Category: UK

‘Work for us or we will say you are a terrorist’

Mohamed Aden, 25, who was approached by a fake postman
Mohamed Aden, 25, who was approached by a fake postman (TERI PENGILLEY)

Robert Verkaik, Law Editor for the Independent reveals ‘How MI5 blackmails British Muslims‘.

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.

Intelligence gathered by informers is crucial to stopping further terror outrages, but the men’s allegations raise concerns about the coercion of young Muslim men by the Security Service and the damage this does to the gathering of information in the future.

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Chalmers Johnson on the Cost of Empire

book cover
"The Bases of Empire", By Catherine Lutz, NYU Press, 356 pages

Why does the U.S. government maintain over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories? How long can the American taxpayer support this far-flung force given the severely weakened economy? And why has there been no public discussion by the Obama administration over scaling back our imperial presence abroad? Chalmers Johnson seeks to explain.

In her foreword to “The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts,” an important collection of articles on United States militarism and imperialism, edited by Catherine Lutz, the prominent feminist writer Cynthia Enloe notes one of our most abject failures as a government and a democracy: “There is virtually no news coverage—no journalists’ or editors’ curiosity—about the pressures or lures at work when the U.S. government seeks to persuade officials of Romania, Aruba or Ecuador that providing U.S. military-basing access would be good for their countries.” The American public, if not the residents of the territories in question, is almost totally innocent of the huge costs involved, the crimes committed by our soldiers against women and children in the occupied territories, the environmental pollution, and the deep and abiding suspicions generated among people forced to live close to thousands of heavily armed, culturally myopic and dangerously indoctrinated American soldiers. This book is an antidote to such parochialism.

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Here’s a broom, Mr Speaker

‘The MPs’ expenses scandal has exposed the House of Commons as an Augean stable – and I mean to get it cleaned up’, writes Mark Thomas.

As some readers may be aware, I have been working on the destruction of international capitalism and bourgeois parliamentary democracy for some time. However, even I have been taken aback by my recent run of success. Had I factored in the self-destructive culture of greed, I could have spent considerably less time handing out leaflets and waving placards and spent considerably more time on the champagne aspect of the “champagne anarchist” life style.

Frankly, no one could have quite predicted the depths to which parliament has sunk. And each release of information, similar to the release of Police Academy films, gets progressively lower and more vile.

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We won’t collude with efforts to use the academy to police immigration

Great initiative from my friend David Whyte, Ann Singleton and Steve Tombs. They decry the insidious way in which academics are being used to monitor foreign students and staff (thanks Moa).

We are among the growing number of academics across the UK voicing our concern about being drawn into playing a key role in an ever-tightening system of immigration control. Many of us are now being asked to implement procedures and checks related to immigration status on both our colleagues and our students. The creeping imposition of such practices raises questions about the legal responsibilities and contractual requirements of university and college staff, the methods the UK is using to police immigration, and the compromising of what remains of academic freedom in Britain.

In February 2008, the Government introduced major changes to UK immigration policies and laws, seeking to consolidate a plethora of immigration-control measures. The main plank of these changes was the introduction of a points-based system (PBS) under which potential employers of migrant workers from outside the European Union must be approved and licensed by the Government before workers are granted permits to take up employment. Thus, universities and colleges must now be licensed as “approved education providers” to bring non-EU students into the UK to study. In addition, before they are admitted to the country, these students must hold a visa giving them permission to enter for the purposes of study at the approved institution, and prove that they have enough money to pay their fees and maintain themselves in the UK.

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The Iraq war has been a monstrous crime

‘Politicians crave a whitewash – but Britain must hold a fully open public inquiry into the bloodbath it helped to create’, writes Seumas Milne.

It’s hardly surprising that those responsible for the human and social catastrophe unleashed by the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, on both sides of the Atlantic, should be desperate to rewrite its history – or try to salvage the shattered reputation of those armies that carried it out. In Britain, as the bulk of its troops withdraw after a campaign that has already lasted longer than the second world war, that propaganda offensive has now reached fever pitch.

Gordon Brown claimed yesterday that the wreckage of blood-drenched Iraq was a “success story”. The defence secretary John Hutton insisted Britain should be proud of its “legacy” in the devastated cities of the south. Hilary Benn, the environment secretary boasted of his support for the original aggression on BBC’s Question Time yesterday, declaring that ” we leave Iraq a better place” – a line repeated word for word by the Sun today and echoed across much of the media.

