7/7, Alex Cox and The Parallax View

Earlier on today I posted links to a couple of videos - one about 7/7, the other about 9/11

A few issues came up, either in the posts themselves or as comments underneath the posts, which have just converged for me in a nicely synchronisitic way

In my post about Tom Secker's 7/7 documentary I mentioned that there was a time, 15 or 20 years ago, when the State Broadcasting Company would occasionally air material of a parapolitical nature which nowadays it wouldn't touch with a barge pole. The example I chose to link to was the Timewatch documentary on Operation Gladio broadcast in 1992

In a comment underneath my post about James Corbett's excellent 9/11 satire I drew a parallel with the montage at the end of Corbett's video and the brainwashing scene that pops out of nowhere in the middle of The Parallax View - made back in the 70s when off the hook conspiraloonery and six minute long photo montages appeared with satisfying regularity in major motion picture productions (that decade gets an undeservedly bad rap imho)

That would be this scene...

Here's the nice convergence

Whilst watching that scene from The Parallax View I recalled an interesting introduction film director Alex Cox (maker of the 'intense' Repo Man) gave to The Parallax View when it was aired on Cox's Moviedrome series back in the late 1980s/ early 1990s

And, joy of joys, the Cox introduction is currently available on Youtube...

That was shown on BBC2 in 1993

The chances of Cox getting away with stuff like that on the State Broadcasting Company are now absolutely, no doubt about it whatsoever, fuck all

Which is a shame as Cox had one or two things to say about 7/7 in his blog which, in turn, kicked off an extended debate on the now defunct Alex Cox forum. That was back in the distant days of 2005 when the Official 7/7 Narrative was still being defended by 'official' 7/7 survivors engaged in frontal assaults, rather than the more indirect defence of the Official Narrative being mounted today by peddlers of perfidious harm and faulty arguments

Cox's original 7/7 article and the subsequent debate are now preserved for whatever passes for posterity these days on the J7 website here

I mention all this because it's only when, and fortunately I'm old enough to do this, I concentrate and think back to how wide the range of permitted public discourse used to be, in comparison to today, that I realise just how much has been taken away from us

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You're lucky I'm there To stop people doing the things That you know they are dying to do

See if you can tell which of the following images comes from where

One of them comes from a dystopic comic which encourages its adolescent readers to whack off on weapons porn, festishistic centrefolds of pitiless, fascistic lawmen and mental imagery of a society in ruins

The other comes from 2000AD

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Iranian Comedy Gold!!

Iran Calls on Britain to Avoid Violence against Protesters

Outstanding

And proof, yet again, that the secret of great comedy is timing

Personally, I'm not currently of the opinion that last night's street parties were deliberately allowed to erupt by a complicit establishment. The Hegelian Dialectic is not the the infallible tactic some conspiranoids would have us believe

It's all very well and good arranging for something shocking to happen so that the public will clamour for a more repressive state. However if, as occurred last night, the state comes across as being incompetent and powerless, this Hegel thing can easily blow up in your face

The probability of the Royal Air Force helping to bomb Syria, or anywhere else, better in the immediate future just reduced considerably

In a (very) perverse way, those looters last night may have saved some lives

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Your cut out and keep souvenir map of the London Riots 2011

The latest news just in is that NATO has recognized a group of rioters in Hackney as being the legitimate government of Great Britain and will start bombing the shit out of schools and hospitals across the country tomorrow morning

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'There was a suggestion you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair...'

Peace through superior firepower

A few days ago I was engaged in conversation with a non-conspiratorially minded chum who works in UK property sales

Times are definitely a changing as, for the first time, he acknowledge to me that, yes, the UK possibly was headed towards a period of severe economic hardship for the massses. He was, however, confident that the UK government 'has got clever people working behind the scenes who can see what's coming and the government probably has already started spending money on starting up some industries that will help pay us out of the mess the country's in'

My response was that there is absolutely no sign of that whatsoever and that whatever industry we could think of getting into, the Asian economies can think of getting into with a much lower cost base.

Even if they consented to enduring the same standard of living as the Chinese or Indians, the wages of British workers cannot be slashed to be competitive with Chinese or Indian labour because UK property costs are so much higher. Property costs that the British have to meet directly in rent or mortgages and indirectly through the rentier element concealed within the price of essential goods and services

However, as I explained to my chum, I have seen copious evidence that the British, and other Western, establishments are preparing for the possiblity of some kind of economic collapse. They haven't invested much in the way of productive manufacturing industry but they have spent shed loads on tooling-up their police forces

But that, my chum argued, was necessary because of the threat of terrorism...

