorkshire accents.

It’s a story that combines a number of elements to form a piquant stew. It’s got the plucky airmen hunting terrorists. It’s got the edge of paranoia about the homeland being a hotbed of dusky suicide bombers. Is that brown chap a few seats away on the bus heading for Afghanistan? Maybe he can’t be arsed and plans to go boom somewhere closer to home?

Best of all, it shows that The Sun are privy to secret intelligence. How cool is that? Check out the intelligence services and, by extension The Sun, getting one over on the hapless Taliban who are no match on the electronic frontier of The War Against Terror:

They do now, dickheads. The melodramatic have been screaming ‘TRAITORS!’ about the Black Country bombers, missing the fact that splashing details of military operations tracking dangerous terrorists doesn’t really speak to the national interest either.

If this all is true, the Brummie Taliban and their supporters have just read on the Internet and in a national newspaper how the British armed forces are tracking them. Now that their spy in the sky cover is blown, the RAF are going to have to switch to tracking the imports of Slade records and Cup-A-Soup into Afghanistan.

A national security snafu or a big pile of steaming page-filler? I can’t decide.

Watch this report about the protest against Scientology in Birmingham. Listen for the Scientologist spokesman’s judicious and not at all out of proportion use of the ‘T’ word:

Fair enough, I suppose. One person’s student out on a jolly is another person’s terrorist. If you’re a blank-eyed propagandist taking orders from a dead writer of piss-poor science fiction, that is.

I’m just worried that the ‘T’ word is becoming so over-applied that very soon it’s going to be harder to identify those of us who aren’t terrorists.

(Via Graham Linehan.)

So, let’s get this straight. Jack Straw was told last December that Labour MP Sadiq Khan was in a spot of bother (Khan, was bugged by the police during a visit to a prison). But didn’t ask why or what for.

In a statement to Parliament, yesterday, Straw said:

I was aware, in December, of press inquiries from a newspaper concerning visits by my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting to Babar Ahmed, but at no stage before last Saturday was I aware of any information that the press inquiries concerned any covert recording or anything like that.

What an incurious soul he is, the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor. At no point did it occur to him to ask just what kind of trouble Mr Khan might or might not have been embroiled in with Ahmed, a man ‘accused of running websites supporting terrorism and urging Muslims to fight a holy war’.

You would have thought that Straw’s sense for trouble might have been a little keener considering the nightmare his government has had in the last few months, but no. To think he studied law at univerity. He must have missed the lectures on the question of motive. He’s clearly unfamiliar with the concept of ‘why’.

Whether this is a quality (or lack of) we should be welcoming in our cabinet ministers is for higher powers than me to decide. It certainly seems odd behaviour in a human being, particularly one at the centre of one the most paranoid and media-manipulative political parties in recent memory. But then if Jack said he didn’t ask, then he didn’t ask.

It must be heaven being him, blithely unaware and unassaulted by the reasons behind the harsh realities of life. ‘One of our MPs is in trouble, Jack.’ ‘Hmmm? Is he really? Oh, well.’ ‘We have to bomb Iraq, Jack’ ‘Hmmm? OK.’ ‘I’m leaving you, Jack.’ ‘Hmmm? Bye then.’

The Counter-Terrorism Bill 2007-08 is 90 pages long with 56 pages of accompanying explanatory notes. By the time you’ve managed to wade through it, deciphering its many sub-paragraphs and exclusionary language, the bloody thing will be law.

I’d be very interested to know how many MPs - the loyalists and placemen at least - will or won’t read all 146 pages before debating and voting. Under the whip system, I don’t suppose they really need to, voting largely being a matter of being simply allowing oneself to be herded through this or that door.

One thing of interest about the bill is that the government’s definition of terrorism is the one laid out in the Terrorism Act 2000. That is, before September 11 2001. It’s interesting to say the least that, despite the supposed changing nature of global terrorism, the government have resisted the temptation to tinker with this one fundamentals.

The BBC give a useful breakdown of the bill which is just as well because I for one am otherwsie completely defeated by the structure and wording of the bill in the raw. I wonder how many people could make a positive engagement with this legislation directly even if they wanted to.

Yet another reason to resist the hammering of the BBC. In this instance at least, it’s a valuable buffer between the public and an enforced, institutionalised ignorance created by the state.

