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Iraq Inquiry Reject By British Parliament

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Thomas Wagner
The Associated Press

The House of Commons on Monday rejected a motion by the opposition Conservative Party calling for a formal inquiry into the British government’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

On a 288-253 vote, the lower house of Parliament sided with Prime Minister Tony Blair, who ruled out such an inquiry now.

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said the government’s view was that “there would come a time when these issues will be explored,” but she added that “it would be wrong to launch such an inquiry” while British troops are engaged in Iraq.

In a separate vote, lawmakers voted 274-229 to adopt a government resolution warning that an inquiry would divert attention from the vital task of improving conditions in Iraq.

Although the government defeated the inquiry motion as expected, the vote was closer than Labour’s 61-seat majority, indicating some party members voted against Blair, who angered many in his party by joining in the war.

Blair gives up the premiership June 27 and will be replaced by Treasury chief Gordon Brown, who made a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday to study Britain’s participation in the war and to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Liam Fox, the Conservative Party’s defense spokesman, said before the inquiry vote that it was important to examine how British leaders decided whether to back the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

“We want the principle established that there must be an inquiry. It’s about making sure we don’t make the same mistakes again,” said Fox, whose party at the time strongly supported Blair’s decision.

In a key House of Commons debate on March 18, 2003, shortly before the war began, 90 percent of Conservative legislators voted for the invasion, compared to 62 percent of Labour members. All the Liberal Democrats, the third-largest party in the Commons, voted against.

The Conservatives’ foreign affairs spokesman, William Hague, urged lawmakers to bow to the “gathering consensus” and hold an inquiry into the war, which has been very unpopular with the British public.

“This government and future governments need to learn the lessons and the country needs to be assured that they will have done so,” he said.

Hague, who led the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2001, spoke in favor of the invasion in the debate four years ago.

At that time, he said it was part of Britain’s “national interest to act in concert with the United States of America in matters of world peace and stability.”

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Police shoot and kill woman

Monday, June 11th, 2007

David Batty and agencies
Guardian Unlimited

Police today shot and killed a 37-year-old woman in Sevenoaks, Kent, after reports that she was carrying a gun.The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said the fatal shooting occurred at 1.20am close to the High Street in the town centre.

One shot was fired by officers. The woman was given first aid but died at the scene. A gun was recovered by police.

The IPCC is investigating the incident, which is standard procedure in fatal shootings.

Police search Suffolk Way near the High Street in Sevenoaks, Kent, after armed police shot and killed a woman. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

An IPCC spokesman said: “I can confirm that in the early hours of this morning Kent police fatally shot a person. This has been referred to the IPCC which has a team of investigators now at the scene.”

The body of the woman was carried away by a black private ambulance at about noon. The coroner has been informed, the IPCC said.

IPCC commissioner Nicola Williams said: “I send my sympathies to the woman’s family and friends and also the police officers concerned.”

The woman has not been formally identified but Ms Williams confirmed that the dead woman was from Sevenoaks. She declined to comment on whether the victim was already known to police.

She said up to eight officers attended the incident, adding that police shootings are “relatively rare” and that it is “unusual” for a woman to be the victim. The shooting was not part of a wider police investigation, she added.

Police cordoned off a large area in the town centre, including the bus station, while forensic experts conduct fingertip searches.

Resident Helen Brown, who was trying to take her young child around the corner to the library, said she was “shocked” that the incident had occurred in Sevenoaks.

“My husband sent me a text because he’d heard it on the radio and I thought he was joking. It’s a bit unsettling really,” she said.

Forensic officers could be seen working in the rear carpark of M & Co, a clothes shop based in the High Street. A member of staff said all the back windows had been covered with material and a policeman was guarding the rear entrance.

Other residents said a police helicopter hovered over nearby Knole Park for several hours this morning.

Three elderly ladies, who asked not to be named, said they had heard police helicopters early this morning.

“They’ve been circling over Knole Park,” one said. “There are plenty of spaces to hide there.”

She said she was “saddened” by the news and added: “It’s supposed to be such a good town.”

College students Harry Dix and Elliott Enos said that they usually skateboarded in the area.

Mr Enos said: “The only underworld in Sevenoaks is a couple of small-time drug dealers.”

He added that the only trouble they had experienced in the area was “getting shouted at by rich people to mind their cars”.

