| Tony Blair warns of putting
civil liberties before fighting terror
Sunday, May 27, 2007 The Metro |
Tony Blair has hit out at the "dangerous misjudgment" of putting civil liberties before fighting terror.
He spoke out as it emerged tough new "stop and question" powers may be given to the police as part of a new anti-terror package.
He insisted the disappearance of three suspects under control orders was not the fault of the Home Office but society's "misguided and wrong" priorities.
Writing in the Sunday Times, he said: "The fault is not with our services or, in this instance, with the Home Office.
"We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first.
"I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong."
He went on: "Over the past five or six years we have decided as a country that except in the most limited of ways, the threat to our public safety does not justify changing radically the legal basis on which we confront this extremism.
"Their right to traditional civil liberties comes first. I believe this is a dangerous misjudgment."
Background: In spite of being about to resign with his "master",
the UK's prime "fixer" John Reid was today talking about ignoring
The Human Rights Act, so he could sort out those bloody foreigners.
BBC
Needless to say, his remarks have met almost universal condemnation (i.e. the neocons are keeping their heads down - sw)
Update: Now Blair wants to jail people without trial!
Update2: Pull Apart this cuckoo's nest we're building
(12469 bytes) [c]
Well, that was convenient - there's another terrible Terror Bill in the offing, three terror 'suspects' abscond (leading the BBC's Home Affairs Correspondent to muse on the subject of deportation, which is an interesting concept when applied to the British citizens now under control orders) and John Reid gets up on his hind legs to attack his usual suspects.
Let's just recap on them:
1) Judicial independence
2) Human rights
3) Parliament
4) Other political parties
Yes, the ideal world for John Reid would have less of all four of those. Thank god the fucker won't be troubling us for much longer, but his poisonous legacy will infect the body politic for a lot longer. Let's produce our own list of suspects for the mess:
1) John Reid
2) Charles Clarke
3) David Blunkett
4) Tony Blair
Yes, a lot of the 'restrictions' and 'limitations' decried by Mr. Reid are self-inflicted - the necessity for getting a High Court order before naming the absconded suspects (the first three haven't yet been named) torpedos any idea of a fair trial in future, while the alternative of not naming them loses you the ability to use the eyes of the public to help you search. The inability to present wiretap evidence in court is entirely the government's decision, which seriously hampers the police and prosecution. How's that for fighting with one hand behind your back, Houdini?
Blair: Jail terror suspects without trial
Prime minister faces battle from civil rights groups, judiciary
BY DAVID STRINGER
Associated Press
Article Last Updated: 05/24/2007 11:14:01 PM CDT
LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair on Thursday revived a plan for jailing terror
suspects without trial after three men eluded police monitoring and disappeared,
but he likely faces a battle with civil liberties campaigners, judges and political
opponents.
Home Secretary John Reid told Parliament the three men who dropped from sight Monday were suspected of planning to travel overseas to carry out terrorist attacks.
The development angered Blair, whose final days in office could turn into a divisive fight over the handling of suspected terrorists.
Britain's "control order" system - a partial house arrest created after judges ruled suspects could not be detained indefinitely without trial - has been exposed as "very much a second best-option," Blair said.
The orders "are not a strong method of keeping people under control," he told reporters. "If we are going to tackle this terror threat with the seriousness it needs, we need the tough measures necessary to protect this country fully."
Officials did not specify when proposed new laws would be presented, but Blair's spokesman said the government was reviewing its options.
Reid said Britain could consider opting out of the European Convention on Human Rights, a move likely to further antagonize civil rights campaigners. In two cases last year, senior British judges cited the convention in ruling against the government.
Civil liberties campaigners said any attempt to create tougher anti-terror laws risked a new political battle for Blair, who will step down as British leader June 27.
"Punishment without trial is a failed policy on both sides of the Atlantic," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty.
Blair suffered his first major domestic defeat in 2005 when lawmakers, including members of his Labour Party, rejected his plan to allow police to hold terrorism suspects for up to 90 days without charging them with an offense.
The escaped men, all British citizens, were not thought to pose a direct threat to the British public because they apparently wanted to engage in violence elsewhere, the home secretary said.
But Ian Blair, head of London's Metropolitan police force and Britain's most senior police officer, said there was no guarantee the men did "not pose a threat to the U.K."
Two of the fugitives, Lamine Adam, 26, and Ibrahim Adam, 20, are brothers of Anthony Garcia, who was convicted and jailed for life last month over a plot to bomb a nightclub, power plants and other targets in Britain, police said. The third man was Cerie Bullivant, 24.
They slipped away while being under control orders, a system that has been widely criticized by Cabinet ministers as too lax because it does not allow for 24-hour surveillance by police.
Pull Apart this Cuckoo's Nest we're building
Who has the guts to stand up to this Nurse Ratched state and its ubiquitous surveillance of our lives?
Henry Porter
Sunday May 27, 2007
The Observer
I once met Andy Warhol at the opening of a nightclub called Regine's in London. He held a microphone and a tape recorder, while his factotums filmed over his shoulder and held a small light. I asked what he was doing. In the voice of a recorded announcement he said something like: 'You're on TV! Everyone is on TV! Everyone will be on TV!' Then without another word the spectral dandy-genius drifted off into the half-light of 1980s nightlife.
Warhol was a prophet of the surveillance age.
