Exactly twenty years ago the European Court of Human Rights found that the British Government had acted illegally in shooting dead three IRA members in Gibraltar, even though the court accepted that the government had a genuine belief that they were planning a bombing attack. Indeed the court accepted the victims were terrorists, and refused compensation to their families on those grounds. But the court refused to accept there was no possibility of foiling the plot through methods other than summary execution.
In the light of the decision that Operation Flavius contravened Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, it is difficult to understand how the government can claim its killing of British men in Syria, with no trial, is anything other than murder. I personally find it difficult to imagine technically how men journeying in a car in Syria were imminently able to instantly wreak havoc in the UK so that it was impossible to prevent by any method other than their execution without trial. The level of certainty required for that decision would involve sufficient knowledge of what was to happen in the UK to stop it here. If there was vagueness about what was actually to happen in the UK, there cannot have been the certainty about the threat claimed. It is a logical impasse.
Frankly in twenty years of experience working with British security services their level of accuracy (remember Iraqi WMD) was never that good. And everybody is fortunately now deeply sceptical about the continual claims by the security services that there are thousands of dedicated Islamic terrorists in the UK conducting hundreds of plots every year, and yet miraculously never actually managing to kill anybody.
Just in case anybody had not worked out yet that the Guardian is a disgraceful neo-con rag, it has an article by its “legal correspondent” Joshua Rozenberg, married to the even more rabid Zionist militarist Melanie Phillips (who still believes the Iraqi WMD exist, hidden in the bed of the Euphrates). Rozenberg assures us it is absolutely legal for the British government to kill us without trial if it wants. He even suggests the murdered Mr Khan would not object:
“If he was waging war on British troops and civilians, he can hardly complain the UK’s armed forces were one step ahead of him.”
Astonishingly for a lawyer, the disgraceful Rozenberg does not seem to notice that the opening “if” is rather important. “If Mr Jones was engaged in insurance fraud, he can hardly complain at being banged up for twenty years”, so according to Mr Rozenberg we can dispense with all that nonsense about trials and evidence and just take the government’s word for it. Not to mention that the government has now instituted summary execution without trial in a country that does not even have the death penalty.
As I have argued, it is not unusual for British people to go to fight abroad. There were British citizens in the Israeli Defence Forces participating in the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza last year. Our neo-con governments of both blue and red Tories have positively encouraged the mercenary companies Executive Outcomes/Sandline/Aegis of Tony Buckingham and Tim Spicer. There are Britons fighting now in the Ukraine. We started by positively encouraging factions in the Syrian civil war, with the Saudis and CIA arming and training them and some of those factions helped constitute ISIL. There is no evidence at all that Islamic State had any interest in attacks in the UK until we started to attack it. (That is not to say it is not a very bad organisation and did not commit actions against UK citizens in its “Caliphate area”. But it did not threaten the UK).
For the government to claim the right to kill British people through sci-fi execution, based on highly unreliable secret intelligence and a secret declaration of legality, is so shocking I find it difficult to believe it is happening even as I type the words. Are we so cowed as to accept this?
Fedup might have a point wrt the refugees in the sense that – as Giyane pointed out yesterday or the day before – it seems likely that they are being used as a reason to attack Syria under cover of attacking ISIS.
As I said yesterday, people seem surprised the Syrian refuges don’t look like ‘Ethiopians circa 1984’ or ‘Biafrans. circa 1969’ or ‘Bangladeshis, circa 1971’. We Westerners have been cultured to expect our ‘victims’ to be firstly, dusky and markedly different from us and secondly, to be in a state of savagery and thus having been at the mercy of our bombs and guns, now utterly at the mercy of our abundant charity. We do not expect them to come from homes like ours, where they were well-fed, well-educated and had life expectations. The Syrian people were not starving and they had decent levels of health and education approaching the levels of eastern Europe. Libya had health and education statistics levels on a par with those of western Europe. Before the 1990s, Iraq was the same as Syria in these regards.
Suhayl
“but it was far, far better than this.”
Pretty much agree with all you say. On the above quoted, I still remember seeing the scenes in Baghdad’s local markets in the days leading up to the first strikes. There was a calm before the storm. Over 10 years later, I doubt those days will ever be back.
