The Osterley Times

Sunday, August 05, 2007

House Passes Changes in Eavesdropping Program

It will come as no great surprise to anyone that the House has passed Bush's amendments to FISA. Bush has not only refused to follow the law regarding FISA, but he has consistently insisted that the FISA law did not need updating, which made his recent insistence that it must be updated as a matter of urgency all the more bizarre.

The legislation makes changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.

There was no indication that lawmakers were responding to new intelligence warnings. Rather, Democrats were responding to administration pleas that a recent secret court ruling had created a legal obstacle in monitoring foreign communications relayed over the Internet.

They also appeared worried about the political repercussions of being perceived as interfering with intelligence gathering. But the disputes were significant enough that they are likely to resurface before the end of the year.

Democrats have expressed concerns that the administration is reaching for powers that go well beyond solving what officials have depicted as narrow technical issues in the current law.

In a statement issued late Saturday, Mr. Bush said he would “sign this legislation as soon as it gets to my desk.” The Senate approved its version of the bill on Friday.

The new laws will be effective for the next six months, although senior Democratic leaders say that they are not going to wait that long before they propose changes.

Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Friday that the bill the administration wanted would allow wiretapping without warrants as long as it was “concerning a person abroad.” As a result, Mr. Reyes said, the law could be construed as allowing any search inside the United States as long as the government claimed it “concerned” Al Qaeda.

Democrats said their suspicions had been fueled in part by the White House’s repeated reluctance to ask Congress for technical changes addressing issues that should have been apparent long ago.

In a recent letter to a Republican on the committee, Representative Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, Mr. Reyes noted that Congress had updated the FISA law eight times since the Sept. 11 attacks.

“You repeatedly claim that FISA is woefully outdated,” Mr. Reyes wrote. “Neither you nor the administration raised concerns during consideration of those bills that the statutory changes proposed were inadequate.”

It is fairly astonishing that there has been such a breakdown on matters of national security between the Republicans and the Democrats since 9-11. Here in Britain, the need to confront the terrorist threat is about the one thing that the main parties can agree on.

However, the Bush administration's cavalier attitude to the law - Guantanamo Bay, suspension of Habeas Corpus, wiretapping without warrants from FISA etc, - have led to an unavoidable chasm of mistrust. Blair was said to have consulted Cameron and Menzies whenever he proposed any course of action that might have been controversial, knowing that it was important that he kept the other political parties on board. In the United States this has not been possible because Dick Cheney and others have set out, from the first day of the Bush administration, to reclaim powers that they think the executive has given up since the Nixon administration. The Bush administration has been cloaked in secrecy which means, whenever they make this kind of request, no-one is ever taken inside the loop and told exactly why the changes they are demanding are so important. The administration simply make the demand and impugn the patriotism of anyone who asks why they need such vague powers.

This has never been truer than in the past eighteen months when it was leaked that the President has authorised warrantless wiretapping, outside of the rules of FISA, and that he refuses to stop doing so.

Then there is the other matter of any time this administration is asked to account for itself at Congressional committee hearings, it either refuses to send people who have been subpoenaed, or it sends Alberto Gonzales along to lie or to claim a memory loss which is so profound that, in anyone else, would signal the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

The House Democratic leadership had severe reservations about the proposal and an overwhelming majority of Democrats opposed it. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the measure “does violence to the Constitution of the United States.”

And that, more than anything else, explains the chasm of mistrust between the Democrats and the Republican party. The current President refers to the Constitution as “just a goddamned piece of paper!” The fact that he has so little respect for this "piece of paper" that he has worn a solemn oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" was always going to lead to a rift between the two main parties.

Giving someone with so little respect for the Constitution the amount of unchecked power that has now been handed to Bush is a grave mistake. And, based on past behaviour, it is a power that he will almost certainly abuse.

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Saturday, August 04, 2007

Cafferty: Tancredo Wants to Bomb Mecca

Jack Cafferty ask viewers what they think of Tom Tancredo's remarks that the US should bomb holy sites in Mecca to reduce the chance of a terrorist attack in the US.

Senate Votes To Expand Warrantless Surveillance

I find the spinelessness of some Democrats simply stupefying. Even with Bush's popularity through the floor, with 45% of the electorate calling for him to be impeached, all he has to do is demand that Congress give him even more power - with even less oversight - otherwise the next terrorist attack will be your fault, and some Democrats simply roll over and play dead.

Here are the sixteen Democratic tossers who gave Bush what he wanted, despite being elected by a public that wanted more Congressional oversight:

Evan Bayh (Indiana); Tom Carper (Delaware); Bob Casey (Pennsylvania); Kent Conrad (North Dakota); Dianne Feinstein (California); Daniel Inouye (Hawai‘i); Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota); Mary Landrieu (Louisiana); Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas); Claire McCaskill (Missouri); Barbara Mikulski (Maryland); Bill Nelson (Florida); Ben Nelson (Nebraska); Mark Pryor (Arkansas); Ken Salazar (Colorado); Jim Webb (Virginia).

Obviously Joe Liebermann voted to give Bush more power although even Liebermann admitted that the bill is far from perfect: "We're at war. The enemy wants to attack us," Lieberman said during the Senate debate. "This is not the time to strive for legislative perfection."

Democrats like those listed above - we can excuse Liebermann as no-one is remotely surprised when that right wing loon votes with the other right wing loons - however, those members of the Democratic Party who were elected only last November to bring this administration to heel, deserve to be held in the deepest contempt. What they have done goes beyond spineless, it is simply shameful... shameful.

Don't these guys ever check an opinion poll? Why do they fall for Bush's faux threats each and every time?

Harry Reid did his best to blame the Republicans:

"My Republican colleagues chose to rubber-stamp a flawed administration proposal that fails to provide the accountability needed in the light of the administration's past mismanagement of key tools in the war on terror," said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Sorry, Harry, that simply won't wash. Were it not for the 16 Democrats who also voted "to rubber-stamp a flawed administration proposal" then they would have never got away with it.

