Saturday, March 21, 2009 

Weekend links.

Another week down, and Manchester United lose for the second weekend in a row. Things don't get much sweeter.

Anywho, onto matters at hand. On the blogs both Craig Murray and BenSix comment on Canada barring George Galloway, Murray especially wondering whether our politicians might make a similar stance to the Dutch ones that supported Geert Wilders. Fat chance; ours don't care about freedom of speech. Paul Linford provides his weekly column, on the policy vacuum at the heart of the Conservatives, Justin answers Tom Harris's feigned outrage that bloggers didn't note the dropping of the much criticised bailiffs policy, where it's tempting to ask whether Harris would like some cheese with his whine, Anton Vowl sees the Mail engaging in up-skirt journalism, but only because Gemma Arteton was wearing (big) pants rather than none, Alix Mortimer says that the upcoming Labour intake shows that the party's doomed, John B notes some statistics which show that the murder rate in London remains stable, rather undermining the "knife crime" epidemic motif, while if you only read one thing, I can't recommend enough Laurie Penny's Tales from the Turnpike, where she collars a banker, relieves him of one note of his fat wad, and hands it to a distressed homeless teenager. Almost restores your faith in humanity.

In the papers, it's a rather a barren week. Marina Hyde in her usual waspish fashion tackles OK!'s premature killing off of Jade Goody, Matthew Parris is readable as ever on lawyers, the law and the connection with politics, and Howard Jacobson somehow files the Myerson saga down to just Jake's habit for making cheese on toast at 2 in the morning and leaving the gas on.

As for worst tabloid article, we are once again spoiled for choice. If we wanted to create a new category of most mystifying tabloid piece, it would have to go to the Sun so much as bothering to cover the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. There isn't of course so much as a word dedicated to the paper's own involvement, and surprisingly in the comments there isn't any mention of it either, where you would expect there might have been. One has to wonder how heavily moderated it's been, although they could have just turned comments off. Also in the Scum is the continued haranguing of Harriet Harman, hilariously called "Harperson", for daring to have a bit of fun with actor Michael Sheen. The prize though must go yet again to Amanda Platell, this time commenting on the post office worker who refuses to serve people who can't speak English. There are choice points throughout, but it's Platell's conclusion that corks it:

It isn’t racist to say that while immigration has benefited Britain in many ways, there are now simply too many people settling here who don’t share our values - and, at worst, actively despise them.

No, it isn't racist - it's just completely and utterly ignorant. Much like the postie himself.

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Friday, March 20, 2009 

It's not enough.

As it has done repeatedly in the past, the government has done the absolute minimum possible in an attempt to put to an end the increasing embarrassment caused by the continuing allegations of our active collusion in torture. We perhaps ought to be glad that the puny sops of publishing the guidance which the intelligence services have when it comes interrogating suspects, the reinvestigation of the treatment suffered by Binyam Mohamed by the Intelligence and Security Committee, and the promise of a new agreement with Pakistan concerning the arrest of British citizens have been offered at all; Diane Abbott seemed to sum up this government's attitude towards torture when she described ministers rolling their eyes and whispering about it "all being a Daily Mail campaign" when David Cameron unexpectedly brought the subject up at last week's prime minister's questions. These are former members of the likes of Liberty, some of them apparently still members of Amnesty International, dismissing the most brutal torture of innocent individuals as a tabloid campaign which they can just ignore, sigh and complain in private about. It might not win them many votes at the next election, pretending to care about "terrorist suspects" having their fingernails extracted with pliers or their penises repeatedly slashed with razors, but the general attitude towards such allegations still comes across as shockingly apathetic, even callous.

It's very good news therefore that Craig Murray will be called before the joint committee on human rights' parallel investigation into rendition and torture, his first opportunity to put his personal experience of information obtained via torture being used by the UK authorities before parliament. While the JCHR has been ignored repeatedly in the past, whether by MI5 chiefs or more recently by David Miliband and Jacqui Smith, it will at the least put into the open far more forcefully what has already been known but rarely highlighted for years. The same cannot be said for the Intelligence and Security Committee, a more discredited body it's difficult to think of. Its reports are unintentionally hilarious, when they are not absolutely scandalous, thanks to the ridiculous censorship imposed upon them, such as in these recent examples:

Whilst the primary focus is necessarily on international counter-terrorism (ICT) work, the UK's intelligence and security agencies also dedicate resources towards countering the challenges posed by ***, ***, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional instability in *** and the ***, and other challenges."