(More on this, maybe, later…)

There’s been some talk in the media about us getting another bank holiday each year. But for what reason? To commemorate the founding of the NHS, suggest some. How about Remembrance Day, say others. Or St George’s Day and others.

I’d like to suggest Counter-Terrorism Bill Day. These bills come round with frightening regularity (much more so than terrorist atrocities) so it seems only right we should mark the day each year.

That way, all of us can sit around in our pyjamas and wallow in the mendacity, sophistry and stupidity wheeled out by the Home Secretary of the day with which to defend his or her case for further authoritarianism. We can relax and reflect upon the contribution made by the people who have made this country the freak of the civilised world it is today. Us bloggers could just change the date on the same blog post and republish it annually - the arguments never seem to change, after all.

Who, for instance, has had the time to luxuriate in Jacqui Smith’s squirming and squirm-inducing appearance (RealPlayer required) on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning? Hardly any of us will have had the time to revel in the hearty yet bitter and scornful laughter that her performance deserved.

She couldn’t or wouldn’t answer the question of why she wants 42 as the number of days the police can hold a person suspected of terrorism. Even a child could tell you that that figure was arrived at by a thought process no more sophisticated or analytical than haggling. The government, for reasons they can’t or won’t explain, want a higher number but know they won’t get it. They’ve gone high to lure their opponents away from their lower figure. Any move upward away from 28 days is a victory for the government - they’re that little bit closer to their magic number and get to portray the rest of us as appeasers of terrorists. Which is a hell of a lot of people when you see the simply massive coalition of opposition ranged against the government on this.

And how about this feat of rhetorical contortionism at the 3m 30s mark in the interview:

Jacqui Smith: If in the future, in exceptional circumstances, a case could be made that there is an operation, an investigation, a number of multiple plots, a really difficult situation in which the police and Director of Public Proscecutions want to be able to apply to a judge to decide whether or not they could hold somebody for longer, that we need to find a way to facilitate that in those circumstances.

Sarah Montague Carolyn Quinn: If that’s not a hypothetical case, then what is?

Jacqui Smith: It won’t be hypothetical if and when it occurs, that’s precisely the point. We are not legislating now on the basis that we’re bringing it in now for something that might happen in the future. We’re putting in a provision for if it becomes unhypothetical. If unfortunately I and many other experts and right and we do need it in the future it is in place in legislation.

Listen for Sarah Montague Carolyn Quinn laughing. We’re not legislating against the hypothetical, we’re legislating against the hypothetical becoming ‘unhypothetical’. I think. ‘Unhypothetical’ is not a real word incidentally. Smith is quite literally making it up as she goes.

How about this from, not-all-scare-mongering Home Office minister Tony McNulty:

As an extreme example, imagine two or three 9/11s. Imagine two 7/7/s. Given the evidence we’ve got and the nature of plots so far disrupted, such scenarios aren’t fanciful.

Imagine, imagine, imagine a story. Where are these plots? Where’s the evidence? The government and police haven’t been shy in coming forward when they’ve discovered these plots in the past (even if most of them turned out to be unfeasible bollocks dreamt up by halfwits and the deluded).

If, if, if, if, if. Take a look at a dictionary definition of ‘if’ and tell me if that isn’t a word firmly rooted in the hypothetical. ‘The rules of the game have changed,’ Tony Blair famously said. He was right, not least in the underpinnings of how the English language actually function.

Forty two days. Six weeks. Does anybody have a job with a holiday entitlement that runs that long or a boss willing to hold your job open for such a time? What about a bank manager or creditor whose patience will run to that? And you must have heard of Parkinson’s Law by now. We are, need it be stressed, talking about locking up people who are suspects. You know, that quaint concept of innocent before proven guilty? Prefixing ’suspect’ with ‘terrorist’ is merely an attempt at implying guilt where it may or may not exist in order to plant a prejudgement in the public consciousness. Nobody gets locked up for six weeks if they’re innocent, do they?

And it continues to get worse. According to The Guardian:

The detailed legislation is expected to be tougher than originally trailed, with no legal definition of the seriousness of the alleged offence that could trigger an exceptional period of detention beyond the current 28 days without charge.

