Domestic Extremists

I think the essence of the current expose of our police state is in Mark Thomas’ piece-

The Metropolitan police circulated the card specifically for the Docklands biannual arms fair in London to help its officers identify “people at specific events who may instigate offences or disorder”. Which is such a flattering quote I am thinking of having it on my next tour poster. While being wanted outside the arms fair, I was legitimately inside researching a book on the subject, and uncovered four companies illegally promoting “banned” torture equipment. Questions were later asked in the Commons as to why HM Revenue & Customs and the police didn’t spot it. Though, in fairness, none of the torture traders featured on the spotter card.

It’s all about who is perceived as the enemy and who is not, and who has power and who does not. That we expect more of the police is testament to the effectiveness of corporate media and their incessant cops shows that eulogise mythic heroes with badges. They are doing a job and the job is what the people with the most capital tell them it is, now that shouldn’t be the case in a democracy.

All three units divide their work into four categories of domestic extremism: animal rights campaigns; far-right groups such as the English Defence League; “extreme leftwing” protest groups, including anti-war campaigners; and “environmental extremism” such as Climate Camp and Plane Stupid campaigns.

So as a vegetarian, anti-imperialist with an eco-socialist bent, it’s suspicious I get 3 out of 4. If I was pro-war, loved vivisection and ran a hedge fund this new secret police project would work out just peachy for me. A political secret police force, are we sure when the Berlin Wall came down that wasn’t actually a successful invasion by the Stasi? Seems only the EDL makes it as unacceptable right wing behaviour (although to be fair surely they would also qualify as special needs too? An issue for social workers as well as the police).

Concern about the environment (y’know that thing we all live in and without we’d sort of die) the beasties within it (that includes us) and a disliking of the propensity for some of the human beasties to kill and torture others so they can steal their stuff makes me a dangerous subversive, a domestic extremist. My conscience can sit a whole lot better with that than it could if say… I were a policeman. The warning from recent history is Neoliberalism leads to a police state, it can only survive through an authoritarian repression of the disempowered, poor and disenfranchised, dissent is necessarily crushed. The challenges that face the human race are vast, our own life support system is in danger but those who cause the worst damage also hold the most power and Change is naught but a brand for election marketing purposes. The repression of those with a vision of the future that is not just Mad Max writ large is suicidally stupid, but that’s not even in contention. What happens now happens because it keeps the ruling class & corporatocracy where they believe they should be and if that leaves the vast majority of the human race utterly fucked, well that’s where the whole police thing comes into play (and internationally the military). These reports show they are just diligently laying the groundwork to maintain control on behalf of the criminals who are causing this crisis, through ACPO & their familiars they are choosing to do this more enthusiastically then ever. As Chief Constables socialise with corporate CEO’s it is inevitable they identify with them, their world view and their solutions, not to mention the big wodges of cash to be had. I don’t think most people want it this way, I don’t think people of good conscience want to have to treat the police as a hostile occupying paramilitary force, just as rank and file ought to realise this is inevitable if this continues.

Prevent=Stasi

The government and police have repeatedly denied that the £140m programme is a cover for spying on Muslims in Britain. But sources directly involved in running Prevent schemes say it involves gathering intelligence about the thoughts and beliefs of Muslims who are not involved in criminal activity.

Read the rest, and look how the Quilliam Foundation earns its keep. (ht2 Dave)

Every Car Journey Logged By Police

The BBC have a new series Who’s Watching You, a filleted excerpt (sans establishment friendly ‘balance’) from the story they are leading with to promote it-

A national network of cameras and computers automatically logging car number plates will be in place within months, the BBC has learned.

A number of local councils are signing up their Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems to the ANPR network. As long as the cameras are technically good enough, they can be adapted to take the software.

John Dean, who is co-ordinating the ANPR network for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: “It’s the finest intelligence-led policing tool we’ve got.

John Catt found himself on the wrong side of the ANPR system. He regularly attends anti-war demonstrations outside a factory in Brighton, his home town.

It was at one of these protests that Sussex police put a “marker” on his car. That meant he was added to a “hotlist”.

This is a system meant for criminals but John Catt has not been convicted of anything and on a trip to London, the pensioner found himself pulled over by an anti-terror unit.

“I was threatened under the Terrorist Act. I had to answer every question they put to me, and if there were any questions I would refuse to answer, I would be arrested. I thought to myself, what kind of world are we living in?”

Sussex police would not talk about the case.

