An Iraqi asylum seeker who was cleared yesterday of making a video identifying potential terrorist targets in London faces being issued with a government control order, the Guardian has learned.

Rauf Abdullah Mohammad, 26, sunk his head into his hands as he was found not guilty at Woolwich crown court of four terrorism charges related to making the tape. The crown had alleged the video was a film of “high-profile targets” made to help Islamist terrorists plot and commit an attack on the capital.

But the jury, with their not guilty verdicts, appeared to accept Mr Mohammad’s case that the hour-long film was a souvenir of his time in London […]

So let’s get this straight. The Home Office isn’t even bothering with an appeal but the opinion is that the Home Secretary will be able to dish out ‘punishment’ simply because of government suspicions.

If anyone from the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” camp can argue their case after this I’d be amazed. Because they are essentially arguing that the whole basis of UK law is worthless and can be bypassed by a politician. Traitors that they are.

BBQ gives Lidl a free PR puff.

As blatant as you like. Again. No byline. Again.

Don’t believe the hypermarket forces.

You may be thinking, okay this time MM has really lost it, but that isn’t my sentiment, rather it is that of ‘New Rpublic’ magazine (which says a lot) and some guy who appeared on the Toady programme’s regular 08:48(ish) F.E.A.R. slot. It was reported (yet again) that trrrrrrrrrrrrsts are exploiting the UK’s freedoms to plot terror antics against the US and may exploit the Visa Waiver Programme to board planes and blow up your family into bite sized bits of fish food whilst their dead souls cavort with pretty maidens (I’m paraphrasing). In any case this is clearly as softening of the ground for either removal of the Visa Waiver Programme AFTER insisting on access to PNR and biometrics in PURELY order to maintain the VWP, or to veal crate the population into giving over more information to prime the NIR database, or more likely BOTH.

btw Murdoch approves

If you want a preview of how ‘helpful’ the trails of information gained by NIR trawling will be take a look at this article at nth position. It goes into detail about an active project in Bedfordshire which agregates information about crime levels, ambulance reports et al. in house-to-house detail. As you will see these records are rather simple to access and there are plans to allow public access via the internet to a range of data gathered:

Surely, I thought, in the name of all that is most sensible, those cannot really be emergency service logs? Later that day, Bedfordshire County Council’s press office kindly supplied me with a CD-ROM of the presentation. Yes, the spreadsheets glimpsed in the presentation really were pages from emergency service logs.

The level of detail included:
* X and Y co-ordinates allowing pinpointing of crimes and accidents on Ordnance Survey maps
* Details of crime victims including address, age and sex
* Ambulance data including patient problems
CDRP: Ambulance data, redacted for patient data privacyIn this last category, the medically confidential information had been shaded over for presentation to the council. However on examination it was easily readable, allowing me to zero in on the locations of the following incidents, all from October 1, 2005
* 12 cases of ‘assault/rape’
* One case each of ‘overdose/poisoning’ and ‘stab/gunshot wound’
* 16 cases of ‘specific traumatic injuries’ [nthposition has redacted the personally identifiable data.]
Information from the fire and rescue service also give OS grid references, street addresses and notes on whether fires are considered accidental or deliberate.
Information from the council’s environmental services includes unprocessed reports pinpointing complainants’ addresses.
From information on council trading standards ‘enforcement visits’, it could be seen that four specific shops in nearby towns had provided drink and/or tobacco to underage children. In the council’s words: “Data on crime and anti-social behaviour incidents is extracted from the partner systems and replicated into a central data store and a common application has been created to provide user access.”

Such is the CDRP’s belief in data protection that they lifted pages of this data store for a slide show, and then simply handed it out to the public on request. And this is the sort of information that is going to be pinged back and forth between the CDR partners. Bedfordshire’s CDRP also plans to show reported incidents of anti-social behaviour on a website map giving house-to-house detail. These maps will be available online to the public.

You will notice that enthusiasm for the project already means ‘institutional ignorance’ of data protection concerns is in place.
The ‘Geographical Information System’ in Bedfordshire is by no means alone. see this Home Office report (pdf) for introduction to the scope of another few (via crimereduction.gov). Interestingly at least one of the Systems (COSMOS – covering the Birmingham area) has a vanilla http login page the insecurity of which should be obvious. This doesn’t exactly make one feel comfortable.

