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Police custody services may go private

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Scottish police forces have been asked to consider privatising custody services and told to improve cells to take greater account of offenders’ human rights.

A report published today by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland says forces need to review their custody facilities with regard to prisoners’ welfare and rights and consult appropriate bodies.

It also recommends that the Scottish Government and individual forces should consider privatising or centralising police custody and think about whether the Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA) should oversee this.

Such a proposal is likely to fuel controversy in the ongoing debate about the breadth of responsibilities which should be passed to SPSA, the body set up a year ago to oversee back-office functions for all eight forces.

Chief constables have backed the SPSA but warned against drawing too much power to the centre.

The report states: “As a precursor to replacing existing custody facilities, we believe that forces should consider whether centralising or privatising the custody function would offer benefit.

“Certainly as an efficiency measure, centralising provision within and across forces merits consideration (with or without privatisation), as does the possible role of the SPSA in managing or procuring this. There is currently a requirement for police officer involvement in the process of accepting prisoners into custody.

“HMICS would simply offer the Scottish Government and forces the professional view that beyond this role there is no compelling operational reason for the custody and care of people arrested or detained by police to remain within the day-to-day management of police forces.”

The report also makes a number of suggestions about how police cells should be configured, including proposing that forces “use microwave sensors” to identify the movement of a person breathing and activate an alarm if there is no movement over a defined period.

The report found that all forces had problems meeting demand for cells at peak times and that many offenders were forced to share cells.

Strathclyde police, Scotland’s largest force, was held up in the report as an example of best practice. The force is currently undertaking a 20-year review of custody suites.

Paddy Tomkins, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, said: “Our inspection found that the design of force custody suites varied across Scotland, according to age, history and limitations of the site. That’s why we’ve worked to identify good practice and help make sure all forces can learn from the many good examples that exist.

“The standards expected in terms of the duty of care are properly much higher than they were in the times when these facilities were first built - that means adopting higher standards will cost in terms of capital investment.

“Police authorities and central government need to be aware of this when projecting capital spend and, for some, this may mean new ways of collaborating or out-sourcing’ will have to be explored.

“We’d like to see a more joined-up approach across Scotland. At the moment it’s left up to individual forces to decide when and what changes to make or what bids to make for capital budget.”

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5,000 children a month added to DNA database

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Christopher Hope

One in four people being added to the DNA database is a child, it emerged yesterday.

The figure provides further evidence that the Government’s “Big Brother” national database is increasingly targeting young people before they are old enough to vote.

Data obtained by the Liberal Democrats from Parliamentary Questions shows that the proportion of children being added is rising, with 5,000 being included every month.

Between October and January, 25 per cent of those added were 18 or younger, compared with less than 11 per cent of those already listed on it.

In total, 152,066 people were put on the database between October and January - 37,818 of whom were 18 or under.

Forecasts suggest that by next year one in 10 children will be included. The Daily Telegraph revealed last month that 44 children under 10 were on the database.

The news has prompted concerns from civil liberties campaigners that Britain is a “surveillance state”.

Liberal Democrat Justice spokesman Jenny Willott said: “There is something horribly Big Brotherish about a society that is adding over 5,000 kids a month to a DNA database when they’re not even old enough to get a National Insurance Number.

“These shocking figures demonstrate just how many children are being dragged into the criminal justice system by the Government.”

A Home Office spokesman said people who were innocent had nothing to fear.

“Under 18s make up approximately a quarter of all arrests, thus a comparable proportion of young persons’ profiles on the [database] should not be unexpected,” it said.

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Fisk: Hizbollah turns to Iran in war on Israel

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

By Robert Fisk in Teir Dibba, south Lebanon
Tuesday, 8 April 2008

The Shia “martyrs” of this hill village are normally killed in the dangerous, stony landscape of southern Lebanon, in Israeli air raids or invasions or attacks from the sea. The Hizbollah duly honours them. But the body of the latest Shia fighter to be buried here – from the local Hashem family – was flown back to Lebanon last month from Iran.

