Stop the March of the Police State! Act Now!

My regular readers will know that for several years, since this blog was first created after the events of 77 in July 2005, I have been warning of the erosion of liberties and the creation of police states on both sides of the Atlantic.

The fact that this is happening as a transatlantic phenomenon is no accident. Bush's fascists first performed a coup on the US electorate by stealing the presidential election in 2000. We know now that by rights the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, was the rightful winner. But there was no challenge. Bush and his band of rogues were allowed to take over the White House. And it happened again in 2004 with 'faulty' electronic voting machines! Again, the criminals were allowed to get away with it. What now in 2008?

It was clear to many of us that the events of 911 were indeed a conspiracy involving some very powerful forces in north America and elsewhere. The purpose was to so traumatize the public that there would be no struggle when a premeditated, systematic erosion of constitutional and civil liberties followed --not only in the USA but in the UK as well as in other English-speaking countries. The wholly spurious 'War on Terror' was the ideological weapon used with which to bludgeon the opposition into submission.

On the international level we were told to prepare ourselves for 'Endless War' the description used by the Bush/Blair/Brown neocons for ongoing imperialist aggression by the US/UK/Israel in what might otherwise be called Resource Wars --wars staged in order that the West might secure strategic resources such as Oil, Gas, Water and other Mineral Resources needed to keep its system turning over.

The police states created through the fake 'War on Terror' are but one side of the coin. On the other is the prospect of Endless War. Taken together, we see the nightmare prospect of an Orwellian apocalypse. It started in earnest with the mass-murders of 911 and 77. It continues with the inexorable march of the police state. Many eyes are opening to what is going on. Many more need still to be opened. Please help that process by passing this link and text to as many people as possible. There isn't a moment to lose.

Rory Winter, CHIMES OF FREEDOM.

NUJ Film shows Police obstruction of Journalists
NUJ, 9 September 2008

The National Union of Journalists has released a short film highlighting some of the problems faced by journalists covering public demonstrations.

The video was released the day after the TUC in Brighton condemned the erosion of civil liberties and media freedoms in Britain. TUC unions unanimously backed a motion, proposed by the National Union of Journalists, which called for a rethink of government policies that put journalists at risk of imprisonment just for doing their job.

Speaking after the TUC vote, NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Journalism is facing grave threats in an age of intolerance. Whilst on the streets dissent is being criminalized, independent journalism is being increasingly caught in the civil liberties clampdown.”

The nine-minute video, called Press Freedom: Collateral Damage, includes examples of the police obstructing journalists in their work.


Release of the film follows numerous complaints from media workers who have experiences of the police going beyond their powers in attempting to restrict the ability of journalists to do their work. The NUJ’s motion to the TUC was part of a wider campaign for a greater recognition of press freedom by the UK government.

The motion also highlights cases of journalists, such as Robin Ackroyd and Shiv Malik, who have faced the threat of jail because of legal demands to reveal confidential source information.

In his speech to Congress, Jeremy Dear drew attention to the case of Sally Murrer, who is facing criminal prosecution for receiving information from a police source, and highlighted the problems faced by journalists attempting to cover the recent Climate Camp in Kent.

Jeremy said: “The terrorising of journalists isn’t just done by shadowy men in balaclavas, but also by governments and organisations who use the apparatus of the law or state authorities to suppress and distort the information they do not want the public to know and to terrorise the journalists involved through injunctions, threats to imprisonment and financial ruin.

“The use of the Terrorism Act and SOCPA increasingly criminalize not just those who protest but those deemed to be giving the oxygen of publicity to such dissent. Journalists’ material and their sources are increasingly targeted by those who wish to pull a cloak of secrecy over their actions.”

The speech concluded: “This isn’t over-zealous policing this is a co-ordinated and systematic abuse of media freedom – and we must expose it, challenge it and act against those who undermine the rights of photographers, journalists and media workers.

“And we must do so because if whistleblowers and sources fear speaking out, if photographers and journalists cannot probe the dark corners of business, politics or human rights, the ability of the media – already under threat from concentration of ownership and cost-cutting – to hold power to account, to expose wrongdoing, to provide the information on which citizens can make informed decisions about their lives will be seriously compromised.

“The Terrorism Act and SOCPA are not sophisticated security policies – they are the blunt instruments of an intolerant government.

“As if in some Orwellian nightmare the Ministry of Freedom tells us that the price we must pay for peace and liberty at home is not just a war in Iraq – not just the billions spent on war – but, in the wake of the London bombings, is the fingerprinting of council workers and the covert surveillance of M&S workers. It is ID cards and 42-day detention. It is curbs on the right to protest, the civil contingencies act and it is the extension of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, a snoopers’ charter giving access to personal texts, emails and internet use.

“The price is too high. Less liberty does not imply greater security. It never has.

“Our movement has been at the forefront of the great struggles for human and civil rights over the past century. In this age of intolerance new struggles must be waged and we must lead that fight.”