So that is where we are now. The fundamental question to pose with these systems is are they necessary? That question is not actually about whether they will aid the authorities which they almost certainly will but whether the information they gather is any more useful than limited research projects. It is the question of what amounts to ongoing mass surveillance is actually more beneficial than spending money on a research programme and then acting in advance of crime and antisocial behaviour – because whatever these systems do they are absolutely useless if no one actually learns from the data gathered. It should be pretty clear to most people that sink estates and higher crime areas share certain characteristics and the findings of research in one location can be applied with a bit of critical thinking to another area. The idea that ongoing mass surveillance is in any way more responsive or accurate than limited research is fallacious, moreover ‘unguided’ systems such as these may obscure potential solutions to problems that ‘guided’ research may uncover – indeed it is like finding a cure for ‘the common cold’ by counting how many people buy cough medicine.

Secondly we have the issues of security and privacy, as the writer from the nth position found, the regard towards data protection aspects is minimal, and has been sidelined in the interests of interoperability, with this approach the underlying assumptions are that everyone has a legitimate use for information gathered and that it is being requseted ‘innocently’.
Additionally in these systems it is unclear how accurate these databases will become once opened up to the public, as the nth position discusses:

Using a special page on the CDRP sites, members of the public will be able report instances of alleged anti-social behaviour. At present, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos) can be made by local courts. They are yet another of Labour’s quick fixes: where prosecution might otherwise fail, or even where no specific crime has been committed, Asbos can be slapped on instead. The bald truth about Asbos is unpalatable enough: they can be (and in fact, are designed specifically to be) applied to anyone magistrates consider to have behaved legally, but badly enough to warrant legal restraint. Now, in a sort of post-modern nightmare, Orwell’s Big Brother has been ousted by Bazalgette’s Big Brother.

The public will be the ones doing the state’s spying, and ‘voting off’ fellow citizens.

You shouldn’t worry unduly about this, because (as one CDRP officer put it): “These reports will be sanity-checked.” What might ‘sanity-checking’ entail? On the face of it, emailed reports of pink elephants leaping over office blocks might not make it on to the map. Then again, you may remember the case of Caroline Shepherd, a woman from East Kilbride served with an Asbo in 2005 for answering her own front door while wearing a nightdress. Or perhaps the luckless would-be suicide who repeatedly jumped in to the River Avon and was hit with an Asbo preventing her from going near any body of water in the vicinity – her name is public knowledge, but I can’t see any benefit in repeating it. (Then there are the cases of Michael Donockley, David Gaylor and David Boag… but I fear that no-one will believe those actually happened: stick their names plus ‘asbo’ into a search engine and find out for yourself).

So on to the future.
If the NIR is implemented ‘successfully’ it will be possible for people/companies with access to GIS technology, and who have bought government database access to overlay ‘public’ and commercial information to create a ‘live profile’ of anyone registered on the NIR database. A criminal will be able to identify high crime areas, perhaps with poor police response times and correlate the data with people recently buying a new car/financial services with PNR flight data they could check if occupants are on holiday etc, etc. Obviously the converse data matching could be employed by the government for their own reasons (we shan’t be handing out any more ideas here I’m afraid). Even if access to this sort of information is more secure (https? phut!) it won’t prevent the internal compromises such as those reported this week at the Identity and Passport Service (the future gateway to NIR informtaion no less).

Naturally an ‘I told you so’ when the NIR fails will be a response that won’t address the problem of its creation. Much like using mass surveillance technology to respond to crime.

You remember the scene from a Simpsons episode, where Bart keeps trying to grab a cake, even though each time he does it he gets an electric shock?

The US government has been accused of trying to undermine the Chávez government in Venezuela by funding anonymous groups via its main international aid agency. …

Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (Coha) in Washington yesterday [said] “The US is waging diplomatic warfare against Venezuela.”

He said that while the US had accused Mr Chávez of destabilising Latin American countries, the term “destabilisation” more aptly applied to what the US was trying to do to Mr Chávez.

[…]

I would file this under ‘normal service’.

Given the bloody history of US intervention in South/Central American policitcs, not to mention Bush’s previous worldwide, you’d think they’d realize this cake is wired to the mains.

