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Another Education is Possible

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

Socialist Review | The testing regime in schools is breaking down. Before the summer break SATs papers were lost or badly marked; pupils were absenting themselves from the tests and head teachers were demanding an end to these wasteful and useless exams. One parent from Sunderland, truck driver Stuart McAnaney, has two sons: James, 11, and nine year old Matthew, at St Anne’s RC Primary School. He said, “I think it is absolutely disgraceful that this has happened. When James was sitting his SATs he was in a terrible state because he was so stressed. I think they should be scrapped altogether.”

From this month a new secondary curriculum has been introduced which encourages schools to put the creativity and fun back into learning. Some in government seem to have recognised that the teaching by numbers approach to learning doesn’t work for all children.

However, the pressure of league tables will force many school management teams to play only lip service to the new rhetoric. Teachers will be forced to continue teaching for the tests as accountability mechanisms such as performance management and lesson observations are used to enforce compliance.

This tension between creativity and the current testing regime can be exploited. Staff at Filton High School, South Gloucestershire, have begun to offer a glimpse of another type of school where learning is more engaging and relevant. We have started to develop a collective approach to curriculum design that engages pupils by dealing with relevant social justice issues and offers them a real audience for their ideas.

Since 2005 both teaching and non-teaching staff have formed a curriculum group called Alternative Futures. We wanted pupils to begin to act in a more critical way. Meeting after school, between 15 and 35 staff regularly attend and plan two-week themed cross-curricular learning projects around current issues. All departments have been represented. Laura Storey, an English teacher and South Gloucestershire NUT equal opportunities officer, says, “The cross-curricular nature of the fortnight enables our students to see the links between their lessons in a way that makes their learning both fun and relevant. Perhaps as important, it also enables teachers to work collectively. Many staff feel that we are beginning finally to control the content of the curriculum.”

Radical thinking

Notwithstanding the new changes in the secondary curriculum, as it stands the school curriculum is geared towards preparing young people for career paths and to promote “an efficient and flexible labour market”. What radical teachers have to ask themselves is, how can we promote radical thinking in our pupils?

With the rise in anti-immigrant racism and the success of the British National Party (BNP), this year staff decided to tackle the issue of cultural diversity, identity and racism. The school has increasing numbers of parents from Portugal and Eastern Europe. Bristol itself is a major centre of Polish migration. The council has estimated that between 15,000 and possibly 25,000 Polish workers have found employment in the city in the last two years. In last year’s council elections the BNP stood in a neighbouring ward to the school on an anti-migrant ticket and, with little canvassing, got 400 votes.

Therefore in the maths department they created a resource called “The Human Race – the Migrant Species”. This allowed pupils to examine the history of migration not just of peoples throughout time but of how mathematical concepts travel from one culture to another and become assimilated into our thinking.

They then went on to ask the pupils to examine two statements: “Too many immigrants are coming into this country” and “Our country cannot afford to help immigrants”.

Pupils were then able to use data to help them critically examine contentious issues based upon facts and not preconceived notions.

As Year 9 pupil Louis said, “I always thought that there were lots of immigrants coming to this country, but I see that was wrong.” Pupils were able to calculate that the difference immigrants make to our population is 0.03 percent. But unless we are able to develop critical faculties within our young people they will always be at the mercy of the misinformation deliberately fed to them by the political right who own the media.

This work was complemented by the science department who worked on deconstructing the concept of “race” as a non-scientific term by exploring the idea of genetic variation.

The English department took an empathetic approach to migration. Using photographs taken by photographer Guy Smallman, pupils explored the journey of a Polish migrant who is shown to be living in appalling conditions in a wood outside a small English town. Information about how immigration benefits society and the reasons why people change country was fed into groups who then began to try to create the “story” of the man in the photographs.

The next stage was to give the groups information about shortages of workers in key areas in Bristol such as hospitals and schools. The pupils began to come up with solutions to staff shortages, as well as identifying any barriers that a migrant might have to taking up employment. Finally they had to write an autobiography as if they were the man in the photograph.