It is frightening to follow what goes on in Syria these days.
I’ve more or less given up in reading about as it is so horrifically unimaginable.
And then there wheels within wheels within….
A fine piece of writing by Felicity Arbuthnot.
It left me feeling extremely sad. What hope for better things to come?
The Murder of Dr Khaled al-Assad, Guardian of Palmyra
by Felicity Arbuthnot / September 8th, 2015
On Freedom’s tree there rained a withering blight,
Glory to proud Palmyra sighed adieu,
And o’er her shrines Destruction’s angel flew.
— Nicholas Michell, 1807-1880, Ruins of Many Lands
At a meeting of Foreign Ministers in Cairo in September 2002 the then Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa warned US President George W. Bush that the proposed invasion of Iraq would “open the gates of Hell … in the region.” Iraq and Syria would be the first to be engulfed in the fire.
German’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said it would be a “big mistake” for the United States to launch its own war on Iraq, and European foreign policy chief Javier Solana insisted that weapon inspections issues were a matter for the UN”, not an invasion
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was isolated as “the sole European leader in Bush’s camp.” Even “Australian Prime Minister John Howard, long one of Bush’s staunchest allies, said he favored a diplomatic solution to the crisis and would not blindly follow the United States into war.”
/..
http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/09/the-murder-of-dr-khaled-al-assad-guardian-of-palmyra/
US trying to prevent humanitarian aid to Syria from Russia. They asked Greece not to let Russian aid aircraft use their airports. Greece refused. Not so Bulgaria. It bent over backwards to please its US masters when asked to prohibit Russian aid planes from landing and taking off in Sofia.
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/confirmed-us-asked-greece-deny-airspace-russian-syria-aid-flights/ri9602
Last week I read that Russia had offered to join the ‘allies’ in helping to defeat IS (which everybody knows is being supplied and trained by the US). Anybody thinking the US and UK want to defeat IS is a lunatic or a troll.
” Anybody thinking the US and UK want to defeat IS is a lunatic or a troll.”
Must you challenge the enablers and status-quo obsessive, John?
Usually, it’s totalitarian or fascist states that murder citizens like swatting flies, not liberal democracies where the rule of law is supposed to be the central core value and process that our state is based on.
Rosenberg’s view or opinion doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. His example of a policeman confronting a terrorist in London and killing him lawfully because the individual is perceived to be an imminent threat to the life and well-being of innocent Londoners, doesn’t stand up, because how can two guys on the streets of Syria, which, correct me if I’m wrong, is on the other side of the world, be engaged in activities that represent an imminent threat to individuals in the UK?
Craig’s absolutely right about the character of the Guardian. It’s a neo-con rag that’s gone downhill to a remarkable degree over the last few years. But Rosenberg’s opinion about the ‘lawfulness’ of these appalling exections is extraordinary. He’s actually presenting an argument in defence of fascist methods that usually occur in police states. To see fascist ideology defended in the Guardian, even applauded, is shocking. Fascism in the Guardian? Bizarre. Where to next?
As we aren’t at war with Syria and parliament didn’t authorise the government to attack or bomb Syrian targets, it would appear that Cameron hasn’t just brazenly broken international law, but domestic UK law as well. If the PM can order the killing of UK citzens, where do his powers stop? If he can get away, literally, with murder, and not be scrutinized or held to account, do we even live in a democracy anymore. Maybe he could order the assassination of Corbyn too, as he’s been called a threat to the UK’s national security. Give the PM, or rather the PM grabs the right to kill UK citizens like this, and what freedoms do we have left that can’t be pushed aside?
Careful perusal of Continental TV footage of the crowds of refugees/migrants waiting at the Greece/FYROM and Serbia/Hungary borders – as well as those waiting for onward transport on certin Greek islands and disembarking inter alia at Austrian and German railway stations leads to the impression that young men make up the great majority of those people.
What inferences – if any – should one draw from this?
Suhayl Saadi.
I haven’t traveled much, but study other cultures thought art etc, after India I hoped to visit some more on the traditional ‘road to India’…
Blair says we should not look at these places as destroyed civilizations, but it’s clear what shape they are now in compared to before…I wonder how we would see it. The road to progress?