But no. Anything in the name of spreading ‘democracy’: someone awake in 2003 said “In Bush-speak, “democracy” has been perverted to mean U.S. imperial hegemony: nations run by puppet rulers who make all the right noises”

Incredibly, ‘terrorism’ originating in South America against US targets doesn’t seem to exist to any great extent. Who’s betting that will remain the case?

Old News….

The concept of never being able to carry a liquid on a plane again has me rapt with JOY! I feel… I feel… so SAFE. I hope the next step is to have built-in stomach pump SECURITY TECHNOLOGY at airports. Crazy, you say? No, YOU’RE crazy. Everyone has terrorist-sponsored deadly HYDROCHLORIC ACID in their stomachs, PERFECT to bring down an entire plane in a flaming horror going straight to hell. With this new deadly STOMACH ACID PLOT, even your very NEIGHBOUR could be the terrorizer!! Be sure to report their every move to your local police station, ESPECIALLY if there’s a tree involved.

ALRIGHT. Is that fear boiling pretty good now? Ready to be manipulated? Yeah? Okay, here we go:

Airport ban on carrying liquids is permanent, warn security chiefs

Barrie Clement / London Independent | August 25 2006

The 200 million passengers who pass through British airports each year will face high levels of security “permanently”, senior government officials say.

Passengers will be ban-ned from taking liquids bought outside the security screening zone on an “enduring basis”, security experts at the Department for Transport (DfT) said.

The officials indicated that any relaxation of the rules would depend on the development of technology able to detect all potentially explosive liquids, the perceived level of threat and the experience gained from operating the procedures.

At present, the equipment was only partly successful. “It is a big step to go from a concept that works in the lab to one that works in a complex airport environment,” the experts said.

But don’t think they want to make the technology easier to use in the airports – quite the contrary! Total success will ONLY be acheived when security lineups spill out the doors and onto the streets. If passengers aren’t being treated like pigs at a battery farm, the government isn’t doing enough to SERVE them.

The rest of this article goes on much like the bbq piece posted earlier, wait… uh… it’s a LOT like the bbq piece posted earlier… er… you wouldn’t suspect this to be a cut-and-pasted PR piece would you? Why, that would be not only SHOCKING but also SURPRISING!

But MEGA X-RAYZ are not the only helpful new technology coming your way from your friends at the airport. But don’t stop flying, okay? Because that means the terrorists have won. (wait, who are the terrorists again?…)

Do you want to be part of a world of sleeping people? Will you be forever addicted to self-restriction?

Established orthodoxies and dogmas, conditioned interpretations of living, regard the material world as reality whilst pretending to deal with the spirit, or existence.

They conceive and propagate evolution and thinking as purely physical. Their control of our visions is sacrosanct. Establishment modes of control and affiliation, many religious and political, rely upon and revolve around unquestioning faith and dogmas, unquestioning acceptance of their inalienable right to assume professional responsibility for our actions upon their shoulders.

We are told we are weak, incapable of grasping scale, afraid of ourselves and desperate to push responsibility for all events in our lives onto them.

We are insistently trained to accept our corporal existence as hopeless in itself, to become subservient to the greater good. We are perpetually conditioned, encouraged, and blackmailed into self-restriction, into narrower and narrower pereceptions of ourselves — our own importance, our own potential, and our own experience.

We are trained to ignore the evidence of our senses and experiences and to feel guilt when we glimpse sense-derived visions of ourselves as free spirits.
The voluntary relinquishing of responsibility for our lives and actions is one of the greatest enemies of our times. […]

Genesis P. Orridge

Still true, only it hurts more now.

IRAN. NUKE. SHOWDOWN.
reported by Chrish – August 24, 2006 – 39 comments

Just think about that for a moment. It’s simple, it’s concise, it’s scary, and it’s a warning. Are you good and scared? Enough to support the administration in another pre-emptive attack against another country that poses no threat to us? That’s what the drill is and has been at FOX News for months and months now.

William Rivers Pitt wrote in January that

“The intelligence specialists in the United States, Germany and Israel all agree that Iran is between three and five years away from being able to manufacture nuclear weapons. This, of course, is based on the premise that such manufacture is Iran’s goal. Take it as a given that it is, and we have at least three years to use diplomacy, economic pressures and possibly sanctions to keep them from creating these bombs.But “three to five years” isn’t going to help the GOP win the midterm elections. They need things to be scary, and they need things to be scary now. The same right-wing groups that ginned up the fantasy that Iraq was laden with weapons of mass destruction, and was an imminent threat, are now at work building up a martial froth about Iran. They did this in time for the midterms last time, and are preparing to do it again.