• "Top priority" in the UK's requirements for secret intelligence last year was given to seven areas:

• ***;
• ***;
• ***;
• ***;
• ***;
• ***; and
• ***."


And I hate to keep banging on about it, but it was also the ISC in its investigation into extraordinary rendition which decided that their definition of ER was different to everyone else's, thereby helpfully managing to clear the security services of collusion with ER in the case of Jamil el-Banna and Bisher al-Rawi.

As Ian Cobain points out, it used to be claimed that MI5's 11th commandment was "thou shalt not get caught". Now that they almost certainly have been caught, the only way to fully understand what went wrong, how far the policy went and why we actively connived with the torture of our citizens and residents is for there to be a full judicial inquiry. There have been far too many lies told for anything less to be acceptable, and hopefully the admittance at last that there may have been a problem will inexorably lead towards one being granted.

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Thursday, March 19, 2009 

A depressing pyrrhic victory.

The only possible way you can describe Barclays' depressing legal victory over the Guardian, Mr Justice Blake ruling that the paper cannot republish the memos detailing the workings of Barclays' Structured Capital Markets team is as a pyrrhic one. The Guardian, in its own editorial, more than sums it up when it states that all that Barclays has achieved is to shut the stable door after the horse has not just bolted, but completely disappeared from view. This is thanks to the documents being immediately mirrored by Wikileaks, where they still reside and where they can be downloaded from a server in this country, in defiance of the injunction. The terms of the injunction mean that the Guardian cannot even point people in the direction of where they can find them or "incite" others to publish; all they will have to do instead is Google for them, where they'll quickly find them.

Part of Justice Blake's justification for ruling against the Guardian was that he didn't believe that the documents had spread far enough for their confidentiality to have completely broken down. This is clearly nonsense: all those that Barclays wanted to hide these documents from have not only got them, they've been poring over them now since Tuesday, whether they be HMRC, Barclays' rivals, or anyone else with the slightest grudge against the bank. The Grauniad refers to the House of Lords ruling on Spycatcher, that you cannot put the melting ice cube back into the freezer. That is more than apt: through the ban the only people who are being denied from being allowed to see what everyone else has is those who are either without the internet or those that have never heard of Wikileaks and can't properly use a search engine.

Equally weak was Blake's second argument. He agreed that the Guardian can report on the contents of the documents, as that is in the public interest; not in the public interest is the unexpurgated publication of the documents in full, containing legally sensitive matters and other confidential information. There are some obvious flaws in this: how is the paper meant to know firstly what is considered legally sensitive and confidential and what isn't? Their lawyers' might come to predictability different conclusions from those of Barclays'. This appears to have the potential to be a slippery slope; how else can a paper know what is sensitive unless they first consult the people they are preparing to expose and give them the opportunity to halt publication in its entirety? Ideally, journalists should do this anyway, but there are certain situations where if they did on an incredibly important story, undoubtedly in the public interest, they could end up not being able to publish anyway. In cases such of that as Max Mosley, there ought to be no question of the person being informed beforehand; when it involves politicians being accused of corruption or corporations being accused of blatant and artifical tax avoidance, there is a good argument for not doing so. Furthermore, why shouldn't the general public be able to view the source material for such exposes and be able to make their own minds up where it is possible for the hacks to provide such a service? Journalists cannot always be relied upon to report accurately what is in things which they either come across, investigate or are handed to them, especially when it comes to such incredibly complex and difficult to understand matters as tax avoidance. The Guardian itself is has an example of this, having misinterpreted how Tesco was operating a tax avoidance scheme and wrongly claiming that they were avoiding corporation tax to the tune of £1bn when they were in fact avoiding stamp duty land tax on a much lesser scale.

Blake also suggested that "if the debate can flourish without the publication of the full documents, that is a highly material factor". But none of the articles in either the Graun or the Sunday Times begins to cover in anything approaching forensic detail just what is discussed and proposed in these documents; they just give a broad summary. Debate can flourish without them being freely available, but that is not truly informed debate. The best summation of what they contain was made by Alan Rusbridger in his statement to the court:

"I considered these documents to be of the highest significance in the debate about tax avoidance.

"They revealed at first hand the processes involved in structuring extremely complex and artificial tax avoidance vehicles; how lawyers and accountants worked together to exploit loopholes in government legislation; and the degree to which they are sanctioned at the highest levels within Barclays."