The police say they do not know how many cameras there are in total, and they say that for operational reasons they will not say where the fixed cameras are positioned.

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, whose job it is to protect personal data, has concerns about the lack of regulation. He said: “There’s very little monitoring. I mean, my office has very limited powers. We have very limited resources. We are not actively monitoring that area. You’re right to ask the question. No one’s checking it at the moment”

Note the repeating themes -the private corporation the Association of Chief Police Officers working with government, surveillance industry friendly surveys & implementation and the misuse of terror laws to harass dissenters. End stage neoliberal authoritarianism is shaping up nicely (even with the odd hiccup). Worth reading again- China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export. We have this myth put about that capitalism = democracy/freedom (not least by Edward Bernays) it is PR concocted by corporations, China is a capitalist as they come these days. We are converging towards endemic surveillance, it’s funny London will host the next Olympics. It’s all going to be a shiny happy corporate world and anyone who says different, might need to be watched, closely.

For Muslim Men The UK Is A Secret Police State Already

Five Muslim community workers have accused MI5 of waging a campaign of blackmail and harassment in an attempt to recruit them as informants. The men claim they were given a choice of working for the Security Service or face detention and harassment in the UK and overseas.

They have made official complaints to the police, to the body which oversees the work of the Security Service and to their local MP Frank Dobson. Now they have decided to speak publicly about their experiences in the hope that publicity will stop similar tactics being used in the future.

Three of the men say they were detained at foreign airports on the orders of MI5 after leaving Britain on family holidays last year.

After they were sent back to the UK, they were interviewed by MI5 officers who, they say, falsely accused them of links to Islamic extremism. On each occasion the agents said they would lift the travel restrictions and threat of detention in return for their co-operation. When the men refused some of them received what they say were intimidating phone calls and threats.

Two other Muslim men say they were approached by MI5 at their homes after police officers posed as postmen. Each of the five men, aged between 19 and 25, was warned that if he did not help the security services he would be considered a terror suspect. A sixth man was held by MI5 for three hours after returning from his honeymoon in Saudi Arabia. He too claims he was threatened with travel restrictions if he tried to leave the UK.

An agent who gave her name as Katherine is alleged to have made direct threats to Adydarus Elmi, a 25-year-old cinema worker from north London. In one telephone call she rang him at 7am to congratulate him on the birth of his baby girl. His wife was still seven months’ pregnant and the couple had expressly told the hospital that they did not want to know the sex of their child.

Mr Elmi further alleges: “Katherine tried to threaten me by saying, and it still runs through my mind now: ‘Remember, this won’t be the last time we ever meet.’ And then during our last conversation she explained: ‘If you do not want anything to happen to your family you will co-operate.'”

More @ The Independent 
Remember Bisher al Rawi, who ended up in Gitmo after he was approached, worked for MI5 and then subject to extraordinary rendition and torture when he was framed as a ‘terror suspect’ for having …a battery charger from Argos. It looks like they are using tougher blackmail & harassment tactics now that rendition and the black site prison network are more common knowledge. For young Muslim men in Britain this amounts to an almost apartheid condition, note they have gone to the papers with this suggesting the exhaustive avenues they took of normal redress were not so helpful. Even now the men arrested in Manchester are being denied their rights and the government looks to deport them -in a fit of pique (?)- after finding zero evidence. The NUS Black Students’ Campaign (or here) have passed a motion supporting these students and Hicham Yezza.

114 Arrested in Mysterious Police Action

Obviously there are no assaults, rapes or murders to be dealt with in Nottingham, they have time to surveil and then mass arrest climate activists before they do anything, note the corporation that runs the power station is working with the police…

More than 100 people have been arrested in Nottingham over a suspected plan to target a power station. Police said 114 men and women were arrested in Sneinton Dale on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage. Officers said they believed those arrested were planning to protest at nearby Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.

More than 200 police officers from Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Staffordshire and British Transport Police were involved in the arrests at the Iona School.

Eon, which operates the power station, said it was helping the police with their investigation.

Residents in the suburb of Sneinton contacted the BBC with reports of a large police presence in the area. Tess Rearden, who lives near where the arrests were made, said she saw 20 police vehicles. She said: “It was all slamming of doors and van doors and all these vans were coming up here – police vans, riot vans. My son came out of his bedroom and he said: ‘Have you seen what’s going on out front? They were all up and down the roads here. It was bedlam, real bedlam.”