A spokeswoman for Kent police said the force planned to release a statement on the incident later today.

There have been three other cases where the police have shot a woman since 1980 but only one of those was fatal, according to the IPCC.

• In 1980 West Midlands police accidentally shot and killed Gail Kinchin, a pregnant 16-year-old.

• In 1985 police accidentally shot and paralysed Cherry Grace during a raid on her home in Brixton, south London, by officers searching for her son. The shooting in May was the trigger for the second wave of Brixton riots.

• On November 2 1997, Jane Lee was shot three times by police in Illford, Essex, but made a full recovery. The shooting occurred after Metropolitan Police officers received reports of an armed woman driving nearby.

Since 1985, 48 members of the public have been fatally shot by the police and another 61 have been wounded.

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Nicaragua leader calls for a New World Order

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Reuters

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who wants more aid from the United States, called on Sunday for a new world order to replace “capitalism and imperialism”, at the start of a trip to arch U.S. foe Iran.

His comments echoed some remarks by his Iranian counterpart who often attacks “imperialist” and “arrogant powers”, although Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a more vehement critic of Washington. Ortega has raised eyebrows in Washington, which broke diplomatic relations with Iran in 1980, for forging ties with the Islamic Republic. But the Nicaraguan president said he did not need permission about who to befriend. “We have chosen our friends by our own will and we haven’t got permission from anyone,” Ortega said shortly after arriving in Tehran, the official IRNA news agency reported. “In negotiation with America we have explained our personal and political positions towards imperialism … Imperialism and capitalism should be removed and we should create a peaceful and friendly world,” Ortega added. Ortega, a Cold War-era enemy of Washington, had earlier said he would travel to Iran on a jet loaned to him by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, a former U.S. foe who has been developing better ties with Washington. The Nicaraguan president, like Ahmadinejad, is also an ally of U.S. antagonist President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. The Iran trip will focus in part on getting Iranian investment in Nicaraguan factories that build tractors and other agricultural equipment, Ortega said before the visit. Business links were a topic when Ahmadinejad visited Managua in January. “In this trip (by Ortega), the agreements between the two countries which were agreed in Nicaragua will be finalised and put into effect,” Ahmadinejad said, IRNA reported. State media also quoted Ahmadinejad saying Nicaragua had been wounded by “the lashes of colonialism”. Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla who fought U.S.-backed Contra rebels during his 1980s government, later on Sunday met Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Today America is the most hated government in the world,” Khamenei told him, the ISNA news agency reported. Ortega said according to the same news agency: “Today America is isolated among other nations.”

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Lies that Unleash Hell

Monday, June 11th, 2007

By Jason Miller
RINF Alternative News

Each day untold millions of US Americans unwittingly immerse themselves in an intellectual, social, cultural, economic, political and spiritual cesspool so rancid and toxic that even microbes with the most voracious appetites for human waste, vomit, and inanimate flesh would shun this infinitely repulsive sewer.

Many highly qualified and intelligent researchers, analysts, and authors have written books, essays, and reports documenting the astounding multitude and variety of crimes committed by the United States throughout its history. Since a nation is an entity comprised of numerous elements and dynamics, we can’t simply blame the government, the Republicans, the Religious Right, the Democrats, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or any one particular component. Therefore, nearly all US Americans bear a degree of responsibility. Obviously, some (i.e. Bush and Cheney) are far more culpable than others because they wield such tremendous power and act with a conscienceless, cynical awareness of the suffering they are inflicting on the Earth and its sentient inhabitants.

Since only about 4% of the population shares Bush’s sociopathic inability to experience empathy or guilt, what is this powerful siren call that motivates so many inherently decent human beings to repeatedly lacerate their souls upon the jagged rocks of complicity in acts that inflict unnecessary suffering upon billions of humans and animals?

How did we become a statistical aberration to the extent that we are a nation of resource-rich, technologically-advanced, mean-spirited, intellectually-stunted moral barbarians where a significant percentage of the population behaves as sociopaths by directly supporting or apathetically ignoring the evils in which they are complicit?

Is it something in our water? Are we genetic misfits? Does our population represent the vanguard of the next step in humanity’s moral “evolution”?

Sarcasm aside, the underlying cause of our depravity is our false, skewed and fractured consciousness which our malignant system begins hammering into our minds as we draw our first breath. This relentless psychological assault persists until we take our final gasp of air.