Only by examining the documents first hand do you fully understand just how Barclays' SCM team operated and operates. Blake's decision has slammed the door on one source of light, but the others remain wide open.

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Wednesday, March 18, 2009 

How many more might there be?

The details in the case of Sean Hodgson are so familiar that they could almost be the boilerplate of any mediocre ITV drama: the local "oddball", often with mental health problems, who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, ends up convicted of murder and left to rot in prison, always denying his guilt, only for his innocence to be eventually established. It's also familiar because it has happened so often, with the names of those involved in similar miscarriages of justice becoming seared on the memory: Barry George, Colin Stagg, Stephen Downing, and probably most notoriously, Stefan Kiszko.

Kiszko's case, where he was eventually cleared of the murder of Lesley Molseed after he was found to be infertile, the real killer having ejaculated onto Molseed's underwear and skirt, was memorably described by one Conservative MP as the "worst miscarriage of justice of all time". That might be disputed by the friends and family of Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans to name but two, both executed for crimes they were subsequently cleared of, but it's one that's stuck. Hodgson's however must challenge it, as did Downing's, who also served 27 years before finally being freed.

For those of us who can barely imagine, or wish to imagine serving any length of time in prison, 27 years seems even more unfathomably abstract. To spend those years also knowing that you are innocent takes the equation even further into territory you have no desire to visit. Simply to survive that time and not come out at the end of it a broken person is almost always an impossible task, and sadly Hodgson, who was already a troubled man who lied pathologically, looks substantially older and frailer than his years. He will presumably receive substantial compensation, like the other recent victims of miscarriages of justice, but it will never even begin to atone for how he has undoubtedly suffered.

The forensic evidence which proved Hodgson's innocence is not always so conclusive however, and can rely just as much on the person running the tests and subsequently testifying as the evidence itself. In Barry George's case the speck of "firearms residue" which sealed his fate was found to have been as likely to come from any other source as it was from the gun which killed Jill Dando. Barri White was convicted of the murder of his girlfriend partially on the basis of particulates found on Rachel Manning's skirt, which the prosecution case said had come from his friend Keith Hyatt's van, supposedly used to dump Manning's body. This evidence was subsequently shown to be completely inaccurate; the particulates were not from the van's seat and in any case the scientist had not done the necessary work to even establish conclusively that they had. After a retrial White was cleared of any involvement in her death. Meanwhile Thames Valley police, having brought what was described as one of the most flimsy prosecutions for murder in years, has been forced to start from the beginning again.

One can only hope that the overturning of Hodgson's conviction leads to all similar cases being re-examined in line with the latest advances. Some others though still languish in prison on even less evidence, the most notorious example being Michael Stone, convicted of the equally infamous murders of Lin and Megan Russell on the basis of a supposed cell confession by an admitted liar. Some, perhaps rather optimistically, have since linked the Russell murders to Levi Bellfield, convicted last year of a series of attacks on young blonde women in London, who has also been linked to the unsolved murder of Amanda "Milly" Dowler. Stone has already had one retrial, and had a further subsequent appeal rejected, yet it seems doubtful that with the remarkable lack of actual evidence linking him to the murders, a "bootlace" found at the scene notwithstanding, that Stone's could yet turn out be a miscarriage of justice to rival all of the above.

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Jenvey saga widens even further.

The Glen Jenvey saga continues to simmer nicely. It now appears that Jenvey does not just fabricate messages on Islamic forums with a view to selling the "extremist" results to the media, but also when cornered turns to smearing his foes with predictable allegations of paedophilia, his IP matching the one making comments on Thai websites with the one behind malicious edits to Wikipedia, attributed to Jenvey.

Difficult though it is get your head round, this all began with a Sun front page story which claimed Islamic extremists, in reality a couple of posters on Ummah.com suggesting sending polite letters to Jews in the wake of the Israeli assault on Gaza, were targeting the likes of Alan Sugar. Since then the PCC has begun investigating, Alan Sugar has launched legal action, the ambassador to Afghanistan has been drawn in, a Conservative MP who has worked with Jenvey has become embroiled, and now it seems likely that the police, already contacted by Jenvey himself, will now also become further involved. Almost all the credit goes to Tim Ireland for an exceptional investigation, and one which seems likely to run and run.

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The Apprentice.

Is just Big Brother for the bourgeois.