Residents said handcuffed suspects sang loudly as they were led away. Susan Lawson, 56, who lives opposite the school, said: “The police said to me ‘get in the house and don’t come out’. Then I saw them bringing people out of the school gates in handcuffs and putting them into vans. The vans kept coming back to pick up more of them. Police had big black and yellow bin bags full of something which they took away. I was shocked, I couldn’t get back to sleep afterwards. It was terrible.”

Speaking on behalf of Eastside Climate Action, Bob Andrews said: “We don’t know anything about the arrests last night. It wasn’t us and we don’t know who has been arrested. But if people were planning to shut [the plant] down like we tried to do two years ago then that is great news. We would fully support people taking safe and responsible action to stop carbon emissions. Ratcliffe is the third biggest single source of CO2 in the country; it has got to be closed down if we are serious about climate change.”

Sir Veiled

Makes you proud seeing out ickle country being reported like this [excerpts]-

McClatchy Newspapers– In an era when security is the top concern for officials in many countries — reinforced by November’s deadly attacks in Mumbai — it takes a lot to be labeled “the most surveilled democracy in the world.” In the case of Britain, the label is not necessarily meant as a compliment. Some — including the European Court of Human Rights — fear that the snooping has run amok.

“Britain is regarded as the society to avoid” for its pervasive surveillance and disregard for personal privacy, said Colin Bennett, a British-born author and academic at the University of Vancouver in Canada. He contends the surveillance culture is “out of control,” targeting not just suspected terrorists and criminals but millions of ordinary people.

Studies in the U.S. and Britain suggest the cameras are a limited deterrent in combating crime and terrorism. They appear to reduce crime when installed in confined spaces, such as parking garages, but are much less effective on open streets and plazas. Experts in surveillance suggest that the boom in camera use is partly driven by an aggressive private sector that pushes technology as the solution to social problems, and the insistence of insurance companies that businesses have cameras in place.

Cameras, however, are just the beginning of the surveillance drive. Having begun to issue national identity cards, the Labor government has also proposed a new law giving police the power to arrest anyone who can’t produce identity papers on demand.

If you’re in a big crowd in Britain, look up. British authorities now use miniature, unmanned “drones” carrying aerial cameras to watch crowds at large events.

A proposed national telecommunications bill allowing the government to monitor all electronic communications has been delayed due to protests from opposition politicians, but many experts predict it will ultimately be passed.

The latest big controversy centers on the database of DNA samples collected from anyone arrested by police. Murakami-Wood said there is “very little control” over the database, which includes a disproportionate number of black men and even children as young as 12, he said. The European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, France, agrees. It ruled unanimously Thursday that the database violates the right of privacy. According to the ruling, more than 1 million samples of people found innocent, among the 4.6 million in the total database, must be destroyed.

“Most people ignore it” when new surveillance cameras go up in their neighborhoods, said Fabien Cox, a 48-year-old consultant to the international water industry. Holding a pint of beer as he stood at the bar of Orwell’s favorite pub, the centuries-old Compton Arms, Cox admitted he was more accepting since a double-decker bus traveling his normal route to work was blown up during the 2005 attacks.

God help the international water industry.

Enemy Mine

NuLabour trying to sneak through massive surveillance? Why I’ve never heard the like!

You might suppose that the economic tornado hitting Britain would cause the government to focus its energy and resources very tightly on the political projects that are of undoubted value. This is not, after all, the moment to be wasting either political or financial capital. But you would be wrong. Faced with a crisis that it patently can’t control, the government is instead seeking to exert power where it still can: over us.

The state’s latest plan to watch us makes every other imminent intrusion seem limited. Next month’s Queen’s speech will contain a brief reference to an innocuous-sounding communications data bill. But what this means is the development of a centralised database that will track, in real time, every call we make, every website we visit, and every text and email we send. That information will then be stored and analysed – perhaps for decades. It will mean the end of privacy as we know it.

Except data mining doesn’t really work in the catch the eveel terrorist type way-

But the authors conclude the type of data mining that government bureaucrats would like to do–perhaps inspired by watching too many episodes of the Fox series 24–can’t work. “If it were possible to automatically find the digital tracks of terrorists and automatically monitor only the communications of terrorists, public policy choices in this domain would be much simpler. But it is not possible to do so.”

The report was written by a committee whose members include William Perry, a professor at Stanford University; Charles Vest, the former president of MIT; W. Earl Boebert, a retired senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories; Cynthia Dwork of Microsoft Research; R. Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle’s police chief; and Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google.