United Press International carried a story last Thursday about a group called the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. This group, according to the UPI story, claims that, “Tehran is planning a nuclear weapons test before the Iranian New Year on March 20, 2006.” FDI, according to the story, offered absolutely no proof to back this claim. But that’s not three to five years. That’s less than ten weeks. Scary stuff, right?

Take a closer look, however, and you can see the fingerprints of the architects of our current Iraq boondoggle all over this. The Foundation for Democracy in Iran is run by a man named Kenneth Timmerman. Timmerman is umbilically connected to the godfather of right-wing think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. It was the American Enterprise Institute that spawned the Project for the New American Century, the think tank that gave us Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, the original noise about Iraqi WMD, and the idea that a military takeover of the entire Mideast is a bully idea. The same people that terrorized the American people into unnecessary war in Iraq are preparing to do the same with Iran, and all in time for the midterms.”

And Larissa Alexandrova of rawstory.com has written for Alternet.org :

” The Bush administration continues to bypass standard intelligence channels and use what some believe to be propaganda tactics to create a compelling case for war with Iran, US foreign experts and former US intelligence officials have said.One former senior intelligence official is particularly concerned by private briefings that Vice President Dick Cheney is getting from former Office of Special Plans (OSP) Director, Abram Shulsky.

“Vice President Cheney is relying on personal briefings from Shulsky for current intelligence on Iran,” said this intelligence official.

Shulsky, a leading Neoconservative and member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), headed the shadowy and secretive Department of Defense’s OSP in the lead-up to the Iraq war — helping to locate intelligence that would support the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq.Several foreign policy experts, who wish to remain anonymous, have expressed serious concern that much like the OSP, the ID is manipulating, cherry picking, and perhaps even — as some suspect — cooking intelligence to lead the U.S. into another conflict, this time with Iran.

“Cheney distrusts the information being disseminated by CIA on Iran,” said one former senior intelligence official. “The reports assembled by the Iranian Directorate at the Pentagon differ significantly from the analysis produced by the Intelligence Community. The Pentagon Iranian Directorate relies on thin and unsupported reporting from foreign sources.”

FOX is doing their part in preparing the American public for the necessity of a strike on Iran with an incessant, literal drumbeat of war, evidenced here in part:

The tactic of drilling and repitition has been well documented on this site. Remember the “flip-flop” segment in “Outfoxed“? Tax and spend? Cut and run? This is more of the same, seen regularly on most of the major shows. Viewers are indoctrinated to believing there’s a “showdown” (great, I thought we were done with failed cowboy diplomacy) and Bush is going to swagger into Iran and save us, like he did in Iraq.

I’ll give these people one thing, no matter how horribly things are going they don’t deviate from Plan A. Some people say that’s resolute but more and more people say that’s just dumb. Maybe even insane.

Taken with the recent blatant media manipulation of declaring terror threats for political purposes, this administration retains no credibility to skeptical, tired Americans. Only the ideologically blinded cannot see (or will not see) that they are being yanked around – again. […]

To defeat the bug, you must understand the bug.

Is this really happening? I mean honestly, when we used to see examples of this sort of TV in the movies,  we laughed our bollocks off, and now, its REAL and RIGHT IN OUR FACES.

Would you like to know more?

You should take a look at:

MEMRI’s recording of an extensive Islam Channel interview with former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad, who sounds in parts like a BLOGDIAL reader and 20AC pumper.

The Islam Channel is an amazing resource; it covers all of Europe and its footprint stretches much further afield. Its news shows everything that BBQ wont, and its pundits are down to earth and go for the jugular every time.

The agenda is clearly to maintain a state of alert and panic until such a time that reverting back to ‘normal’ and ‘reasoned’ security measures is forgotten – the new normal becomes the insane and displaying any traits of disobedience to authority figures is taken as a sign of terrorism. Lie detector tests, voice stress analysis technology, advanced screening which produces naked images of passengers along with brain scanner and perspiration tension analysis systems are all being implemented as the notion of innocent until proven guilty is jettisoned without recourse.

