Daily Archives: Sun, 1 June, 2008

Brown crap

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Prime Minister Gordon Brown has a guest spot in the Times in which he continues to argue for 42-day detention without trial. Even the headings take your breath away.

42-day detention; a fair solution
The complexity of today’s terrorist plots means the Government needs more powers

“A fair solution”? I detect a new and specialist use of the word “fair.” It obviously isn’t going to be “fair” to any falsely accused suspects. So, it’s hard to see who is meant to benefit from this concern for even-handedness.

“Solution”? Solution to which problem, exactly? To the problem of detecting active terrorists? Clearly not, that is an intelligence and policing issue. How will these activities be made any more effective by capturing random people, when there is no evidence against them, and and waiting for them to crack? The text claims that it’s fair to the police because it takes ages to root through computer files.

Oh, ffs. Are terrorists really so stupid that they write all their plots down in Word documents and store them on their PCs. Let’s assume, for a moment, that is the case. It wouldn’t take a criminal mastermind to decide to stop doing that, the very first time such evidence got any of them arrested.

It certainly can’t be a “solution” to the problem of their being alienated groups of people with the will to commit terrorist acts. As far as I can see, it’s actually a quick way to manufacture terrorists. Every falsely detained person will mean more and more people become alienated from UK society.

“More powers”? That is, powers that go beyond ubiquitous video surveillance, monitoring every email message and phone call, ID cards and photographing almost every journey? Would it it even be possible to come up with many more “powers” short of plugging our brains into a national monitoring system and modelling policing on Minority Report?

Brown says:

Britain has lived with terrorist threats for decades. But I am under no illusion that today’s threats are different in their scale and nature from anything we have faced before. Today in Britain there are at least 2,000 terrorist suspects, 200 networks or cells and 30 active plots.

Yes, Britain has lived with terrorist threats for decades. Not just threats. Major terrorist actions. So, when Briown says, he is “under no illusion that today’s threats are different,” I first assume that he means that he realises that the current “TWAT” is not really different from the Irish bombing campaigns. (Which were addressed without a 1984-style social transformation. And were ended through concessions and negotiation. And provided the example of how internment served to consolidate support for PIRA… A lesson that the current government seems willfully determine don ignoring )

No such luck. He is really saying – in the face of English grammar – that he is under that very illusion.

Then the numbers. They really annoy me, these “30 active plots” and “200 terror networks”. I have mentioned these spurious statistics before. The very specific numbers have been going the rounds for the best part of a year.

Are we to assume, then, that our police are so stupid that they KNOW there are 30 active plots and they can’t do anything about them? They KNOW about 200 terror networks and they somehow can’t gather the evidence to stop them? What on earth would we be paying these people for?

This is not just nonsense. It insults both the competence of our police and the intelligence of the public.

Brown has apparently started phoning up the public, getting ever more desperate in his attempts to capture the Daily Mail vote, after catastrophic Labour results in the local elections.

This Times guest column appears as his response to an imminent Commons revolt that could put a stop to the 42-day detention plan. Brown has been criticised by friends of the increasingly repellent Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, for not supporting her on the issue.
He is trying to pull in the big guns – the fearful Great British Public – to put the fear into any members of the Parliamentary Labour Party who are going to do the decent thing in next week’s vote.

I say to those with legitimate concerns about civil liberties: look at these practical safeguards against arbitrary treatment. With these protections in place, I believe Parliament should take the right decision for national security.

This would be rather more convincing if there weren’t examples of exactly how well the “protections in place” work, such as in the cases of the student and university staff member and the forbidden manual downloaded from a US government site.

Defining honour

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Today’s Observer has the horrific story of the murder of the mother of a 17-year-old Iraqi girl who was murdered a couple of weeks ago, because she was friendly with a British soldier.

Just to reprise the original murder. Rand Abdel-Qadar was seen talking in public with the soldier. Her father attacked her.

Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand’s two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust. (From the Observer, 11th May)

Leila Hussein had to go into hiding after denouncing her husband. She was sheltered by a woman’s rights organisation, but was ambushed and shot while moving between safe houses.

A fortnight ago, the Observer reported an interview with the father:

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse. ….
Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

Somebody get a dictionary for the Iraqi police and Abdel-Qader Ali, please. Or for me. Because if this is “what honour is”, then my understanding of the word is deeply flawed.

In fact, the man has even been rewarded. He is going to get paid without having to go to work.

Sources have indicated that Abdel-Qader, who works in the health department, has been asked to leave because of the bad publicity, yet he will continue to draw a salary.
And it has been alleged by one senior unnamed official in the Basra governorate that he has received financial support by a local politician to enable him to ‘disappear’ to Jordan for a few weeks, ‘until the story has been forgotten’ – the usual practice in the 30-plus cases of ‘honour’ killings that have been registered since January alone.

The Observer suggests that this case has only received so much attention because Rand was in love with a foreigner rather than an Iraqi. 30 cases since January? Thirty.

As far as I can see, the only person who showed any signs of holding to a concept of “honour” in this sorry crime was Leila Hussein. And look what happened to her.

Abdel-Qader is a Shia and he claims God’s support:

I know God is blessing me for what I did,’ he said, his voice swelling with pride. ‘My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.’

As so often, religion becomes the last refuge of the scoundrel.

You can’t lay the blame for these sorts of outrages at the door of religion, as such. It’s sexism – which also victimises these men involved by ingraining them with insane models of what it is to be a man. However, whenever some evil bastard wants to play a winner-takes-all trump card that beats all the opposition, you can usually rely on religion to serve this ideological end.

Here’s a link to the International Campaign to Stop Honour Killings.