Evidently, he's still in need of a little more conspirasizing

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I've been pulled up a couple of times in this blog for suggesting that British police have become more like para-militaries in recent years. The people who've pulled me up have have referred to the pitched battles, complete with cavalry, during the miners strike and the treatment meted out to people like Blair Peach and Stephen Waldorf as being evidence that the police have always been a bit 'tasty' when it comes to dealing with people who get in their way

And, yes, these commentators have a point but, with all respect, have you taken a look at the British police recently...


Even former senior coppers and yes, though I still can't quite believe it, Max 'Have you read my book about how great the SS were' Hastings have recently written articles suggesting that having machine-gun toting police who can execute people with impunity is probably not the way for supposedly civilised societies to go...

How can the public feel safe when the police are so scared?

Of course, the police have a tough job. But to shoot dead Mark Saunders like a mad dog was an affront to the values of a decent society

Sir Max Hastings - sole liberator of the Falkland Islands and born-again bleeding heart pinko fag subversive

But even these (presumably) principled voices against the militarisation of our police compromise their argument by agreeing that, because of the threat of terrorism, there is a place for some British policemen to be kitted out with the kind of weaponry and mentality that wouldn't be out of place in a 1970s junta, but only sometimes

Now, to me, it's plain as day that the Terror threat is being at least bigged-up, and possibly at least partially instigated, by the numerous interest groups that benefit from a society collectively crapping its pants

But that's actually a moot point

Even if I believed that the Terror threat was 100% genuine and as really, really scary as our Overlords keep telling us it is, we should still reject the surveillence state and militarised police on the time-honoured bases that those who surrender liberty for a little temporary safety really do deserve neither, that freedom has a price and that if we change our society in response to terrorism the terrorists have achieved their objectives

You will hear none of these arguments being promoted by British politicians, journalists or officially sanctioned (low) pressure groups like Liberty

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The gun fashionably displayed by the group of licenced potential killers in this photo is a variant of the iconic Heckler & Koch MP5...




The MP5 can chuck out bullets at rates of up to 500-600 rounds a minute. It's black, it's scary looking and it can kill a lot of people very quickly. It's the kind of high-quality weapon that gives serious gun nuts a roaring chubby just thinking about it.

MP5s, and a smattering of the higher velocity H&K G36, are now a common sight in London in the hands of Metropolitan police officers. If you're ever at one of London's airports take a look up sometime and you'll see police officers at the mezzanine levels strutting around with their MP5s, presumably ready to cut loose from elevated positions of fire at the drop of a hat.

If you think about it for a moment that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even if the quality of domestic terrorist was to take a quantum leap up from the kind of sad losers who make bombs out of flour and set fire to their underpants to the kind of terrorists who actually have access to guns, are the police really going to open fire with machine guns in crowded airport terminals? And, even if so, why do those armed police have to be there right in front of our fucking faces all the time?

The answer, I fear, is the same reason why the government sent light tanks to Heathrow before the invasion of Iraq. That weaponry is not there to scare potential (and, remember, allegedly suicidal) terrorists. It's there to scare us




The reason why I mention all of this now is because of this recent snippet from the State Broadcasting Company...

Police in training for 'Mumbai-style' gun attack in UK

...suspects were planning to copy the 2008 attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai*, where 10 gunmen went on a three-day rampage, killing 166 people and injuring more than 300, the sources said.

In response police armed response units are being given more powerful weapons.

Our correspondent said the UK authorities had been planning for such an attack ever since Mumbai* happened.

"David Cameron has taken a personal interest in the problem ever since his first threat assessment given to him when he took office in May.

"Now police armed response units are getting their firepower and their stocks of ammunition increased to deal with multiple terrorists armed with automatic weapons," he said.


More powerful than MP5s and G36s?!

What the fuck are they planning to start dishing out?

A few days ago I posted this clip as being a possible model for the introductory titles to any new TV series about the Metropolitan Police...

It was an attempt at weak humour

And it's weaker by the day



* = You remember the Mumbai attack, that's the one that included operatives with connections with US intelligence that the Indians are getting pissy about. A back-story that has been lavishly covered by the British State Broadcasting Company. Or, there again, maybe not.