The airports are merely a beta test for the exact same measures to be rolled out in major cities, where regular checkpoint officials inspect internal passports and consumers are body scanned to enter a supermarket or any kind of public event as spy drones swoop overhead to catalogue movement and alert authorities to any suspicious body language (remember Poindexter’s gait analysis?).

The key to achieving all this on the part of the Neo-Fascists is to carry out more staged terror attacks on soft targets like sports stadiums, schools and large shopping malls. In terms of police state propaganda, these attacks would be more effective than a 9/11 style event because the implications would reach down into the roots of everyday life.

After more soft target terror attacks on buses and trains, citizens will be forced to biometric scan and show ID just to enter the transport station. Resistors who refuse to take a national ID card and eventually an implanted ID chip will be punished by their exclusion from a trusted travelers program that denotes how well a citizen has behaved and compares that score to the criteria of how and when they can travel. Nationwide toll roads snaking across the US and Britain that use RFID signals at toll booths and instant kill switches in private vehicles will see this nightmare extend its tentacles into the personal vehicle of every citizen.

The majority of what I outlined is already being implemented at major transport and police hubs in the US and Britain. When the technology to automate these measures is more widely used, its cost will drop and in turn spread like wildfire outside of the major cities and into local communities – unless we scream bloody murder and stop it before it makes it out of the airport terminal and onto our street corners. […]

The Watson Report

I agree with this report, except for one point.

Screaming bloody murder is not a strategy. It is on the same level as marching, petion writing and all other pointless, innefective, 20th century energy sapping political strategies.

The only way that this ‘beta’ test is going to be proven to be a failure, and the nationwide rollout prevented is if the small number of people who use the airlines, for a stretch of 14 days, engage in a total boycott of all flights going into or coming out of the UK. As I said before, the root cause all of this is money. The airlines cannot withstand any kind of well organized boycott. These regulatoins can be dismantled in 21 days or less, and all it will take is one organized action to pull it off.

It will be seen that the beta test has failed, and not only that, the understanding of the new rules of engagement will be revealed to everyone at once.

Nothing less than this will do to solve the problem. The tools to do it ar in our hands. All you have to do is…DO IT.

Do I have to spell out how to organize a boycott? I sure hope not.

The threat of liquid explosives would remain, as it was not possible to “uninvent” a threat, but the ways in which it was dealt with could change, officials said.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5281896.stm

The mind BOGGLES at the illogic of these people.

They invent a threat, and then say everyone must suffer because they cannot uninvent what they have invented!

The comletely bogus ‘ricin plot’ is no different from this ‘liquid bomb plot’. It is a fiction, an invention, a fairy tale, a sham, a circus, a fraud, a deception, a shake-down, a fourberie, a ruse.

I’ll tell you about ‘uninvention’; the beasts who are behind this are going to be uninvented very shortly, at the polls.

This absurd baggage ban demonstrates that the Soviet yearning snakes at the helm are wiling to destroy Britain as a place of culture…without any reason whatsoever. This is hardly surprising; after all, they think that Ballet is not suitable for charity status since it is a ‘liesure activity’ and not an art. Classical music? Like private schools, its for the elite only, not fit for charitable status and should be banned altogether.

This is the true nature of the unimaginable beasts that have taken over this country. They have now locked all fine instruments into Britain and locked out all fine instruments. This means that if Hélène Clerc-Murgier wants to come here with her instrument, she cannot. It means that all classical musicians in the UK cannot get out with their instruments.

This is total insanity.

For years people have been threatening to blow up planes…and sometimes they got away with it. At no time did anyone ever suggest that everyone everywhere should be penalized due to the actions of a small number of people, and that was in the days when the threat was not manufactured; in the days of the Red Brigade, Baader-Mienhof, and Carlos ‘The Jackal’ . Are we now supposed to cower like dogs because a couple of bearded STUDENTS chat about ‘bombz’ on teh internetz?

Come on!

Ministers are to announce next month that they have overturned a key data protection principle which prevents information on individual citizens held by one government department from being passed to another public agency, the Guardian has learned.

It is believed that a cabinet committee, MISC 31, set up by Tony Blair to examine data sharing and chaired by Hilary Armstrong, the chief whip, decided last month to overturn the principle that personal information provided to a government department for one purpose should in general not be used for another.

