I am an anarchist etc.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before it happened, thanks to the lunacy of the way the terrorism laws have been drafted:A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court.
The 17-year-old, who was arrested in the Dewsbury area of West Yorkshire on Monday, was given bail after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court.
It is alleged he had a copy of the "Anarchists' Cookbook", containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives.
The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000.
The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year.
The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.
It seems then that you can now be arrested and charged with a crime simply for owning a book which is freely available from Amazon and doubtless dozens, if not hundreds of book shops around the country.
It's doubly stupid for another reason. The Anarchist Cookbook is notoriously inaccurate, written as it was by a disillusioned 19-year-old man during the Vietnam era, with much of the information coming directly from military and special forces' manuals, as the author himself has wrote. If you want to lose a few limbs while making explosives that are unlikely to go off except in your face, then the Anarchist Cookbook should be your weapon of choice. It ought to be handed out to anyone who feels like carrying out a suicide bombing: hopefully what would happen to them as a result would bring the term back to its original definition.
Perhaps more instructive is that the teenager (who else?) was arrested in Dewsbury. Dewsbury was where Mohammad Sidique Khan lived prior to carrying out one of the 7/7 suicide bombings, and where arrests were made earlier in the year over the ongoing investigation into the attacks, with all those arrested, including Khan's wife, released without charge. Could it be that the police in Dewsbury are rather overreacting due to the town's most infamous recent son? The Crown Prosecution Service really ought to know better than to take such flimsy charges to court, but in the "age of terror™" even the slightest and silliest infringement of our too broadly drafted laws is seen to be actionable.
Labels: Anarchist Cookbook, idiocy, terror, terror laws
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Though if you check out the Yorkshire Post he apparently also possessed potassium nitrate and calcium chloride.
So expect terror raids on the Amazon warehouse, on garden centres and dairies. Not to mention schools, chemical suppliers and possibly the Nestle and Cadbury's manufactories.
Busy, busy.
Posted by
FlipC |
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 10:31:00 AM
I was crap at science at school. But even I was aware of such material. didn't have t'internet as we'd only just discovered zx80s.
(and girls)
Yes 20 years of visits to garden centres has its benefits!
Posted by
eric the fish |
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 7:04:00 PM
In other words, idiot teenager is alienated, probably depressed and has tiny amounts of items that could be used to make explosives but would probably most likely only fizz if they even went off.
He had a video of the devil's face in smoke in the fire following the 9/11 attacks? The same picture that was printed in tabloids around the world as a supposed portent? I'm not ashamed to admit I've downloaded the videos of men in Iraq being executed, mainly because it helps make you realise just how inhuman some sections of the so-called "resistance" are. Am I a potential jihadi because I've also downloaded them, as well as dozens of others of insurgent videos, because they also help keep me informed when I write about Iraq and the insurgency there?
Kid'll probably end up getting a couple of years in the current climate. Now that'll fuck him up, when whatever stage he's going through would most likely have simply passed.
Posted by
septicisle. |
Thursday, October 11, 2007 1:56:00 AM