Democrats "have a Pavlovian reaction: Whenever the president says the word 'terrorism,' they roll over and play dead," said Caroline Fredrickson, Washington legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, predicted that the bill's approval would lead to the monitoring of ordinary Americans by the National Security Agency, which conducts most of the government's electronic surveillance. "If this bill becomes law, Americans who communicate with a person abroad can count on one thing: The NSA may be listening," he said.

I am so glad I am not an American. I find Britain hard enough to deal with where the nearest we can come to a progressive government is New Labour who, to be fair, do engage in some progressive politics. However, in the US I would have no-one representing me at election time. And I certainly couldn't bring myself to vote Democrat if one of those sixteen tossers represented my state.

Greenwald, as always, sums it up best:

Examine virtually every Bush scandal and it increasingly bears the mark not merely of Democratic capitulation, but Democratic participation. In August of 2006, the Supreme Court finally asserted the first real limit on Bush's radical executive power theories in Hamdan, only for Congress, months later, to completely eviscerate those minimal limits -- and then go far beyond -- by enacting the grotesque Military Commissions Act with the support of substantial numbers of Democrats. What began as a covert and illegal Bush interrogation and detention program became the officially sanctioned, bipartisan policy of the United States.

Grave dangers are posed to our basic constitutional safeguards by the replacement of Sandra Day O'Connor with Sam Alito, whose elevation to the Supreme Court Congressional Democrats chose to permit. Vast abuses and criminality in surveillance remain undisclosed, uninvestigated and unimpeded because Congressional Democrats have stood meekly by while the administration refuses to disclose what it has been doing in how it spies on us. And we remain in Iraq, in direct defiance of the will of the vast majority of the country, because the Democratic Beltway establishment lacks both the courage and the desire to compel an end to that war.

And now Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, with revealing symbolism, cancel their scheduled appearances this morning at Yearly Kos because George Bush ordered them to remain in Washington in order to re-write and expand FISA -- a law which he has repeatedly refused to allow to be revised for years and which he has openly and proudly violated. Congressional Democrats know virtually nothing about how the Bush administration has been eavesdropping on our conversations because the administration refused to tell them and they passively accepted this state of affairs.

The intense rush to amend this legislation means that most of them have no idea what they are actually enacting -- even less of an idea than they typically have. But what they know is that George Bush and Fox News and the Beltway establishment have told them that they would be irresponsible and weak and unserious if they failed to comply with George Bush's instructions, and hence, they comply.

He's demanded that they amend a law that he doesn't even comply with - that fact alone should be the subject of impeachment proceedings, the President has openly and brazenly admitted to committing a Federal crime - but these buggers are falling over themselves to give him exactly what he asks them for, even though they have no idea at all how the wiretapping programme is being implemented.

Those sixteen Democrats don't deserve to be re-elected in 2008. They were elected to stop Bush's blatant misuse of power and asked to restore the balance between the executive and the other branches of government. They have not only failed to stop him but they have gone further and legalised his criminality.

Balkinisation:

In the category of "Glass Half-Full," how's this?:
"I’m not thrilled," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. "There are some changes we need to make to make sure that American citizens are protected. But it's a lot better than a lot of things that have been forced down this Congress' throat right before recesses that trampled on American's liberties."
Now there's an inspiring selling point: "Vote for the FISA Amendment -- It Tramples on Even Fewer Liberties Than the Military Commissions Act!" (That's going to go over really well at the YearlyKos breakfast this morning.) House vote tomorrow. It is expected that the bill will be approved. The Republican strategy? Comments such as this, from the chief Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith: "I hope that there are no attacks before we are able to effectively update this important act."

And some Democrats fall for that horse shit. Thank God I'm an old European.

Click title for full article.

Mugabe's decree on prices puts Zimbabwe economy in a tailspin

Mugabe has come up with a brilliant new plan to counter the hyper-inflation that is wrecking the Zimbabwe economy. He has ordered all shops to slash their prices in half. Why didn't anyone think of this earlier? Why have economists made economics seem so complicated when a genius like Mugabe can come up with something so harebrained?

The result?

One month after Mugabe decreed just that, commanding merchants nationwide to counter 10,000-percent-a-year hyperinflation by slashing prices by half and more, Zimbabwe's economy is at a halt.

Essentials like bread, sugar and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean's diet, have vanished, seized by mobs of bargain-hunters who denuded stores like locusts in wheat fields. Meat is nonexistent. Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic.

Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl, because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss. Businesses are laying off workers or reducing their hours.

Of course, the difference this will make to Zimbabwe's poorest citizens is almost nil as they have long given up on money and rely on food which they can grow in order to survive. Now the people feeling the pinch are the businessmen and Zimbabwe's more affluent citizens.

"The last seven years, I haven't panicked at all. I always figured that where there's a will, there's a way, and I'd make some sort of plan," said one Bulawayo clothing manufacturer who, like most people, refused to be identified for fear of retaliation by the government. "Now I'm not so sure. I think there's a real collapse coming."

The middle class traditionally don't give a monkeys how badly their nation's underclass are treated but, now that Mugabe's tactics are starting to effect their lifestyles, it might not be too long before Mugabe starts to feel the heat of a protest that he won't be able to put down as brutally as he has in the villages.

"Considerations of color have begun to blur very much," said one Bulawayo doctor whose average patient is a white business manager. "White people will tell you, a little embarrassed and shy, that they're eating nothing but sadza," or corn meal porridge, the doctor said. "They've been reduced to the diet of the rural poor."

And what is the Zimbabwean government's reaction to the fact that the shelves are empty in the supermarkets? Why, more threats, of course.

"We are at war. We will not allow shelves to be empty," one of Mugabe's vice presidents, Joseph Msika, said in a July 18 speech.

Since then, gangs of price inspectors have patrolled shops and factories, imposing sometimes-arbitrary price reductions, and as many as 4,000 businesspeople have been arrested, fined or jailed. State-run newspapers publish lists of telephone numbers on their front pages daily, exhorting citizens to report merchants whose prices exceed dictates.

Ordinary citizens initially greeted the price cuts with a euphoric - and short-lived - shopping spree. However, merchants and the government's many critics say that much of the cut-rate merchandise has not been snapped up by ordinary citizens, but by the police, soldiers and members of Mugabe's ruling party who have been tipped off to the price inspectors' rounds.