As with the other examples from last year’s project, an attempt has been made to embed learning in real, often controversial, issues. However, as this is a type of “offline” simulated reproduction of reality, a bridge is being built between everyday issues and more abstract concepts such as justice or equality.

This process allows pupils an opportunity to reflect and offers them the option of repositioning themselves to work out their own values and beliefs. During this year’s project on racism one Year 9 pupil, Tasha, commented, “I liked learning about other people. I didn’t like Polish people before – they’re foreign. But now I know they’re not trying to take over. I like the work we’ve done in English because writing about someone’s life makes you realise how hard life is for immigrants. They don’t just get everything they want, like benefits and a house, like we think they do.”

To make projects more real we move out of the four walls of the classroom and bring in people involved in the struggles we are exploring, to talk and work with students. Last year the school looked at climate change and had an expert witnesses’ day. One of these was Elaine Graham Leigh who represented the Campaign Against Climate Change.

Learning also takes place offsite. During the Climate Change project in 2007 Year 9 pupils were offered a choice of trips: to learn how to measure a community’s carbon footprint; to work with community artists to make fashion items out of “rubbish”; to cook in Bristol’s top organic restaurant.

This year pupils went out and asked questions of the public about living in a multicultural society, and some of the responses shocked the students.

We also decided to work with Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR). Martin Smith and Weyman Bennett led workshops on music and migration. On the last day LMHR put on a concert for all the school’s pupils with Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. and Bashy.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) has been very supportive. This year acting general secretary Christine Blower attended the last day of the project. She told staff that she was working with LMHR to see how a website could be developed so that anti-racist teaching resources such as our own could be shared across schools.

Since the late 1970s education unions have been squeezed out of education policy development and shoe-horned in to concerning themselves with pay and conditions issues. Nevertheless, the successful ballot over the NUT’s political fund earlier in the year showed that many teachers believe that the union has to engage with broader political issues such as racism and fascism.

This concern with broader political issues is reflected during the themed learning projects. There is a real buzz among a wider layer of staff about social justice issues. Twenty five staff turned up to an after school meeting of the Alternative Futures group to hear Martin Smith talk about racism and migration. The discussion focused on how to expose the BNP and the relationship between multiculturalism and anti-racism. During the Climate Change project in 2007 discussion took place about individual and social responses to increasing levels of carbon dioxide.

Anna Brooman, who is in her second year of teaching, was a key organiser of this year’s event: “As a new teacher, working on these projects has opened my eyes to the wider political agenda behind education and has also led me to get involved in my union. Earlier this year I represented the school NUT group at the lobby of parliament. I also spoke about our work at the Education for Liberation conference in London in June. It has been a fast and very enjoyable learning curve.”

Outside of the school we have begun to tap into new networks such as the Global Education Network which is exploring ways of introducing “global” issues into the curriculum. We were able to explain how our model of curriculum change offers a coherent method to enable this. We have been invited to lead a session at the Climate Change and Development conference for educators in October. Not surprisingly, other schools are signing up to the Alternative Futures vision of education.

The “common sense” of government approaches to teaching and learning then is in contradiction with what many teachers feel they should be doing. One London teacher put this well. “In my school I have to train staff in how to prepare a lesson for Ofsted. After I have done this I then suggest what they could do on a daily basis. Needless to say, the two are not the same.” Alternative Futures is situated within this political contradiction.

There are also plans for a radical education conference on Alternative Futures next year sponsored by several university education departments. Educators are beginning to want concrete solutions to the present ideological and political crisis in education. The practical initiatives we have outlined begin to pose questions about the struggle for control within the system and offer a glimpse of a different kind of education based on the needs and interests of teachers and students.

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No “Bailout” for the World’s Poorest

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

By Thalif Deen | As a spreading financial crisis threatens to deepen the economic recession in the United States, the news of an unprecedented 700-billion-dollar bailout package reverberated through the corridors of the United Nations last week as over 100 world leaders gathered in New York for the annual talk-fest: the 63rd session of the General Assembly.

At a time when the United Nations is seeking increased financial assistance from rich nations to help developing countries meet the faltering Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including a 50-percent reduction on extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, the current U.S. economic crisis and its predictably negative fallout overseas is expected to be a major setback.