Last month? WTF on whose authority (I’m sure that this question doesn’t ‘matter’ anyway). In any case this is a key decision in allowing the NIR to be used as a hub for government busybodying, snooping and before you can say ‘Salamitaktik’ Aleikum – Control over day to day activity. This is exactly the way the government can say $PRIVATE_DATA will not be stored on the National Identity Register even though anyone with NIR information will be able to access a government database with that information on it.

The current policy means that public bodies and departments must provide a legal justification each time they want to share data about individuals and specify the purpose. The new policy will reverse this and allow officials to assume that personal data can be shared unless there are pressing reasons not to disclose it.

This basically means no one is going to bother checking why a DEFRA official is so interested in your Driving License or why someone from the MOD is checking your tax returns. This is also the the attitude towards data sharing in the US and what makes their Social security Numbers so valued for fraud using information gathered by the state.

Mr Suffolk has denied there will be free trade across Whitehall in personal information: “Not all information will be shared,” he said. “This is not about sharing your health record or criminal record. It is about basic data sharing to ensure that services to citizens are seamless.”

Not YET. You wouldn’t have imagined a backroom committee would be able to overturn data protection policy would you? And, again, at whose bequest/with what safeguards? Who is this Mr Suffolk, without legislative responsibilities, that we are supposed to trust with this statement?

(John Suffolk, the former Director General of Criminal Justice, is the new government CIO…An IT veteran with a CV stretching back over 25 years including a stint as IT director at the Britannia Building Society, Suffolk will report in to Ian Watmore, the previous holder of the post and now Head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit…In his spare time, Suffolk helps run a farm for rare breeds.)

It is expected that the change of policy on data sharing will be presented as a consumer-friendly move.

To call the public consumers in relation to government services is still a distortion of the relationship.

Officials say that when a family move home, they could register their new address online with their local authority, which would then update the records of the new local authority and pass the information to the driving licence authorities, the tax authorities and the electoral registrar.

At least half of this does not concern central government in its current role (and in the utopian future none of this would need to be handled by central government).

…Critics claim that an unpaid parking ticket for someone on benefits could lead to that information being passed to the Benefits Agency and the fine deducted directly.

Or perhaps you will be denied medical care unless you top up your NI contribution, more likely, overpaid tax credits will be automagically deducted from your pay packet. Give with one hand, take with the other and pay ‘commission’ on both that’s the reality of Brown’s top down economic view – I digress.

So the need to shed the state from your life becomes even greater. The gap between rich and poor expands, between those who can afford privacy and those who are bullied into justifying their lives to all and sundry. Unless unless…

Via the Guardian who are also doing some good exposing of the massively over budget NHS IT coordination project (you can feel the wasted billions in NIR implementation in your veins – furring them up like cholesterol)

A Home Office radio commercial publicising a child protection website has been banned because it could have led people to pornographic material. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the advert could not be broadcast again in its current form.

The website advertised, thinkuknow.co.uk, advises children on how to stay safe online.

But a listener who misspelt the address found a series of links led her to adult porn websites.

[…]

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), which has now taken over the radio campaign, said the pornographic material was at least four clicks away from the misspelt web address. […]
!!!

I can’t think of anything here that isn’t probably already whizzing through your brains. Even all those inane Kevin Bacon triplets.

But at least our kiddies are now safe!

Blair has created over 3,000 new criminal offences during his time in office – one for every day of his tenure and six times the amount created by Tory predecessors John Major and Margaret Thatcher. Allied with a raft of authoritarian anti-terror legislation, social behavior mandates and hate speech restrictions – ridiculous measures such as criminalizing the nomination of a neighbor to turn off your house alarm have also been introduced.

The so-called ‘liberal’ Blair has instituted a police state that obliterates anything the traditionally imperious Tories could ever get through.

In addition to the frenzied lawmaking, Blair has overseen the abolition of jury rights, handing cases likely to last over 3 months to the dictate of a single judge, criminalized any protest not authorized by the government under the Serious Organised Crime Act, mandated the entry of any protester into a terror database upon police questioning, created glorification of terror laws that are so sweeping they could apply to any form of free speech, eradicated habeus corpus by introducing house arrests and ever-increasing time lengths of detention without charge, attacked the notion of guilty until proven innocent by imposing curfews for under 16’s, supported the use of intelligence knowingly obtained from torture in Uzbekistan and allowed the use of British airports for the ‘extraordinary rendition’ of terror suspects, created framework for the introduction of mandatory ID cards and implemented a national DNA database that stores records for eternity even if the suspect is acquitted of their crime.