Perhaps I am some kind of insane optimist, but I keep feeling that Mugabe's government simply has to fall. He's got away with acting in the most tyrannical manner, backed and apologised for by the shameful Mbeki, but surely he has now - by causing such hardship to even the middle class - simply gone too far.

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Fox News: "Some People Say"

The classic sequence from Outfoxed where they examine Fox News's use the term, "some people say".

The calamity of disregard

By Richard Norton-Taylor

It is now chillingly clear: MI6's pre-Iraq warnings were swept aside by an obsessed White House.

In the run-up to war, senior British security and intelligence officials as well as diplomats made it clear that they were strongly opposed to the invasion of Iraq - though not clear enough. Why now, why Iraq, they asked; it would merely increase the terrorist threat, as the joint intelligence committee warned ministers less than a month before British troops and bombers joined the US attack on the country. Concern in Whitehall was shared by some perspicacious Americans, including General Tony Zinni, the former head of US central command, which is responsible for operations throughout the Middle East. He called it the wrong war, fought in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
Now comes fresh evidence that senior British officials tried to persuade the Bush administration to keep off Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan, the real source of terrorist violence inspired by al-Qaida. On the Brink, the newly published memoirs of Tyler Drumheller - the CIA's chief of clandestine operations in Europe until 2005 - tells of a meeting on September 12 2001. The day after al-Qaida's attacks on America, George Tenet, then CIA director, met three British guests - Sir David Manning, then Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser; Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6; and Eliza Manningham-Buller, then head of MI5. "I hope we can all agree that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq," Drumheller quotes the leader of the British delegation as telling Tenet.
In a recent article in the New York Review of Books on Tenet's autobiography, At the Center of the Storm, Thomas Powers points out that Tenet names his British guests but omits what was said at the meeting - while Drumheller reports what was said but was prevented by the CIA (which did not want to upset the British) from identifying who said it.
Powers says the appeal not to attack Iraq came from Manning. Drumheller does not dispute that. In his book he says Tenet responded to Manning by saying: "Absolutely, we all agree on that. Some might want to link the issues, but none of us wants to go that route."
A few days later, a group of diplomats and MI6 officers met their American counterparts at a lunch at the British embassy in Washington. Again MI6 expressed concern that the Bush administration had Iraq in its sights. A senior official (Drumheller, obeying instructions, does not identify the official or his nationality) went further, inquiring what the CIA was going to do once the US had "hit the mercury with the hammer in Afghanistan and the al-Qaida cadre has spread all over the world". The official asked: "Aren't you concerned about the potential destabilising effect on Middle Eastern countries?"
Questioned last week about just how far MI6 and other British officials tried to apply pressure on the Americans, Drumheller told the Guardian: "I think the British did everything they could to keep the US focused on Afghanistan. They understood Iraq much better than we did." One of the things they understood was that there was no link between al-Qaida and Saddam, an assertion made against all the evidence by Dick Cheney and his circle.
The worrying, even terrifying, thing about these and other accounts by former CIA officers is the ease with which America's intelligence agency was swept aside by cliques in the White House and the Pentagon intent on war. The CIA's weakness had a knock-on effect on MI6 as both agencies became victims of the blind determination of their respective political masters.
The Bush administration's obsession with Iraq, and Blair's failure to do anything about it, left a dangerous vacuum in Afghanistan. The Taliban was allowed to fill it, and British soldiers continue to be killed there.
· Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security affairs editor
richard.norton-taylor@guardian.co.uk

Click title for source.

77,000 US bridges in need of urgent repair

After the tragedy in Minnesota, when a US bridge collapsed claiming five lives, transport specialists in the US are now saying that a further 77,000 bridges in the US share the same "structurally deficient" status as the bridge that collapsed.

Transport specialists said billions of dollars would be needed to replace the bridges, many of which were built 40 to 50 years ago and were coming to the end of their life.
The Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, said: "I think anybody who looks at the national picture, the national statistics, and says that we don't have a problem would be naive ... We have a major problem."

It always astonishes me that a country like the US, who spend more on their military that any other country in the world, don't allocate a fraction of that sum to maintaining their infrastructure.

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said that domestic programmes, such as replacing ageing infrastructure, had been short-changed because of the billions being spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Since 9/11 we have taken our eye off the ball," he said.
The Democrats had proposed spending $631m (£309m) more on federal highway safety than Mr Bush budgeted for but he had threatened to veto the proposal.

Bush "threatened to veto the proposal"? I think it's time to put that bill back on his desk. I somehow doubt he'll be threatening to "veto that proposal" now.

President George Bush, who was widely criticised for staying on holiday at his Crawford ranch in Texas after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans two years ago, is to visit the bridge site today.

Better still, put it in his hand whilst he's looking at the wreckage and dare him to issue his bloody veto.

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Slowly, Clinton Shifts on War, Quieting Foes

As she prepares to face the Yearly Kos Convention, it's worth reflecting on just how subtly Hillary Clinton has adjusted her war position over the last year to dampen the Liberal tide of opposition.

She used to state that it would be a mistake to name a "date certain" for withdrawal, but now states that it is time to begin "ending this war — not next year, not next month, but today.”

And she has managed to bring about this U-turn without any cries of flip-flop, claiming that her adjustment was as a result of the facts on the ground rather than a politically calculated repackaging.

It says something about how unpopular this war has become that a Democrat centrist like Clinton has adjusted her position to such an extent that she is now calling for withdrawal. This is the woman who has been booed by Liberal audiences for her Iraq war stance.

What a difference a year makes...

There was a time when Hillary facing the Yearly Kos Convention would have been a worry to her, but it appears that this is all in the past.

A New York Times/CBS News poll in July 2006 found that among Democrats who said the invasion of Iraq had been a mistake, 56 percent said they had a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton’s performance. A year later, that figure had risen to 69 percent. Her standing during that period among all Democrats has also shown improvement. On the campaign trail, antiwar protests at her appearances are less frequent and less loud.

“Thanks to her votes on defunding the war and supporting a timetable for withdrawal, she has defused the war issue as a problem for her, and her 2002 vote for the war, to quite an extent,” said Medea Benjamin, a leader of the antiwar group Code Pink, whose members once regularly booed and heckled Mrs. Clinton whenever she spoke about the war.