Addressing delegates last week, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that the current gloomy outlook threatens the well-being of billions of people, “none more so than the poorest of the poor.”

“This only compounds the damage [already] being caused by much higher prices for food and fuel”, he added.

Ban has called for 72 billion dollars per year in additional external financing to achieve the MDGs by 2015.

As one Asian delegate put it: “The 72 billion is peanuts compared to the 700 billion the White House wants to dish out to save some of the Wall Street firms from going belly up.”

“And the urgent needs of developing nations will now be the least of the priorities of the United States and other Western donors,” he predicted.

Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockman of Nicaragua, the newly-elected president of the General Assembly, warned that the current financial crisis will have “very serious consequences” that will impede the significant progress, “if indeed any progress is made”, towards the targets established by the MDGs, “which are themselves insufficient”.

“It is always the poor who pay the price for the unbridled greed and irresponsibility of the powerful,” he said, taking a passing shot at the staggering 700-billion-dollar bailout proposed by the administration of President George W. Bush to save the high-stakes investment banks of New York from bankruptcy and collapse.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates that “money doesn’t seem to be a problem, when the problem is money”.

“Let us look for a moment at what is happening on Wall Street and in financial markets around the world. There, unsound investment threatens the homes and jobs of the middle class,” he added.

There is something fundamentally wrong, he argued, “when money seems to be abundant, but funds for investment in people seem so short in supply”.

Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding told the General Assembly that the crisis currently rocking the world’s financial markets reflects the inadequacy of the regulatory structures that are essential to the effective functioning of any market.

But it is more than that. It represents the failure on the part of the international financial system to facilitate the flow of resources into areas where they can produce real wealth — not paper wealth, he added.

Golding said the world is not short of capital: “What it lacks are the mechanisms to ensure the efficient utilisation of that capital.”

As the economic meltdown in the United States continues, the casualties are piling up both among commercial and investment banks: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual (allowed to collapse with no government bailout); American International Group, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (allowed to survive with emergency financial assistance, including some from the government); Merrill Lynch has been folded into Bank of America and Citigroup has taken over Wachovia Bank.

The outrage against Wall Street, described as the world’s financial capital, is also directed at the high salaried chief executive officers and the middle rung bosses who make multi-million-dollar salaries, with stock options and perks that set them up in a privileged class by themselves.

According to one report, the lowest salary on Wall Street was around 280,000 dollars a year in a country where the average low or middle class employee would go home with a pay packet of 50,000 or 75,000 dollars per year.

In 2007, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, was paid 68.7 million dollars — described as “the most ever for a Wall Street CEO.”

As the entire U.S. economic edifice is in danger of collapsing, the White House has been called upon to save some of the biggest financial institutions in the country and, at the same time, redress the excesses of Wall Street business tycoons who earned multi-million-dollar salaries and extravagant bonuses.

The greed factor in the crisis is that these same tycoons, who are responsible for mismanaging their companies, still insist on continuing with their same lavish lifestyles and lofty salaries even after the massive taxpayer-funded bailout.

But these salaries and bonuses are likely to be curbed as part a return for the bailout package.

Addressing the 192-member General Assembly last week, the President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the economy of any country is “too serious an undertaking to be left in the hands of speculators”.

Ethics must also apply to the economy, he said. But, unfortunately, in the race for profits, the ethical factor has ceased to exist.

The president quoted the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado who once said: “We must not allow speculators’ profits always to be privatised, while their losses are invariably socialised.”

And as a postscript, the Brazilian president added: “We must not allow the burden of the boundless greed of a few to be shouldered by all.”

In the 1987 Hollywood movie ‘Wall Street,’ Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas plays the role of a ruthless corporate raider, Gordon Gekko, who forsakes all business ethics to climb to the highest echelons of the business world.

His speech to a meeting of stock traders is still considered a classic on Wall Street: “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.”

“Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

Douglas, who is the U.N.’s goodwill ambassador for disarmament and a “messenger for peace”, was at the United Nations last week to participate in the International Day of Peace.