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Tuesday, March 17, 2009 

The smartest guys in the room get hot under the collar.

It would be nice to think that with various tax havens having to promise to be rather more transparent in their operations than they have been previously, threatened with being "named and shamed" by the OECD, that the actual businesses which exploit such havens would be following a similar trajectory. The sad reality is that both will continue to get away with it just as they have in the past: they'll wait for the current mood to slowly wither away, as it will when the economy eventually recovers, and then the same old lawyers and same bean-counters will be back to doing what they do best, letting the rich and powerful get away it while castigating the scum at the bottom who dare to fiddle their benefits.

Barclays however hasn't even bothered with letting it all blow other. Despite being in negotiations with the Treasury, threatened by its toxic assets, which it wants the government to insure, it still succeeded in gaining an injunction against the Guardian, stopping it from hosting documents detailing "Project Knight", a tax avoidance scheme devised in Feburary 2007 which could have seen the bank save between £40m to £60m in a single year. This is despite the fact the scheme is not illegal, and that Barclays even says that it fully informed Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs of what it was doing. Why then is it so desperate for the documents not to enter the public domain? Is it ashamed of what it was doing, legal though it was? Barclays' lawyers Freshfields argued that the documents were property of the bank, and that could only have been acquired by someone who had breached confidentiality agreements.

Sadly for Barclays, either the documents were up long enough for someone to mirror them, or they were also distributed to Wikileaks, increasingly becoming vital against legal threats of all varieties, where they are still fully available. Not just is the proposal for Project Knight included, but also documents detailing the setting up of a "Brazilian Investment Strategy", "Project Brontos", "Project Berry II - Investment in Index Linked Gilts", "Project Faber", "Project Valiha" and a memo detailing the minutes of a meeting of Barclays' Structured Capital Markets team concerning the setting up of an office for SCM in Luxembourg. Most interesting to do with the injunction issued against the Guardian is the involvement of Freshfields with Project Faber. Normally you would imagine that Barclays would have employed a separate legal firm to deal with the media, as Freshfields is ostensibly only involved with business law advice, but in this instance they seem to have decided not to do so. This raises a potential conflict of interest because the document on Project Faber details Freshfields' legal advice on the tax risk which the project would incur, and unlike the other documents where the risks are summarised fairly succinctly, Freshfields goes into quite some detail on five specific UK risks which Faber raises. Again, there's no suggestion here that either Barclays or Freshfields has done anything specifically illegal, but it also certainly seems to be in Freshfields' interest, as well as Barclays', to stop the documents from entering the public domain.

I won't pretend that I understand much of these documents, nor probably would 99% of the other people in the country, unless we had the likes of "Slicker" from Private Eye personally explaining them to us, but Richard Murphy is another man who does and who was asked by the Sunday Times to look at them after they were first passed them but didn't publish them in full. He described Project Valiha thusly:

It is designed so the money goes round in a big circle and comes back to Barclays so that they make £99m in tax savings without taking any risk at all. The whole thing takes three days.


As for the others:

“They work on the basis of exploiting tax regulations and the laws of different countries. They don’t generate any real profit for anyone, but they do save vast amounts of tax that they would otherwise pay.”

The Sunday Times claimed that Barclays might have been saving up to £1bn in tax through the various schemes, something the bank has vigorously denied. Murphy has though commented rather further on the schemes, of which it seems there might be even more which haven't turned up on Wikileaks:

I’ll tell you what I think is going on with Barclays. In my opinion it has constructed a series of wholly almost entirely artificial transactions undertaken through a significant number of separate legal entities, most under the control of Barclays itself, but some, inevitably, owned, or controlled (and in these deals it is always difficult to define what that might mean, deliberately) by the counterparty to the transaction - in most cases banks such as Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Fortis and so on.

Those entities have been in a number of jurisdictions, the UK and the Cayman Islands being the most common, but Luxembourg also being a participant. Some have been limited companies, some limited liability partnerships.

Some of those entities, even when incorporated elsewhere are tax resident in the UK, and some are not.

Some account under International Financial Reporting Standards. Some account under UK accounting standards.

It would seem that Barclays are trying to realise profits that they have ‘manufactured’ in most cases through these immensely complex structures by arbitraging (trading off) international taxation law, company law in various jurisdictions and even accounting standards, to achieve taxation results that mean that profits are realised or sold without taxation liabilities arising for Barclays.