Nearly unshakeable illusions and delusions enable a relative handful of ruthless corporations and plutocrats to manipulate nearly 300 million people into helping them pursue their objective of world domination and exploitation, as out-lined in the Project for the New American Century.

Let’s deconstruct but a few examples of the nearly innumerable strands in the tangled web of pernicious lies comprising our false consciousness:

The Founding Fathers were noble, saint-like champions of the “common” people who forged a nation affording freedom and equality for all.

Our founders were mostly aristocrats who formed a constitutional republic of, by and for land-owning white males. Native Americans, the poor, and women were excluded. Chattel slavery was recognized as a legal enterprise. Many of our revered founders advocated and facilitated the Native American Genocide in the interest of expanding our borders.

Greed and selfishness are virtues.

Capitalism, which has evolved into its utterly reprehensible advanced stages here in the

United States, is intellectually buttressed by the ridiculous notion that people acting on two of the most despicable traits of humanity, greed and selfishness, will enhance the commonweal. The current state of affairs in the

United States demonstrates otherwise. Despite the slight doses of socialism which have mitigated the abject suffering inflicted by relatively unfettered capitalism during the Gilded Age, and despite the fact that we are the wealthiest nation in the history of humanity, there are still over a million homeless human beings, millions experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly fifty million lack a viable means to obtain our outrageously expensive medical care, our leading indicators of health are amongst the lowest of industrialized nations, urban public school systems are in a state of crisis and decay, and, as Katrina so clearly indicated, we are content to spend most of our hard-earned tax dollars on industrialized murder, blame victims, and leave the suffering to die, even here at home.

America is the land of opportunity.

Are many of us better off than most of the people on the planet? In a material sense, yes. However, bear in mind that the principal reasons many US Americans enjoy a degree of prosperity is that we stole a large chunk of a resource-rich continent (which is geographically situated in a way that makes a mass invasion nearly impossible), and that we built much of our prosperous economy on the backs of black slaves. Rapacious capitalism has enabled us to economically colonize and exploit many nations in the developing world, which explains the utterly nauseating gluttony we exhibit by representing 5% of the world’s population and consuming 25% of its resources. Oink, oink!

Is there economic upward mobility in our society? Yes. Yet rags to riches stories are extremely rare. Aristocratic dynasties are alive and well in the

United States. One need look no further than George W. Bush or Paris Hilton to recognize that we are far from being the meritocracy that media shills like Oprah would have us believe. Beloved Oprah is ostensibly a benign and benevolent self-made billionaire emblematic of the “boundless opportunities” in the

US. Certainly there is merit to her philanthropy. However, she erases her positive contributions many times over by promoting the notion that if a black woman like her can make it, anyone can. (And by the way, you who haven’t “made it” like Oprah, what the hell is wrong with you?) Her glowing endorsement of The Secret and its wholesale promotion of employing “magical thinking” to attain the “American Dream” was beyond the pale.

America saved the world from fascism during World War II

Let’s set the record straight here. A number of large

US corporations and dynastic plutocrats, including Bush 43’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, made significant financial contributions to the Nazi cause before the Trading with the Enemy Act became law in 1942. We also need to remember that the United States refused to lift a finger to help the poor and working class in

Spain as they fought to preserve their democratically-elected government from the fascist onslaught of Franco, the Church, and the moneyed elite.

We lost about 500,000 people battling fascist imperialist forces in World War II.

Russia sacrificed 20 million human beings. Were it not for

Russia, we would probably be speaking German right now.

Besides, the

United States is now in the prefigurements of fascism. We are becoming the very threat from which we allegedly saved the world.

America needs to maintain its leviathan military industrial complex to ensure its security and to spread freedom and democracy

The

United States spends more money on “defense” each year than the rest of the world combined. With the vast arsenal of weaponry we possess, it is beyond farcical to suggest that our security is seriously threatened at the existential level.

We maintain military bases in 130 countries. We invaded Iraq and

Afghanistan preemptively (which is a war crime for which we hanged Nazis). Yet we tenaciously strive to perpetuate the inane assertion that we are not an empire. Capitalism demands perpetual growth, meaning capitalist nations inevitably engage in imperialism to expand their markets, enhance their profits, and find cheaper wage slaves. We utilize the legions of the empire to spread the misery of “free markets,” consumerism, exploitation, and environmental rape.