They can’t even tell us exactly what they want to lock people up for. Sure, we’re clinging onto the values that we hold dear in the face of implacable terrorism. It’s just that these values seem to be from the 12th century or thereabouts. Why not just throw Muslims in a pond and see if they float? Talk about sinking to Osama’s level.

I’ve said this before but most people in Britain will roll along with this due to a failure of imagination. They cannot picture themselves falling victim to these laws. They think these laws are designed to trap unknowable, generally brown-skinned, cranks and murderers and not used against nice Christian white people. That may or may not be true, if you’ve never heckled a political rally or read aloud the names of the dead at the cenotaph, but the lack of empathy for others still has the power to disgust even a cynic like me. The innocent get released without the fanfare of their arrest, so we don’t have to feel too bad.

All this would be (slightly) easier to swallow if we were treated as having any degree of intelligence. You have to come to the conclusion that the government’s argument can’t be put in any other way than patronising illogicality because it falls apart when subjected to even the most cursory of intelligent scrutiny. So, it’s got to be hyperbole and stonewalling, obfuscation and contempt, and all the other ingredients needed to make the laughing stock palatable.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Home Office had a cage full of Sun readers and X-Factor viewers who every policy has to be run past before publication. If the proposed legislation doesn’t cause the subjects to shit themselves in terror and bash their screaming heads against the bars then it has to be reworded until it does.

What a day it will be when a government minister can sit down and talk to us like we weren’t dropped on our heads as children. An adult debate held between adults with at least an attempt at mutual respect. That’d be worth a bank holiday.

Tim Ireland outdoes himself once again. I think you’ll go a long way to find a better demolition of the idiotic ban on protesting around Parliament[1].

* And not just because I have a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo.

One of the biggest threats to US security may now come from within Europe, US Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff has told the BBC.

Yes, but does he have a dossier cut and pasted from the Internet? Without one of those, all this is just so much wind.

When you think about it though, this could be a way out of trouble for Peter Hain. All he need do is defect to the Americans and spill the beans on our weapons of mass destruction programmes, our burgeoning nuclear ambitions and our links to rogue states in return for a pile of CIA cash and certain assurances.

Then, the humanitarian intervention going off without a hitch, the British people welcoming their American rescuers with open arms and flowers, and our natural resources (minor celebrities and buy-to-let landlords) liberated eight ways from Sunday, Hain can head the new puppet government.

It’s perfect. We’re saved from terrorism (one way or another), Hain salvages his career and the likes of David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Melanie Philips, along with their attendant keyboard battalions and armchair artillerymen, can finally shut their big yap.

Update: Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Chertoff’s gut:

Thanks to pro_tempore in the comments.

Sunday just keeps getting better and better for Muslims:

In an attempt to stop young Muslims being seduced by Al-Qaeda, women will be sent on training courses designed for FTSE 100 managers to give them the skills and confidence to confront fanatics.

(The comments under this news story are a joy, by the way.)

You’ll never guess whose ideas this is. Go on, have a guess. Oh, all right then…

Amid fears that extremists are becoming more sophisticated in their recruitment, Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, has concluded that a key way to stop extremist ideas further permeating Muslim communities is to give “the silent majority” a stronger voice.

It’s an excellent idea, fully thought through - naturally - and right up there with chain gang uniforms and ethnic rebranding. Although the article fails to mention it, no doubt there will first be sessions for those Muslim men reluctant to let their wives, sisters and daughters attend these courses with ‘business leaders and top athletes’.

So why Muslim women? Well, the squeakiest wheel gets the grease, as they say. And Muslims are the squeakiest of all wheels when you’re a weakening government with a right-wing vote to court.

The thing is, the groaning machinery of UK Plc has so many, many squeaky wheels. So, I’m sure we can be confident that, once this pilot is deemed successful, it will be rolled out to the rest of Britain’s women:

In an attempt to stop young men being seduced by violence, women will be sent on training courses designed for FTSE 100 managers to give them the skills and confidence to confront wife-beaters.

The possibilities are endless…

In an attempt to stop young men being seduced by alcohol, women will be sent on training courses designed for FTSE 100 managers to give them the skills and confidence to confront public drunkenness.