“There’s still a passionate minority of us who believe the fact she won’t apologize for her war vote is a big deal,” Ms. Benjamin said.

But, she added, “she has gone a long way to changing things.”

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal Daily Kos Web site, said Mrs. Clinton had “done a great job of blurring on the war.”

Mr. Moulitsas, whose Web site inspired this weekend’s gathering of bloggers in Chicago, cited Mrs. Clinton’s statements that she would leave a sizable military force in Iraq even after reducing the American military role there, saying that distinction was lost in the way she had presented her antiwar credentials.

“I don’t know if policy and rhetoric are aligned,” Mr. Moulitsas said. “But people don’t see the policy paper on our side; they hear what she says, and she talks a great game.”

Clinton, unlike Edwards, has refused to ever apologise for her pro-war vote, and the fact that she insists that she will leave "a sizeable military force" in Iraq remains a worry to those of us who oppose the war entirely.

An adviser to one of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents, who did not want to be quoted by name offering praise for the way she was handling the issue, described the senator’s change as “more of a slide than a flip-flop.”

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers pointed to statements she has made and stances she has taken over the past year that have repositioned her. Those include her decision, this spring, to vote in favor of a troop withdrawal timetable, and her decision to support a cut off of money for the war. She signaled the shift with a speech to the Democratic National Committee in February saying, “If we in Congress don’t end this war before January of 2009, as president I will.”

I'm not entirely happy with Clinton's stance on this and find the fact that she intends to leave "a sizeable military force" in Iraq a profound worry.

However, Clinton - like her husband - has always been a committed centrist, believing that elections are won by clinging to the centre ground.

It says a lot about how perceptions of the Iraq war have changed that we now find Hillary of all people in our camp, promising that - if she wins - she will bring the troops home.

Ordinary people stating what they believe have the power to change things. To make people in power reconsider their positions. Hillary's war stance, and the transformation it has undergone in the last year, is the proof of that.

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Friday, August 03, 2007

Jon Stewart on Cheney and Rumsfeld

Jon Stewart covers the interviews done by Rumsfeld and Cheney.

The Return of the Rummy

You Don't Know Dick

Dodd takes out O'Reilly.

Chris Dodd challenges O'Reilly over his attacks on the Daily Kos, stating that half a million people visit this website every day, so it's hard to regard them all as extremists. Dodd rightly points out that O'Reilly's actual objection is to this groups ideology, as it is left wing and O'Reilly is ferociously right wing.

O'Reilly, in a fantastic moment devoid of irony, calls Dodd a "propagandist" which - to paraphrase Galloway - is a bit like having the Hunchback of Notre Dam lecturing you on your posture.

Dodd points out that Indiana University have studied O'Reilly's programme and found that he makes derogatory comments about individuals and groups "every 6.8 seconds". At this point, as usual, O'Reilly's head explodes.

Dodd then brings up O'Reilly's comments about San Francisco. O'Reilly denies ever having made any such comments and accuses Dodd of getting his information "from Media Matters", as if the source immediately discredits the accusation. For the record, this is what O'Reilly said about San Francisco:

O'REILLY: Hey, you know, if you want to ban military recruiting, fine, but I'm not going to give you another nickel of federal money. You know, if I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, "Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead."

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.

And, yes, I did get that from Media Matters. However, a trip to their website will prove that O'Reilly did say what he now denies, as they have an audio of him saying i t.

So O'Reilly is blatantly lying.

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

Cleared of lying, but still questions for Met chief to answer

It beggars belief.

Policemen at Lord's cricket ground had heard the rumour that an innocent man had been shot. A detective at Marylebone police station had heard that there had been a "massive cock-up ... involving a Brazilian tourist". A Met secretary even overheard the words "they got the wrong man" and "Brazilian".

And yet we are told that Sir Ian Blair was completely unaware of these rumours. I was sitting in a car in the west end of London thinking that the fact that the radio kept referring to Jean Charles de Menezes as "a suspected suicide bomber" meant that he probably wasn't one, and yet we are told that Sir Ian Blair remained blissfully unaware of any doubts that they had got the wrong man.

But Sir Ian apparently remained oblivious. "When the commissioner left New Scotland Yard mid evening on July 22 2005 he was almost totally uninformed," the report concluded. "He did not know of the considerable information within the MPS in relation to the emerging identity for Mr de Menezes and the likelihood that he was not involved in terrorism. Numerous others within the MPS did know."
It concluded: "The Metropolitan Police Authority should consider why the commissioner remained uninformed of key information."

The report is putting all the blame on Andy Hayman, the Assistant Commissioner, who, it is said, deliberately withheld information.

It [the report] accused Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, the head of counter-terrorism operations, of "misleading the public" by trying to hide the fact that the dead man was not a suspect of the 21 July suicide bombing plot. His actions, says the report, "cause us serious concerns".

The report reveals that Mr Hayman had briefed crime reporters on the day of the shooting that the dead man was not one of the 21 July suspects. However, that information was "deliberately withheld" from a press release he helped to write later on. The report states: "Assistant Commissioner Hayman chose to mislead the public by his actions."

Sir Ian is being almost bullish in stating his innocence.

"Despite much speculation to the contrary, I did not lie to the public. The IPCC describes me, when I left New Scotland Yard on the evening of 22 July as 'being almost totally uninformed'. As far as the shot man was concerned, I knew my officers were conducting inquiries expeditiously... I neither believe that my senior colleagues let me down, nor that my position on that night was unreasonable."

He's almost proud of the fact that he has been found to have been "almost totally uninformed". And yet, that surely raises further questions surrounding his competence. If I, sitting in a car, had begun to ask questions about the incident - based solely on reports I was hearing on the radio - then surely it is not unreasonable to expect that the leading police officer in the land would have entertained similar doubts? And yet we are told that he didn't. And, listening to him yesterday, he appears to be proud of that.

In those twenty four hours of apparent ignorant bliss Sir Ian Blair attempted to quash the IPCC from conducting an independent investigation into the shooting saying that to do so would "hamper" the police hunt for the bombers.