And don't forget to read the hard-hitting, insightful and totally objective analysis from the SBC's totally unspooky Frank Gardner to the right of the article about UK police being armed with gatling guns or whatever the fuck it is they're getting. Frank's analyses are worth the State Propaganda Tax on their own

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I Can't Believe It's Not a Proper Inquest!! pt4

Given that the J7 team are doing an excellent job of analysing the material generated by the 7/7 Inquest over at their dedicated blog J7: 7/7 Inquests Blog, I do not intend to duplicate their effort by posting my own version of their work.

I may, however, make occasional posts on issues that I wish to amplify or offer a slightly different take on

The latest post on the J7 Inquests Blog discusses the evidence that there may been more than four people in the group of alleged bombers that visited London on 7/7, and the off-hand treatment of that evidence by 7/7 Inquest officials...

Don't Mention The Fifth (or Sixth?) Man

A commentator underneath one of my recent posts seemed to think that because I and others have issues with the absence of relevant CCTV material that maybe we are under the impression that the four alleged bombers didn't visit London on 7/7.

Nope

There could just as easily have been five, or six, or zero, or, yes, even four bombers who travelled down to London by train on the morning of 7/7

I haven't the faintest idea

That's my problem with the Official Narrative

The only alternative theory I am promoting is that I think the Official 7/7 Narrative is currently unsupported by evidence of a quality that would secure a criminal conviction 'beyond reasonable doubt'

and that's putting it mildly

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Additional 7/7 Inquest analyses that people have made me aware of since my last post include...

Terror on the Tube

Thanks to the commentator who pointed me to Nick Kollerstrom's posting on the 7/7 Inquest. Dr Nick has admittedly assisted with some useful research on 7/7, particularly in establishing that the original version of the Official 7/7 Narrative had the alleged bombers travelling to London on a train that didn't run. An all the more impressive performance from the Official Narrative given that it also alluded to witnesses on that non-existent train

I do, however, have a major problem with the quality of Dr Nick's judgment. Not least the fact that he decided to diversify into a spot of Jewish holocaust revisionism where he put his name to an article which implied that Auschwitz was some kind of Nazi Butlins; complete with swimming pool, water polo and picture postcards. An article that the mainstream and controlled alternative media got righteously steamed up about just before Dr Nick offered himself up for selectively-edited sacrifice by the BBC's Conspiracy Files

Wish You Were There?
Nazi Slave Labour Camps - The Kollerstrom View

Out of respect to the useful work that he has done, I'll link to Dr Nick's current posting on the 7/7 Inquest but I won't be including his site on any permanent link listings, as he has demonstrated that he is more than capable of pulling off feats of outstanding foolishness at the drop of a hat

Personally speaking, I may, on occasions, attempt to use crude humour or a superficially flippant style when writing about issues such as 7/7 but I never forget that this is a serious business and that 56 people died violent deaths on 7/7. This is not some abstract intellectual entertainment and to even hope to achieve some kind of positive result I believe that we sceptics have to educate ourselves to exercise good judgment and common sense

...as demonstrated by Keelan Balderson, producer of 7/7 The Big Picture, over at Wideshut.co.uk

Keelan's just put out a podcast containing a reasoned critique of the 7/7 Inquest (the 7/7 material starts 20 minutes in). The podcast, like 7/7 The Big Picture, is a little rough around the edges but nevertheless contains good information and reasoning. It is clear that Keelan is working hard towards developing an evidence-based analytical approach that tries to avoid the flights of fancy that have been attributed to Conspiraloons in the past


Tom Secker, the producer of another indepedent 7/7 Documentary, Seeds of Deconstruction is another researcher who seems to me to be trying to exercise critical judgment in his handling of the 7/7 material. Tom's take on the 7/7 Inquest thus far can be found over at his blog Howard Beale's News Hour


By their forensic nature, the articles I've linked to above are quite long and detailed. As such they illustrate one of the dilemmas faced by independent researchers who are sceptical of government narratives

If those researchers perform painstaking, meticulous research they are accused of being pedantic, train-spotter types who waste their lives teasing out the kind of tiny inconsistancies that even a completely honest narrative would contain

If those researchers don't perform painstaking, meticulous research they are then subject to the kind of bullshit typified by this comment from an anonymous bell-end underneath a link to J7 on the Indymedia site...


"18.10.2010 14:42
Most of your claims around 77 were around pulling apart the original and sparse CCTV released but now there has been a wealth of it been released your claims are meaningless. All these theories trickle down from Alex Jones, David Icke and others who make a lot of money from books, DVDs and lecture tours. You accuse people of being sheep for following 'mainstream media' but then you get your information from the likes of Infowars a site that tells its readers they need guns and gold to protect themselves, and they happen to sell it! Sorry Troofers, 911 was an outside job, 77 was an outside job. PS Just because you put the word 'truth' on your websites and in the name of your groups doesn't mean it is true."