America is a Christian nation.

While many argue endlessly over the separation of church and state, or whether or not the

United States was founded as a Christian nation, an equally profound question receives far too little attention.

What is the nature of the Christianity that our nation, in which a large number of denizens label themselves as Christians, collectively manifests?

Our rigid Puritanical roots still maintain a tenacious grip on our psyches. This impedes our capacity to overtly experience life’s carnal, sensual pleasures without experiencing guilt at violating taboos. Denying ourselves reasonable indulgence triggers the bacchanalian excesses that lead to rampant addiction to pornography, drugs, and alcohol.

The isolation, rage, and spiritual emptiness engendered by our consumerist, narcissistic, and violence-obsessed culture catalyze events like the ones at Columbine and

Virginia Tech. With lamentations and hand-wringing, the mainstream media repeatedly expresses its utter astonishment when people snap to such an extent. After all, human beings living in a spiritually vacuous, hyper competitive environment have an infinite capacity to absorb insults, loneliness, rejection, exclusion, bullying, and hatred without reacting violently, don’t they?

One of the basic principles Christ espoused was to practice the Golden Rule. Whoops. Slaughtering millions of human beings throughout our history leaves us well short of the mark on that one.

Perhaps the most inspiring spiritual wisdom the Jewish carpenter conveyed to humanity came in the form of the Beatitudes. How do we manifest them in the

United States?

The poor in spirit are considered to be impotent and irrelevant in a culture that thrives on egoism and self-promotion.

Those who mourn over moral injuries and tragedies are instructed to “get over it,” take some pills to mask the pain, and “move on”.

The meek are crushed by aggressive, acquisitive mobs.

Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness find that their efforts to satisfy, slake or quench are in vain as they wander a seemingly endless spiritual wasteland.

The merciful are considered weak and fall prey to those who abuse their compassion for their own personal gain.

The pure in heart are exploited as a reward for their decency.

The peacemakers are ridiculed as idealists, cowards, and collaborators with the latest enemy our plutocracy has created to justify its endless wars.

Despite the brutal nature and seemingly insurmountable power of this juggernaut of a nation, there is still hope for humanity and the world. While the opulent class, military careerists, fundamentalist Christian leadership, corporatists, AIPAC, “elected” officials, and the prostitutes in the corporate-dominated media propagate a sociopathic agenda through maintaining the simulacrum of the

United States as the “leader of the free world,” there is abundant evidence of an increasing awareness of their perfidy and malevolence. Simmering beneath the surface for years, moral outrage now threatens to reach full boil thanks to the increased awareness facilitated by the Internet.

The people of the

United States are not freaks or anomalies. 96% of us have a conscience and can act empathetically. It is simply a matter of time, and perhaps a few more doses of pain, before reality obliterates what is left of the fiction we have been inculcated to embrace as the

United States of America.

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MI5 Phone Taps Cannot Be Used As Evidence

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Philip Johnston

It stands to reason, doesn’t it? MI5 has got all this evidence against terrorists taken from tapping their phones, so if it could be used in court, which it can’t, dozens of them would be behind bars.

We would be able to prosecute suspected terrorists, rather than leaving them in judicial limbo - subject to control over their movements, but never actually accused of, charged with or tried for anything.

Every year, about 1,500 intercept warrants are issued by ministers to enable the police and the security and intelligence agencies to monitor the conversations of suspects.

Yet none of the information they gather can be used as part of any prosecution. Nobody can even ask in court whether a phone has been tapped.

On the other hand, if a hidden microphone placed in a suspect’s house picks up what someone is saying on the phone, then that is admissible in court, because there was no tap on the phone line itself. This is clearly absurd.

But it is not quite as straightforward as closing a loophole. It is often said that objections by the Security Service are the principal blockage to using phone-tap evidence.

It is cast as the villain of the piece, even though successive directors general have said that they do not oppose its use. Where they have a problem is with the practicalities, of which more later.

David Cameron recently suggested to Tony Blair that this whole issue should be considered by a committee of the Privy Council - an idea promptly filched by Gordon Brown.

Both Labour and the Conservatives seem to see this as something of a breakthrough, but memories are short at Westminster.

A similar committee of privy counsellors, chaired by Lord Newton, looked at precisely this subject five years ago, and concluded that intercept evidence should be admissible. A review of anti-terrorism legislation carried out by Lord Lloyd in 1996 also recommended such a change.