Responding to a reporter who asked him: “Are you saying, Gordon, that greed is not good?,” a visibly annoyed Douglas shot back: “”I am not saying that. And my name is not Gordon. He’s a character I played 20 years ago.”

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Ex-CIA Official Pleads Guilty in Corruption Case

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

By Derek Kravitz | The story of the CIA officer, his mistress and his wealthy businessman friend appears to have come to an end, with the intelligence agency’s former executive director likely facing about two years behind bars.

Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the former No. 3 official in the CIA, pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court to one count of wire fraud stemming from sweetheart contracting deals he awarded to a friend and a high-level CIA job he got for his mistress.

Prosecutors say he received $1,000 meals and lavish vacations from his friend, California businessman and GOP donor Brent R. Wilkes, in exchange for helping Wilkes score CIA contracts. Foggo, 53, was originally charged last year with 28 counts of wire and mail fraud, unlawful money transactions and making false statements.

The favors he got from Wilkes included:

– An offer of a “high-level, high-paying” job in Wilkes’s companies after he retired

– Family vacations in Scotland, aboard a private jet, and a trip to a Hawaiian estate, costing $32,000, along with a $4,000 helicopter ride to a round of golf and more than $44,000 in lodging

– A cigar humidor

– Meals at the Capital Grille, Ruth’s Chris Steak House and the Serbian Crown in Washington.

At his Jan. 8 sentencing, Foggo faces up to 20 years in prison for the one count (although prosecutors have recommended he serve only 37 months).

The plea deal comes about three weeks after Foggo threatened to divulge classified information about the identities of numerous agents and programs as part of his defense, prosecutors said.

His attorneys wanted to “portray Foggo as a hero engaged in actions necessary to protect the public from terrorist acts,” prosecutors said at the time. They called his efforts “a thinly disguised attempt to twist this straightforward case into a referendum on the global war on terror,” according to court filings.

Foggo was long considered a pseudo-political appointee by former CIA Director Porter J. Goss, a man who had served with the agency for 25 years in far-flung outposts in Honduras, Austria and Germany and had prided himself in his new role as the watchdog over media leaks by CIA officials. (When told of a book about an agency analyst’s work on a book about the Osama bin Laden case, he is accused of telling the ex-official, Gary Berntsen, that he would “redact the [expletive] out of your book so no one will want to read it.”)

Foggo first was implicated in the corruption scheme back in March 2006, when former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a California Republican, was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for accepting bribes and gifts. As part of his sentence, Cunningham admitted using his seats on the House appropriations and intelligence committees to earmark funding for programs intended for business associates, including Wilkes.

The CIA’s inspector general began looking into Foggo’s dealings with Wilkes, a friend from the pair’s high school and college days. At the time, the agency said the review was routine and confirmed that Foggo had attended private poker games with Wilkes at a Washington hotel, but stressed that Foggo said he had done nothing improper. (Wilkes later pleaded guilty to bribery for giving Cunningham money and other gifts in exchange for nearly $90 million in work from the Pentagon. He was sentenced in February to 12 years in prison.)

After Goss was forced to resign in April 2006, Foggo said he would resign, too.

Federal agents then searched Foggo’s seventh-floor suite at CIA headquarters — an event some agency officials described as unprecedented — and hauled away boxes of evidence from his home in the Oakdale Park section of Vienna. Congressional investigators opened up their own probe and he was indicted in February 2007.

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Tortured Briton wins US battle over papers

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

A British resident now held at Guantanamo Bay has won an order in the US courts requiring the country’s government to hand over material that might help his defence against terrorism charges, it was revealed at the High Court in London

Binyam Mohamed, 30, insists that he admitted to plotting a dirty radioactive bomb attack on the United States only after being tortured by having his penis cut with a razor.

Recently his London lawyers won a High Court ruling that David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, should reconsider his refusal to let the Muslim convert’s lawyers see papers that might help clear his name.

The case revealed how the British security services co-operated with the US in the interrogation of terrorism suspects who were moved from country to country and held in secret locations.