J7 doesn't plug guns and gold. I don't plug guns and gold. None of us rely on Jones or Icke as primary sources. There is no wealth of CCTV, and the kind of person who posts mendacious nonsense like this is either a natural fucking idiot or a professional fucking idiot

And never, not once, in years of posting hundreds of sceptical articles have I had to resort to misrepresenting the views of people I disagree with. I may be off the mark with some of the views I hold but if that ever turns out to be the case I would have been honestly wrong and I have not lied to others, or myself.

And if I ever found myself behaving in that way I hope I'd be honest enough to ask myself what kind of Truth it is I pretend to be defending through the application of misrepresentation and deceit

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I Can't Believe It's Not a Proper Inquest!! pt3

Twenty or thirty years ago, proceedings such as the ongoing 7/7 Inquest would have been subject to critical scrutiny by at least some journalists and politicians. Not necessarily because those journalists and politicians suspected a high-level State conspiracy but simply because that's what they were supposedly employed to do, to hold the State to account

In most other dimensions and universes this headline would be considered bollocks

Today, literally not a single paid journalist or politician is exercising any critical scrutiny over the 7/7 Inquest. An inquest into an event which has been used to justify a national commitment to overseas wars and torture, as well as the erosion of domestic civil liberties

Literally dozens of Terror Bastards tooling up for a campaign of bloody mayhem - or some people buying fish fingers. It's difficult to be sure

Over this last weekend a handful of, for want of a better adjective, ordinary people have been working through and analysing transcripts and other material generated by the 7/7 Inquest. These researchers are not being paid for their efforts and they are, in fact, reviled and accused of being mentally ill by the professional whores who should be doing that work

What a screwed up state of affairs we find ourselves in. We live in a time where the range of public discourse permitted to us by our Establishment has been so narrowed that the simple act of being sceptical of government narratives is now routinely dismissed as mental illness

Fuck them

Fuck them all

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The folks at J7 have recently started a blog dedicated to their analysis of the material generated by the 7/7 Inquest

J7: 7/7 Inquests Blog

The first three posts are...


7 July Inquests: It's A Conspiracy, Stupid!

Which points out that the people running and taking part in the 7/7 Inquest are doing a stand-up job of attributing blame and apportioning guilt to the four alleged 7/7 bombers

...even though a) the Inquest has barely started, and b) the people running and taking part in the 7/7 Inquest have acknowledged that it is not the job of an inquest to attribute blame or apportion guilt anyway


A CCTV Fuss About Nothing?

Which ponders the question of how the Metropolitan Police could have been searching CCTV footage from Luton Station for signs of the alleged bombers one day before the Met had actually identified who the alleged bombers were and where they'd boarded their train. Maybe the Met is in on the secret of time travel?


The Final Curtain - "CCTV rich" to "CCTV FAIL!"

We Conspiranauts are well familiar with the long-established scientific principle that CCTV cameras spontaneously break-down whenever pointed at alleged terrorists carrying out their attacks or policemen shooting innocent people in the back of the head. However, there is still an almost comedic quality to the list of excuses, obsfucation and plain old bullshit that is being offered up by the Met in lieu of actual CCTV coverage from 7/7.

It's all vaguely reminiscent of Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch - only the Met has got fuck all video evidence rather than cheese

At this rate of foul-ups the 7/7 Inquest is going to tie itself into terminal knots within a few weeks, regardless of however compliant the mainstream media continue to be. Presumably this will have been anticipated and corrective measures will be employed. Such a state of affairs was reached in the weeks after 7/7 when even the mainstream press started to question the suicide bomber narrative. At which point one, then two, 'confession' videos fortuitously emerged on the web and all was right in Official Narrative Land once again


As well as the work being carried out by J7, the researcher behind wideshut.co.uk is also publishing some analysis

And that, aside from some comments posted on this blog, is about it as far as I'm aware of. I do miss Lord Patel's contributions, and Lord Patel, at times like this. If anyone passing through this blog knows of any other decent research (and I think it's fairly clear what I mean by decent) being carried out on the 7/7 Inquest material please do share

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I Can't Believe It's Not a Proper Inquest!! pt2

"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. Thank you, thank you. Now excuse me I've got an inquest to run..."

Years ago, shortly after 9/11, I was arguing with a work colleague about the blatant inconsistancies in the Official Narrative of that particular atrocity.

