In Britain the police raids go on as do the arrests which without exception are being carried out under the Terror Act. The latest were on Thursday when six people were arrested in relation to demonstrations in support of Gaza last January.
This is the police state that Blair and now Brown are chiefly responsible for having created where literally anyone who speaks out or protests at government policy is deemed a potential terrorist.
Though the DHS reports apply to the US they should be taken into consideration where UK police strategy is concerned. The UK 'War on Terror' is nothing more than a copycat version of what was first instigated by George W. Bush and immediately imitated by Tony Blair.
Although the UK has its own history of encroaching police powers which I have covered elsewhere on this blog and particularly in the article, Edward Thompson and the Growth of Britain's Police State, a pattern of events in the Blair/Brown administration over the last twelve years illustrates how a US-instigated phoney 'War on Terror' provided Blair and his successor Brown to attack British freedoms and to vastly accelerate their country's slide into a police state.
There was a time not long ago when people such as Bush, Blair and Brown would have been denounced and punished as traitors and criminals. Instead they are lauded by a corrupt establishment whose inherent criminal nature they served-out faithfully.
The increasingly oppressive character of the police on both sides of the Atlantic signals the true nature of an Anglo-American fascism masquerading as 'liberal democracy'.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
The Totalitarianizing of Britain: The crushing of eco-protest brings shame on our police
This blogger among others echoed Noam Chomsky's warning after 911 that the greatest danger facing the West was not from terrorism but from the assault on our liberties that would inevitably take place as a result of the 'security measures' that would be put in place. Predictably, that assault took place and the rule of law has been replaced, thanks to Messrs Bush and Blair, by police state rule.
The persecution of Muslims was just the beginning. Now that that phase has mostly played itself out the next to be persecuted are domestic dissidents and protest groups. What the UK police did at Kingsnorth last year and more recently at the London G20 protests mark a more ominous turn of the screw.
Gradually, those in the establishment are waking up. Let's hope that there is still time in order to halt what looks like an inexorable slide into totalitarianism. Journalist, Henry Porter, writes in yesterday's Observer:
This is the end-product of the disastrous legislative assault on Britain's rights and liberties inaugurated by Tony Blair. We are now in a crisis of moral or perhaps deep psychic inconsistency, with a government that in one half of its brain desires good PR on climate change but in the other half seethes with the authoritarian desire to stamp out an impertinent challenge to its record of inactivity. The manifestation of this arrogance can be seen in the police officers at the G20 demonstrations who covered their faces and removed their identifying numbers from their uniforms before lashing out at demonstrators - perhaps killing Ian Tomlinson - and the tactic of "kettling", which wrongly deprives people of their liberty, as well as risks their safety. more...
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Stop the March of the Police State! Act Now!
My regular readers will know that for several years, since this blog was first created after the events of 77 in July 2005, I have been warning of the erosion of liberties and the creation of police states on both sides of the Atlantic.
The fact that this is happening as a transatlantic phenomenon is no accident. Bush's fascists first performed a coup on the US electorate by stealing the presidential election in 2000. We know now that by rights the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, was the rightful winner. But there was no challenge. Bush and his band of rogues were allowed to take over the White House. And it happened again in 2004 with 'faulty' electronic voting machines! Again, the criminals were allowed to get away with it. What now in 2008?
It was clear to many of us that the events of 911 were indeed a conspiracy involving some very powerful forces in north America and elsewhere. The purpose was to so traumatize the public that there would be no struggle when a premeditated, systematic erosion of constitutional and civil liberties followed --not only in the USA but in the UK as well as in other English-speaking countries. The wholly spurious 'War on Terror' was the ideological weapon used with which to bludgeon the opposition into submission.
On the international level we were told to prepare ourselves for 'Endless War' the description used by the Bush/Blair/Brown neocons for ongoing imperialist aggression by the US/UK/Israel in what might otherwise be called Resource Wars --wars staged in order that the West might secure strategic resources such as Oil, Gas, Water and other Mineral Resources needed to keep its system turning over.