So the state is left with a huge unwieldy system that will however be useful as control-

We all have a gulf between who we really are and the face we present to the world. Suddenly that barrier will be taken away. Would a protester at the Kingsnorth power station feel quite so confident in facing the police if she knew that the minute she was arrested, the police could find out that she’d just spent a week looking at abortion on the web? Would a rebel politician stand up against the prime minister if he knew security services had access to the 100 text messages a week he exchanged with a woman who wasn’t his wife? It isn’t just the certainty that such data would be used against people that is a deterrent, it’s the fear. As the realisation of this power grew, we would gradually start living in the prison of our minds.

Naomi Klein on Golden Shield

Some excerpts and um, everywhere the story is the same, our governments are all enthusiastically implementing similar measures. (ht2 Mahatma X Files).

China-bashing never fails to soothe the Western conscience — here is a large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and democracy, is so much worse than Bush’s America. But during my time in Shenzhen, China’s youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).

Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious system of online controls known as the “Great Firewall.” Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it “captures” more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security’s massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with “mobile iris and multimodal devices” so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department’s “largest facial-recognition database system”; and produces driver’s licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in “extremely general” terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company’s CEO would only say, “Stay tuned.”

It is L-1’s deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn’t just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it’s U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1’s China dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his face.

Data Mine

Ministers are to consider plans for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK, it has emerged. The plans, reported in the Times, are at an early stage and may be included in the draft Communications Bill later this year, the Home Office confirmed. A Home Office spokesman said the data is a “crucial tool” for protecting national security and preventing crime. Ministers have not seen the plans which were drawn up by Home Office officials.

Where do they get their ideas?

Ominous Phrase Of The Week

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation’s most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea’s legal authority.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department’s new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities — such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. The department has previously said the program will not intercept communications.

Define ‘resolved’…

28 Daze Later

While we fight an extension to detention (oh yeah!) without charge to 42 days/six weeks (maybe they think 42 days will give them the answer to life, the universe & everything- or in other words 41 days of torture and one day to sign the piece of paper they put in front of you), let’s not forget it already is 28 days/4 weeks which puts us in line with…Burma and Ming the Merciless probably. At the end of all this the best we have achieved is not to have a 42 day/6 week limit. We are still busily building ourselves a real world theme park based on the hit film Brazil.

So Dear Establishment-

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.

Let ’em know- They Work For You.

‘The Wire’ Writers Call For Resistance To The Drug War

Via Tom @ Automatic Preference: If you don’t know about the Wire, I would find out if I were you, the writers here include the creators and include a former journalist, a former detective & teacher, all award winning writers who in  The Wire have crafted something that appears to be a TV drama but was something far more significant a depiction of the failing dysfunctional institutions of a city, the drugs war, the police, the schools, the working class, the media, politics and how capitalism is devaluing human beings day by day. Here they call for civil disobedience and becoming part of resistance to the failed policies rather than a collaborator-

The Wire’s War on the Drug War
By Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they’ve invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?

And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.

Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That’s the world’s highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we’ve been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren’t any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America’s most profound and enduring policy failure.

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn’t resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren’t fictional.

Drones, The Cost Effective Killer

This report backs up what Naomi Klein wrote, that the Israeli weapons industry benefits from using attacks on Palestine as a testing ground for new technology. Which becomes another incentive against peace.

Palestinians say they know when an Israeli drone is in the air: Cell phones stop working, TV reception falters and they can hear a distant buzzing. They also know what’s likely to come next — a devastating explosion on the ground.

“Our experience is that the drone missile is successful in hitting its targets, and it’s deadly,” said Dr. Mahmoud Assali, a Palestinian physician who works in the emergency room of a northern Gaza Strip hospital that has often treated Palestinian gunmen hit by Israeli drones.

“The drone has a zone of around 15 meters (50 feet) where it decimates everything. It targets people and leaves them in pieces,” Assali said.

Israel is at the forefront of the drone technology that is increasingly being used in hotspots around the world. The unmanned craft provide a deadly and cost-effective alternative for armies to target enemies

A militant from the southern Gaza Strip who belongs to the Islamic Jihad group said drones were mostly used to target individuals, and not structures. He said they often hovered at much higher altitudes than manned aircraft and their missiles were frequently more destructive, leaving deep gashes where they landed.

The militant said the drones usually targeted slow-moving targets, like people walking, or cars slowing down to avoid potholes in a road.

“It looks like it makes small circles in the sky, but before it’s about to fire a missile, it slows down,” the militant said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he feared being identified by Israel. “It’s not like any other plane. You don’t see the missile leaving, it’s very quiet.”