Propaganda
Craig Murray's blog
September 10, 2008

I have been worrying about the serious deterioration of civil liberties in the UK for five years now, but a small incident last night convinced me we are living in a country that must be classified as "Not free". I was travelling to the theatre on the tube, and the large majority of passengers were shrouded by copies of either London Lite or the London Paper. Some thirty copies of each banner headline screamed shrilly its message of fear through the train: "Five Suicide Bombers on the Loose in London!" "Jet Terror Plot!" "Terror Jury Holiday Farce Resulted in Acquittals!"

The propaganda, which reflected uncritically the briefing the Security Services and Home Office have been manically pumping out since the non-existence of the "Bigger than 9/11" jet plot was confirmed, was so stark and so divorced from any connection to the truth, that I am convinced we are already in effect living in a totalitarian state where the government controls the population through fear with brutal efficiency and with absolutely no regard to the truth. The government had contrived to turn a major blow for its "War on Terror" scaremongering into a vehicle to ramp up that scaremongering.

The Lite told of there still being bombers around from the "Jet Terror Plot" and gave no indication whatsoever that the jury had decided the jet plot did not exist. Indeed it claimed shamelessly that the three terrorists convicted of conspiracy to murder had been planning to bring down planes - a direct lie.

The London Paper was still more worrying, because it put detail into the line the odious security service spokesman Frank "Goebbels" Gardner has been pumping out on the BBC: juries are unreliable. It said that the failure to convict in the trial was due to interruptions for a holiday for the jurors and because of an injury to a juror in a golf accident. The clear trend of the briefing coming from the government is towards the abolition of jury trials in terrorist cases: Diplock courts.

Meantime in London two men are on trial for "terrorism" because they attended a demonstration at the Uzbek Embassy against the hideous Uzbek regime, at which red paint was thrown at the Embassy to symbolise the blood of Karimov's many thousands of victims. Such protest as paint-throwing should, I think, be illegal, but given events like the Andijan massacre of many hundreds of peaceful demonstrators, I have huge sympathy for those who undertake civil disobedience in the Uzbek case. It has nothing to do with terrorism, but under the notorious Section 58 of the Terrorism Act there is real danger of conviction and heavy sentences.

These are critical times: all good men and women must fight hard against the closing in of the system upon us.

So what does it Take for the People to Rise Up?

Following the terrorising of protestors by the Twin Cities pigs at the US National Republican Convention, Ron Jacobs writes a good piece in The Dissident Voice saying:

I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Jerry Springer-like drama playing out around the GOP vice presidential pick Sarah Palin. Let me also state that I seriously wonder how long it will be before the folks that vote for the Republicans year in and year out realize that the men and women they are voting to rule them are part of the Washington elite just as much as the Democrats they despise.

He goes on:

What I do care about in terms of this week in Minnesota is what is going on outside the convention. From all reports in the media outlets that cover that which is not scripted by the GOP, the streets of the Twin Cities have been turned into a zone where police terror is permitted and even encouraged ... In addition, police have attacked protesters, journalists and bystanders with clubs, pepper spray, and tear gas. So far, close to five hundred people have been arrested. Most of them are being held in open air detention centers.

But this state terrorism wasn't carried out merely as a local operation. Clearly it had been carefully planned a long way ahead of events, not just by city authorities but by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No doubt all the way back to the thugs in the White House.

These arrests, while certainly of questionable legality, are but the tip of the iceberg. On September 3, 2008, eight members of the RNC Welcoming Committee– some of the primary organizers of the protests–were formally charged with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism. These eight were among those arrested in the pre-convention raids and, according to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), face up to 7 1/2 years imprisonment each.

The evidence collected by the pigs to substantiate these charges is in itself laughable, were the charges not so serious:

None of the defendants have any prior criminal history involving acts of violence. Searches conducted in connection with the raids failed to turn up any physical evidence to support the allegations of organized attacks on law enforcement. ” Because no physical evidence of this nature was found, police seized common household items like lighters, cleaning fluid, some nails and a couple hatchets and claimed that these items were to be used to incite insurrection. In addition, police claimed they confiscated two buckets of what they called (I’m serious here) “weaponized urine.” What these buckets actually contained was gray water used to flush toilets at the house where they were found. According to police, other seized materials included other types of household tools, padding (probably to protect people from police truncheons), some pvc pipe and an army helmet.

Jacobs sums up:

At this writing, the charges brought against the eight are state charges. It is unknown whether or not federal authorities have any plans to charge these eight or any of the others arrested. What is known is that, much like Chicago forty years ago, the primary cause of any riots that might occur in the Twin Cities are the result of unconstitutional police actions supported by local officials, the national party nominating its warmongering candidate, and the federal police state apparatus. Indeed, the events of forty years ago were termed a police riot by a federal commission formed to investigate the disturbances.

