Tag: Tony Blair

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On an Unimaginable Scale

Paul Stephenson, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police in London, said the goal of the people suspected of plotting the attack was “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”  New York Times, August 28, 2006

I guess now we know why the scale was “unimaginable”. It was unimaginable because only the police involved in this case could look at the evidence they had gathered and come to the conclusion that a major terrorist plot was actually in the making.

As always, over and over and over again, the headlines screamed TERROR! UNIMAGINABLE SCALE! BOMB FACTORY! HIJACKINGS! 10 or more planes!!! and so forth and so forth. It’s almost as if the police were desperately trying to convince you that all of the infringements of your civil liberties, all the excessive new police powers, all of that sold-out, smug, superciliousness on Tony Blair’s face– all of it was justified. Here they are– Al Qaeda plotting again!

Well, it could be Al Qaeda. They admitted right away that there was no real evidence of a link. Oddly, they admitted that there was no evidence at all, of a link to Al Qaeda, but they understood the media: every article I saw on the story included the phrase “Al Qaeda” mostly to acknowledge that no link to AL QAEDA!!! was found.

The paranoid reader immediately understands: of course it was Al Qaeda. They just haven’t found the proof yet.

As it turns out, there is not much evidence of anything else either, other than the usual story of young, devout and foolish Islamic fundamentalist boys plotting and bragging and conducting rather laughable experiments to see if they might actually be able to blow up a disposable camera. The “bomb factory” turns out to be an apartment where they stripped batteries and emptied sport-juice containers. One of them had a copy of a schedule of flights on his memory stick. There was no date. They had not even discussed possible dates.

There had not been a single successful explosion of anything. They had no weapons. They had no passports.

In one of their homes, they found a copy of a book– they have noted this, for the judge to consider as something material to the question of whether these people should be locked up indefinitely– they found a book called “Defense of the Muslim Lands.” Oh the horror!

They also found “jihadist” literature. Suppose that we Christians were suddenly under suspicion of plotting to attack Muslims around the world. Suppose they searched your house. Would they find any “Christian militant” literature? Would they find a link to James Dobson’s website which advocates defiance of the courts? Ah ha!

The security commissioner of the European Union, pleasantly named Franco Frattini, said the British decided to proceed with arrests because they had intercepted a message from Pakistan saying “go now”. A “senior British official” admitted that the message was not quite that clear.

British Home Secretary John Reid, at the time, told the media that attacks were “highly likely” and would be on an “unprecedented scale”.

If you can find some indication anywhere that this idiot was not making statements of unimaginable stupidity and unprecedented hysteria, please show me. Reid himself had to back down quickly once he realized, apparently, that he was about to destroy the tourism industry.

Are the Islamic boys guilty of something? I don’t know. If I was in a mood to be really, really generously broad-minded about what they were actually up to I suppose you could charge them with…. well, get serious. With what? Talking about conspiring to plot? Hating America?

The truth is– check the news stories– buried on page 5 or so– if you don’t believe me— the truth is this: they had no weapons, no bombs, no tickets, no actual date, no specific plan to commit any terrorist act. They just talked about how they hated America and Britain because of their decadence, and because of their foreign policies. That’s about it.

I understand– you don’t believe me. It’s too silly to be true. I won’t be offended if you go and check some newspapers first. Even the paranoid ones do generally repeat the official facts. So back to my point– I don’t think I would convict them of anything.

It doesn’t matter. The headlines did their work. More than ever more and more people are convinced that there are thousands of Muslim youths out there planning right now to blow up airplanes and drop anthrax on you and build nuclear bombs and kill you all. We must kill them first.

And more and more people think I’m crazy for actually insisting that even terror suspects are entitled to due process and a fair trial under the laws that have existed for years and years before there ever was a 9/11.

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Tony Blair Bans Military Parades, Medals, and War Movies

According to the CBC, Tony Blair is finally going to do something I can agree with. He is going to ban the glorification of terrorism. From now on, it will be illegal to “glorify”– that’s the word they use: “glorification”– acts of terrorism.

First of all, let’s describe terrorism. Acts of violence with the aim of achieving a political or social objective? Violence directed at civilians? Violence used to further a religious cause? Let’s get the definition straight, because we don’t want the British occupation of the Middle East at the close of World War II to be classified as terrorism, because then, I suppose, we would have to ban “Lawrence of Arabia”, or “Cast a Giant Shadow”. And we don’t want the first American gulf war to be classified as terrorism, just because

What about violence for the purpose of obtaining material benefits or economic power? Like the U.S. inspired coup in Guatemala in 1956? And does this mean that General Pinochet of Chile will really be arrested and held the next time he visits Britain? Is it unsafe for Mr. Henry Kissinger to spend a weekend frolicking in London? “In Flanders Fields” glorifies acts of violence by British and Canadian conscripts in World War I. What was so different about those acts of violence, to further the aims of the British government of the day? That they were deceived by an elected government into believing that killing Germans had some kind of divine purpose?