He was hailed as a martyr in the village Husseiniya mosque but the Hizbollah would say no more. For when a Lebanese is killed in live firing exercises in the Islamic Republic, his death brings almost as many questions as mourners. Yet it is an open secret south of the Litani river that thousands of young men have been leaving their villages for military training in Iran. Up to 300 men are taken to Beirut en route to Tehran each month and the operation has been running since November of 2006; in all, as many as 4,500 Hizbollah members have been sent for three-month sessions of live-fire ammunition and rocket exercises to create a nucleus of Iranian-trained guerrillas for the “next” Israeli-Hizbollah war.

Whether this frightening conflict takes place will depend on President Bush’s behaviour. If America – or its proxy, Israel – bombs Iran, the response is likely to be swift and will come from the deep underground bunkers that the Hizbollah has been building in the fields and beside the roadways east and south of Jezzine.

For months, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, has been warning Israel that his organisation has a “surprise” new weapon in its armoury and there are few in Lebanon who do not suspect that this is a new Iranian-developed ground-to-air missile – rockets which may at last challenge Israel’s air supremacy over Lebanon. For more than 30 years, Israel’s fighter-bombers have had the skies to themselves, losing only two aircraft – one to a primitive Palestinian SAM-7 shoulder-fired missile, the other to Syrian anti-aircraft guns – during and after its 1982 invasion.

After its 1980-88 war with Iraq, Iran introduced a new generation of weapons, one of which – a development of a Chinese sea-to-sea missile – almost sank an Israeli corvette in the last Hizbollah-Israeli war in 2006.

Can the Hizbollah shoot Israeli jets out of the sky in the event of another conflict? It is a question much discussed within the 13,000-strong United Nations force in southern Lebanon – essentially a Nato-led army, which contains French, Spanish and Italian troops as well as Chinese, Indian and sundry other contingents – which would find itself sandwiched between the two antagonists.

There are no armed Hizbollah fighters in their area of operations – Nasrallah respects the UN resolution which placed the peacekeepers between the Israeli border and the Litani in 2006 – but the UN mission, along with its soldiers, will be gravely endangered in the event of another war.

If its aircraft could no longer bomb at will over Lebanon without fear of being destroyed, would Israel stage another costly land invasion – highly unlikely after the bloodying its troops took in 2006 – or use its own ground-to-ground missiles on Lebanon? For if the latter option were chosen, it would bring a whole new dimension to Lebanon’s repeated wars. Long-range missiles have proved hopelessly inaccurate in Middle East conflicts and the Iran-Iraq war. But whatever political sins they still commit, the Lebanese – despite their current crisis – appear to have rejected any return to civil war. In such a war, no one could repeat the old lies about “pinpoint accuracy”.

The government of Fouad Siniora may be trapped in its own “Green Zone” in central Beirut – it even refused to attend the Arab League summit in Damascus – and parliament is suspended after 17 vain sessions to elect a president. A series of prominent Lebanese MPs and journalists have been murdered or attacked since 2005 but Syrian troops have left and the Lebanese army still manages to keep a form of order on the streets. However, the Syrian intelligence presence has been maintained in Lebanon – and Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. This does not mean that war is inevitable.

So the future of Lebanon remains – as it did in 2006 – in the hands of the United States and Iran. Just as the Israelis constantly warn of war, so the Hizbollah still promises revenge for the car-bomb murder of its former intelligence officer Imad Mougnieh in Damascus in February. Regularly, the Israelis warn that they will respond to attacks but that they will “choose the moment and the place and the means”.

And sure enough – following the Hizbollah’s pattern of using Israel’s own words – Nasrallah said on 24 March that the Hizbollah would “choose the moment and the place and the means” to retaliate for Mougnieh’s death.

And each month, the Hizballoh improves its new bunkers north of the Litani. Some now sprout aerials but they may be “dummies” for Israel’s pilots to attack. Deep underground telephone land-lines have been laid to those which are visible and to those others which are beneath the surface. The Hizbollah learned a lot from the 2006 war. Then its secret bunkers were air-conditioned with beds and kitchens attached. But when Israeli troops discovered a handful of them, they also found copies of their own Israeli air force reconnaissance photographs, complete with Hebrew markings.