The miraculous fire-proof passports were high on my list of bullshit, as was the suggestion that the hijackers had been cramming 767 flight manuals in the airport car park on the morning of 9/11. I also had big issues with the story that at least some of alleged Muslim fanatics had got lagered up in the Pink Pony titty bar the night before their 'martyrdom operation'

My colleague explained to me in the most patronising tone he could muster...

'But what you don't understand is that these Al Qaeda operatives are trained to blend in seamlessly into Western Culture'

Now, as it happens, he was the kind of seedy old sod who did frequent titty bars on business trips and probably does consider them to be the epitome of Western Culture, but that's by the by

My response to my colleague was

'Is there anything those men could have done that would have disproved that they were Al Qaeda terrorists?'

His answer was that they shouldn't have destroyed the Twin Towers

Basically, he already knew that they were guilty (because he had been told by the media that they were), and the details of anything they did before the attacks, however banal or contradictory to the notion that they were religious fanatics, was to be interpreted in that light

Once you adopt that kind of mindset absolutely anything a person you've identified as a criminal does will be damning proof of their guilt

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Critical thinking clearly isn't as popular as it once was but, even so, it should still be fairly clear that theories which are phrased in a way that they can't ever be disproved, even if they are wrong, are not very useful theories at all

They are, however, the basis of much top quality comedy - including many a Marx Brothers routine, huge chunks of Catch-22 and the scene in Life of Brian where Brian denies that he's the Christ and is then informed that 'Only the True Messiah denies his divinity'

That which makes for top quality comedy does not, however, make for top quality inquests...


From the afternoon session on the 11th:

13 There is no evidence at all that we have seen to
14 suggest that the bombers were duped in some way so that
15 they did not know that they were going to die or, even
16 more absurdly, that they did not know that they were
17 carrying explosives at all. Indeed, such claims run
18 entirely contrary to all the evidence that I have
19 summarised so far.
20 It is right to say that the bombers were
21 surprisingly effective, it would seem, in concealing
22 their intentions from those around them. Tanweer played
23 cricket in the evening before putting the terrible plot
24 into effect and seemed more concerned, according to his
25 family, by the loss of his mobile phone.


You could write a longish essay exploring how many different flavours of intellectual dishonesty feature in the above extract from the 7/7 Inquest proceedings

but the short answer is, 'a lot'

A slightly longer answer can be found on the J7 Forum...


"This is utterly circular, and a complete nonsense.

The conclusion that there is no evidence that the alleged bombers were duped or otherwise unknowing suicide bombers is based on the assumption that they were entirely knowing. One piece of evidence that Tanweer was not a knowing, intentional suicide bomber (his playing cricket) is dressed up as evidence of the alleged 'concealing their intentions from those around them'. But this presumes that they were knowing, intentional suicide bombers, so the conclusion that there's no evidence of them being dupes or patsies is an implicit premise in analysing the very evidence that they were dupes or patsies.

When your conclusion is actually an implicit or explicit premise in your argument then your argument is circular. It also engages a certain degree of doublethink - evidence they weren’t guilty isn’t evidence they weren’t guilty, because we know they were guilty, and hence there’s no evidence they weren’t guilty.

This is a bloody pantomime. It not only presumes a desired conclusion, but seeks to refute 'conspiracy theories' by merely repeating the very thing the 'conspiracy theories' are questioning. It's like they've let the BBC's Conspiracy Files crew loose to carry out the inquests."

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Ah, the Good Old days...

Anyone for a spot of purification?

Back in the golden days of no-nonsense justice, the process of identifying evil doers was sped up considerably by deciding that they were guilty before any inquiry actually began

The potentially tedious, long-winded and utterly pointless process of having to hear a case for the defence was often done away with thanks to the brilliant innovation of offering the pre-judged a less agonising form of execution if they confessed

Costs were kept to a minimum and impressively high conviction rates were achieved

Re-offending rates were low

Times moved on and things have changed

A bit

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Those of us who are dissatisfied with and can point to gaps in the Official 7/7 Narrative, and who think that this is more important than the X-Factor or the new football season because of the societal changes that have been justfied by 7/7, should have raised an eyebrow at today's news that...

7/7 bomber's widow loses appeal for legal aid at victims' inquest

High court blocks Hasina Patel's application for financial help to understand Mohammad Sidique Khan's motive

The first eyebrow raiser, though we arguably should be used to that by now, is this constant referral by the media to the alleged 7/7 bombers as being the 7/7 bombers

Says who exactly?