Israel has long been considered the world leader in drone technology and proudly exhibits its products at international air shows. But it maintains its drones are for surveillance purposes, and refuses to confirm using them in airstrikes.

Doron Suslik, a top official at the Israel Aerospace Industries, which manufactures drones, said the company has customers from all over the world, including Switzerland, France and India, with annual sales of $500 million to $600 million.

He refused to divulge the drone’s military capabilities, citing his clients’ desire for confidentiality. Government and army officials also refused to comment on the drone’s firing capabilities.

The use of drones is shrouded in secrecy, and Israeli defense officials refuse to comment publicly on whether they are being used in airstrikes in Gaza. However, Israeli officers in private conversations have confirmed use of the weapons.

Gitmo Torture Tapes Not Wiped

The claim they were wiped was a deliberate misdirection, the tapes wiped were standard CCTV security tapes not the recordings of interrogations, but the Admiral they wheeled out deliberately blurred the distinction to give the impression the torture tapes were wiped.

Cernig @ Atlargely:-

Just over a week ago, the Seton Hall Law’s Center for Policy and Research published a report that said military records and statements showed over 24,000 tapes had been made of interrogations carried out at Guantánamo Bay. The same day, a Washington Post article following up on that report said that many of those recordings might have been taped over, destroying valuable evidence. That article was based upon a court filing “by Guantanamo’s commander, Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, who said video surveillance recordings in several areas of the facility have been automatically overwritten and no longer exist”.

However, in an email and a comment to my posts on the subject, Michael Ricciardelli – one of the co-authors of the Seton Hall Law report – wrote –

There seems to be some confusion stemming from the Military (there’s a surprise) and the press concerning the “automatic over-writes” on the video recorders in hallways and common areas in Guantanamo. These cameras (think in terms of the video cameras in convenience stores– but more sophisticated) were said to have recorded “day-to-day” “mundane” life at Guantanamo. According to the Military, every certain number of days these “hallway” and “common area” monitor recording systems automatically taped over themselves( i.e., were “overwritten”).

These statements came from a declaration of Rear Admiral Mark H. Buzby, United States Navy on February 8, 2008 (case 1:05-cv-00023-RWR Document84-4; Washington Post, February 14, 2008). Importantly, these “hallway” and “common area” monitor recordings are specifically NOT video recordings of interrogations– And the Rear Admiral is exceedingly careful to NOT say that they are in his declaration; though, perhaps, it could be anticipated that because of the way the declaration was made the media would confuse the two separate and distinct issues. Which is to say, that the responsive statement’s by Rear Admiral Buzby have misdirected and now obfuscate the issue. As such, some of the media reporting has failed to make clear this distinction between the “day-to-day” video recording and the video recording of interrogations. This distinction, however, is readily apparent if one looks to the partially redacted text of Rear Admiral Buzby’s declaration.

So copious evidence of war crimes exists in the possession of the perpetrators, if they are not seized soon and investigated (and impeachment of the Commander in Chief and the co-conspirators in creating the legal ‘gray ‘ framework for torture and the medical professionals who also took part) then they get away with war crimes previously the United States has convicted people for. And the journey into the abyss continues.

There are key stages in a descent into this depravity, points at which the correct action, pressure applied, leverage utilised can turn course, points that once you go beyond it becomes much harder to change course. Iraq was a key one, a tipping point of the project and let’s forget the 911 excuses, it was planned before that, the warrantless wiretap program began before that, American torture manuals were written before that. All the tools were available, the empire was already far reaching and corrupt when the Bush project took power through his brother’s state Florida and a biased packed Supreme Court. And with the means, the motive & the opportunity, they got to work. Time to make some choices people. Time for action.

Friday Nooz Dumped!

Knowing the IAEA report would be an overwhelminlgy positive one on Iran’s nuclear program the US threw a spanner in the works, at the last minute (last Friday) they dumped a load of ‘intelligence’ from a laptop they claim contains plans of Iranian weapon programs. However the provenance of this laptop is a bit…how shall we say…yellow cakey? So the IAEA report includes some mention of these accusations which the Iranians have for now angrily dismissed. This has now been used to help the six sanctions crazed western powers to bolster their plans for a package of measures to be announced next week. See how that works?