That's why it's so vital to him that he has been found to have been so profoundly ignorant of the rumours that were swirling around the rest of the Met.

Sir Ian made clear yesterday that had the IPCC found the allegations against him substantiated he would have resigned.
"If I had lied I would not be fit to hold this office. I did not lie," he said.

There are other reasons to resign besides lying. The simple fact that Sir Ian Blair never asked whether or not Charles de Menezes was wearing a suicide belt is surely enough to make him reconsider his position. When news that a "suspected suicide bomber" had been shot came across my radio that was the first thing that went through my mind. Are we seriously to believe that Sir Ian never even thought about this? That he never asked anyone that obvious question? And, if he didn't, why didn't he?

But the family of Mr Menezes claimed the police had "got away with murder" as they denounced the IPCC findings as a whitewash. It was, they said, "unbelievable" that the Commissioner was unaware of what had happened. Relatives also pointed to a passage in the report which established that Mr Menezes was not given a proper chance to protest his innocence. The police had stated that he was challenged and warned before being shot but that was untrue.

Patricia Armani da Silva, a cousin, said: "No one has been held responsible for anything, no one is going to be prosecuted. The police have been allowed to get away with murder. We are very disappointed."

Sir Ian made many false statements during the twenty four hours in which he claims to have been totally ignorant of what had taken place.

Just after 3.30pm that day, Sir Ian made a series of statements at a press conference about the shooting which his staff already feared to be incorrect. "This operation was directly linked to the ongoing terrorist investigation ... the man was challenged and refused to obey police instructions," Sir Ian said.

This was false. Jean Charles de Menezes was never challenged by police officers and given any chance to clear himself, he was simply shot dead in cold blood as he sat on a tube train. In order to justify those false statements - and to justify the fact that Sir Ian attempted to quash the IPCC from conducting an independent investigation into the shooting - it is vital that he is found to have been totally ignorant of almost everything that was going on around him that day.

The inquiry presented an extraordinary picture of chaos, confusion and rumour on the day Mr Menezes was shot. A number of senior officers at Scotland Yard began to realise within hours that an innocent man had been killed, as did officers unconnected with the case and even some off-duty colleagues. Yet Sir Ian was said to have been kept out of the loop of "crucial information" about the identity of Mr Menezes until the next morning.

Mr Menezes, an electrician from Sao Paulo, was killed just after 10am. His wallet was later searched and revealed his Brazilian identification. The report says that, within minutes, news of that reached the Commissioner's office and his chief of staff, Caroline Murdoch. However, at 3.30pm, Sir Ian told a press conference that the shooting was linked to the "ongoing and expanding" investigation into the 21 July plot.

I don't believe that "within hours" the police began to realise that an innocent man had been shot. They shot him on a train in order to stop him from blowing himself up. It is therefore inconceivable that no-one lifted his shirt looking for a suicide bomb. When none was found, the doubts must surely have started to bubble almost instantaneously.

And yet, these doubts never percolated to the top, which accounts for why Sir Ian stood in public and made several totally false and misleading statements.

If that's the truth, if it really does all come down to Andy Hayman, then Sir Ian still has a lot to answer. Not the least of which is why weren't his suspicions aroused by the same information that was making the rest of us question what had just taken place? And can he be said to be in charge of his own office if these rumours are swirling around and he is totally unaware of them?

He's supposed to our number one police officer. If I'm sitting in a car in west London asking these questions - with much more limited access to information than he has - then it really beggars belief that he never, at any point in those twenty four hours, asked himself the most obvious question of the lot.

"Have we got the right man?"

A totally innocent man was shot dead in broad daylight in central London and, two years later, no-one has been found to be responsible. And, as far as we know, that same "shoot to kill" policy is still in place. There has been no change in the policy, nor does the report suggest one.

The report tells us nothing, other than the suggestion that Sir Ian Blair was totally unaware of what was going on in his own office. And there's scant comfort in that for anyone. Especially for the family of Jean Charles de Menezes.

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Thursday, August 02, 2007

Olbermann on Murdoch's takeover of the Wall Street Journal

I've always thought that Fox is attempting to stop news altogether and turn news itself into mere "opinion". Rachel Maddow makes this very point. What is Bill O'Reilly doing on a News channel? He's not telling the news, he's giving his extreme right wing opinion.

The Gorilla in the room

This is the subject that is not allowed to be discussed in American discourse. Why were they attacked and what motivated the attackers. Here we see how even the 9-11 commission edited out the answer.

Hat tip to Representative Press

Hardball Discusses Pat Tillman

The Bush administration's credibility gap:

Vets go head to head on the subject:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: Myths and Facts

As Bush stomps about insisting that he needs changes to be made to FISA in order to meet changes in the way that terrorists operate in the modern world, the American Civil Liberties Union have produced a useful fact sheet for checking Bush's pronouncements against reality.

MYTH: We need this now.
FACT: This is not the time to hand even more power to an administration that has denied the legislative branch's constitutionally mandated oversight role and refused to hold the attorney general accountable for a series of contradictory statements. The only thing more outrageous than the administration's call for even more unfettered power is a Congress that would consider giving it.

MYTH: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act needs to be modernized.
FACT: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been updated more than 50 times since being enacted in the '70s. It was updated as recently as last year.

MYTH: We need warrants to wiretap foreigners abroad.
FACT: Current law allows foreign-to-foreign communications to be intercepted without a warrant. What this proposal is really about is the right to wiretap Americans - without a warrant - who are speaking with people overseas.

MYTH: FISA has not kept up with new technology.
FACT: There is absolutely no new technology that evades FISA. Even the man responsible for prepping and filing all FISA applications, James Baker, head of the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, has said that, "There's no type of collection that's prohibited by the statute." FISA was modernized by the Patriot Act, by Intelligence Reform legislation and by the re-authorization of the Patriot Act - indeed has been updated 50 times since it was enacted in 1978.