Mohamed’s London lawyers say information held by the British security services could support his allegations of torture. They want it disclosed to his US legal team in a bid to prevent a convening authority referring charges against Mohamed to a US military commission at Guantanamo.

They say the Foreign Secretary, despite the recent High Court ruling, is still unlawfully failing to disclose information.

At a preliminary hearing, two judges were told that a US Federal Court sitting in Washington had now ordered the US government, in habeas corpus proceedings, to provide any potentially “exculpatory material” to Mohamed’s American lawyers by October 6.

This is material that might show what happened to the Ethiopian national between 2002 and 2004 - the period when he alleges he was held in communicado in Pakistan, secretly rendered to Morocco and tortured, before being subsequently flown to Afghanistan and then to Guantanamo Bay in September 2004.

Ben Jaffey, appearing for Mohamed, told the judges that this was “a welcome development” in the US, but at present the scope of the disclosure ordered was unknown.

Lord Justice Thomas, sitting with Mr Justice Lloyd Jones, said the US proceedings could influence what happened in the English courts.

Source

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FBI won’t release documents on anthrax suspect

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

By MARISA TAYLOR | WASHINGTON - The FBI is declining to release at least 15,000 pages of documents related to the now deceased prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks despite lingering suspicions that the bureau has accused the wrong man.

In August, the FBI and Justice Department identified Bruce Ivins, a former microbiologist at the U.S. Army’s biological weapons research center at Fort Detrick, Md., as the “only person involved” in the attacks that killed five people and terrorized the nation.

But David M. Hardy, the section chief of the FBI’s records management division, notified McClatchy Newspapers that his office could not immediately release the records because there were “investigative leads still open” and the FBI needed to withhold the documents in order to protect confidential sources, privacy, law enforcement techniques and a suspect’s right to a fair trial.

McClatchy had filed a request for the documents under the federal Freedom of Information Act, which generally permits the release of records of a dead person.

Ivins committed suicide in July.

In a letter received by McClatchy on Tuesday, Hardy said the FBI has identified a “significant number” of documents related to Ivins that have not yet been released and is still searching for other relevant records.

The investigation, known as Amerithrax, is not officially closed. But when it is, Hardy said, the FBI will release documents on a “rolling basis as soon as practicable.” So far, the FBI has received eight requests for records related to Ivins.

“Although the FBI cannot predict with absolute certainty when the Amerithrax investigation will be formally closed, we can assure you that the FBI has already begun to make initial preparations,” he said.

Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she was not surprised by the decision because open records exemptions give the FBI broad latitude to cite the need to protect law enforcement efforts.

“There’s virtually no chance of getting FBI records in this case until they decide to close it,” she said. “This is a situation where it’s probably going to be years before we figure out what they’ve got.”

David A. Schulz, an attorney who’s represented media in open records lawsuits, agreed the bureau had that prerogative under the law, but said it seemed “a bit of a stretch” for them to be invoking that exemption because they have publicly stated they have solved the crime.

The Justice Department has released hundreds of pages of court records and detailed a trail of circumstantial evidence against Ivins, including his access to anthrax with genetic mutations that matched the DNA of the spores that were mailed in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The government identified Ivins as the sole culprit a week after his suicide and a month after the government paid another former Fort Detrick scientist almost $6 million for wrongly implicating him for years.

However, some experts have continued to question the bureau’s evidence, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., whose office received some of the anthrax-laced letters, recently said he did not believe Ivins acted alone.

In an attempt to bolster confidence in the bureau’s handling of the case, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced recently that a panel of independent scientists would review the FBI’s DNA analysis of the anthrax spores.

Given widespread skepticism, open records advocates said the FBI should move more quickly to release additional records.

“The FBI is asking us to trust them that they got the person responsible, but they’re not releasing all the evidence that would reassure us that this is the case,” said Jane Kirtley, an open records expert at the University of Minnesota. “I would argue that as a matter of policy they should be releasing much more to make their case.”

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Human rights concern over 42 days

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

Government plans to enable police to hold terror suspects without charge for 42 days have caused “considerable concern” at Europe’s human rights body.