The Hizbollah had obviously bribed or blackmailed Israeli border guards for the pictures – from which they could tell at once which bunkers the Israelis had identified and which remained unknown to them.

Which is how, in 2006, its guerrillas sat safely through days of air bombardment in the latter, while allowing the Israelis to blitz the “known” fortresses to their hearts’ content. Who knows if the Hizbollah has not since collected a new batch of photographs for the coming months?

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Secret US plan for military future in Iraq

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Seumas Milne
The Guardian

A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.

The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked “secret” and “sensitive”, is intended to replace the existing UN mandate and authorises the US to “conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security” without time limit.

The authorisation is described as “temporary” and the agreement says the US “does not desire permanent bases or a permanent military presence in Iraq”. But the absence of a time limit or restrictions on the US and other coalition forces - including the British - in the country means it is likely to be strongly opposed in Iraq and the US.

Iraqi critics point out that the agreement contains no limits on numbers of US forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term US security agreements with other countries. The agreement is intended to govern the status of the US military and other members of the multinational force.

Following recent clashes between Iraqi troops and Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in Basra, and threats by the Iraqi government to ban his supporters from regional elections in the autumn, anti-occupation Sadrists and Sunni parties are expected to mount strong opposition in parliament to the agreement, which the US wants to see finalised by the end of July. The UN mandate expires at the end of the year.

One well-placed Iraqi Sunni political source said yesterday: “The feeling in Baghdad is that this agreement is going to be rejected in its current form, particularly after the events of the last couple of weeks. The government is more or less happy with it as it is, but parliament is a different matter.”

It is also likely to prove controversial in Washington, where it has been criticised by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has accused the administration of seeking to tie the hands of the next president by committing to Iraq’s protection by US forces.

The defence secretary, Robert Gates, argued in February that the planned agreement would be similar to dozens of “status of forces” pacts the US has around the world and would not commit it to defend Iraq. But Democratic Congress members, including Senator Edward Kennedy, a senior member of the armed services committee, have said it goes well beyond other such agreements and amounts to a treaty, which has to be ratified by the Senate under the constitution.

Administration officials have conceded that if the agreement were to include security guarantees to Iraq, it would have to go before Congress. But the leaked draft only states that it is “in the mutual interest of the United States and Iraq that Iraq maintain its sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence and that external threats to Iraq be deterred. Accordingly, the US and Iraq are to consult immediately whenever the territorial integrity or political independence of Iraq is threatened.”

Significantly - given the tension between the US and Iran, and the latter’s close relations with the Iraqi administration’s Shia parties - the draft agreement specifies that the “US does not seek to use Iraq territory as a platform for offensive operations against other states”.

General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, is to face questioning from all three presidential candidates on Capitol Hill today when he reports to the Senate on his surge strategy, which increased US forces in Iraq by about 30,000 last year.

Both Clinton and Democratic rival Barack Obama are committed to beginning troop withdrawals from Iraq. Republican senator John McCain has pledged to maintain troop levels until the country is secure.

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Breaking Through the News Filter

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Peter Chamberlin

If it is true that the power belongs to the people in America, and Congress still answers to the people, then what force prevents the people from rising up to demand that Congress answer to the people’s will? The answer to that question is that the “silent majority” is only silent because they have been kept in the dark; they do not know the truth about the dire predicament we are in.

The American mainstream media has allowed itself to serve as a disinformation service for the promotion of neoconservative (Likud) propaganda to the American people, under the guise of the “free press.” American media dispenses misinformation which promotes the idea of world war against the Muslims, while systematically censoring international news content to propagate the idea of “bad Muslims.” This effectively insulates Americans from any truth that might leak out of the wire services, guaranteeing that graphic images of Iraqi or Palestinian children being pulled out of the American-made rubble or lying stacked-up like cordwood in a local morgue are not seen by many people. It is the powerful censored images of what is being done that will get ordinary, big-hearted Americans to pay attention to our own war crimes.