The result has been a deliberate attempt to defraud – by which term I mean seeking to secure a financial advantage by deception, although not (I stress) illegally.

The deception has been on three parties. The first has been tax authorities who despite their brave statements to the contrary did not, I suspect, know the full details of some of these arrangements. It would seem that some may not have been disclosed to them.

Secondly, Barclays have sought to defraud (using the above definition) the taxpayers of the UK and maybe elsewhere who have not received the funds rightfully due to them on profits declared.

Thirdly, I think they have defrauded (using the above definition) their shareholders by declaring profits which were not, in my opinion, sustainable and which were manufactured through preconceived and structured financing deals in which the counterparties played a remarkably small part in exchange for what was, in effect, a fee to allow Barclays to record realised profits by turning the manufactured profits into third-party transactions.


This seems to be the real reason why Barclays is so desperate to keep the documents out of ordinary people's hands. They realise that they are some of the first real hard evidence to emerge of just how specialist teams within the banks sought to avoid tax, and who were subsequently incredibly richly rewarded for their work, with Murphy claiming that the head of Barclays' SCM division may well have been earning an astonishing £40m a year (other sources claim it could be £75m, for which see this revoltingly sycophantic article), about the same amount as that which one of the schemes would have saved the bank. In order to offset such huge remuneration, the profits from the avoidance would have had to have been far higher, and the £1bn a year figure no longer looks as nonsensical as Barclays claim. It somewhat puts Fred Goodwin's pension, even the £3 million lump-sum we now know he received into perspective, hence why Murphy has put up a further four posts on what should be done. At the very least we need to stop apologising for and excusing tax avoidance and demand that companies, in the words of Alistair Darling, don't just adhere to the letter of the law but also the spirit of it. Great public anger over the bailing out of the banks has not yet reached boiling point, but the Barclays revelations may just push the mercury further towards the top.

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I stared into the cold, dead eyes of unpopular journalism...

As well as being exploitative and revolting, the coverage of the Fritzl trial has also delivered some simply shockingly bad journalism. The Guardian, despite its crowing about the only British broadsheet in the courtroom, has at least tried to remove all sensationalism and cod personal insights from its reports, even if the sub-editor behind the headline was not as subtle. The same, unsurprisingly, cannot be said for the Sun, or the other papers that led with the impossibly precise figure of 4,000 rapes, but Brian Flynn's piece in places has to be read to be believed:

I STARED into the cold, blue eyes of incest fiend Josef Fritzl yesterday — and saw not a flicker of remorse or shame.

Fritzl had lowered the blue file binder he used to hide his face from photographers when he entered court.

The power-crazed monster, who regards females as objects to dominate and abuse, was finally confronted by two women who will decide his fate

Yet, with a sick discipline learned from the Nazi heroes of his youth, he simply gazed ahead, expressionless, for more than two hours.

...

As the public section of the trial ended yesterday, Fritzl reached for his blue folder and held it against his face once more.

It was as if he believed that no one was going to see into his soul.

But he was too late for those of us in court who had already fixed upon his eyes.

I was in no doubt I had seen the most evil man on earth.


Even Craig Brown might have baulked at satirising a humourless, puffed-up journo in such a fashion, thinking that no one would believe one could write such utter meaningless twaddle dressed up as an actual news report. Fritzl will remain the most evil man on earth until the Sun finds the next one, who should be along a couple of days from now.

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Monday, March 16, 2009 

Fritzl and media saturation.

There really is nothing quite like some good old fashioned humbug. The same media which rejoiced in the Josef Fritzl story, covering every sordid detail of the 24-year long abuse of his daughter even as it proclaimed itself shocked and horrified at what he had done, while chomping at the bit to ascribe to Austria as a whole the blame for the man, is now covering his trial in the same fashion. This should be one of those occasions where the media just leaves well alone, lets justice take its course and leaves the shattered family in peace, but of course someone somewhere would cover it, so therefore all of them have to. The Guardian is even crowing about being the only "broadsheet to have a correspondent in court throughout the trial", as if that's something to proud about. The person who abused therefore has his audience, through which the abuse can be continued and extended, even if for the last time.

This is nothing more than voyeurism of the worst kind, purveying the peversions to a salivating audience whilst pretending to simply be providing a public service. Then again, when you have the likes of Peter Hitchens saying with a straight face that women who are raped when drunk have to bear some of the responsibility, it's not entirely surprising that the Fritzl story has been proved to be so amazingly popular.