The police states created through the fake 'War on Terror' are but one side of the coin. On the other is the prospect of Endless War. Taken together, we see the nightmare prospect of an Orwellian apocalypse. It started in earnest with the mass-murders of 911 and 77. It continues with the inexorable march of the police state. Many eyes are opening to what is going on. Many more need still to be opened. Please help that process by passing this link and text to as many people as possible. There isn't a moment to lose.
Rory Winter, CHIMES OF FREEDOM.
NUJ Film shows Police obstruction of Journalists NUJ, 9 September 2008
The National Union of Journalists has released a short film highlighting some of the problems faced by journalists covering public demonstrations.
The video was released the day after the TUC in Brighton condemned the erosion of civil liberties and media freedoms in Britain. TUC unions unanimously backed a motion, proposed by the National Union of Journalists, which called for a rethink of government policies that put journalists at risk of imprisonment just for doing their job.
Speaking after the TUC vote, NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Journalism is facing grave threats in an age of intolerance. Whilst on the streets dissent is being criminalized, independent journalism is being increasingly caught in the civil liberties clampdown.”
The nine-minute video, called Press Freedom: Collateral Damage, includes examples of the police obstructing journalists in their work.
The motion also highlights cases of journalists, such as Robin Ackroyd and Shiv Malik, who have faced the threat of jail because of legal demands to reveal confidential source information.
In his speech to Congress, Jeremy Dear drew attention to the case of Sally Murrer, who is facing criminal prosecution for receiving information from a police source, and highlighted the problems faced by journalists attempting to cover the recent Climate Camp in Kent.
Jeremy said: “The terrorising of journalists isn’t just done by shadowy men in balaclavas, but also by governments and organisations who use the apparatus of the law or state authorities to suppress and distort the information they do not want the public to know and to terrorise the journalists involved through injunctions, threats to imprisonment and financial ruin.
“The use of the Terrorism Act and SOCPA increasingly criminalize not just those who protest but those deemed to be giving the oxygen of publicity to such dissent. Journalists’ material and their sources are increasingly targeted by those who wish to pull a cloak of secrecy over their actions.”
The speech concluded: “This isn’t over-zealous policing this is a co-ordinated and systematic abuse of media freedom – and we must expose it, challenge it and act against those who undermine the rights of photographers, journalists and media workers.
“And we must do so because if whistleblowers and sources fear speaking out, if photographers and journalists cannot probe the dark corners of business, politics or human rights, the ability of the media – already under threat from concentration of ownership and cost-cutting – to hold power to account, to expose wrongdoing, to provide the information on which citizens can make informed decisions about their lives will be seriously compromised.
“The Terrorism Act and SOCPA are not sophisticated security policies – they are the blunt instruments of an intolerant government.
“As if in some Orwellian nightmare the Ministry of Freedom tells us that the price we must pay for peace and liberty at home is not just a war in Iraq – not just the billions spent on war – but, in the wake of the London bombings, is the fingerprinting of council workers and the covert surveillance of M&S workers. It is ID cards and 42-day detention. It is curbs on the right to protest, the civil contingencies act and it is the extension of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, a snoopers’ charter giving access to personal texts, emails and internet use.
“The price is too high. Less liberty does not imply greater security. It never has.
“Our movement has been at the forefront of the great struggles for human and civil rights over the past century. In this age of intolerance new struggles must be waged and we must lead that fight.”
I have been worrying about the serious deterioration of civil liberties in the UK for five years now, but a small incident last night convinced me we are living in a country that must be classified as "Not free". I was travelling to the theatre on the tube, and the large majority of passengers were shrouded by copies of either London Lite or the London Paper. Some thirty copies of each banner headline screamed shrilly its message of fear through the train: "Five Suicide Bombers on the Loose in London!" "Jet Terror Plot!" "Terror Jury Holiday Farce Resulted in Acquittals!"
The propaganda, which reflected uncritically the briefing the Security Services and Home Office have been manically pumping out since the non-existence of the "Bigger than 9/11" jet plot was confirmed, was so stark and so divorced from any connection to the truth, that I am convinced we are already in effect living in a totalitarian state where the government controls the population through fear with brutal efficiency and with absolutely no regard to the truth. The government had contrived to turn a major blow for its "War on Terror" scaremongering into a vehicle to ramp up that scaremongering.
