The insurmountable problem for those who categorise any accusation of the state acting deliberately wrongly as a “conspiracy theory”, is truth. There is, beyond any doubt, a police operation to infiltrate left wing groups in the UK with spies.
The case of the extraordinary Ratcliffe Power Stations convictions shows how very wrong this can go. The courts have ruled not only that the police acted as agent provocateur, but that police colluded with our supposedly independent prosecutorial service to withhold vital information from the court.
The lord chief justice was among the appeal court judges who published this yesterday:
“It is a case which has given rise to a great deal of justifiable public disquiet, which we share. Something went seriously wrong with the trial. The prosecution’s duties in relation to disclosure were not fulfilled. The result was that the appellants were convicted following a trial in which elementary principles which underpin the fairness of our trial procedures were ignored. The jury were ignorant of evidence, helpful to the defence, which was in the possession of the prosecution but which was never revealed. As a result justice miscarried.”
The court here is making a stand against the contempt for political liberty that emanated from the very top of the Blair government and spread to affect the policy and operations of all governmental institutions in the UK. The mindset that made it OK for the government to set up young environmental activists, was no different from the mindset in which MI5 agents thought it was OK to collude in the torture of Binyam Mohammed.
But here lies the rub. The appeal court is trying to right the wrongs done to middle class white people. The amount of infiltration and agent provocatuer activity against “Muslim extremists” has been of a much higher order. The “fertiliser bomb plot” is one example of an attempted crime by deluded people who had been penetrated and very probably egged on from the start. The “airline bomb plots” and “Manchester Easter bomb plots” both involved the shadowy double agent Rashid Rauf.
Furthermore, precisely that openness by the prosecution the appeal court demands is deliberately denied to Muslim defendants on terrorist charges, who are frequently not allowed to see and thus to challenge the provenance of “Evidence” against them by the security services.
There has, thankfully, been a steady stream of overturning of crazy “terrorist” judgements on appeal, including the truly appalling conviction of the woman for writing “terrorist poems”. But it nonetheless remains true that we are yet to recover sufficiently from the Blair poison to give the full benefit of law to Muslims in the way we have just done to middle class white people.
Careful Craig,
Whilst I haven’t looked much at this website for the past year or so, you will soon (if you haven’t already) look at buildings falling down at free fall speed – and think back to your physics class at school.
Even Pilger was very close to “coming out” in a video I saw of him today of a speech he gave in Australia.
The truth is exceedingly ugly but its nice to see that Sky News seem to have shaken off Murdoch and are doing real investigative reporting from Libya
“West Ignoring Rebel War Crimes, Claim Civilians Fleeing To Tripoli’ In Libya”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Juh1IGBUc
Tony
“The “fertiliser bomb plot” is one example of an attempted crime by deluded people who had been penetrated and very probably egged on from the start. The “airline bomb plots” and “Manchester Easter bomb plots” both involved the shadowy double agent Rashid Rauf.”
Yes, Anony, we shouldn’t forget the slimy Babar when speaking of double agents.
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=mohammed_junaid_babar_1
He was the ‘supergrass’ star witness, essential to the prosecution, in the fertiliser bomb plot trial, in which the defendants were sentenced to 40 years.
This statement was read out on behalf of the defendants at the end of the trial:
“This was a prosecution driven by the security services, able to hide behind a cloak of secrecy, and eager to obtain ever greater resources and power to encroach on individual rights.
There was no limit to the money, resources and underhand strategies that were used to secure convictions in this case.
This case was brought in an atmosphere of hostility against Muslims, at home, and abroad. One stoked by this government throughout the course of this case.
This prosecution involved extensive intrusion upon personal lives, not only ours, but our families and friends.
Coached witnesses were brought forward. Forced confessions were gained through illegal detention, and torture abroad. Threats and intimidation was used to hamper the truth. All with the trial judge seemingly intent to assist the prosecution almost every step of the way.
These were just some of the means used in the desperate effort to convict. Anyone looking impartially at the evidence would realise that there was no conspiracy to cause explosions in the UK, and that we did not pose any threat to the security of this country.
It is not an offence to be young, Muslim and angry at the global injustices against Muslims.”
Babar, who proclaimed in Nov 2001: “I will kill every American that I see in Afghanistan, and every American I see in Pakistan”, was, earlier this year, given his promised reward: freedom. He had served four and a half years out of a possible 70.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/13/jihadi-train-7-7-bomber-freed
At Babar’s release hearing, the defending attorney says, amongst much other, the following (with no objection from the FBI): “This is a man, Judge, who’s been out for over two years. He has changed his life. He has become a law abiding, productive citizen, and I believe he’s paid his debt to society.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2011/feb/14/court-transcript-mohammed-junaid-babar
Junaid Babar was able to travel freely between Pakistan and the UK despite Pakistan’s airports having the PISCES system installed, a point that was put to Witness G for MI5 at the 7/7 Inquests after J7 contacted the counsel for the bereaved. Witness G claimed to not know about this system:
J7: 7/7 Inquests Blog: MI5 taking the PISCES – Part 1
More about Junaid Babar here:
J7: 7/7 Inquests Blog: A cat amongst the [stool] pigeons – Mohammed Junaid Babar
Ingo,
I can’t help you. The kind of fraud I’m talking about is
carousel fraud when goods are imported VAT-free into the UK but are not sold for consumption in the home market. The goods are sold through a series of companies, each liable to VAT, before being exported, possibly even back to the original seller.