This is the real unseen war being fought mostly in population centers, where powerful bombs and armor rip through communities to flush-out all the proud patriotic young men who would dare to harbor ideas of self-defense or resistance. This is the cold reality of the war, that we are fighting a war against ideas with heavy bombers and tanks. This is what the self-anointed saints (neocons) describe as a “clash of civilizations.” That is the official story line that is fed to the American people by the nightly news, as they create an illusory vision of the war, in order to mislead.

News about the real war that leaks through the media filter undermines the fake publicity war. The revealed contradictions that seem to undermine “the mission” are written off as “mistakes” by reporters (which politicians immediately deny), even though they showed the real war unfolding according as planned. The war planners counted on chaos and sectarian violence to erupt after the overthrow of regimes. The plan had always been to trigger a series of wars of manageable size, by using local gangsters and mercenaries to foment divisive insurrections. The purpose of this strategy was to target local “extremists,” the official designation of those who would take up arms against the American proxies.

It is the job of the “news”/propaganda organ to build on this idea of self-defense=terrorism, as the foundation for waging the propaganda war against the American people. The American mercenaries become “linked to al Qaida” in the official deception, as they begin to assassinate the targeted leaders of those who resist the coming occupation. Once begun, any one of these local conflicts could be pumped-up into a real war. Eventually, one of these small wars would explode into the desired regional conflict, which would enable America to use of all the weapons in its arsenal, in a massive campaign to seize all the oil fields and potential supply routes.

In their pursuit of the imperial agenda, the mainstream media has used the campaign for president in a masterful stroke of misdirection, to distract the people with the “shiny object” (the false hope of our first “people’s president” since JFK). The false hope of our first independent president obfuscated the fact that today all political candidates are beholden to a foreign power (Israel), because of the power accumulated by the agents of that foreign government (AIPAC, the Israel lobby), as demonstrated in the “bi-partisan support” for an attack upon Iran.

It is because of this illusory national unity for expanding the war, which directly contradicts the common will among the people for shutting-down the war, that the people are becoming aware of the lies. As people begin to awaken to the truth about the war they start to understand that the “war” being described on television by reporters, politicians and military types is not the real war that is unfolding behind the curtain. When enough people awaken to this truth they will represent an irresistible force to the unwanted expansion. Once this new national consensus is created we will demonstrate to Cheney that we really do oppose his war, even though his opinion will once again be “So?”

Even though the American majority clearly wants this war ended now, that is not the intention of the ruling elite. Cheney’s minions have already set tripwires, beyond our reach in the countries that border Israel, for triggering a larger “defensive” conflict. That is the nature of trip wires; once some careless fool sets such a trap, he has no say about when it is who tripped, or by whom. Our fate has been placed in Israel’s paranoid hands, even though Israel is the only country in the world that has consistently pushed our government to attack Iran or its allies on their behalf.

This intolerable situation presents us with an overwhelming problem that must be dealt with immediately, if we are to avoid the accompanying military disruption of our lives that will come with it. How do we inspire the dazed American people to rise-up and stop this new aggression from happening in their name, against their will? How can you convince a nation that has buried its own conscience that it is in its own interest to take a stand against state genocide?

The sleeping sheeple are blissfully unaware that world war may be imminent. They do not know that the day after Cheney visited the royal house, the Saudi Shura Council announced “national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards,” because of credible threats to Iran’s Bushehr reactor. Americans will not hear this from the national news, but they will hear every word of Petraeus’ upcoming testimony before Congress, where he will blame everything on Iran once again. This time he may provide the missing catalyst for igniting the war on Iran, since the government has not yet been able to provoke an Iranian misstep to their provocations in Iraq. Somebody has to be forced into fighting back, somewhere, before we can label them “al Qaida” and the use of the really big guns is authorized.

