The BBC says that the Gitmo trials will be fair.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has promised a fair trial for Guantanamo prisoners accused of organising the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Firstly, these are military tribunals, not courts, but they intend to seek the death penalty. Does that sound like a convincingly fair trial to anyone outside the Bush administration?

Surely, by definition, you can’t have a fair trial where the evidence is extracted under torture.

If the investigators were so inept that they had to keep people in isolation for years, interrupted by periods of regularly overtly torturing them, to make a case, I suspect they may not have the strongest case in the world.

This is clearly the perspective of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“Possibly putting someone to death based on evidence obtained through water-boarding, or after prolonged periods of sleep deprivation while being forced into painful stress positions, is not the answer,” said Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch. (from the BBC website)

Is the Bush administration completely stupid?

Is there any way on earth that this show trial will diminish the threat of terrorism, given that noone outside of the US and few people inside must see this as any form of due process?

Even the British royal family doesn’t believe what the US says about the war in Iraq, ffs. Much as it grieves me to quote a Royal in an approving manner,
Prince Andrew got it pretty well spot on last week, although he was seriously slated in the media, for daring to express a political opinion.

(Ironically, Princess Diana is still worshipped by the media, precisely for daring to express herself. I guess that is more to do with the touchy-feely “poor sensitive me” stuff that she came out with. In the present day, you are much more respected if you discuss your bulimia on Oprah than if you give any serious thought to the world…)

Andrew said there were

“occasions when people in the UK would wish that those in responsible positions in the US might listen and learn from our experiences”.

Basically, the prince, himself a decorated Falklands war veteran, was implying that the colonial mistakes of the British could prove instructive to the USA. Specifically, not acting in ways that spur lifelong hatred and will to fight, I assume.

He also said, although more politely, that we in the UK don’t believe what we hear from Washington, post-Iraq:

the Iraq war had induced a “healthy scepticism” towards America.(from trhe Guardian, 5 Feb 2008)

I grant that our own government seems hellbent on not learning any lessons from history, so it’s not as if our hereditary figureheads have any influence here, either. But, surely years of holding on to their land and fending over republican revolutions have taught them a thing or two about the virtues of flexibility and of not making unnecessary enemies.

Five musicians were awarded damages after a Ryanair pilot  refused to carry them, acting on the suspicion of an onboard psychologist.

(This is clearly a man whose awareness of the limits of his own expertise had been misinformed by tv programmes with psychologists and profiler heroes, such as Cracker and Criminal Intent. The pilot may also have watched too many of these.)

The story would be quite comical if it didn’t involve serious embarrassment and major inconvenience to some blameless travellers.

…. And if the incident didn’t expose pure racism …..

The paranoid psychologist saw 5 black men sitting separately on the plane, although they had been together in the departure lounge. (Has he never been on a packed plane before? Maybe he knows the secret of getting 5 adjoining seats without booking 2 years in advance. It’s often tough enough to get two seats in the same part of the plane.)
He claimed that one of the men, who was blind, appeared to be reading a newspaper. (The blind man’s friends were actually reading to him, but in any case, blindness is not necessarily total. Does a blind person incur a duty of complete blindness on themselves, in case their limited sight turns out to confuse people. )

Apparently impressed by the psychology professor’s logic, the Ryanair pilot,

Captain Dunlop decided to remove the men, the only black people on the flight, after two families and a stewardess said that they would not fly with them on board.

So, even after the men had been removed from the flight and their credentails fully established, Captain Douglas refused to have them on board.

The decision left the group stranded in Sardinia and unable to see their families on New Year’s Eve. The first available flight back to Britain on New Year’s Day was to Liverpool. The men could not find a hotel when they arrived in the city and had to spend the night at a bus station, sleeping on their instruments. They only got back to London on January 2.

Even if you choose to ignore the obvious racism behind all this, the incident speaks volumes about where our anti-terrorist panic is leading us, as a society. We seem to be becoming more and more like the McCann “witness” – who saw a non-Anglo-saxon man in the resort, a few days before the McCann’s arrival, and assumed that he must be the person responsible for the disapperance of Madeleine. The British press seem more than happy to treat this prejudiced nonsense as a genuine witness statement.

This psychologist did the same. He saw some people who stood out – to him – ONLY by the fact of their not being white. He then chose to interpret their every action as a threat and to report them to an authority – the pilot – who immediately went along with the claims of a middle-class white passenger, despite their innate absurdity.

Imagine:

• Professional terrorists whose plan somehow requires that there be 5 of them together on a flight but that they appear to be strangers to each other.
• They also have to pretend to be a steel band, thereby making a mockery of the whole “unknown to each other” idea.
• One of them has to pretend to be blind.

This already constitutes a plan so cunning as to be incomprehensible to mere mortals. What could possibly be achieved by having an ostensibly blind passenger, who was actually sighted? Would a terrorist act be more effective if any stray nosey fellow-passenger passers-by might assume those involved weren’t travelling as a group.But the oddest assumption is that the supposed terrorist architects of this intricate and complex plan do not even have the wit to stick to it for a couple of hours.