The Lite told of there still being bombers around from the "Jet Terror Plot" and gave no indication whatsoever that the jury had decided the jet plot did not exist. Indeed it claimed shamelessly that the three terrorists convicted of conspiracy to murder had been planning to bring down planes - a direct lie.
The London Paper was still more worrying, because it put detail into the line the odious security service spokesman Frank "Goebbels" Gardner has been pumping out on the BBC: juries are unreliable. It said that the failure to convict in the trial was due to interruptions for a holiday for the jurors and because of an injury to a juror in a golf accident. The clear trend of the briefing coming from the government is towards the abolition of jury trials in terrorist cases: Diplock courts.
Meantime in London two men are on trial for "terrorism" because they attended a demonstration at the Uzbek Embassy against the hideous Uzbek regime, at which red paint was thrown at the Embassy to symbolise the blood of Karimov's many thousands of victims. Such protest as paint-throwing should, I think, be illegal, but given events like the Andijan massacre of many hundreds of peaceful demonstrators, I have huge sympathy for those who undertake civil disobedience in the Uzbek case. It has nothing to do with terrorism, but under the notorious Section 58 of the Terrorism Act there is real danger of conviction and heavy sentences.
These are critical times: all good men and women must fight hard against the closing in of the system upon us.
I wish people would stop breaking into tears when they talk to me these days.
I am traveling across the country at the moment — Colorado to California — speaking to groups of Americans from all walks of life about the assault on liberty and the 10 steps now underway in America to a violently closed society.
The good news is that Americans are already awake: I thought there would be resistance to or disbelief at this message of gathering darkness — but I am finding crowds of people who don’t need me to tell them to worry; they are already scared, already alert to the danger and entirely prepared to hear what the big picture might look like. To my great relief, Americans are smart and brave and they are unflinching in their readiness to hear the worst and take action. And they love their country.
But I can’t stand the stories I am hearing. I can’t stand to open my email these days. And wherever I go, it seems, at least once a day, someone very strong starts to cry while they are speaking.
In Boulder, two days ago, a rosy-cheeked thirtysomething mother of two small children, in soft yoga velours, started to tear up when she said to me: “I want to take action but I am so scared. I look at my kids and I am scared. How do you deal with fear? Is it safer for them if I act or stay quiet? I don’t want to get on a list.” In D.C., before that, a beefy, handsome civil servant, a government department head — probably a Republican — confides in a lowered voice that he is scared to sign the new ID requirement for all government employees, that exposes all his most personal information to the State — but he is scared not to sign it: “If I don’t, I lose my job, my house. It’s like the German National ID card,” he said quietly. This morning in Denver I talked for almost an hour to a brave, much-decorated high-level military man who is not only on the watch list for his criticism of the administration — his family is now on the list. His elderly mother is on the list. His teenage son is on the list. He has flown many dangerous combat missions over the course of his military career, but his voice cracks when he talks about the possibility that he is exposing his children to harassment.
Jim Spencer, a former columnist for the Denver Post who has been critical of the Bush administration, told me today that I could use his name: he is on the watch list. An attorney contacts me to say that she told her colleagues at the Justice Department not to torture a detainee; she says she then faced a criminal investigation, a professional referral, saw her emails deleted — and now she is on the watch list. I was told last night that a leader of Code Pink, the anti-war women’s action group, was refused entry to Canada. I hear from a tech guy who works for the airlines — again, probably a Republican — that once you are on the list you never get off. Someone else says that his friend opened his luggage to find a letter from the TSA saying that they did not appreciate his reading material. Before I go into the security lines, I find myself editing my possessions. In New York’s LaGuardia, I reluctantly found myself putting a hardcover copy of Tara McKelvey’s excellent Monstering, an expose of CIA interrogation practices, in a garbage can before I get in the security line; it is based on classified information. This morning at my hotel, before going to the airport, I threw away a very nice black T-shirt that said “We Will Not be Silenced” — with an Arabic translation — that someone had given me, along with a copy of poems written by detainees at Guantanamo.
In my America we are not scared to get in line at the airport. In my America, we will not be silenced.