I also want to restate the point I made about internal and external behavior of governments, and add there is no necessary correlation between the brutality of governments and the peoples level of civilization.
Un-Fortunately the isolation of people here propagate these myth’s among the uk, that i’v always felt to be one of the most violent and regressive cultures. Any good traveler knows EU is far worse for violent crime, theft. etc..
Node @ 7.49pm
I find that really interesting: a third person killed by the drone. Obviously he wasn’t an imminent threat to the UK or we would have been told about him. So presumably he was just a driver or something. Funny how Cameron didn’t mention him (her?).
Alcyone, yes, I know, it’s beyond word,s really.
Thanks, Ishmael.
For a reminder of something good and beautiful that is Syrian, here is the website of a pal of mine, Maya Youssef. She’s an extremely talented musician who was trained at the Conservatoire in Damascus in both Arabic Classical and Western Classical music. She now lives in London. If anyone’s involved in music festivals, events, etc. please do consider booking her. She’s a superb musician.
http://www.mayayoussef.com/
”Anybody thinking the US and UK want to defeat IS is a lunatic or a troll.”
Must you challenge the enablers and status-quo obsessive, John?
—————————————————————
Ben, believe me, there are some who comment here could wear both hats. 🙂
The very serious matter about what has sometimes been termed ‘collateral damage’, that is anybody in the vicinity of the drone strike being likely a victim also, should never be forgotten in these state-terrorism attacks. As KoWN and others have pointed out this is murder. Although we have been at war all this century we are not officially at war. Because we are not at war that makes Cameron a murderer.
When I wrote this article about US extra-judicial killings in my heart I wanted to believe it could never happen in my beloved country. Now we know it has happened here. We’re as bad as the gun-crazy Yanks.
http://newsjunkiepost.com/2013/06/04/the-united-states-of-extra-judicial-murder-and-imprisonment/
21 children and 14 women were killed in the drone-strike that took the life of target Anwar al Awlaki (an innocent man until proven guilty). Abdulelah Haider Shaye, the journalist who reported this, was jailed to shut him up.
“In January 2011 Shaye was imprisoned in Yemen on anti-terrorism charges. The Yemeni government, presumably in an attempt to curry favour from the US, or possibly because of promises of aid, told the world media that it had killed Anwar al Awlaki and three other US citizens not under suspicion of terrorism, one being a sixteen-year-old boy. However, Shaye discovered at the site of the drone killing materials that were not in the Yemeni arsenal, including fragments from a US tomahawk missile and cluster bombs, which he photographed and distributed to the press; he also reported that the victims of the drone attack had included 14 women and 21 children.”
For those who might have missed today’s emergency debate on the refugee crisis (called for by the Labour shadow home secretary)…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSSHdp_O2bY
… which was a bit sanitised, to put it mildly. If I were being cynical I would say that today’s debate was an exercise in grandstanding Ms.Cooper into winning the Labour leadership.
Probably far more lively will be tomorrow’s six party motion for the UK Government to do more about the refugee crisis. This motion is being debated on an SNP Opposition Day and is led by Westminster SNP Leader Angus Robertson.
It’s one to watch out for, although it probably won’t be reported much.
“Ben, believe me, there are some who comment here could wear both hats. :)”
Is there some extra penalty we could accept for stating the obvious? What is it about comments to any front which will elicit a response, whether to our point or the opposite? Is it the deep hunger of narcism, or the loneliness of the long distance runner? I cannot answer with certainty, can you? All I can see is the pandering to the status-quo that is the present-day politico’s daily diet of bullshit, necessary to unnecessary political survival. Politics is penultimate bullshit and it’s unfathomable why anyone wants any part of it.
There is some breaking news that NAF forces in Eastern Ukraine are to surrender and ask for amnesty. It might have something to do with the mass build-up of Ukrainian Kiev-led troops. I read a report yesterday from a commander that Novorossiya does not have the weapons against such forces and that Kiev had planned a major offensive around the 21 September, probably when Putin was at the UN in America. My understanding is they are prepared to hold elections on the same day as the rest of Ukraine in line with Kiev elections. I guess they are trying to avert further bloodshed.
Fwister
“Its just not good form to kill and boast, just as its not good form to carry out a coup and boast. Some subtlety is required.