The arguments have been debated umpteen times in Parliament, most recently when the Serious Crime Bill was going through the Lords just a few weeks ago.

In the teeth of Government objections, peers voted to lift the ban in crime trials; and since this Bill starts its progress through the Commons tomorrow, MPs will also have the opportunity to vote on the matter.

Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, wants the ban lifted and so does Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General. Where criminal trials are concerned, there is no need to wait for a Privy Council inquiry.

The case for allowing intercept evidence to be used by the prosecution in criminal trials is strong. In jurisdictions around the world, notably in America, it has been used to put underworld godfathers in jail. In Australia, where rules of evidence are similar to here, phone-tap evidence has been used in 2,363 prosecutions, of which 1,533 have resulted in convictions.

But in terrorism cases, it is rarely used - not least because there are few, if any, pertinent cases.

Tapping the phones of terrorist suspects is not simply about bringing people to trial. It is about discovering and thwarting plots that could kill hundreds of people. An apparently banal exchange overheard via a wire tap may mean nothing to most people, but be of huge importance to an intelligence officer who knows the codes that are used.

It may be impossible in a trial to persuade a jury, beyond reasonable doubt, that whenever a suspect, mindful that his phone might be bugged, referred to a watermelon he meant a bomb, yet it could have been the information needed to stop a terrorist atrocity.

Of course, it is Parliament’s will that should ultimately be decisive, not that of the security services.

As our Direct Democracy authors argue in these pages today, criminal justice has passed out of democratic control and into the hands of a professional elite. This trend should be reversed - but it is still worth listening carefully to the concerns of that elite.

MI5’s position is that if its intercept “product”, as it calls it, is going to be used in court, then MPs should be aware of the implications.

At present, a Security Service officer will transcribe something from a telephone tap only if it is considered useful for further intelligence work. This could be just a few pages, or even sentences, from an intercept that has lasted months.

But if this has to be produced in court then British disclosure rules mean everything will have to be transcribed.

Rightly, defence lawyers are not going to be content with a selective transcript chosen by the prosecution; they will want to see the lot, since there could be something that will exonerate their client. (In fact, phone-tap evidence is already admissible in court, though only if it helps the defence, not the prosecution.)

MI5 believes its officers have better things to do than spend weeks transcribing hundreds or thousands of pages of phone conversations, most of which will prove nothing in court.

In Operation Crevice, which led to the conviction of five terrorists intent on blowing up shopping centres and nightclubs, 100 phones were intercepted over a period of 18 months. Transcribing all the conversations would have taken dozens of people months of effort.

The work could be contracted out, but some conversations will be in languages or dialects that are not familiar to professional transcribers. This problem could be overcome with more money and extra staff.

But is it needed? In the Crevice case, the key evidence that led to the convictions came from eavesdropping - bugging the cars and homes of the suspects, which is admissible - not from phone taps.

It is not the disclosure of interception methods nor the fear of compromising sources that is MI5’s main concern; it is the sheer amount of work involved for possibly little positive outcome.

You may think that is the price that has to be paid. But it is a price none the less.

It might make more sense to draw a distinction between criminal and terrorist cases, using phone taps to secure convictions in the former, but only for intelligence-gathering purposes in the latter.

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Powell: Close Guantanamo

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Ninemsn 

Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday the military prison at Guantanamo Bay for foreign terrorism suspects should be immediately closed and its inmates moved to the United States.

Powell, who in a 2003 speech to the UN Security Council made the case for war against Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction that were never found, said the controversial prison in Cuba had become a “major problem” for the United States’ image abroad and done more harm than good.

“Guantanamo has become a major, major problem … in the way the world perceives America and if it were up to me I would close Guantanamo not tomorrow but this afternoon … and I would not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system,” Powell told NBC’s Meet the Press.

“Essentially, we have shaken the belief the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don’t need it and it is causing us far more damage than any good we get for it,” he added.

The United States is holding about 380 foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo.

Rights groups and foreign governments have called for the prison to be closed, saying holding prisoners there for years without trial violated legal standards. But Washington says the prison is legal and necessary to hold dangerous individuals.

“I would get rid of Guantanamo and the military commission system and use established procedures in federal law,” Powell said, saying some leaders around the world were using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds.