More times than I can count, courageous and confident men who are telling me about speaking up, but who are risking what they see as the possible loss of job, home or the ability to pay for grown kids’ schooling, start to choke up. Yesterday a woman in one gathering started to cry simply while talking about the degradation of her beloved country.
And always the questions: what do we do?
It is clear from this inundation of personal stories of abuse and retribution against ordinary Americans that a network of criminal behavior and intention is catching up more and more mainstream citizens in its grasp. It is clear that this is not democracy as usual — or even the corruption of democracy as usual. It is clear that we will need more drastic action than emails to Congress.
The people I am hearing from are conservatives and independents as well as progressives. The cardinal rule of a closing or closed society is that your alignment with the regime offers no protection; in a true police state no one is safe.
I read the news in a state of something like walking shock: seven soldiers wrote op-eds critical of the war — in The New York Times; three are dead, one shot in the head. A female soldier who was about to become a whistleblower, possibly about abuses involving taxpayers’ money: shot in the head. Pat Tillman, who was contemplating coming forward in a critique of the war: shot in the head. Donald Vance, a contractor himself, who blew the whistle on irregularities involving arms sales in Iraq — taken hostage FROM the U.S. Embassy BY U.S. soldiers and kept without recourse to a lawyer in a U.S. held-prison, abused and terrified for weeks — and scared to talk once he got home. Another whistleblower in Iraq, as reported in Vanity Fair: held in a trailer all night by armed contractors before being ejected from the country.
Last week contractors, immune from the rule of law, butchered 17 Iraqi civilians in cold blood. Congress mildly objected — and contractors today butcher two more innocent civilian Iraqi ladies — in cold blood.
Is it clear yet that violent retribution, torture or maybe worse, seems to go right up this chain of command? Is it clear yet that these people are capable of anything? Is it obvious yet that criminals are at the helm of the nation and need to be not only ousted but held accountable for their crimes?
Is it treason yet?
This is an open invitation to honorable patriots on the Right and in the center to join this movement to restore the rule of law and confront this horror: this is not conservatism, it is a series of crimes against the nation and against the very essence of America. Join us, we need you.
This movement must transcend partisan lines. The power of individual conscience is profound when people start to wake up.
Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey said No: he told colleague that they would be ashamed when the world learned about the Administration’s warrantless wiretapping. Comey said No: history will look at this torture and disgrace the torturers. A judge today ruled that the U.S. can’t just ship prisoners out of Guantanamo to be tortured at will — she said No. The Center for Constitutional Rights is about to file a civil lawsuit — against Blackwater: they are saying No.
In Germany, according to historian Richard Evans, in 1931-1932, if enough Germans of conscience had begun to say No — history would have had an entirely diferent outcome.
If we go any further down this road the tears will be those of conservatives as well as progressives. They will be American tears.
The time for weeping has to stop; the time for confronting must begin.
The UK government's attempt to ban a march in support of bringing troops home from Iraq is scuppered by strength of popular resistance.
Gordon Brown looked set to make an ass of himself protesting the suppression of democratic freedom of expression in Burma while at the same time banning a peaceful demonstration in Britain, under threat of police suppression. Under new legislation the British government would have been'legally' entitled to physically restrain protestors, thereby drawing a direct and relevant comparison between scenes in Burma and on the streets of London. But that embarrassment was neatly avoided. The first sign that a volte face had occured was when the BBC started to report that the protestors were 'claiming' that a ban had been imposed! Desperate stuff. See 'Lenin's Tomb' website for ongoing updates on the situation: http://leninology.blogspot.com/2007/10/ban-broke-demo-report.html
Bear in mind folks, that the UK is a country that arrested a woman protesting in the vicinity of Downing Street for the crime of reading out a list of UK soldiers who had died in Iraq. She was regarded as a terrorist threat.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Cartoon, thanks to Steve Bell
The Sovietization of Britannia by the Corrupt Politics of Bullshit
The process of an oligarchy being rapidly totalitarianized through a corrupt political system goes on it would appear at an inexorable pace. Whatever the outward appearance might be Britain is rapidly becoming a police state. Whether or not it will simply remain a de facto Labour-Conservative dictatorship remains to be seen.