Using the fear of terror, Blair has presided over the destruction of liberty in Britain and the final act may be another devastating attack to herd the sheep back into their pens and leave the path clear for a Tory takeover and a continuation of the same Neo-Fascist doctrine. […]

The Watson Report

80%. That’s alot of people!

We have to get to the point (like the Spanish have) that even if there is another attack, it will not be enought to get the population ‘on side’.

But I said this before!

Strict security measures at UK airports are having a “devastating impact” on musicians, says the Musicians’ Union. It says its members “are reporting significant lost earnings” because they are unable to take their instruments on board aircraft as hand luggage.

Many instruments are too fragile to be placed in the hold of an airliner, the union told the BBC News website.

But the Department for Transport said the security regulations will “be in place for as long as they need to be”.

Under the rules, passengers are allowed one item of cabin baggage, which must be no larger than a laptop bag.

A spokeswoman at the Department for Transport said instruments would have to be checked into the hold until the security situation is downgraded. […]

Your comments on this story:

It’s the damage inflicted by temperature which is a major issue Simon, London

It’s not only the danger of damage from the instruments being knocked about, it’s the damage inflicted by temperature which is a major issue. Extreme cold will more than likely split the wood, or possibly damage the valves of many instruments. Then, going from the cold to the heat will more than likely warp the wood, making them unplayable.

Sadly, it isn’t as simple as packing instruments in a flight case.

There was a cellist on my flight to Belfast on Monday who had no problems getting it in the cabin, and stored at the front of the plane. For those travelling to the States I’d probably suggest flying out to Schipol/Charles De Gaule and then back over to America. OR fly to canada and then a local flight into the states.
Steve, Belfast/London

[…]

I am a professional violinist living in London and would like to point out that although it is a similar situation for other professions, I would be very surprised if any other equipment that people carry on to a plane can be valued in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds. Optical equipment such as cameras etc. are factory produced and made in numbers. Our instruments have an intrinsic cultural value and uniqueness that make them an exception.
JM, London

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5273576.stm

Lots of comments on this story at BBQ.

As we can see from the comment above, people are already avoiding the US and UK to play and work and live in places that are not in thrall to this mass hysteria. It is the loss of the people of the UK and the USA to not have these great performers and their instruments, and they deserve this fate, because they are sheepishly going along with this total farce, the only person standing up against it being the boss of Ryan Michael O’Leary…. who is Irish!
These ‘security’ arrangements are absurd. Everyone knows it, and yet, they go along with it, and whine like children on BBQs comments instead of attacking the root cause of the problem; Bliar and the wholley owned Mass Murder Cabal Murder inc. .
I will say it again. If you do not want everything you have loved to be destroyed by Murder Inc. you had better WAKE UP and PUT YOUR FOOT DOWN and refuse to finance this insane cabal of villains, who lie to your face, with absurd double talk, platitudes and nonsense that not even a child would believe.

And as for an example of instant self contradiction:

I would like to reassure the public that we are doing everything we can to keep you safe, for you to live your lives without being in constant fear.

However, we must be realistic. The threat from terrorism is real, it is here, it is deadly and it is enduring.

You cant make shit like this up. And as for the rest of that article:

I shall try to give you an idea of the size and complexity of this investigation.

There have been 69 searches.

These have been in houses, flats and business premises, vehicles and open spaces.

As well as the bomb making equipment, we have found more than 400 computers, 200 mobile telephones and 8,000 items of removable storage media such as memory sticks, CDs and DVDs.

So far, from the computers alone, we have removed some 6,000 gigabytes of data.

The meticulous investigation of all this material will take many months. All the data will be analysed.

This is TOTAL HOGWASH. If they have charges to bring, then they have enough evidence to charge, and all of this garbage is totally irrelevant. They have, by their own admission, been monitoring these people for over a year. During that time it must be an absolute fact that they have VOLUMES of information about these people. This is just pathetic window dressing to try and keep the hysterial level high. They say they have found 200 telephones. So what? They have been bugging those phones for over a year, and have built up social networks for all 200 of those numbers, guaranteed. To list that they have these telephones is just grandstanding. And as for the computer equipment, all of it is irrelevant. These people were caught because they communicated, and they (so they claim) were arrested with incriminating items in their posession, enough to bring a charge. This dirty washing list is simply nonsense, and no one is buying it…at least no one that can think is bying it.