Ok, I know the police and government do but both institutions have been known to get things wrong in the past and, dare I say it, tell fibs occasionally.

That's why silly things like inquests and jury trials and the opportunity for representatives of the accused to present a defence came into fashion for a while

Anyone referring to the alleged 7/7 bombers as the 7/7 bombers, in the absence of a conviction by due process, is pissing all over the principle of Innocent Until Proven Guilty

That would be one of those sacred freedoms the terrorists are supposed to be trying to take away from us

That's another one off their todo list already then

Another reason to raise your eyebrows over the refusal to give legal aid to the widow of an alleged 7/7 bomber is the reason given for refusing the aid...


"Far from providing any information that might assist the wider public interest, she has flatly and unequivocally declined the opportunity to do so."

"Although requested by this court to show how she could help establish why her late husband and the others whom she knew acted to murder fellow citizens, she has provided not an iota of evidence to us which could show how she could bring a wider benefit, let alone a significant benefit, to the inquests or to the understanding of the victims of the bombing."


...which basically boils down to the High Court saying that this woman would be granted legal aid only if she is willing and able to confirm her husband's guilt

If she is unable to provide such evidence or, perish the thought, she's not 100% sure of her husband's guilt she can fuck right off

Back to the golden days of no-nonsense justice it is then

And I appreciate that I'm in the tiniest of minorities thinking like this but I guess that part of my brain which thinks that sticking to moral principles is really, really easy and involves no tough decisions must be damaged beyond repair

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Have you noticed our caps have got skulls on them?

Yet another (relatively) oldie but goodie...

...inspired by a comment underneath my previous post, on the subject of JFIT

Not as funny as Junkie Christmas but quite relevant to some of the appalling comments, written by ignorant racist dickheads who genuinely believe that they're the Good Guys, I've been trawling through on the web recently

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Gewaltmonopol des Staates

A little Friday afternoon fun for the increasingly paramilitary British police and their Magic Wellness Sticks*, whilst they wait for some proper civil disorder and things to really kick off...

Three arrests after mass water fight in London's Hyde Park 'got out of control'

* =

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Hmmmm, neoserfdom...

I'm still Down Under and still not sure when I'll be returning to Europe or whether I'll have the time or inclination to crank this blog up properly again

though fantastic announcements like the following go a long way to remind me that there really is no escape wherever you are...

"HOMEBUYERS are to be offered never-ending mortgages in a bid to overcome Australia's affordability crisis."

"A mortgage partner for life"

The really fucking depressing thing is that being down here in NZ/ Oz is like being transported back 10, 15, 20 years in the UK and facing the prospect of living through what happened to the UK all over again for a second time - the privitisations, the credit boom and dislocations and inequalities that come with it, the rise of the service sector at the expense or productive industry, bonkers property costs, the Culture of Fear, the shite, propaganda-laden media, all of it

...and what makes it doubly depressing is witnessing, with the benefit of hindsight gained in the UK, just how easy all this stuff is to pull off

No-one ever failed to control a population by understimating people's susceptibility to greed and fear
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The Smallest Policeman in the World - The Sequel

Small Copper, Big Mullet

A week or so ago there was a spurt of outraged tutting about the story of a British street photographer arrested in Kent under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act

What interested me in particular was the photographer's account of comments made by one of the police officers who arrested him...

"For a further 5-10 minutes I stood in the street in full view of passers by handcuffed and accompanied and intermittently spoken to by officers xxxxx and xxxxx. Whilst sharing their views about the threat of terrorism officer xxxxx stated she had felt threatened by me when I took her picture. I cannot recall exactly what she said but I do recall her referring to my size and inferring she found it intimidating at the time (I am 5ft 11in and weigh about 12 stone)"

...which reminded me of something that happened to me a couple of years ago when I was photographing a demonstration in Whitehall (as per a longish post I made at the time here).

Cutting a long story short I was on the receiving end of a totally unlawful bout of harassment from an under-sized WPC who kept closing in on my personal space, under the watchful eye of half a dozen over-sized police officers not too far away.

It got to the point where I had to repeatedly back-off with my hands in the air, just on the outside, maybe not that outside, chance that I was accused of assault and had the crap kicked out of me; as I had already seen happen to another unfortunate half an hour before

All in the course of protecting the public from evil doers and trouble-makers, no doubt

My potential victim clearly knew what she was doing, as did I

These two stories, in turn, reminded me of the adventures of the Smallest Policeman in the World (actually, I've seen a couple, not just one) who gets wheeled out at select demonstrations and staged photo-opportunities featuring large, scary Muslims - especially recent converts with intriguing CVs




Does the Met have a conscious policy of using short-arses and women to make radical IslaMI5ts look scarier and photographers or other persons of interest look like dangerous thugs ?