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Tory logo.

The site where you can create your own Conservative party logo slogan sadly seems to have collapsed under the weight of use, but not before I managed to create my own, not really humorous, more poignantly cynically honest version:

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Scum-watch: Kavanagh demands Muslims personally apologise to him, and crime confusion.

Almost a week on from the protests in Luton by around 15 Islamists, those out to milk it for all its worth still haven't let go. Today Trevor Kavanagh in the Sun, having previously treated us to Islamophobia in response to accusations of Islamophobia instead introduces us to his amazing knowledge of both the terrorist threat and the Muslim community:

IF you thought public fury over the latest ‘IRA’ atrocities was impressive, wait for the uproar over the next 7/7.

For the jihadists haven’t gone away, either.

They are just furious that a few flint-eyed extremists from the Real IRA and Continuity IRA have beaten them to it.

How does Kavanagh know this? Simple: he doesn't. The jihadists haven't gone away, it's true, and undoubtedly the threat from them is worse than it is from Republican dissidents, but it's also worth bearing in mind that there now hasn't been a major attack foiled since the liquid bomb raids, over two and a half years ago, not counting the dismal failure of the Tiger Tiger and Glasgow airport patio gas canister attacks.

Last week’s Belfast demos involved peace-loving citizens from both sides of the community.

The question is, will we see peace-loving Muslims, preferably some in hijabs, filling the streets of Bradford after the next Islamist outrage?

Most British Muslims are as appalled by violence as the people of Northern Ireland.

Some bravely condemned the Luton fanatics who spat bile at our soldiers as they marched home last week.

But would they turn out in their thousands to denounce another massacre like the London Tube murders?

Unlikely. Yet, if they fail to join other British citizens in publicly expressing disgust, they risk being seen as silent sympathisers.

Kavanagh here doesn't see the flaw in his own argument. He is suggesting that Muslims would be the only ones that wouldn't turn up to denounce a second 7/7 attack, yet there was no response after 7/7 akin to that which we saw last week in Northern Ireland, also unlike the response in Spain to the Madrid attacks there. And why preferably some in hijabs? Because Kavanagh assumes that women wearing them must be more extreme, or more devout? This mirrors Kavanagh's previous comments regarding hijabs, which he described as "provocative", when they are nothing of the sort. Niqabs maybe, hijabs from this secularist's view unpleasant and unnecessary but not "provocative". Kavanagh's remarks that if they fail to live up to what he demands of them they "risk" being seen as "silent sympathisers" could not be more clear: he views them as outsiders unless they distinguish themselves by denouncing something that was not done in their name but by those who claim to share their religion. He wouldn't subject any other group in this country to this sort of treatment; what makes it's acceptable to do it to Muslims?

Not satisfied with this, he then, like the Sun has repeatedly, questions the allegations made by Binyam Mohamed regarding his rendition and torture:

But lying is the default position for Islamists. Which is why we should question Guantanamo inmate Binyam Mohamed’s claim he was tortured by America and hung out to dry by the British.

On balance, I prefer the word of our security services.

The Ethiopian asylum seeker is another ex-druggie convert, deluded by fantasies of Islamic purity in hellholes such as Chechnya and Afghanistan.

Yet we are giving him sanctuary, at huge cost and potential risk.

He is not British. He should be sent home, along with ALL foreign terror advocates who trade off the freedoms they are so determined to destroy.


Except he doesn't claim that it was only Americans that tortured him. His main mistreatment occurred in Morocco, where he was rendered by the Americans (undisputed, as we have the flight logs which showed a trip on the correct date on a plane associated with the rendition programme) and where, as the Intelligence and Security Committee has already said, MI5/6 provided his interrogators with questions which were used while he was tortured. How much evidence does Kavanagh actually want? Does he want to see Mohamed's penis, which was sliced with a razor and still bears the scars? That he has lived here since he was a teenager has no real links to any country other than here is irrelevant to Kavanagh; he should just be thrown out because of his own ideological bias.