The empire’s occupation forces in Iraq breathed a sigh of relief- Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mahdi army militia to extend its cease-fire for another six months. While the damage form a previous war is still being denied in the imperial courtroom-

A federal appeals court upheld on Friday the dismissal of a civil lawsuit against major U.S. chemical companies brought by Vietnamese plaintiffs over the use of the defoliant “agent orange” during the Vietnam War. The ruling, handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, concluded the plaintiffs could not pursue their claims against Dow Chemical Co, Monsanto Co and nearly 30 other companies. The lawsuit contended agent orange caused ailments, including birth defects and cancer.

Uzbekistan is a country our government tries to deport people to saying it is a safe place, it now claims to have abolished the death penalty-

SURAT IKRAMOV– In the past, death penalty verdicts were handed down on the basis of two articles in the criminal code — murder with intent, article 97, and terrorism, article 155. Between 2002 and 2007, we have monitored trails on both these counts. We have demonstrated that in almost half the cases the charges were fabricated and the defendants subjected to torture. Guilt was not proven in the trails.

But despite this, the courts sentenced innocent people to death under pressure from the executive branch of power. At the same time, the real criminals were allowed to go free. So, with the abolition of the death penalty those illegally sentenced to death could gradually have the chance of being exonerated — that is if the real killers or terrorists are actually arrested. 

Once again the free market fails and begs the government to help protect their profits-

The government has said it will review the future of broadband internet in the UK amid calls that it should help firms pay for installing new infrastructure.

And will MI5 own up to it’s dirty war in Ireland? Whadya reckon?

MI5 operated in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles – running large numbers of agents and informers.There have been allegations that it was involved in collusion with republican and loyalist paramilitaries. Lord Eames and Mr Bradley want all groups involved in the Troubles to tell the truth about their role. They met the Director General of MI5 in London on Friday afternoon to discuss how much it is prepared to reveal.

And the dirty drone war in Pakistan-

In the weeks before the election Monday, a series of meetings among President George W. Bush’s national security advisers resulted in a significant relaxation of the rules under which U.S. forces could aim attacks at suspected Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the areas near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The change, described by senior U.S. and Pakistani officials who would not speak for attribution because the program is classified, allows American military commanders greater leeway to choose from what one official who participated in the debate called “a Chinese menu” of attack options.

Instead of having to confirm the identity of a suspected militant leader before attacking, this shift allows American operators to strike convoys that bear the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run, for instance, so long as the risk of civilian casualties is judged to be low.

Yeah that’s right, if they look a bit…terroristy, flying robots of death away! But after the elections Bush minions are pre-empting the new rulers by saying they are worried they might curtail this aerial automata slaughter, hint hint, don’t you fucking dare.

Eritrea is making preparations for a US approved Ethiopian attack by kicking out UN forces enforcing a dodgy US brokered border agreement-

The [UN] mission started work in 2000 after a two-year border war between the Horn of Africa neighbors that killed an estimated 70,000 people. It has been stationed in a 15.5-mile (25-km) buffer zone inside Eritrea. But Asmara turned against the mission because of U.N. inability to enforce rulings by an independent boundary commission awarding chunks of Ethiopian-held territory, including the town of Badme, to Eritrea.

And apparently the police state has decided they can bug MP’s conversations, oh yes, say hello to the telescreen Winston-

The report says the recording was not covered by the Wilson doctrine, which forbids the security services bugging MPs. Rose reaches this conclusion by deciding that only bugging requiring the approval of the home secretary is covered by the doctrine, while the recording in Khan’s case only needed to be authorised by a senior police officer.

Get that? Because a cop did it the Wilson doctrine doesn’t apply now, if MP’s don’t come down on this like a ton of bricks, we are in deep trouble.

The Presidential soap opera continues and as this points out, McCain betraying himself and backing torture, not so big a story as the good old politician shags lobbying bint standby. Also this disturbing nugget-

Security details at Barack Obama’s rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena. The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

The question as yet unanswered is was this form the campaign, in which case no big conspiracy, or was it something else? Can the demonstrably institutionally racist & politically compromised secret service be trusted.

And the British war crime kept covered up is now getting some media presence-

British troops may have executed up to 20 captives in southern Iraq in 2004, human rights lawyers claimed today. A dossier of evidence from men taken captive after a gun battle near the Iraqi town of Majat-al-Kabir in May 2004 also suggested soldiers tortured and mutilated captives. Lawyers for five Iraqis today issued detailed witness statements, photographs of corpses and death certificates of the men who died. The allegations first emerged within weeks of the incident and have since been investigated by the Royal Military Police.

Only took lot’s of hard legal work and almost four years.