After WWII most MPs knew about death first hand, but today they are insulated. Drone warfare insulates them further and the army, the RAF and everyone. Yes, if one has to kill reduce the risk to one’s own side, but don’t use that reduced risk to increase your blood lust. If MPs sanction this sort of thing then THEY the MPs should spend time in national service and on front line service.”
____________
In your analysis, do you think one should incorporate the change in technologies, resulting in the so called social-media where it is feasible for people to hang themselves and others in public i.e. a rather new form of extreme self-incrimination?
‘Safe’ is obviously one of these key, power words that politicians read about in their ‘how to win an election’ books, and are advised to use by their media flacks. It’s faintly ridiculous really, justifying a policy because it keeps Britain ‘safe’, as though anyone who opposes the policy is somehow willing to make the UK ‘unsafe’. I hear this language emanating from the US, where prospective candidates have no issue at all calling out political opponents who ‘wish to harm’ America. Sure, I stand before you looking to be president, and I really do wish to harm all Americans! There are many things I loathe about political language, but mostly it’s just all so stupid: talk in a proper sentence, assholes, it really wouldn’t kill you.
Cameron has just killed UK citizens, using drone strikes. What is interesting is that in the corporate media, this is scarcely controversial. And of course, rather then keep us ‘safe’, we can expect blowback, but the corporate media will ignore that too. I am of the view that Cameron is also guilty of war crimes, this time in Libya, and soon in Syria, both of which contries are almost as much a basket-case failed-state as Iraq. I concede that it’s all but impossible to be as much of a basket-case as Iraq, but we have tried very hard. But, nobody resigns and nobody gets fired, because none of it happened. Carry on.
All is not well in the ranks of Isis [Daesh] just like UK politics nepotism rears its ugly head. Isis fighters desperate to blow themselves up in the name of Jihad are accusing senior militants of favouring friends and relatives by putting them on suicide bombing missions first.http://www.albawaba.com/editorchoice/daesh-suicide-bombing-waiting-list-699830 You could not make this stuff up. Reminds me of the suicide bombing instructor, who told his class to pay attention because he was only going to show them how to operate the belts once.
I hear the disingenuous exclamations from News Readers to field reporters every day….”Be Safe”….as though that end were the most important affect of reporting. Let them expose themselves as good journalists do every day in war zones, not weather or car-chase local events of little true danger. But the important thing is that the viewer/reader knows the talking Head has consideration for his/her grunts actually reporting on news events, not reading them with bad grammar and syntax.
Impatient suicidals reflects poorly on dedicated Christians. Why is it they want to go to Heaven, but are reluctant to die?
Remember when Lee Clegg was accidentally convicted of murdering an Irish teenager and perverting the course of justice? A posse of judges and the corp-0-rat media soon put that right.
There has been a large amount of Israeli involvement in the development of drone aircraft.
Home › Drone overview › Rise of the Reapers: A brief history of drones
Rise of the Reapers: A brief history of drones
By Chris Cole
6/10/2014
Part One – the early years
http://dronewars.net/2014/10/06/rise-of-the-reapers-a-brief-history-of-drones/
‘At the end of the Vietnam war 33 (Lightening Bugs) were given to Israel where they were used to undertake surveillance missions during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The next generation of UAVs would be, as Bill Yenne author of Birds of Prey, a history of US drones, put it, the offspring not of the American initiatives of the 1960s, but of the Israeli initiatives of the 1980s.[3] In the 1970’s and 1980’s, while the US lost interest in drones for intelligence gathering and surveillance purposes (preferring to invest time and money in satellites and hi-resolution imagining) Israel took the lead in drone development, building a number of different surveillance drones. [4] Israeli sold several to the Pentagon, including a drone called the Pioneer which could be launched from a ship or from military base. The US quickly put the Pioneer to use during the First Gulf War where it was used in more than 300 missions.[5]
Enter into our brief history Israeli aerospace ‘maverick’ Abraham Karem said by many to be ‘the man who invented the Predator drone’.[6] In 1974, aircraft engineer Karem, left Israeli military giant Israeli Aircraft Industries to set up his own UAV business. Having no luck selling his ideas to the Israeli military, Karem and his family emigrated to the US where he continued to work on his designs. In the early eighties Karem demonstrated a UAV built in his garage to DARPA who funded flight tests and in 1985 signed a contract with Karem’s new company, Leading Systems to develop a larger endurance UAV called Amber.[7] While Amber flew successfully, due to budget cuts funding for the project was axed. While Karem continued working – including developing a new, simpler UAV based on Amber called the Gnat 750 – financial pressure led to Karem and his company being bought out and eventually being swallowed in 1990 by General Atomics, owned by billionaires Neal and Linden Blue.’