The forbidden reaction of self-defense (which we define as “terrorism”) is more likely to come from one of Israel’s ongoing military provocations against the feisty freedom-loving Arabs, than from Iran. Our government is deeply involved in supporting these Israeli attacks upon the Palestinians and their neighbors, in the hopes that one of these attacks will bring sufficient Muslim retaliation upon Israel to justify our waging a larger genocidal war against Islam, in defense of Israel. The centerpiece of this strategy is guaranteeing Israel’s security. That is the central rationalization for utilizing nuclear weapons to disarm Iran.

The fulfillment of the Likud plans of Ariel Sharon for the land of Palestine remains the central foreign policy goal of the Bush Administration. We are the primary diplomatic force pushing the other nations to support the medieval Israeli seige and strangulation of Gaza, as well as the illegal partitioning of the West Bank (Ariel Sharon called it making a “pastrami sandwich” of the territories). Our government has also intervened militarily, by parking the Fifth Fleet off Lebanon’s coast to support the next Israeli attempt to annex southern Lebanon and to eliminate Hezbollah and Syria along with it.

There is a third world war coming, with consequences for all living things. We have the legal authority under our Constitution to prevent our elected proxies from carrying-out this next planned war in support of Israel, yet the feeble American resistance movement cannot even agree on a common purpose. We all must decide whether we are in this volunteer freedom militia to stop the war machine before it becomes unstoppable, or just to validate our own pet theories and vindicate our own biases. The more time we waste fighting over the divisive questions that keep us apart (and keep us isolated from the American majority), the easier we make it for the enemy to bide their time, until their big opportunity arises.

For now, we must put aside all other divisive issues which separate us and make our message undeliverable to the American sheeple. This means that all issues that do not directly contribute to blocking the attack should be considered secondary issues. We cannot question our current course, which leads to the destruction of American democracy to save Israeli democracy, if we cannot get past distracting questions concerning 911.

Identifying the prominence of Israel in our war upon the world, will automatically repel many heavily-indoctrinated Americans, before they ever hear our arguments for opposing this war. It is true that American media is dominated by pro-Israeli interests who regularly censor pro-Palestinian, or pro-Muslim news. This is the nature of our national news filter, the obstacle that must be overcome.

We cannot deal with the Israeli connections to the “mistakes” we have made in our own war on terrorism if we cannot separate the historical record of Israeli actions from ongoing speculation about Israeli connections made in 911 investigations. Going off on these diversionary tangents merely disrupts the debate about Israeli manipulation of American foreign policy, which is a hostile act that must not go unpunished.

The war plan which flowed outward from the Vice President’s office, becoming American foreign policy, began in Israel’s Likud Party. Israel’s war on terror became the template followed in America’s terror war, from the Islamaphobic strategy at its core, to its indiscriminate policy of assassinations using large missiles on crowded streets. The placement of hundreds of neocon ideologues, many of them citizens of both the US and Israel, brought the Likud war plans for America directly into the heart of American government. This amounted to the wholesale infiltration of our government by elements of the Israeli government.

If Congress can be pressured into ignoring calls from the White House to attack Iran, because of the deterioration of Iraq, can the people then produce more pressure than the political pressure generated by the Israel lobby? We don’t have to produce a revolution to take back our country, we just have to be able to generate irresistible political pressure to wrestle control our Congress from the lobby’s hands. You see, they’ve all got it turned all around. It is we the people who control our government, not the other way around.

Questions like these are all over the Internet, but the answers given to them can only be enacted outside the Web, within the mainstream media. Our small minority cannot affect change of this magnitude without help from the silent majority. The fact remains that we will never reach this mute/deaf majority until we get some of these questions into that controlled media. I believe that we will begin to successfully penetrate that media filter whenever we learn how to simplify our questions so that they fit within the boundaries that have been set by political correctness. If we focus on one all-important line of questioning, carefully choosing the words that we use (aimed at stopping the planned escalation of the war), we may avoid causing reactionary responses.

Find the right questions and hammer away at people like Brzezenski, or search for the last real newsman, one with a conscience.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9pDY_ny6Qo[/youtube]

The point is, the hammering must not stop. There can be no let-up, no peace for the enablers of our dysfunctional government, until they stop their war upon the world.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 4:58 am and is filed under General, Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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