They are “terrorists” so inept that they can be out-thought by an academic with a plane ticket – someone who fills no formal intelligence or security role and has no access to any information whatsoever, except his own prejudices, in fact.

The judge gave them 4 times the standard amount of damages, but this sum still seems derisory, especially as RyanAir even gave a false story to the press.

Normally, damages for being denied boarding are limited to £250, but the judge said that the group’s “embarrassment at being the only black persons removed from the aircraft at gunpoint for no just reason, their inability to be with their families and friends on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, the overnight stay in the cold of Liverpool, [all] had to be taken into account”.
Ryanair had also lied about the incident to the press. Peter Sherrard, the airline’s head of communications, had told newspapers that “airport security were informed and decided to remove the group”, and that “no request was made to our pilot to allow this group to reboard”. This was “false and misleading”, the judge said.

On the BBC website, those (like me) who mocked the new McQualifications get a right telling off by Mike Baker for being snobbish.

Hmm. Another chance to sound off about them. In numbered list format, even.

• It’s fine for companies to choose to train their staff and give them proof of having achieved a certain standard of competence in the company’s work. It’s hardly the concern of public awarding bodies.
• Despite a rhetoric of opening up the opportunities to gain qualifications to the less academic, these “qualifications” implicitly place the holder firmly in the “peon” class.
• At the same time, they create a further “under-peon” class of people who haven’t got them. So, they put people who haven’t got them at an unnecessary disadvantage in terms of getting jobs or promotion.
• Vocational qualifications being what they are, they will reward those people who can fill out the standard phrases in their standard portfolio in a standard way. This means that people who are actually good at being shift supervisors but rubbish at documenting their achievements will do worse than those who are good at collecting documents.
• Any one of average intelligence can pick up the skills needed to work in most jobs, with a bit of experience. What difference does a piece of paper make except to limit access to those jobs?
• There is a big UK push for all under-18s having to be in “education or training.” Hmm. Education that stretches the mind, maybe. Training in craft skills, maybe. Training in tasks that any able-bodied person can pick up in a couple of weeks, no.

Is objecting to McQuals for McJobs being “snobbish” toward the recipients? I think the disdain they rouse comes from a recognition that these are worthless bits of paper that just attempt to draw an obscuring veil over the massive deskilling of workers and the failure of the education system to develop people’s real potential.

It is a national outrage (depending on which segment of society you hail from) and it is certainly something that impacts all elements of the UK. It is also subject to a strangely twisted world view.

I am talking about oil prices (and petrol prices specifically).

For us poor Brits, the average price of petrol (gasoline for our colonial brethren) is now £1.05 per litre. This is approximately $7.91 a gallon. For some people it makes owning a car financially crippling (to the great joy of some “green” lobbyists), and it also has the knock on effect of making public transport prices increase to the point of stupidity. Given the way modern society works, not having access to affordable transport is fatal. Using plain old me as an example, my “commute” to work leaves me driving at an average of 23 miles per hour which is far from economical with the fuel – however there is no public transport which covers the route, it too far to walk (20 miles) and for various reasons cycling is not an option. I have no choice but to foot the big assed fuel bill each month (best part of a gallon each way…).

As you can imagine, fuel prices annoy me. A few years ago we had all manner of protests over the UK when road haulage firms complained about the high tax rates, but despite this pump prices have been steadily rising every few months. Breaking the £1 per litre mark was once thought to be so outrageous as to never happen. Ha.

The government tax fuel at 65%, pretty high really. I don’t actually have a problem with this in general terms as it provides a phenomenal source of revenue for the country. This is, normally, a GOODTHING™©. However, despite this source of revenue, a tax which is claimed to exist at least partly to encourage people to reduce personal transport usage, is not being used to provide good quality public transport.

Whenever people complain about the monstrous cost of vehicle fuels, the oil companies are always quick to point the finger of blame on the government’s massive fuel tax. And, on the surface, this seems reasonable as 65% tax is high. If you take the oil companies at face value, they are charging the minimum they can get away with to recoup their costs and pay their taxes. Aren’t they all saintly?

Today, one of the headline news items read “Shell sets new UK profits record.”

Wow. How can these two versions of reality be reconciled?

If, as they claim, the high cost of oil is solely dependant on the government imposed tax how is Shell managing to turn £13.9 BILLION in profit? That is in the region of £230 per person in the UK. For that, they could strike off 30p a litre on fuel and still be making a phenomenal profit – not to mention the massive amount of extra sales they would get.

It really makes my head spin to think that Shell (and presumably the other oil companies) are happy to commiserate with the public about the high price of oil while at the same time gouging a monstrous profit. Petrol prices may suffer from high taxes, but the root cause of their bank-balance-busting status is the uncontrolled greed of the oil companies. At least the governments tax makes its way back to the nation…