The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee said suspects should be taken to prison after 14 days as police cells were inadequate for longer detention.

The controversial law was passed by MPs in June and will be voted on in the Lords in a fortnight.

The government said it was “acutely aware” of its responsibilities.

The Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) visited the high-security Paddington Green police station in west London in December.

It wanted to inspect “the safeguards afforded to persons detained by the police under the Terrorism Act 2000 as well as the conditions of detention of such persons”.

Under the Act, terror suspects can be detained up to 28 days - which the government wants to extend to 42 days in “special circumstances”.

But the committee said in a report released on Wednesday: “The existing - and possible new - provisions regarding the permissible length of pre-charge detention in cases falling under the terrorism legislation are a matter of considerable concern to the CPT.

“The committee has no intention of entering into the current debate on the arguments for and against the length of pre-charge detention of terrorist suspects in the UK.

“However, as the CPT has emphasised in the past, in the interests of the prevention of ill-treatment, the sooner a criminal suspect passes into the hands of a custodial authority which is functionally and institutionally separate from the police, the better.”

Under the UK’s code of practice, suspects must be transferred from police station to prison after 14 days unless a detainee specifically asks to remain in the police station, or when transfer to prison would hinder effective investigation of the case.

The CPT report warned: “The information gathered at Paddington Green high security police station indicates that the exceptions have become very much the rule.”

It said that allowing requests was a “fundamentally-flawed approach from the standpoint of the prevention of ill-treatment”.

It also doubted whether an investigation would be hindered if a suspect was transferred, as police can still question the detainee, even in prison.

Safeguards

“Transfer to a prison should in all cases be obligatory if detention of a terrorist suspect beyond 14 days is authorised (and, preferably, such a transfer should occur at a much earlier stage),” the report said.

The committee criticised the state of Paddington Green, especially as authorities had failed to act on its 2005 report, which said the station was not suitable for prolonged detention.

But a Home Office spokesman said: “Very few terrorism suspects have been held in police custody for more than a few days and all have been with judicial authority.

“Of 11 individuals held in custody for 14 days or more, nine were transferred to the prison authorities at 14 days.”

The spokesman added that the government takes the welfare of detainees seriously and that safeguards are in place for suspects detained for longer periods.

BBC News

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Censorship and Freedom of Speech

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

By Craig Murray | This is the key section from my new book which the publisher is unwilling to publish due to legal threats from Schillings libel lawyers, acting on behalf of the mercenary commander Tim Spicer:

” Peter Penfold was back in the UK. He was interviewed separately. Both Penfold and Spicer were interviewed under caution, as suspects for having broken the arms embargo.

Then, suddenly, Tony Blair intervened. On 11 May 1998, without consulting the FCO, he gave a statement to journalists. Penfold, Blair declared, was “a hero”. A dictatorship had been successfully overthrown and democracy restored. Penfold had “Done a superb job in trying to deal with the consequences of the military coup.” All this stuff about Security Council Resolutions and sanctions was “an overblown hoo-ha”.

I believe this episode is extremely important. In 1998 the country was still starry-eyed about Blair, but with the benefit of hindsight, this intervention points the way towards the disasters of his later years in office. It is extraordinarily wrong for a Prime Minister to declare that a man is a hero, when Customs had questioned him two days earlier under caution over the very matter the Prime Minister is praising. It shows Blair’s belief that his judgement stood above the law of the land, something that was to occur again on a much bigger scale when he halted the Serious Fraud Office investigation into British Aerospace’s foreign bribes. But of course Blair’s contempt for UN security council resolutions on the arms embargo, and the belief that installing democracy by invasion could trump the trivia of international law, prefigures precisely the disaster of Iraq. As with Iraq, Blair was also conveniently ignoring the fact that Sierra Leone was left a mess, with Kabbah in charge of little more than Freetown.

In the FCO we were astonished by Blair’s intervention, and deeply puzzled. Where had it come from? It differed completely from Robin Cook’s views. Who was drafting this stuff for Blair to the effect that the UN and the law were unimportant? For most of us, this was the very first indication we had of how deep a hold neo-con thinking and military interests had on the Blair circle. It was also my first encounter with the phenomenon of foreign policy being dictated by Alistair Campbell, the Prime Inister’s Press Secretary, The military lobby, of course, was working hard to defend Spicer, one of their own.