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The Day of Bahr Moussa

UK’s retreat from Basra is ‘A historic day for Iraq – but not in the way the British want to believe,’ writes Robert Fisk.

One hundred and seventy-nine dead soldiers. For what? 179,000 dead Iraqis? Or is the real figure closer to a million? We don’t know. And we don’t care. We never cared about the Iraqis. That’s why we don’t know the figure. That’s why we left Basra yesterday.

I remember going to the famous Basra air base to ask how a poor Iraqi boy, a hotel receptionist called Bahr Moussa, had died. He was kicked to death in British military custody. His father was an Iraqi policeman. I talked to him in the company of a young Muslim woman. The British public relations man at the airport was laughing. “I don’t believe this,” my Muslim companion said. “He doesn’t care.” She did. So did I. I had reported from Northern Ireland. I had heard this laughter before. Which is why yesterday’s departure should have been called the Day of Bahr Moussa. Yesterday, his country was set free from his murderer. At last.

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Printing Police Lies

An excellent article by George Monbiot, setting the abominable policing of the G20 protests into context. Monbiot explains that we are not merely dealing with “a few rogue officers [who] got out of control”, as much of media commentary in the UK would have it, but state-sanctioned violence that is “organised and systematic”.

If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has been twatted by the police. As the tabloids turn their fire onto an unfamiliar target – the unprovoked aggression of Her Majesty’s constabulary – the love affair between the cops and the rightwing press has never been more fragile.

The policing of the G20 protests at the beginning of this month was routine. Policemen hiding their identification numbers and beating up peaceful protesters is as much a part of British life as grey skies and red buses. Across 20 years of protests, I have seen policemen swapping their jackets to avoid identification, hurling people against vans and into walls and whomping old ladies over the head with batons. A friend had his head repeatedly bashed against the bonnet of a police van; he was then charged with criminal damage to the van. I have seen an entire line of police turn round to face the other way when private security guards have started beating people up. I have seen them refuse – until Amnesty International got involved – to investigate my own case when I was hospitalised by these licensed thugs (the guards had impaled my foot on a metal spike, smashing the middle bone).

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Police and PM in dock over arrest of terrorist suspects

Surprise, surprise! The British state cried wolf again. ‘Case against Muslim men amounted to one email and handful of telephone conversations’, report By Jonathan Brown, Robert Verkaik and Kim Sengupta. Also check out this brilliant indictment of the ‘war on terror’ by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The case against 12 Muslim men involved in what Gordon Brown described as a “major terrorist plot” amounted to one email and a handful of ambiguous telephone conversations, it emerged last night after all the men were released without charge.

Eleven Pakistani students and one British man were freed after extensive searches of 14 addresses in North-west England failed to locate evidence of terrorist activity, according to security sources. Police did not find any explosives, firearms, target lists, documents or any material which could have been used to carry out an attack. Yesterday, the Government’s own reviewer of terrorism legislation said he would investigate the case.

The Home Office said it would deport the 11 Pakistani men, who are aged 22 to 38 and were in Britain on student visas, because the Government believed they represented a threat to national security.

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A dick named Cox

What do you call someone who in 2009 believes that ‘Blair must have believed that WMD existed, since even the peace lobby did…[s]eeking to protect oil supplies wouldn’t have been an entirely ignoble concern…he might honestly have thought this would be in our own best interests. Alastair Campbell …could still have believed in the policy he was enforcing’ and thinks In the Loop is a bad film because it ‘excludes the part played by principle’?

There is much that one could criticize about the Armando Iannucci film In the Loop. That it couldn’t be as credulous as the tools in the New Labour press is not one of them. It is a travesty the British press should allow bovine oafs like David Cox to defile their pages.

UN Anti-Racism Conference Boycotted for Tackling Racism

The Durban II UN conference on racism has suffered a series of blows as the USA, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands joined Israel, Italy and Canada in boycotting the talks.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has complained of a “disparaging media and lobbying campaign” against the UN conference on racism aimed at silencing criticism of Israel by those with “narrow, parochial interests” who demonstrate “reflexive partisanship.”

This can be seen in the UK where Denis MacShane MP (a member of Labour Friends of Israel) has pressured the government to withdraw if  “attacks on Jews are made” and the Jewish Human Rights Coalition (JHRC) has called on the government to withdraw completely, with notable success as the UK is now only sending a delegation, with no senior official.

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