(Un) Intelligence

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Soon, We’ll All Be Radicals
If..."intelligence" reports described recent crimes and the people who perpetrated them, there would be little problem from a civil rights perspective, and it could actually be helpful to the average police officer. Instead, they have followed a "radicalization" theory popularized by the NYPD (PDF).

That theory postulates that there is a "path" to terrorism that includes the adoption of certain beliefs, and political, religious, or social activism is viewed as another step toward violence. Actual empirical studies of terrorism conducted in the Netherlands and Britain refute this theory, but the idea that hard-to-find terrorists can be caught by spying on easy-to-find activists appears too hard to resist to U.S. law enforcement.
It's happening here as well, regardless of "empirical studies".

Beyond a joke

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This nonsense is getting beyond a fucking joke.

I've shied away from terms like 'police state' but I'm not sure I can any longer. We are becoming a (beyond a) joke society.

Police delete London tourists' photos 'to prevent terrorism'
Like most visitors to London, Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris took several photographs of some of the city's sights, including the famous red double-decker buses. More unusually perhaps, they also took pictures of the Vauxhall bus station, which Matzka regards as "modern sculpture".

But the tourists have said they had to return home to Vienna without their holiday pictures after two policemen forced them to delete the photographs from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism.

Matkza, a 69-year-old retired television cameraman with a taste for modern architecture, was told that photographing anything to do with transport was "strictly forbidden". The policemen also recorded the pair's details, including passport numbers and hotel addresses.
You could always just use Google, I suppose.



Oh va voy!

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WARNING: Anti-Semitic post ahead (that is to say, anti-Semitic in the sense that it dares to criticise the thuggish, criminal and terrorist state of Israel)

Harry’s Place: Jeremy Bowen guilty of breaking guidelines on inaccuracy and impartiality
The Zionist Federation said in response to today’s news: “Mr Bowen’s position as Middle East Editor of a public service broadcaster is untenable in the light of the ESC’s findings.”
A response from The ZIONIST Federation! Included with not a hint of irony. This was a guest post from Chas Newkey-Burden a non- Jewish writer and journalist accused by Private Eye of posting positive reviews of his books on Amazon. Being a journalist we can be sure that he takes a  measured and objective view of the behaviour of the State of Israel. After all, look at his website header:



Here is a view from a man known for writing something of a little more substance than biographies of Amy Winehouse and Paris Hilton and a handbook for Arsenal FC.

Robert Fisk: How can you trust the cowardly BBC?

The BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest...The BBC's preposterous committee claims that Bowen's article "breached the rules [sic] on impartiality" because "readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war".

Well, yes of course. Because I suppose the BBC believes that Israel's claim to own land which in fact belongs to other people is another "sensible" view of the war. The BBC Trust – and I now find this word nauseous each time I tap it on my laptop – says that Bowen didn't give evidence to prove the Jewish settlement at Har Homa was illegal. But the US authorities said so, right from the start. Our own late foreign secretary, Robin Cook – under screamed abuse from Zionists when he visited the settlement– said the same thing. The fact that the BBC Trust uses the Hebrew name for Har Homa – not the original Arab name, Jebel Abu Ghoneim – shows just how far it is now a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby which so diligently abused Bowen...

Anyone who has read the history of Zionism will be aware that its aim was to dispossess the Arabs and take over Palestine. Why else are Zionists continuing to steal Arab land for Jews, and Jews only, against all international law? Who for a moment can contradict that this defies everyone's interpretation of international law except its own?

The Left and Crime

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Dissident Voice : Should We Take Crime Seriously?
The Left is more out of touch with public opinion on crime than on almost any other issue. A perfect illustration of this was provided by an article in Socialist Worker last month headlined “Capitalism and Rape”. After criticising judicial and police attitudes to rape, the writer points out that rape is a “social problem” and “Socialist Worker has no tradition of calling for more arrests or harsher sentencing to deal with social problems.” The root cause of this social problem, we are told, is the alienation brought about by capitalism. As for the solution, we read:

Abusers should receive treatment and counselling to help them to live normal lives and prevent them repeating their behaviour. But to eradicate all forms of sexual violence we need to fight together to create a very different kind of society.

There are several things wrong with this analysis. To argue that there will be no rape after the revolution dodges two very important issues. Firstly: how should we deal with sexual violence until we abolish capitalism (assuming this is a long way off)? Should we console rape victims with the news that there will be no rape in the new socialist society? Secondly, it is utopian to argue that sexual violence will not be a feature “after capitalism”. While removing alienation might dramatically reduce instances of rape, it is unlikely to completely abolish the crime. All societies are faced with the problem of how to deal with anti-social behaviour, of which rape is an extreme example.

Blair for Pope?

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Pope to reform Catholicism
Describing how his attitude to homosexuality has changed, Blair, who currently heads a religious think tank, outlined his respect for former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who taught him that "conventional wisdom is not necessarily wise: it can be wrong and it can be just a form of conservatism that hides behind a consensus". He also paid homage to hisa old friend and current Business Secretary (Lord) Peter Mandelson who has been "attacked in certain quarters for being gay and yet, at the same time, I don't believe that has altered in any shape or form people's opinion of him."
Absolutely right. We would all have considered Mandelson a slimy tosser even if he'd been heterosexual

Unhidden

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A Coffin, a Flag, a Photograph
For the first time in 18 years, the Pentagon granted the news media access on Sunday night to cover the arrival of a coffin to Dover Air Force Base from overseas.

The coffin, draped in a flag and bearing the body of Air Force Staff Sgt. Phillip Myers of Hopewell, Va, was unloaded from a government aircraft by the military honor guard. Sergeant Myers, 30, was killed by an improvised explosive device near Helmand Province in Afghanistan on April 4, according to the Defense Department.

PaperRound update

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Police 'assaulted' bystander who died during G20 protests
The man who died during last week's G20 protests was "assaulted" by riot police shortly before he suffered a heart attack, according to witness statements received by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

Investigators are examining a series of corroborative accounts that allege Ian Tomlinson, 47, was a victim of police violence in the moments before he collapsed near the Bank of England in the City of London last Wednesday evening. Three witnesses have told the Observer that Mr Tomlinson was attacked violently as he made his way home from work at a nearby newsagents. One claims he was struck on the head with a baton.