“It’s a more equitable way, and more understandable in constitutional terms,” he added.

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Freedom of Information act stalled

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Charles N. Davis
Rutland Herald

Congress, apparently content to explore ever new depths in public disapproval, is on the verge of having a single member derail the most meaningful reform in years of the federal Freedom of Information Act.

How, you ask, when overwhelming majorities support the legislation in both the House and Senate?

The secret hold, of course. Ever heard of the secret hold? It’s a beauty – a real relic of the stuffed shirts of yesteryear, smoke-filled rooms and fat cats with stogies guffawing over the latest bamboozle of the taxpaying schmucks. Think country clubs, secret handshakes and bizarre rituals.

Members of the Society of Professional Journalists, the nation’s largest journalism-advocacy organization, used the power of the blogosphere to find out whose legislative bludgeon was buried in the back of open government. We called every senator, one by one, until at last – when it became clear he could hide no longer – Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), came blinking and grimacing into the sunlight and admitted that it was he who placed a secret hold … on a bill that addresses secrecy in government.

You can’t make this stuff up.

This is how it works in Washington, kids: Sen. Kyl – this year’s Secrecy Champion — has several as-yet-unstated objections to the Freedom of Information Reform Act, a truly wonderful bill that would significantly improve one of the strongest tools Americans have to supervise the inner workings of government and to hold elected officials accountable.

The bill has plenty of bipartisan support. It is the product of tireless work and advocacy by many open government and press freedom groups and fine legislative craftsmanship by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. The U.S. House of Representatives in March approved a version of the bill with 80 Republicans joining 228 Democrats for a 308-117 vote.

The Senate Judiciary Committee then unanimously sent the measure forward to the full Senate for a vote.

In your civics book, this would be the moment where our senators hold a public debate on the merits and demerits of the legislation at hand, then vote. The votes are then counted, and if the senators who support the bill outnumber those who oppose it, well, you get the idea.

But no, not when senators, using an archaic parliamentarian parlor trick, can stop a bill dead in its tracks merely by telling their party’s Senate leader or secretary that they wish to place a hold on the bill. That’s when Sen. Kyl – who routinely charts a brave course on the immigration debate, and can often be counted on to reason rather than bloviate – slipped in the hold.

The practice of honoring secret holds has no basis in law and has no support in Senate rules. It’s a good-’ol-boy creation and another of the seemingly endless perks of the Senate, where the rules always seem to benefit the representatives far more than the pesky public.

Oh, I know what’s coming: the inevitable blathering about the world’s greatest deliberative body and its need for timeless soul-searching and “candor” and how terribly hard legislating can be. We’ll hear all about collegiality and efficiency and the grand traditions that make the Senate “special.”

Spare me. Tear down the whole argument in favor of secret holds, and it comes down to cowardice: It allows a senator to cower behind anonymity while signaling their dislike for a piece of legislation. More to the point, it takes what would be a single losing vote on the floor of the Senate and converts it, magically, into stoppage of legislation.

That’s awesome power with absolutely no accountability.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who discloses his holds as a matter of practice, introduced an amendment in 2006 to force all senators to identify themselves when placing a hold on a bill. That proposal has gone nowhere fast. Are you surprised?

Charles N. Davis, a member of SPJ’s Freedom of Information Committee, serves as the executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

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Mark Thomas: Laws have chilling effect on activism

Monday, June 11th, 2007

By Mick Meaney
RINF Alternative News

British comedian and political activist, Mark Thomas, made stark a warning at the annual conference of the GMB union in Brighton, last week, about a draconian British law prohibiting protests outside Parliament without prior police permission.

The ban exists within half a mile radius of the House of Commons that severely damages civil rights in the United Kingdom, in which the government overruled the Human Rights Act - that was meant to guarantee freedom of speech. The legislation came into effect back in August 1, 2005 and signalled the ushering in of a British police state.

The law means anyone gathering to demonstrate within the designated area is committing a criminal offence. Many campaigners, including Brian Haw, expect the ban radius to grow over time and eventually outlaw all forms of protest against government policies in the UK.

“I even had to get permission to wear a red nose in Parliament Square on Red Nose Day. The police are having an internal debate about this law because it’s just not worth it,” said Mark Thomas.

“The effect of these laws is to curtail our rights. They are having a chilling effect on campaigning and activism.”

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