In Salford, they now have traffic wardens (called parking attendants in the newspeak of the times ) with cameras fitted to their heads. These sons of Warhol will not just film parking violations but, empowered by one of New Labour's bossy innovations, they will also capture those who litter or allow their dogs to defecate in the wrong place. Armed with the evidence, they will issue fixed penalty notices to offenders.
And a jolly good thing too, you may say. I cannot agree. If some podgy uniformed stalker with a camera lens sticking out of his hat starts filming me any time soon I will not be answerable for my actions, and it is my fervent hope that the people of Salford will treat these street-spies with all the rude contempt they deserve. For it seems to me that the infringement of rights represented by filming without permission far outweighs any crime I or my dog may commit. In short, we are losing more than we gain. And that loss runs right through our once brave, bloody-minded, individualist culture, which is now watched, nagged, chivvied and fussed over by a political establishment whose guiding spirit is Nurse Ratched.
Nurse Mildred Ratched, you will remember, was the head administrative nurse in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, the novel by Ken Kesey that is set in a mental health hospital in Oregon. She is a powerful symbol of arbitrary power - and indeed of malign government - who has complete sway over the lives of the inmates, until one Randle McMurphy comes under her charge. She crushes his challenge with a lobotomy but her order in the ward is never quite restored.
With our simple trust that the ever-extending reach of authority is somehow good for us we become more like those inmates every day. Last week saw the launch of the first police camera drone which will spy on people in Manchester. New speed cameras are being tested in London. They don't flash the speeding driver but they do take his picture. Energy monitors are to be installed in our homes to display the individual consumption by appliances, and three million homes already have micro chips in their dustbins which when activated will reveal how much the homeowner is throwing away.
To portray these last two as infringements of liberty would be absurd, but they seem to add to the sense of official intrusion. Of far greater importance is the news that the DNA of 100,000 teenagers - many of them guilty of no crime - has been taken and stored on the police national database. They will be on it for the rest of their lives and have no rights over how their DNA is used and, like the rest of us, cannot predict what genetic science will eventually tell the authorities about them. Can anyone seriously doubt that this is a fundamental breach of privacy and is contrary to the spirit of any code of rights ever written?
What makes our apathy so striking is that even police officers are beginning to speak out about the state we're creating. Ian Readhead, head of the Association of Chief Police Officers data protection group, warned that we were moving to an 'Orwellian situation' with cameras being installed in peaceful villages such as Stockbridge in Hampshire. Mr Readhead, also deputy chief constable of Hampshire, said if the spread of cameras continued, Britain would not be a country he would want to live in.
His comments followed those by the acting chief constable of Suffolk, Colin Langham-Fitt, who criticised the growth of CCTV and the government's ID card scheme. If these officers are expressing concern, we can safely conclude that it is time for us to show something more than the bovine compliance of the last few years.
The issue of surveillance and databases is crucial to our future, to our children's future, and the maintenance of sound and transparent democracy. The more information we allow government about our movements and our lives, the more power we give up to a centralised authority which will, as night follows day, become ever more shielded from proper scrutiny.
With the concerns expressed in this column about the erosion of civil liberties and the attack by Blair on parliamentary scrutiny, I am often taken to task by people who are more relaxed about New Labour's decade-long assault on rights. A woman columnist on the Times suggested that those who worry about surveillance manifest a kind of vanity - that we're suffering from a delusion that the state is actually interested in our petty lives. That is simply not true. I don't believe the state is remotely interested in me, but I am convinced that with its fixations about crime and disorder, the government is building a state that is among the most controlled in the free world. And at least two senior police chiefs agree.
It is a measure of New Labour's cunning to frame the issue in terms of rank individualism against the collective good. This approach is supported by what is known as pro-social thinking, the idea that each of us owes the state and community as much as the state owes us. The effect is to diminish the individual and to burden us with obligations to the state. We must prove our innocence positively, submit to all kinds of monitoring and allow agencies to retain information about our movements and genetic essence all in the endeavour of being good, pro-social citizens.
Ratched is winning. From behind the glass screen I hear the whisper of her uniform, a smile of satisfaction spreads across her face as the inmates begin to settle down for the evening.
But there is still time because most of us know in our hearts that the collective good will suffer just as much as any individual if we continue to lead the way in the West with these surveillance systems. Go to any country on the continent, or to the US, and you will see only a fraction of the cameras that are on British streets, and of course they have nothing like the DNA database or the ID card scheme, which to the French, for example, seems self-evidently oppressive. These societies are no less safe than we are - just less observed and in consequence more free.
Over the last few weeks one or two hints have been dropped by Gordon Brown's allies that he is considering a written constitution, which would include a new, home-grown Bill of Rights. If Labour provides the conditions for the writing of an eloquent but simple Bill of Rights which everyone can understand and which is embedded in the constitution beyond the reach of Parliament, I will eat several straw hats. It seems unlikely because a clearly written statement of each person's rights - including privacy - would militate against the very control that Labour has sought to impose.
But I emphasise one point: Labour could not attempt the Ratched strategy without our help. It is our fears, lack of rigour and laziness which have led us to this pass. Where is Randle McMurphy when we need him?
Guradian
and read the comments under the article - many saying what we are saying - that
the middle classes will not rise up against "the hand that feeds them".
Surprise, surprise. Did they ever? But what about "the people"? Will
they be sheeple? sw