Police terrorism of this kind is not only restricted to the US. Here in the UK it has got much worse in the last decade or so since Tony Blair, who no doubt on Bush's orders imported the 'War on Terror' and chickenhawk fascism to Britain. As the US Constitution has been demolished by these Bringers of Chaos so our eight-centuries'-old Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus have been effectively done in and done away with. The pattern is predictable: if it happens in the US today, we'll have it here by tomorrow.

The Rule of Law has been given the death sentence.

You think I jest? Well here's an example of how the Rule of Law is turned upside-down by the very people responsible for its legislation: For over a year now some of us have been trying to get the UK police constabulary to bring charges of war crimes against Tony Blair and Co. Now there is no question that these are common war criminals we're dealing with. The International Criminal Court Act of 2001 goes to great lengths to describe their crimes.

But it appears that war crimes are, after all, a political matter and nothing to do with the process of justice. War crimes are something we hang around the necks of our enemies once we have fought and won a war against them in which we ourselves commit countless war crimes against the innocent victims who got in our way: 'collateral damage' it's called. Very sad. Too bad. But that's war you know and once we've won we can attach all the blame for all the killing on those horrid people we had to go to war against in the first place. We did it to the Germans and we're doing it to the Serbs right now (and that'll learn 'em to mess about with us!)

That last bit in brackets, of course, is hissed inaudibly by the Judge so that only the Clerk of Court can hear it. It wouldn't do for us commoners to hear just what a stitch-up the judicial process can be when it has to deal with its political enemies. Well we discovered that when we reported Blair and his fellow war criminals to the British plods. In most cases they just scratched their heads bemusedly.

"Nothing to do with us. Complain to the politicians!" they replied in dismissal. So we took it to the politicians --in my case to Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond, 'Our Eck'. "Nothing to do with me," he replied predictably. "Don't expect me to waste police time!"

Which only goes to show just how knowledgeable your average politician, be he never so high, is of national and international law. The ICC Act of 2001 is modelled on the Rome Statute of 1998 and was legislated into being by the MPs who were sitting at that time in Westminster's House of Commons. MPs, it should be recalled, including one Alex Salmond. But then a week in politics is a long time as the late Harold Wilson once observed and the memory of your average MP very much shorter.

Well, my own complaint was finally taken seriously by a politically savvy Chief Constable who neatly passed the buck onto the Counter Terrorism Command at Scotland Yard. Now why, you may ask, should the reporting of a crime be passed onto Counter Terrorism? Does this mean that the British police, in their wisdom, consider our politicians to be potential terrorists? Or is it really we who are being reported for daring to uphold the Rule of Law in the case of such crimes?

It seems that we stepped out of line and are now being investigated for possible terrorist offences. For having carried out Britain's first known civil obedience campaign, asking the powers that be to carry out their own laws, we have been turned into terrorist suspects! Now what does that tell you about the inverted bizarro world in which we find ourselves today?

I could go on to describe the surveillance state in which we long-suffering Brits live today, where there are more CCTV cameras spying on us than anywhere else in the world. I grew up in the Cold War of the 'sixties when we were fed scare stories about those dreadful Reds in the totalitarian Soviet Union. Ha! And look at us now! Betcha any money those Russkies don't have anywhere near the CCTV and other surveillance we have! And doesn't that prove our technological superiority!?

Just how much repression are we in the Anglo-American world prepared to take before we rise up against our tormentors? How many millions does it take to shiver and starve and die in the cold of midwinter as many of us soon surely will? If nothing else does it, empty stomachs soon leads to revolt. And this is where the manner in which our governments treats protestors returns for our consideration. For if what we are seeing in the US and in Britain, conveniently justified as a 'War against Terror', is anything to go by then we're in for a very rough time indeed. The events of 911 and 77 were only just the beginning. We ain't seen nothin' yet.

So let me finish this rant by repeating here the thoughts of a fellow Brit on the significance of events at the RNC for not just north Americans but their distant cousins on this overcrowded little island:

What this shows is the extent the authorities will still go to protect the interests they serve. [These are] unfortunately effective tactics.

Where this breaks down is if the protest movement can reach a critical mass. Squashing even a few hundred and arresting a few dozen is one thing. But if protests become the norm across the country then they can't 100s of thousands. Numbers reduce them to impotence.

Unfortunately, mass based organising whilst extensive cannot get that kind of number out consistently. You need millions of people who are prepared to risk prison and criminal records. And when you're mortgaged and you need to keep a particular kind of job to keep feeding the family then the ability to participate, and take these risks, is curtailed.

However, when ruling elites reduce enough people to a state where you don't give a damn, or the costs of confronting power directly are no longer outweighed by the gains to be achieved through conformance, then you are in a revolutionary state.

It can happen! The ruling class despise most outside of their class instinctively. And they are pulling away in wealth. I suppose as long as the populace have bread and circuses then they might be able to brazen it out for a while yet!

Medialens

Indeed. But for how much longer?

Rory Winter