And how about…

In an attempt to stop young men being seduced by speeding, women will be sent on training courses designed for FTSE 100 managers to give them the skills and confidence to confront Jeremy Clarkson.

What better way to combat the pernicious, evil multiculturalism that Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester and many others say threatens to sweep us all away on a tide of hatred? We don’t want to entrench multicultural attitudes by exclusively singling out Muslim women. Let’s spread this horseshit around some.

In case you’d forgotten, the Home Office is holding a public consultation into the right to protest outside Parliament as curtailed by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. You’ve only got until January 17 to make yourself heard so get on with it.

The consultation document (PDF, 31 pages) makes for interesting reading. As Beau Bo D’Or has discovered, Mark Thomas‘ (and everyone else’s) Mass Lone Protests haven’t gone unnoticed…

So they want 58 days. When you’re trying to sell something, always go with your highest price first. It’s the first principle of haggling. Who doubts they’ll settle for less?

Last week the Home Secretary claimed she didn’t have a clue how much they were going to ask. It didn’t take long for her to calculate her profit margins as it turned out - they saw last time that at 90 days demand was too elastic.

Now it’s a question of who bottles first, the government or those who don’t want to move beyond 28 days detention. If it’s the latter then we get into the horsetrading to see how far both parties are prepared to move.

Any number between 29 and 58 is a victory for the government. They get an increment and, like last time, get to smear their oppenents as appeasing suicide bombers. When it’s actually the other way around.

They can then come back next years and the next and the next to demand another increment. They’ll go with the highest price first, 72 days maybe. Under this process they’ll eventually get their way - and why stop at 90?

(See also Parkinson’s Law.)

Why the hell have we got a ‘simple sailor‘ in charge of our anti-terrorism strategy? Were all the complicated ones busy?

Simple sailor Lord West is a man in two minds. At 8.20 this morning he was emphatic:

Lord West said he still needed “to be fully convinced that we absolutely need more than 28 days”.

“I want to be totally convinced because I am not going to go and push for something that actually affects the liberty of the individual unless there is a real necessity for it.”

‘I want to be totally convinced’. Well somebody convinced him because an hour later he was as equally emphatic, just from a different angle:

[A]t 0930, after a half-hour meeting with Mr Brown, the peer told the BBC he was “personally convinced” that the 28-day limit needed extending.

“I personally, absolutely believe that within the next two or three years we will require more than that for one of those complex plots,” he said.

He later issued a statement in an attempt to clarify his position saying: “I am quite clear that the greater complexities of terrorist plots will mean that we will need the power to detain certain individuals for more than 28 days.”

‘Maybe being a simple sailor and not a politician, I didn’t choose my words very well,’ was his excuse, bless him, as he insulted 37,500 members of the Royal Navy. I bet he gets into all kinds of hilarious scrapes with that shortcoming. We should write a sitcom. This week Lord West doesn’t choose his words very well and ends up hiding naked in a cupboard when the vicar comes for tea.

Still, it’s a rags to riches tale of such a simple sailor becoming the First Sea Lord. There’s hope for us all, on this showing. What odds on John Prescott being the first man on Mars? West’s given schmucks all over the country a reason to carry on. Then you think, it’s just as well he wasn’t asked to fight a major sea battle during his time as head of the Navy. What with him and his inability to choose his words carefully we could have been in real trouble.

It’s either that or, after going off-message on the radio, Lord West was told to get out and debase himself on national television in an ‘ee, am right daft me’ style. Actually stupid or told to act stupid in order to keep his job? Who would you prefer in that position, an idiot or a puppet? Is there another explanation?

Anyway, must dash. I’m making dinner and I’m convinced it’s going to take no longer than 28 minutes. The directions on the pasta packet say 14 but I’m telling the kids it’s going to take nearly an hour. Because I’m convinced.

Via Alex again, we have this excellent analysis from The Register’s mighty John Lettice on the events leading up to Jean Charles de Menezes getting his marching orders.