Fucked if I know

But, speaking as someone who's been on the receiving end of some seriously dodgy behaviour, I have my concerns. The Metropolitan Police started losing my trust with this kind of provocation, plus the occasional public execution, long ago

Be warned

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Zeitgeist

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Best of the Bunch

Others here

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Nowhere to run to baby. Nowhere to hide... pt .47

I've already posted a link to the following story via a comment in a previous post. I think it's worth linking to because it illustrates a couple of things...

- The assault on personal freedoms being made in the name of the bullshit 'War on Terror' is truly global

- If there aren't any Muslims on hand to justify the establishment of a police state framework virtually anyone else will do. And if they're not scary enough they're encouraged to be a bit scarier


Anti-terror squad spies on protest groups
By NICKY HAGER and ANTHONY HUBBARD
Sunday Star Times | Sunday, 14 December 2008

Police teams set up to identify terrorism threats and risks to national security are spying on protest and community groups, including Greenpeace, animal rights and climate change campaigners, and Iraq war protesters.

Police officers from the Special Investigation Group (SIG) have carried out surveillance and used a paid informer to gather information not just about planned protests but the personal lives and sexual relationships of group members.

The police informer, Christchurch man Rob Gilchrist, whose activities are revealed in today's Sunday Star-Times, was a key member of various community groups during the past decade.

He helped arrange protests and was close friends with leading campaigners, and advocated radical and illegal activities by the groups.

Last week he said he was embarrassed and sorry for what he did. The people he spied on were not security threats. "I know they are good people trying to make a better world."

Wellington human rights lawyer Michael Bott said the surveillance of peaceful groups was repugnant and "has shades of Big Brother and Soviet Russia". Surveillance of the personal lives of members of peaceful groups meant the basic right to privacy was being eroded. "It just appears fundamentally abusive and wrong."

Gilchrist was unmasked recently when his animal rights and Labour Party activist girlfriend Rochelle Rees was helping him fix his computer. She stumbled across signs of him passing information about protest groups to an anonymous email address.

This address has since been traced to two SIG officers based at the Christchurch central police station, Detective Peter Gilroy and Detective Sergeant John Sjoberg. Gilchrist privately referred to them as "Uncle Pete" and "Uncle John".

Melbourne newspaper The Age reported a similar case three months ago, where an undercover police officer had infiltrated community groups. He worked in Animal Liberation Victoria, taking part in a midnight raid on a battery hen farm, and helped organise anti-Iraq war demonstrations.

He worked for Australia's similarly named Security Intelligence Group, which is also officially focused on terrorism...


There is, of course, just a little bit of irony about state operatives monitoring NZ Greenpeace for terrorist tendencies when you recall that Greenpeace itself was the victim of state sponsored terrorism when French government agents blew up the Rainbow Warrior twenty years ago




Not that states, especially western democracies, ever actually sponsor terrorism and even if they did we'd know all about every single terrorist act they ever sponsored because we'd read about it in the newspapers. Definitely

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So, who's next then?

Not a tragic suicide after all

Just in from Sky News...


The mother of Jean Charles de Menezes has said she feels "reborn" after a jury at an inquest into her son's death rejected a verdict of lawful killing

The 10 jurors returned an open verdict after listening to more than seven weeks of evidence into the 27-year-old's death.

Earlier, Mr de Menezes' family had said the inquest was a "whitewash" after the coroner said the jury could not return a verdict of unlawful killing.

But after the jury rejected a string of claims made by police officers about the events leading up to Mr de Menezes being killed, Maria Otone de Menezes said she was relieved.

In a statement read out at a news conference by the family, Mrs de Menezes said: "Since the moment that the coroner ruled out the option of unlawful killing I was feeling very sad.

"But today I feel as if I have been reborn."

In a damning indictment, they dismissed claims by a firearms officer, codenamed C12, that he shouted "armed police" before opening fire.

The jury also disputed that Mr de Menezes had walked towards officers before he was killed.

The jurors concluded that six police failings caused or contributed to the innocent man's death.

The jury of five men and five women came to a majority of eight to two in delivering their open verdict. Of the remaining 12 questions, the jury were unanimous on all but two of them.

Firearms officers shot Mr de Menezes on a train at Stockwell Tube station in south London on July 22, 2005, after mistaking him for failed suicide bomber Hussain Osman.