A few days later Customs and Excise concluded their investigations. A thick dossier, including documentation from the FCO, from the raid on Sandline’s offices, and from elsewhere, was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The Customs and Excise team who had interviewed us told me that the recommendation was that both Spicer and Penfold be prosecuted for breach of the embargo. The dossier was returned to Customs and Excise from the Crown Prosecution Service the very same day it was sent. It was marked, in effect, for no further action. There would be no prosecution. A customs officer told me bitterly that, given the time between the dossier leaving their offices and the time it was returned, allowing time for both deliveries, it could not have been in the CPS more than half an hour. It was a thick dossier. They could not even have read it before turning it down.

I felt sick to my stomach at the decision not to prosecute Spicer and Penfold. So were the customs officers investigating the case; at least two of them called me to commiserate. They had believed they had put together an extremely strong case, and they told me that their submission to the Crown Prosecution Service said so.

The decision not to prosecute in the Sandline case was the first major instance of the corruption of the legal process that was to be a hallmark of the Blair years. Customs and Excise were stunned by it. There is no doubt whatsoever that Spicer and Penfold had worked together to ship weapons to Sierra Leone in breach of UK law. Security Council 1132 had been given effect in British law by an Order in Council. I had never found in the least credible their assertions that they did not know about it. I had personally told Spicer that it would be illegal to ship arms to Sierra Leone, to any side in the conflict. Penfold’s claim never to have seen an absolutely key Security Council Resolution about a country to which he was High Commissioner is truly extraordinary.

But even if they did not know, ignorance of the law is famously no defence in England. Who knows what a jury would have made of this sorry tale of greed, hired killers and blood diamonds. But I have no doubt at all – and more importantly nor did the customs officers investigating the case – that there was enough there for a viable prosecution.

The head of the Crown Prosecution Service when it decided not to prosecute was Barbara Mills. Barbara Mills is a very well-connected woman in New Labour circles. She is married to John Mills, a former Labour councillor in Camden. That makes her sister-in-law to Tessa Jowell, the New Labour cabinet minister with a penchant for taking out repeated mortgages on her home, and then paying them off with cash widely alleged to have come from Silvio Berlusconi, the friend and business colleague of her husband David Mills, who according to a BBC documentary by the estimable John Sweeney has created offshore companies for known Camorra and Mafia interests. Tessa Jowell and David Mills were also both Camden Labour Councillors, and are close to Tony Blair. Blair is also a great friend of Berlusconi, despite the numerous criminal allegations against Berlusconi and his long history of political alliances with open fascists. Just to complete the cosy New Labour picture, another brother-in-law of Barbara Mills and Tessa Jowell is Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.

Did any of those relationships of Barbara Mills, the Director of Public Prosecutions, affect the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to proceed with the case, and to take that decision in less time than it would have taken them to read the dossier Customs and Excise sent them?

Barbara Mills was to resign as Director of Public Prosecutions later that year after being personally criticised in his judgement by a High Court judge who ruled against the Crown Prosecution Service for continually failing to prosecute over deaths in police custody. That has not stopped the extremely well connected Dame Barbara from being appointed to a string of highly paid public positions since then. ”

It is infuriating that, Maxwell style, Spicer (who has made millions form the war in Iraq) is using the prohibitive costs of defending a libel case to intimidate my publisher. The result is that important information I received at first hand, and an account of events to which I am eye-witness, is being repressed, as is an important independent critique of early Blair foreign policy.

I am not currently confident the book will get published at all - I am not prepared to put out anodyne pap, which hides the truth, under my name.

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Expanded DNA testing threatens innocent

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

By LONNIE RANDOLPH | In early July, Gov. Mark Sanford vetoed a bill that would have required the state to collect DNA samples from people simply arrested for — but not convicted of — felonies and certain other crimes, and add their DNA profiles to state and national databases. The NAACP could not have agreed more with the veto.