MYTH: Congress knows the facts about the NSA warrantless spying program.
FACT: The Senate Judiciary Committee asked for the legal rationale for the program nine times before issuing subpoenas, and still hasn't received an answer due to consistent stonewalling by the administration and the Department of Justice. The American public and their elected senators and representatives do not yet know the full extent of the warrantless wiretapping program and the extent to which FISA has been violated. So why would Congress grant additional power to this administration?
MYTH: The telecom giants need immunity. FACT: The administration has asked for a provision that would give immunity - from criminal prosecution as well as civil liability - for the telecom companies' participation in any future warrantless wiretapping program. It is unprecedented to give sweeping immunity to an entire industry - especially before a full and public airing of the facts.

It is astonishing that the Democrats are even considering going along with this. Perhaps the Bush administration should agree to be bound by FISA before anyone considers making any amendments to it.

Click title for source.

Gonzales Offers a Defense to Senate Panel

Alberto Gonzales has offered a defence of his recent Congressional testimony insisting that he was telling the truth when he testified because of a very narrow definition of the Terrorist Surveillance Programme, which he insists was intended to refer only to eavesdropping and not to any other N.S.A. surveillance activities.

In a letter to leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Gonzales said a dispute between the Justice Department and the White House in March 2004 involved other N.S.A. surveillance activities, not that domestic eavesdropping program. He said the White House first called the eavesdropping the Terrorist Surveillance Program after it was publicly disclosed in December 2005 and confirmed by President Bush.

“I recognize that the use of the term Terrorist Surveillance Program and my shorthand reference to the ‘program’ publicly ‘described by the president’ may have created confusion, particularly for those who are knowledgeable about the N.S.A. activities authorized in the presidential order,” he said in the letter, sent to Senators Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the committee’s senior Republican.

He added that the confusion might have been acute among those “who may be accustomed to thinking of them or referring to them together as a single N.S.A. program.”

I have always argued that I thought Gonzales was linguistically parsing to make such a distinction. However, there's a problem with this argument. Gonzales is now arguing that TSP began shortly after the President confirmed the existence of the eavesdropping programme in December 2005. However:

But after Alberto Gonzales testified about the NSA program in February, 2006, he was forced to send a lengthy letter (.pdf) several weeks later "clarifying" (i.e., correcting) much of the testimony he gave on the key issues and, among other things, this is what he said about when the "TSP" began:

That is a rather direct admission that the "TSP" -- as such -- began in October, 2001.

Gonzales, by his linguistic parsing, has tied himself up in knots here. It would have been much better had he simply given honest answers to the questions put before him rather than to have attempted the half arsed legalese that he has indulged in.

For instance, when he states "that the confusion might have been acute among those who may be accustomed to thinking of them or referring to them together as a single N.S.A. program”, he is - from all the evidence available - talking about everyone other than himself. Even the head of the FBI does not make the distinction that Gonzales is insisting upon. Indeed, judging from Gonzales's letter in February 2006, this is a distinction that he himself has only recently started to think of as existing.

So far it appears that no-one is buying this.

“The attorney general’s legalistic explanation of his misleading testimony under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week is not what one should expect from the top law enforcement officer of the United States,” a statement issued by Mr. Leahy said. “It is time for full candor to enforce the law and promote justice, rather than word parsing.”

Mr. Leahy added that he still wanted Mr. Gonzales to correct his testimony by the end of the week, although he did not say what action would be taken against the attorney general if he did not.

“I hope he will take that opportunity,” the senator said, “to clarify the many issues on which he appears not to have been forthcoming and to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee and the American people the whole truth.”

Another Democratic member of the committee, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, charged in a statement that Mr. Gonzales had done “far more than create confusion, he’s placed his office in disrepute.”

“After reading the letter,” Mr. Schumer said, “we renew our call for a special prosecutor” to investigate Mr. Gonzales.

It's ludicrous for Gonzales to say that he has merely "created confusion". He has invented a false distinction between eavesdropping and the rest of the TSP, insisting that TSP refers only to eavesdropping and that "other intelligence activities" refers to the other parts of the programme that are so far undisclosed.

It is quite clear that this distinction existed in no-one's mind other than his own, as he himself points out in his most recent letter.

It's rather startling that he states that his testimony would be confusing "particularly for those who are knowledgeable about the N.S.A. activities authorized in the presidential order".

This appears to be a confession that, the more you knew of the truth, the more "confusing" his testimony would seem. That's the nearest we are going to get to an outright admission that he dissembled and lied.

If you actually knew the truth, he now admits, you would have been more "confused" than anyone else.

Had he any dignity he would long ago have left the stage.

Click title for full article.

Saudis cautious on plans for Middle East conference with Israel

Saudi Arabia have said that they would be interested in attending a peace conference with Israel as long as it dealt with "the substantive matters of peace, the issues of real substance and not form or insubstantive issues".

In other words they are not up for attending another of Olmert's non-meetings where the only matter on the table for discussion is "Palestinian terrorism".

He added if that were the case "it becomes of great interest for Saudi Arabia and should we then get an invitation from the Secretary [Rice] to attend that conference we will look very closely and very hard at attending the conference."

Saudi Arabia, and other members of the Arab League, which met in Cairo on Monday, do not want to attend a Middle East conference that would be little more than a photo opportunity for the Israelis. They say any such meeting must be based on the Arab land-for-peace formula, calling for Israel to return to its 1967 borders. They also say the talks should not be limited to the Palestinian conflict but should also cover Israel's occupation of Syrian land.

This is a very important sign that Saudi Arabia might consider attending, but the caveats that the Saudis are insisting upon are also important. The Israelis need to show that they are serious about handing back land that they have illegally occupied for forty years, all the while building on that land - and moving it's civilian population on to that land - despite continued UN resolutions demanding that it desist from doing so, and in defiance of international law.

Of course the Saudis have already come up with their own peace initiative for resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, an initiative that the Israelis were at pains to influence, although the Saudis refused to bend to Israeli pressure.

I notice in today's Ha'aretz newspaper that the possibility of the Saudi's attending is being put down to the recent offer of an arms deal from the US, as if the Saudi Peace initiative did not exist.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal announced Riyadh's willingness to consider attending at a press conference with Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates prior to the former's departure for Israel.

"When we get an invitation from the minister [Rice] to attend, when this takes place, we will study it and we will be keen to attend," he said.