Note how nothing is being said about the people released without charge. How is it that they can have a group of people under ‘unprecedented surveillance’ for over a year and then STILL arrest innocent people?! What would they have had to say in the cells that could have exhonerated them that could not be gleaned during the extreme surveillance? The mind boggles at these people’s incompetence. But I digress.

We would not be discussing this at all if this great country was being run on the behalf of and in the interests of its citizens. England would not be the second nation listed every time people talk about war crimes and injustice.

None of this should be hapenning in the first place.

The life that you loved and drank down like free mountain water is being eroded on a daily basis. The knock on effect, the erosion of culture, free exchange of ideas, meeting people EVERYTHING is going to be shut down and then ground into dust before your very eyes.

I had a ‘heads up’ to watch a re-run of a 2003 episode of ‘Dinner with Portillo‘. This is a discussion programme where Tory Michael Portillo chats around a dinner table with the great and the good and the thick, discussing current events. The episode is entitled ‘Ameria’.

Last nights episode featured Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, George Galloway MP, and Rosemary Righter, chief leader writer The Times.

It was PRICELESS.

All of the idiotic blinkered jackasses, cheifly Rosemary Righter, were ridiculed in the light of the Iraq debacle by their own narrow minded, inexperienced foam mouthed blatherings, all of which proved to be wrong. Georgeous George was TOTALLY VINDICATED, as he predicted absolutely and perfectly, the situation that Iraq is in right now.

Portillo came off looking silly. The Guardian writer displayed that anemic innefective posture that they are so good at. The american displayed every trait that caused the programme to have to be made in the first place. Once again, most revolting and disturbing was Rosemary Righter; venemous, unrepentant, lie barking, slandering monster, the type of which is responsible for all of our troubles and of whom there seem to be an unlimited supply.
When the history of all this is written by an honest person, George Galloway will finally be revealed as the only honest person who understood the whole problem and told the trugh throughout.

Not since the Social Democrat Party collapsed after a false start has a major political party in this country fallen from grace so shamefully. 1997’s ‘love in’ between England and New Labour began in good spirit, with the prospect of a justifiable Blair victory to balance out two decades that had already seen two long Conservative leaderships. A full house at Westminster enjoyed ‘spin politics’ at its best, skewed, indulgent and controlled – but nothing in the Chamber was as extraordinary as the way the trust ended outside it.

When one Minister, Peter Hain, applauded Blair’s first five years after admitting that the agenda had been tampered with, an upset and angry UK population worked on until tea. Even then their failure to refuse to pay taxes promptly allowed a chaotic display of aggression, in which first the US and then the UK governments appeared to order air strikes in Iraq. A country that prides itself on the spirit of fair play was plunged into a sad and resentful disharmony. This may have bitter consequences for both politics and international relations in this country.

Last year the black clouds gathering over The Oval Office mirrored the mood of the 20 UK and 22 US politicians inside it. The bewildered faces were not sure whether there would be a Middle East to exploit today – only later was it confirmed that the oil was secure and had been awarded to ‘The Coalition’. Past bad blood between Iran and the US sides had boiled over to produce an inexplicable stand-off: no evidence had been produced to support the suspicion of nuclear weapons.

The Police Complaints Commission remained silent on the policing issues last night. Labour insist that their protest at judges’ leniency was intended to be a brief and token one, but a dispute that began within the Cabinet ended with Mr Blair and his colleague, John Reid, refusing to rescind bad legislation. This turned an incident that could have been resolved into a childish and destructive stand-off. The dispute was not between the police and muslims, which should allow the forthcoming one day melas to continue. But it can only fuel the alienation felt by some British Muslims at a time of great strain.

Today all flights should have continued, with the lost time being made up – it is now clear that is not going to happen. In due course Mr Reid and his fellow officials should be asked to present their evidence to the public.

Today, Brown is predicted for the leadership and the man might in any case prove to be a washout. However, it is a shame that Blair’s pride, rather than necessity has brought the party to unnatural legislation.

Not the Guardian leader