As I write the polling booths have just closed for municipal elections throughout the island and parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales. Everywhere, Tony Blair's Nu Labor is expected to be heading for a debacle. Also, in England to lose votes to the neo-Nazi British National Party (BNP). Increasingly, the old, the disaffected and the marginalized are turning away from Nu Labor in disgust and desperation to choose what used to be a fringe, rightwing, racist party, the BNP. In the main this phenomenon seems to arise from a protest vote but it would be dangerous to dismiss it as such.
What started as a protest vote against the neocon Thatcherite Nu Labor has created a rightward momentum through which you see you see the lowest scum of the earth crawling out from underneath the upturned stone of social discontent. Make no mistake, the BNP is a virus which thrives on political malaise. Whenever capitalism goes into crisis, the extreme right, capital's skeleton-in-the-cupboard, appears as if from nowhere. The anti-Nazi playwright, Bertholt Brecht, made that observation in Weimar Germany. He was right. Hitler followed. And the phenomenon has reappeared everywhere in Europe.
And it will not be stopped by the political status quo which, itself, is very much part of the current political malaise. It should surprise no one that with the collapse of social democracy and consensus politics we have seen those capitalist modes replaced by something far nastier in tooth and claw personified by Reaganism, Thatcherism, the neo-Thatcherite Nu Labor and the brute ideology of opportunism and lies in Straussian 'neo-conservatism'.
There is a descending curve here and we seem to be approaching its nadir. The new totalitarians, the fascists of the 21st century are its product, opportunists who saw the main chance and took it. In the process they have destroyed our limited freedoms with the pretence of protecting 'security' and an utterly fake 'war on terrorism'. Using a compliant mainstream media (MSM) they conduct a relentless war against the truth and sanity. Consigned to a surreptitious brainwashing process, Joe Public is lobomotized into the acceptance of an inverted world of realities, where war is peace, freedom is enslavement and dictatorship masquerades as democracy.
It is in that mirror world we now find ourselves, where not a day goes by without some show trial or false flag operation manufactured by the state's intelligence services. The other day, I reported on the draconian sentences handed out to five so-called terrorists in a British state trial where it is clear that the intelligence services provided their own witnesses.
Mohammed Junaid Babar is one such. Babar is a naturalized US citizen, an ex-computer programmer and FBI informant. He is known to have given evidence in four different countries! It was his testimony, more than any other factor, which incriminated the five unfortunates now incarcerated at Her Majesty's pleasure for most if not all of their mortal existence on Prison Planet. It is also significant that the judge chose to accept a jury verdict given by a simple majority and not by consensus. Already, the likelihood of a blatant mis-trial is everywhere to see indicating that torture by third parties (probably the Pakistani ISI) was used to obtain incriminating 'evidence'.
But who cares? And if they do what is being done to redress justice? The speed by which one attack against our freedoms is superseded by another leaves us reeling. The very day after the recent trial verdict was given, Blair announced yet another refusal to hold an enquiry into the events surrounding a previous, we are told 'terrorist', event: the London bombings on 7/7 2005. His reasons for denying us this: that it might compromise the work of the intelligence services! For once he was speaking the truth. A close and unbiased enquiry --and that would rule out a Blair-controlled public enquiry-- would expose the manner in which the intelligence services have, themselves, played an incriminating part in what were, in the real world, sting operations set up and controlled throughout by said services.
Since the Crevice, 'Fertilizer Bomb' (also known as Bluewater) mis-trial, I have been building up a dossier on it and the call for a 7/7 enquiry. Within 48 hours the size of this dossier is itself daunting. It's going to require some dedicated sleuthing to collate the details. Suffice to say that it really isn't necessary to examine the minutiae of either case to see the blatant manner in which the law is being misused by dictatorial and opportunist politicians such as the Blair Nu Labor crowd to turn their country into an open prison, a panopticon.
Blair and his Nu Labor, together with the Bush War Party in Washington and the Howard quislings in Canberra, must be held to be what they have become: traitors. And the British chapter of these traitors will, I hope, have been put on trial by the electorate on 3 May.
Let's hope that tomorrow will see their demise.
Lawyer Imran Khan's Crevice Trial statement for the defendants