However, he stressed, "we are interested in the peace conference, one that deals with the heart of the peace process, the issues of peace, the core issues, not one that is just a podium for meetings and talk that do not enrich peace." Without guarantees that the conference will address these issues, therefore, Saudi delegates are unlikely to attend.

The Saudis are keen to attend as long as Israel is serious about wanting to talk about substantive issues that lead to peace in the region. Olmert is already signalling that he is preparing to play the same old game:

Olmert also used his meeting with Rice to detail the gestures that Israel has made to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas recently. However, he said, it is too soon to speak about transferring parts of the West Bank to PA security control; such a step would first require increased security cooperation and reduced terrorism.

I wonder how such a logic would play out in any other occupation. For instance, I wonder if the Americans would dare say that they would not end their occupation of Iraq until all resistance to that occupation ended? Were they to do so the Americans would simply be guaranteeing their presence in Iraq for a very long time. Indeed, the British used such tactics when they were attempting to hold on to India. And now, Olmert repeats the tactic, ignoring the fact that the occupation and the violence are directly linked and that one fuels the other.

The prime minister added that Hamas must be "kept out of the game" as Israel explores new cooperation with the Palestinians.

And, showing the perfect example of the new "democracy" that the US is keen to export to the region, the Israelis are stating that they will negotiate only with the people that the Palestinians did not choose as their democratic representatives.

Livni spelled it out:

"There is a Palestinian government which meets the requirements of the international community, a government that believes in the vision of the two states, a government that shows determination to change the situation, and Israel is not going to miss this opportunity," she said.

Of course, when Livni speaks of "the international community" she is using a code which roughly translates as "the US and Israel".

She continued:

Nevertheless, she added, any progress will be conditional on the PA's ability to control the territory and fulfill its security obligations.

In other words, end any violence caused by the occupation before we can even consider ending the occupation itself. Cart. Horse. Horse. Cart.

The Saudis are right to be cautious, as judging by what the Israelis are saying so far, it's same old... same old...

Click title for full article.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Bush is attempting to decriminalise his criminality.

I have been arguing on here that, as Bush already has updated FISA through the Patriot Act, that his recent calls to update FISA again are not about any need to provide the government with tools to tackle terrorism - after all, according to his own words, he now has such power as long as he gains court approval - but rather, as he has been refusing to ask the courts for approval, what he now seeks is to decriminalise his own criminality by removing the need for court approval from the procedure.

After all, Gonzales has repeatedly stated that there is no need to update FISA:

And as for the administration's recently unveiled claims that FISA must be amended and liberalized ASAP otherwise we will be unsafe from the Terrorists, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been asking the White House for almost two years what revisions to FISA are needed, and it was the White House that continuously insisted that no such changes were needed. From Gonzales' letter:

The only reason FISA has not been amended since December, 2005 -- when it was revealed that the President was violating it -- is because the White House has blocked all legislation designed to revise it

So, if the White House have constantly been claiming that FISA does not need amending, why would they possibly be suggesting that it is so urgent that it now be amended?

And the answer at last:

The national intelligence director, in a letter Wednesday to the House intelligence committee, stressed the need to be able to collect intelligence about foreign terrorists overseas. Mike McConnell said intelligence agencies should be able to do that without requirements imposed by an "out of date" law.
"Simply put, in a significant number of cases, we are in the unfortunate position of having to obtain court orders to effectively collect foreign intelligence about foreign targets located overseas," he wrote the committee chairman, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas.

So Bush is trying to decriminalise his criminality. In the words of Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union:

"The administration claims the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must be 'modernized.' Actually, it needs to be followed," she said. "The reality is, their proposal would gut FISA."

The ACLU said the legislation backed by the administration would give immunity from criminal prosecution and civil liability for the telecommunication companies that participate in the NSA program. The ACLU urged lawmakers to find out the full extent of current intelligence gathering under FISA before making changes.

"The only thing more outrageous than the administration's call for even more unfettered power is a Congress that would consider giving it to them," Frederickson said.

So Bush is actually planning on gutting FISA of it's need for court approval whilst lying - why am I remotely bloody surprised? - about needing to update it to meet the need to tackle modern terrorist's methods.

Once again, Bush plays the card of attempting to save the nation from the scourge of terrorism, when in actual fact he is actually trying to make the illegal acts he has participated in legal.

Cheney: I Don't Recall

Cheney opens with his usual protest that he hasn't read the article being discussed - does Cheney even read papers I wonder? - and then he settles on the tried and tested Gonzales response of, "I don't recall" even though he admits that this is something that one would be expected to recall.

This really is an administration of liars, all of whom seem to selective memory recall.

Hardball: Michael O'Hanlon is preaching propaganda and cherrypicking the facts.

UN vote backs Brown's call for action to end Darfur conflict

Gordon Brown's honeymoon really is going a treat.

Gordon Brown scored a dramatic first foreign policy victory last night when the UN security council voted to deploy a 26,000-strong international force to Darfur, with a mandate to stop the massacres of civilians which have driven 2 million people from their homes.
Mr Brown has made Darfur a foreign policy priority, and the UN resolution was an initiative he promoted 10 days earlier with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, aiming to end a year of international drift on the issue. This week he secured George Bush's support for the draft.
The vote was passed unanimously after China, the Sudanese government's main defender at the UN, dropped its objections. British officials said that China's oil interests in Sudan were eventually outweighed by anxiety about a possible international human rights backlash over Darfur aimed at next year's Olympic Games in Beijing.
The UN vote will dispatch a hybrid force of 19,555 UN and African Union (AU) soldiers and more than 6,000 police from around the world. They are due to take over from a largely ineffectual 7,000-strong AU force in the western Sudan by the end of the year, and will have a much more muscular mandate. They are being deployed under chapter 7 of the UN charter which will give them the right to use force to protect civilians and assist the delivery of relief supplies.

The world's inaction over Darfur has been a bloody disgrace and the fact that we are eventually employing forces there is to be welcomed.