Military parades essentially glorify the capacity of the government to inflict violence upon various enemies of the realm. Good. Let’s ban them, along with “Top Gun”, “Ballad of the Green Berets”, and “The Dirty Dozen”. Can we arrest Oliver North now, since he supported and “glorified” the activities of the Contras in Nicaragua when they were trying to overthrow the Sandinista government?

How about anyone involved in the Reagan administration’s support of — holy cow!– Osama Bin Laden, and the insurgency against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan in the 1980’s?

Bust Margaret Thatcher for her passionate romance with British military might in the Falklands?

It’s a magic bus. Let’s all get on board.

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Tony “Kappo” Blair Rises to the Occasion!

Tony Blair is determined to stamp out terrorism. Good for him. He’s like a reformed smoker– how could anybody have ever been so rude as to smoke in public? I can’t believe it. We must save them from themselves!

So he is proposing new legislation which makes it illegal to be a terrorist. Yay! Now we can arrest them all.

The new law allows the British Government “to deport anyone who fosters hatred, or advocates violence to further beliefs, or justifies acts of violence.”

How do we know who to arrest? That’s easy. They are Arabs. Oh wait– no, no, no– that would be racist. No, no, no. No mention of race, please, we’re British. We will arrest Frenchmen, Americans, Canadians, Poles, and even Catholics, if they “advocate violence” or “justify acts of violence” for the purpose of furthering beliefs. Not Arabs. Unless they advocate violence. And certainly not Moslems. Unless they’re Arabic.

Now will they arrest General Pinochet, if he happened to drop by for medical treatment again? How about Fidel Castro? How about Pat Robertson? George Bush?

The problem with laws that are passed as a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived crisis, is that they often serve more of a political than a practical function. It is already illegal to commit murder or arson in Britain. And the idea of arresting people who “advocate” violence is a fig leaf to be used to justify legal action against people against whom the government otherwise has absolutely no evidence, or patently unreliable or unconvincing evidence. It’s the kind of law that can be used to threaten people with long jail sentences in order to encourage them to provide information about other people who can be arrested, who can in turn be threatened. It’s the kind of law the police always insist will result in convictions because they very often just “know” who the bad guys are but can’t arrest them because of onerous restrictions issued by the courts actually requiring evidence and such.

The Government gets to make it look like it’s actually having an effect on terrorism and the general public can rest assured that the last names of the people prosecuted are never going to be “Smith” or “James” or “Wilson” or even “Blair”.

Blair also wants it to be illegal to attend a terrorist training camp. Is that going to be retroactive, like in the U.S.? Can we now prosecute Charles De Gaulle? Oops! Of course. Because the Vichy government was not legitimate, like, say, the governments of Egypt or Libya.

You think, of course not, but there’s no “of course” about it. Didn’t De Gaulle advocate violence against the government of France? You didn’t like that government? Neither did I. But I didn’t read the part of Blair’s legislation that lays out which terrorists are okay.

How is a terrorist training camp different from an enemy’s military training camp? I suppose terrorists don’t have an embassy, or loans from the IMF, or fighter jets. But there is a rather compelling case for the idea that most of the training camps in Afghanistan before the U.S. led invasion were actually branches of a national government’s military. You could certainly make the case that Afghanistan deserved to be invaded, because it harboured terrorists who may have been partly or wholly responsible for 9/11, but it is ridiculous to declare that every soldier who defended Afghanistan against the American-led invasion was a terrorist. They were soldiers. Their country was invaded by a large, belligerent foreign power. They were defending their homes and families against a foreign invader. They might have been defending a bad government, but up ’til now, we have never held soldiers responsible for the sins of their leaders.

Under Blair’s and Bush’s criteria, every German and Italian soldier in World War II could have been deemed a terrorist.

One of the reasons Blair feels Britain needs stronger anti-terrorism laws is that Canada and the U.S. have stronger anti-terrorism laws. Our citizens have too many civil liberties. Mr. Prime Minister, we cannot allow a civil liberties gap!

The fact that Anne Coulter had kind words to say about Tony Blair should have tipped me off as to just how vile this man is. He’s the ultimate defective permutation, a hybrid of nanny-liberalism and crypto-fascist authoritarianism. He and Janet Reno should govern Nevada together.