As the jury returned its verdict after its sixth day of deliberations, the Menezes family accused coroner Sir Michael Wright of "presiding over a complete whitewash".

In a fierce attack, they said he "failed on every count" during proceedings.

After the hearing, acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson said: "We must and do accept full responsibility for his death.

"For someone to lose their life in such circumstances is something the Metropolitan Police regrets.

"In the face of enormous challenges faced by officers on that day, we made a most terrible mistake. I am sorry."

He said officers had been working in a "unique situation" in the wake of the July 7 suicide bombings - in which 52 people were killed - and the attempted terror attacks in the capital on July 21, after which there were potential bombers on the loose.

"No one set out that day to kill an innocent man. The coroner has ruled that on the extensive evidence put to the court that this was not an unlawful killing."

He said the officers who shot the Brazilian "set out with the intent to protect and defend the public".

Some 100 people gave evidence at the inquest into the death of Mr de Menezes.

Among them were 65 police officers, mostly firearms and surveillance experts, 50 of whom were granted anonymity.

The jury also heard from 17 Tube passengers and Mr de Menezes's cousins.

There was much anticipation that former Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair could give evidence, but he resigned just under two weeks into the inquest.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission called for a review of police procedures in the wake of the shooting.

IPCC chairman Nick Hardwick said the inquest did not "examine the broader issue of how the police should respond to the threat of suicide terrorism.

"I call again for this to have much broader debate and scrutiny by the public and their representatives," he said.

Sky News crime reporter Martin Brunt said it was a "distinct possibility" that the IPCC, which initially cleared those involved of any wrongdoing, would choose to review that decision.

He said that since the jury had effectively decided that the firearms officers had lied about giving a warning before the shooting, disciplinary action was a possibility.


Needless to say, and contrary to the bullshit being parroted by the BBC, Sky and all the others, no-one has yet proved that De Menezes' executioners made any mistake whatsoever when they killed an innocent man.

The only thing that has been proved is that the executioners and their bosses have lied through their fucking teeth about the execution and that the full force of the establishment was used to slander an innocent victim after he was killed

And no amount of corporate media spin can hide that

Fucking disgraceful

and, in the light of the fact that the bastards who ordered the execution are completely unrepentant and have openly, and repeatedly, stated that it could very easily happen again, it's also fucking scary




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edit: actually, something else was proved in the inquest and that is the police knew full well that JCdM was not carrying anything that could have been a bomb and therefore could not have been a potential bomber

Rest assured that little nugget is going to be filed away in the same memory hole as the revelation earlier this year that the alleged 7/7 bombers supposedly scattered their ID, personal effects and bombs around the crowded tube carriages before setting their bombs off (?!!)

and conspiracy theorists are supposedly mentally unwell because they're sceptical of official narratives? For fuck's sake...

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What do you think you are? Some kind of a comedian?

'Austrian Clown' Arrested

Austrian artist Christian Eisenberger (1978) was arrested on Monday by the Metropolitan Police on the corner of Bishopsgate and New Street in the City of London. After a brief interrogation he was released, carrying parts of his outfit in a plastic bag.

Eisenberger, who is well known in Austria for his sculptures and performances in public spaces as well as for performances in the middle of nature, was walking on Bishopsgate, wearing a clown's outfit, when a member of the public alerted the police. Most probably, the reason for this was that Eisenberger wore not only a typical clown's costume with the appropriate clown's make-up, but also carried a belt around his waist fitted with brightly coloured artificial explosives.




Eisenberger, who was visiting London for 48 hours, commented that he knew that the walk through London would fail at a certain point, but to his surprise his visits to Downing Street, Parliament Square, the new Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Modern went unchallenged. The public responded with amusement and while some members of the public raised eyebrows, none of the security guards at the various sites took action.

However his freedom as a clown ended when he was spotted by members of staff at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) who stood outside smoking cigarettes.

Minutes later, exactly 20 footsteps away from the police station at Bishops Gate near Liverpool Street Station, eight policemen surrounded Eisenberger, handcuffed him, and led him to the nearby police station, having relieved him of his red clown's wig and red nose. Where the same performance earlier this year in Vienna caused only amusement, it goes without saying that walking through London's financial centre in an 'explosive clowns costume" will draw not only reactions by the public, but also by the police who will react swiftly.




Perhaps in these chastened times, tragicomic figures will draw attention and will make people stop and think. The irony of this event is that the clown 'Eisenberger' was not only being a clown but he also seemed to be a potential threat to the public. HVS December 2008

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