This jumped out at me:

The report notes that the ground surveillance team all appeared to believe that they did not have a positive sighting, while the control room believed that they did. It looks very much as if faulty filtering and Chinese whispers effectively manufactured this situation, helped along by individual officer’s fears of the consequences of making a mistake. This would tend to make them extremely cautious of saying that it definitely wasn’t Nettletip [the police codename for Hussain Osman], meaning the possibility that it was him was pretty well embedded in the system. These doubts would be filtered upwards, and the same fears would lead superior officers to give undue weight to a single claim of ‘might be’ over half a dozen of ‘probably isn’t’. The claims of CO19 [the firearms officers] that they heard “definitely” illustrate that direct monitoring in the control room isn’t the answer either - nobody admits to saying that, and they may simply have missed the word “not”.

Now, I’m no expert on counter-terrorism, but when I was at journalism school, we were given a handy tip to avoid getting into trouble when reporting court cases. At a case’s conclusion, it’s deemed sensible not to use the terms ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ in a dictated or written report.

The person taking the dictation might miss the ‘not’ or a harassed and on-deadline sub-editor, busily cutting and pasting at your copy might accidentally remove the ‘not’. Then you’re in trouble because you’ve given the not guilty person in your report an action for libel. Much better to use ‘acquitted’ and ‘convicted’.

So, the next time the Met have a team of tooled-up Bodies and Doyles hurtling towards an identified or unidentified target, instead of saying it’s ‘definitely’ or ‘definitely not’ him, why not try, say, ‘affirmative’ or ‘negative’? Why it hasn’t been considered before is something of a mystery. I know I’m a mere blogger and not London’s top cop, and it’s a crazy plan, but it might be worth considering. They could even ask ’should we convict or acquit?’ for that snappy action-movie dialogue vibe if they like.

Alex Harrowell on the IPCC investigation into the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting:

Here we hit the damning detail; nobody ever identified Jean Charles de Menezes as the bomber, but this information never reached anyone in a position to act on it. Yes, several of the surveillance officers were at different times of the opinion that he might perhaps be; but no-one who thought so had seen his face. The only member of the surveillance team who did thought he wasn’t.

Read the whole thing and appreciate why Sir Ian Blair really has to go. Alex can help you there as well.

Those Muslims. They’re a worry, aren’t they? We worry about them integrating. We worry about the books they read. We worry about the religious premises they attend. We worry about the library stock dedicated to their religion. We worry about offending them. We worry about how some of them talk in funny languages called “Arabic” and “Urdu”, whatever they are. We worry about what they’re thinking. We worry about whether some of them are AS WE SPEAK plotting our demise, brainwashing children, and writing poems about the joys of beheading infidels. We worry about whether the anti-terrorist legislation which is clearly targeted at “them” is tough enough; the home secretary doesn’t know how much longer the pre-charge detention limit should be, but she does know that it isn’t long enough.

To add to all of these existential problems and threats, the Sun today cheerfully informs us of another problem with Muslims. Apparently, the numbers of Muslims behind bars has risen by 120%. This undoubtedly means that BRITAIN’S jails risk becoming breeding grounds for Islamic extremists…

read the rest

Not much to add right now to the de Menezes verdict that hasn’t been already said by Beau, Jamie, Alex and particularly Septicisle.

I’ll just say that there’s something badly wrong when a public investigation into the shooting of a man by police in public has to be orchestrated via the back door of health and safety legislation.

Also, I know I’m naive and not terribly worldly wise on such matters but aren’t organisations and companies human constructs? They’re created and controlled by human beings. Humans perform the input to the organisation, they consume its outputs and are involved in every step of the process in between.

When something goes wrong, say for instance, an innocent man is shot in the head seven times and then smeared variously as a terrorist, drug dealer and rapist, how is it nobody’s fault? How can you blame an organisation as if it suddenly gained sentience and moral agency? When people stand up and say ‘It wasn’t me, it was the organisation’, isn’t that a tacit admission that something is broken, radical changes must be made or that, in the face of logic and common sense, the organisation has broken free of control of its human masters? The latter seems to be the fashionable excuse in an age of personal irresponsibility whether it be to do with train crashes, corporate manslaughter or hired guns like Blackwater.

It seems to me that the de Menezes verdict is being interpreted by some as if New Scotland Yard had risen off its foundations like some kind of crazy Japanese robot, went striding down to Stockwell and robbed a man of his life. Are we talking some kind of cybernetic sick building syndrome here? Or, rather, the simple fact of nobody having the balls to take responsibility for the 19 ‘catastrophic’ errors that killed an innocent man?