The first link in the chain often goes missing without accounting for the VAT. The final link in the chain reclaims the VAT it has paid from the government before disappearing.
The money that disappears in each fraud is millions, could be £250 million.
The money is rarely traced and the Mr Bigs usually escape.
Panorama did a programme on it in 2006. No doubt you saw it Ruth. I can’t find the video online though.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/5366914.stm
Right, Ruth. And you argue that the UK spooks use this in a systemic manner as a stream of ‘black money? Have I got that correct? The conclusion, then, is that these ‘Mr Bigs’ who get away with it must be working for the spooks. That would be not uncommon, actually, since quite a few crime bosses allegedly work for MI5 (eg. allegedly, the late Arthur Thompson Senior in Glasgow in relation to gun-running to the UDA) or, in the USA, the FBI, etc.
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http://www.booksfromscotland.com/News/Roddy-Lumsdens-Blog/190406-The-Last-Godfather
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Of course, the semi-official history is that MI5 was keeping an eye on gun-running to the UDA, whereas it has been argued that in fact, they were running it.
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So here we see the spooks running major crime operations in order to further their ends (in Northern Ireland) but also, simultaneously, generate ‘black’ income for their own purposes. Well, think of Iran-Contra.
Thanks Ruth, my missis has put me right already, a mistake on my behalf.
Carousel fraud is one of the negative results joining the EU brings with it. I knew of it since 1979, when a friend of mine driving a cool HGV told me about taking it from Hungary, full of best fillets of beef worth a few hundred of thousands, and shifted it across six borders within days, re directing the VAT trail and in the end having ‘cleared’ the load, never understood how it could work but he said that it was rampant then.
I hear that its phones these days, is that right? my friend is long off the road, he now tunes motorbikes, one of the best in Germany.
Albert Jay,
This line of argument is not convincing, for the reason that it is essentially an “all swans are white” argument. All states to-date are malign to some extent, but from this it does not follow that a benign state is inconceivable.
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A state is an obvious way of enforcing co-operation within its boundaries (preventing freeloading if you prefer). This is necessary because opportunistic non co-operation is part of human nature as observed empirically by economists (‘rent-seeking behaviour’) but also confirmed in evolutionary biology through application of game theory. Simply put, 100% co-operation cannot be an evolutionary stable strategy, so a proportion of a population will always seek to receive more than they contribute (this need not be a static phenomenon – different people at different times, as opportunities present themselves).
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Modern states are still evolving and all are plagued by democratic deficit to varying extent. Thus some of the power of the state can be opportunistically monopolised by minority groupings if mechanisms are lacking that allow the people to prevent this. These mechanisms are what we call democratic institutions – written constitutions, independent judiciary systems, elected legislatures – these are widespread examples of weak safeguards but better, stronger democratic institutions are conceivable and indeed already exist and are effective (see Switzerland and Uruguay). The more democratic the state, the less scope exists for corruption and in extremis zero corruption is conceivable.
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So it is plausible that the existence of the state is not in itself problematic, rather it is the predominant form of the state that needs urgent attention. The state acts in our collective interest when it is used by us to enforce co-operation between ordinary citizens in various spheres of public life. Examples are the NHS, the creation and maintenance of various infrastructure networks, criminal and civil law enforcement – contract law, employment law and so on. However at the same time the state protects the interests of elites who are able to subvert the apparatus of the state for their private purposes. To tear down the state because it acts both for and against our interests does not make sense. What makes sense is to change the state so that it is unable to act against our interests.
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For these reasons I am also wedded to the idea of the state.
Here’s an interesting piece on the co-opting of non-violent populist opposition groups. Not precisely related to agents provocateurs, but still part of the same panoply of manipulation:
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http://www.swans.com/library/art17/barker81.html
Read about how it’s done in the USA:
Targeted and Entrapped; Manufacturing the “Homegrown Threat” in the United States; Center for Human Rights and Global Justice; NYU Scool of Law; 2011
http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/targetedandentrapped.pdf
Harpie, that is a really comprehensive and excellent report, thanks for sharing the link. I’ll disseminate the link widely. People need to know about this stuff that’s going on.
You can read the Court of Appeal’s judgment at http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2011/B3.html
Suhayl,
‘And you argue that the UK spooks use this in a systemic manner as a stream of ‘black money? Have I got that correct? The conclusion, then, is that these ‘Mr Bigs’ who get away with it must be working for the spooks.’
Almost. Behind the Mr Bigs as classed by HMCE/HMRC is the real Mr Big whose role is hidden. The HMCE/HMRC Mr Bigs may have a criminal record and if caught they’re kept from divulging anything sensitive during the trial by either reward i.e. weak evidence being brought against them or intimidation i.e the threat of more charges or a heavy sentence.
Sjb,
Any judgement with JUSTICE CALVERT-SMITH at the helm is bent.
Same with MITTING & OUSELEY.
Yes, during trials HMCE/HMCR carefully picks venues/judges for trials and during appeals particular judges are carefully put in place.
Ruth, yes, I think that that was often also the modus operandum with the Glasgow ‘Mr Bigs’ in relation to Northern Ireland, etc.