Blair sat on his arse and ignored this issue because of the obstructionist tactics of Khartoum, and it is a very large plus to Gordon Brown that he has managed to secure movement on this issue so soon after becoming Prime Minister.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, called the decision a "historic and unprecedented resolution" which will send "a clear and powerful signal" of the UN's commitment to "close this tragic chapter in Sudan's history". Britain's ambassador to the UN, Emyr Jones Parry, called it "an unprecedented undertaking in scale, complexity and importance".
Hours before the vote, Mr Brown went to the UN headquarters to endorse the resolution, describing Darfur as "the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today". Since a rebellion broke out in the province in 2003, the fighting has cost the lives of more than 200,000 people, most at the hands of Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, sponsored by Khartoum.

Brown is forcing the agenda that many of us regard as important. For too long this issue has been ignored whilst Washington obsessed itself with Iraq and potential action against Iran. Blair, who always followed Washington's agenda, paid lip service to this issue whilst doing bugger all about it.

Brown has really hit the ground running. He has been aided in this by the fact that pressure has been put on China - ahead of the Olympic games - to finally give up on it's objections to anything being done over this matter. But, the important thing is that he has recognised the right time to seek action and that the action that he sought has been accepted by the UN.

Although there is much still to be done:

"It is not time ... to pop open the champagne bottles. The true test of this measure is not what happens today in New York, but what happens over the coming weeks in Darfur," Allyn Brooks-LaSure of the Save Darfur Coalition said last night.
Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, pledged the political momentum would be maintained, calling for a rapid deployment of the force "in conditions that allow it to make a difference".

Brown's maiden voyage to the US has turned out to be a complete success.

The security council voted while Mr Brown was flying back from his maiden US trip as prime minister, which his aides claim has been an outstanding success. At Camp David, the prime minister reaffirmed his support for the transatlantic alliance but stopped short of the warm personal endorsements of President Bush for which Tony Blair had been known. A Washington Post headline on the meeting described the British prime minister as "more bulldog than poodle".

Brown set out to show that he was different from Blair... and he has done so. Both in substance and in style.

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De Menezes shooting: UK's top anti-terror officer is singled out

I listened to the news that the police had shot a man at Stockwell tube station on the radio as I drove to collect a friend. When I picked my friend up, I told him what had happened and he said, "Good".

That was the atmosphere in London two weeks after 7-7 and the day after four other men had tried to blow themselves up on the tube. London was on tenterhooks and very angry.

I was suspicious of the news only because the radio kept describing the man who had been shot - we didn't yet know the name Jean Charles de Menezes - as a "suspected suicide bomber".

This description puzzled me. Had the man been carrying a suicide bomb they would not have described him as such. They would have said that a man wearing a suicide belt had been shot before he could detonate it. So for twenty four hours the police continued to talk of the man they had shot as this "suspected suicide bomber". It was only the next day that the police admitted their terrible mistake. This delay in admitting what really happened as been the subject of an enquiry over here.

The enquiry into the matter is at last due to report and is thought to have largely cleared Sir Ian Blair, although Andy Hayman, the overall head of counter terrorism and intelligence, is understood to have been singled out for being deliberately misleading.

The police have been falling over themselves to make clear how unfair they think any criticism levelled at them is:

"This was London in the grips of an attack, two weeks after another terrorist attack had killed 52 people," said one source. "Four men were on the run who could have attacked again, the events of the day were extremely fast moving. There is a sense that the IPCC, having failed to recommend any action against any of the officers involved in the shooting itself needed a scapegoat."

De Menezes, 27, who was making his way to work, was shot seven times in the head by an armed police surveillance team after being mistaken for one of the suspected July 21 suicide bombers. In the hours after the shooting, Scotland Yard maintained that the man targeted was a suspected terrorist, but were forced to concede the following day that an innocent man had been killed.

In tomorrow's report, Mr Hayman is accused of being deliberately misleading over what he revealed on the day of the shooting about the identity of the man the police had killed.
Sir Ian, who said initially the dead man was "directly linked" to anti-terrorist operations, was not told that he was an innocent man until the next day - Saturday July 23.
But, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, sources say there were unconfirmed rumours that the man who had been killed may not have been one of the four suicide bombers being hunted. Mr Hayman is criticised by the IPCC for not passing this on to Mr Blair at a briefing he had with him at 6pm that night.
However, senior sources question how he could have passed on the unsubstantiated rumours at that stage.

I have some sympathy with Hayman if he is being singled out as the only person who should be criticised here. After all, surely Sir Ian asked someone if the man that they had shot was wearing a suicide belt? For the belief that he was wearing one must have been the only justification for the police taking the action that they did.

And yet, for twenty four hours after the incident, we were treated to stories of how the suspect had ran from the police (a lie), and how he had jumped over the ticket barrier (another lie) whilst being pursued by police officers. And yet, in all these reports, the subject of a suicide belt was never raised.

Eventually, the next day, the true story emerged. Jean Charles de Menezes, a totally innocent man, had boarded a tube train - completely unaware that he was being followed by armed officers in plain clothes - and these same officers had pinned him to his seat and fired eleven shots, seven of which entered his head and one which entered his shoulder.

There is much to criticise about the police's behaviour that day, but none of it is limited to anything that Andy Hayman did or didn't do.

Why was a suspected suicide bomber allowed to get on to a bus, when a bus had been blown up a mere two weeks before in London?

Why wasn't the suspect challenged in the streets by armed officers before he could have represented a serious danger to anyone?

The whole bloody operation was a disgrace and picking out Andy Hayman for criticism strikes me as unfair. But this is happening because the enquiry is concentrating on the alleged cover-up rather than on the validity of the operation itself.

Surely we can learn something of how to deal with suicide bombers from the Israelis? You don't allow anyone who you suspect as a suicide bomber to get anywhere near a bus or a train. You challenge them long before that point, in the street, and if you think they are going to detonate themselves and cause any harm to people around them then you take them out.

The de Menezes operation was bungled from start to finish and concentrating on whether the police covered up the fact that they had shot an innocent man rather misses the point. The danger that he represented, regarding his status as a would be suicide bomber, should have been established long before he entered Stockwell tube station.

The fact that it wasn't is what led to this tragedy. The police need to establish a set of guidelines over how suspected suicide bombers should be approached. Following them across London on buses and then shooting them through the head on tube trains surely isn't the best plan we can up with?

Click title for full article.