Much of the rest is the same old spouting that the Sun has cranked out for years, all without anything approaching proof or anything approaching insight, bringing up the old already disproved idea that it's foreign imams that are brainwashing the youth when in fact the radicalisation process is far more complicated and more to do with groups of like-minded individuals and the internet than simply listening to the sermons of the Qatadas and Hamzas. The new tactic is to quote at length those who have turned their back on radical Islam, even when they themselves are discredited. Shiraz Maher, who produced a report which had the most ridiculous and rigid recommendations for the government when tackling extremism for the think-tank Policy Exchange, discredited over Islam after Newsnight exposed that it had fabricated parts of a previous report is given space, while Ed Husain, more reliable but also unwieldy in what he thinks should be done, unlike his more amenable colleague Majjid Nawaz, also of the Quilliam Foundation, is also given room to voice concern over how Luton didn't turn out to denounce 15 people who weren't even all from the town, despite pictures from mosques on Friday which featured many worshippers condemning the protests.

All of this covers up the fact that the very thing Kavanagh seems to want is in fact just as likely to alienate as it is to unite. Demanding that Muslims as a block denounce something that doesn't in any way represent them is the exact sort of thing that is guaranteed to cause resentment towards a society which is already fearful and sceptical, and in some cases even prejudiced against them. The Sun's entire coverage of terrorism and the war on terror has been conducted in an "us and them" style, completely wedded to the Bush administration's policies on it, and scornful of the alternatives. That this has been counter-productive could not be more plain, yet the paper continues to defend it, ridiculing those tortured and demanding that terror laws be ever further tightened.

Elsewhere, the Sun's leader is typically confused (url will change as usual):

CRIME statistics alone cannot reveal the truth about Broken Britain.

They can be twisted any way the Government likes.

The Tories point to Justice Ministry figures showing convictions for teenage violence and theft doubling since Labour took office.

True, says the Government — but only because we’re bringing more yobs to book.

In fact crime is DOWN by a massive 39 per cent.

Does someone really need to explain to the Sun that just because crime is down that doesn't mean that convictions must also be down? It seems like it. As with Kavanagh, the Sun has already decided what's actually happened: Britain is broken and the government twists the statistics. True, it doesn't help when the government is caught doing just that, such as over the knife crime statistics released late last year, but the Sun itself fell for that and then claimed that no one had believed them anyway. The Sun then launches its own survey:

Crazy, isn’t it? So we must all decide for ourselves.

Today, we report four teenage murders in three days.

Do you think crime levels are lower than in 1997?

Do you feel there are enough police to keep order? That sentences are sufficient deterrent?

Do you think Labour really has been “tough on crime”? Do you feel safer than when they came to power?

We’ll bet the answer, every time, is No.

And the Sun is determined that the answer remains no, as its hysteria over "Broken Britain" and demands for ever more police and prison places continue unabated.

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Sunday, March 15, 2009 

Weekend links.

No overall theme again this weekend, so let's just get straight into it. On the blogs, there's my gun control/school shootings post mirrored on Lib Con, where there's an informative and interesting debate in the comments, Blairwatch notes that Iraq is set to execute 128 prisoners, as well as sentencing show throwers to three years in prison, 5cc on Mail Watch highlights the Mail's continuing emphasis on immigration, Craig Murray lets us know how the JCHR treated the email campaign that he launched, Shiraz Socialist looks at the link between the Revolutionary Communist Party, that band of libertarians and their influence on current Tory thinking re: multiculturalism, rhetorically speaking, Anton Vowl and Daily Quail tackle the continuing fallout from the Luton demonstrations, Laurie Penny mirrors her Red Pepper article on Britney Spears and Alix Mortimer looks at the cynicism behind David Cameron's apology over his party's economic policy.

In the papers, Matthew Parris tries to find out
what the Conservatives' foreign policy is and fails, Janice Turner, riffing on the blackmailed BMW heir, suggests that empowered women have few qualms about paying for sex, Deborah Orr says that apologies change nothing, Howard Jacobson amusingly as always talks of the boredom of existence, Christina Patterson, noting the bizarre current fascination with Ayn Rand says she's the last role model we need right now, Tristam Hunt attacks the Mail over their own assaults on Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and Jeremy Clarkson (yep, Jeremy Clarkson) pisses all over his fellow Sun columnist's efforts with an actually rather good piece on "common sense".

As for worst tabloid article of the weekend, you can make your own decision. You can either go with the Sun's attack on the BBC for daring to broadcast an interview with Binyam Mohamed, when they certainly didn't go after the Mail on Sunday in a similar way who got there first, or with the horror of yet another fucking article in the Times by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal about his split from the equally loathsome Liz Jones, via the fact that Jake Myerson obviously wasn't treated as badly as he was.

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