/..
http://dronewars.net/2014/10/06/rise-of-the-reapers-a-brief-history-of-drones/
Evil.
Drone Wars Twitter
https://twitter.com/Drone_Wars_UK
Cameron as a drone releasing his weaponry. His head as a pink condom as per usual!
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2015/sep/07/steve-bell-on-the-drone-killing-of-british-citizens-in-syria-cartoon
“Reminds me of the suicide bombing instructor, who told his class to pay attention because he was only going to show them how to operate the belts once.” Harry Law.
Ha! Sounds as though it was straight from ‘The Life of Brian’, doesn’t it? Except of course it’s hard to parody what is already beyond parody.
ISIS almost sounds like something created in a fiction. ISIS is the punk rock of Islamist movements. You know, the Taliban, well that was pub rock and Hamas was garage. The GIA was the Stooges and Al Qaeda was a kind of New York Dolls.
I’m not trivialising something horrific. I’m mocking it and also hinting at the postmodern – not at all traditional – nature of this whole phenomenon and possibly the attractiveness to some.
“His head as a pink condom as per usual!” Mary
Good Lord, Mary, steady on! It’ll be the Anais Nin and the Marquis de Sade next.
Excuse me for a moment while I recalibrate my moral compass……
Applying Cameron’s logic, the murder of Georgi Markov in London in 1978 becomes A.O.K. since he was seen as a threat by the Bulgarians and they killed him without creating an excessive risk to innocent Londoners. 1-0 to the killers.
The murder of Alexander Litvinenko was OK in so far as the Russians believed him to be a threat but not OK in so far as the method used did risk innocent lives. 0-0 draw on that one.
http://972mag.com/israeli-hotels-warn-jewish-guests-that-arabs-will-also-be-there/111503/
Israel try’s to recreate the American Deep South of the early 1960’s on the Mediterranean .
Laughing in our faces contd. And the timing after yesterday.
Hi ………
You recently signed a petition on the UK Government and Parliament Petitions website for: Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested for war crimes when he arrives in London: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/105446
The Committee considered this petition, along with the Government’s response, on Tuesday 8 September.
Because the Government said in its response that the request made by the petition was something that it was not able to do under UK and international law, the Committee agreed that it would not take any further action on the petition.
It is still open to MPs who want a debate on this issue to find other opportunities, such as an application to the Backbench Business Committee: http://www.parliament.uk/bbcom
You can use this link to find out who your local MP is and how to contact them: http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/mps/
You can see all the decisions the Petitions Committee made at its meeting here: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/petitions-committee/news-parliament-2015/8-sept-committee-decisions/
Click this link to view the petition “Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested for war crimes when he arrives in London”:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/105446
Thanks,
The Petitions team
~~~~~~
More than 107,000 British citizens signed the petition and, if like me, are dissatisfied with that glib response.
Q Who are the members of the Petitions ‘team’?
I’ve just read a report that Arseniy Yatsenyuk, prime minister of Ukraine, was fighting the Russians and involved in torture during the Chechnyan War. The author claims it is justifiable for Russia to kill him in a drone-strike. How come Russia is forever getting the moral high ground?
I wonder if Bashir Al Assad has got any drones?
David Cameron is undoubtedly conspiring with Barack Obama and others to launch armed attack on Syria, even if we are not bombing Syria already. How is Assad supposed to stop him? There is no possibility that Cameron could be induced to come to Syria.
According to Cameron’s logic, it would be perfectly legal for Assad to send drones over to Downing Street to execute him.
Drone technology will presumably not stay in Western hands forever more. When other countries start sending drones over to the West, what are Western leaders going to say?
Kind regards,
John
My first laugh of the day Suhayl. I can’t remember ever feeling so gloomy as I do at the moment.