As Gov. Sanford pointed out in his veto letter, fewer than half of all felony arrests in our state lead to felony convictions. Had he signed the bill into law, tens of thousands of DNA samples would have been collected from innocent South Carolinians each year.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as Article I, Section 10 of the S.C. Constitution, protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures, and ensures due process procedures are followed when searches are conducted. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that taking tissue or fluid samples from individuals constitutes a search. This is why South Carolina, along with many other states, has limited DNA profiling to individuals who have been convicted of felonies. South Carolina law also allows for the collection of DNA samples from an accused suspect, but only with a court order.

Due to the overwhelming disparities that already exist in the criminal justice system, this legislation would have had a disparate impact on racial and ethnic minorities. Minorities are far more likely than whites to be arrested on unsustainable grounds. Collecting DNA samples at the point of arrest would have resulted in the DNA database becoming increasingly skewed with minority profiles. This assault on equal treatment under the law would have been aggravated by the inadequate expungement procedures contained in the bill.

During debate, some lawmakers claimed that DNA is just like a fingerprint. But unlike fingerprints, DNA samples (which are retained by the state alongside the more limited DNA profiles they generate) can provide insights into disease predispositions, physical attributes and ancestry. Repeated claims that human behaviors such as aggression, addiction, criminal tendency and sexual orientation can be explained by genetics render such databases especially prone to abuse. Our state already has a tainted history concerning genetic information: Until 1985, state law allowed for the forced sterilization of people — mostly African-Americans — having presumed genetic “defects.” Imagine how these DNA samples, with the wealth of genetic information they provide, could be misused by the government, business or law enforcement.

And unlike fingerprints, DNA can identify biological relationships, often referred to as “familial searching.” In some states, law enforcement has started to mine the DNA database looking for partial DNA matches. Those innocent individuals with a partial match are then investigated in the hopes that they might be related to the real culprit. Familial searches can yield thousands of partial matches, which translates into significant time and money spent investigating and intruding on the lives of innocent people.

In addition to concerns about privacy and racial biases, flooding our already-backlogged DNA labs with tens of thousands of unnecessary samples could have undermined law enforcement’s efforts to catch criminals. Around the country, there have been reports of delays of several months and even years in analyzing rape kits as crime labs face overwhelming DNA testing demands brought on by database expansions. These backlogs not only allow attackers to roam free, but also can contribute to errors in DNA analysis, labeling and interpretation, resulting in serious miscarriages of justice.

While DNA testing is an important tool that can and should be used for solving crimes, collecting DNA samples from those not yet convicted or even charged with a crime would lead us down a dangerous and expensive slippery slope. Despite our differences with the governor on other issues, we believe in this case he deserves our thanks.

Dr. Randolph, a Columbia optometrist, is president of the S.C. NAACP.

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Tories attack Labour surveillance schemes

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

Kablenet.com | Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, has criticised the ID-card scheme, among other government projects, in his speech at the Conservative conference.

In Birmingham on Tuesday, Grieve said the public is “fed up with the creeping growth of a surveillance society which intrudes into their private lives and loses their personal data”.

He said the government had “created the worst of all worlds”, by increasing surveillance while levels of crime heightened. “We’re less free. We’re less safe,” Grieve said.

Much of Grieve’s speech concerned policing. He said the Conservatives would cut form-filling requirements and scrap targets for police forces. However, Grieve also criticised the fact that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allows local authorities to use surveillance.

Grieve praised his predecessor, David Davis, who resigned to fight a by-election over issues including ID cards earlier this year. He said that neither Gordon Brown nor Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, had referred to the ID-card scheme in their speeches to the Labour conference last week, despite Brown boasting of it the previous year.

“We’re winning the arguments on freedom, and David Davis deserves the credit for his stand,” said Grieve, adding that the Conservatives would “meet the terrorist threat head on, without sacrificing the freedoms that millions died defending”.

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British envoy says mission in Afghanistan is doomed, according to leaked memo

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

The official version of the US-led campaign in Afghanistan received a blow today with a leaked report that the British Ambassador in Kabul believes that US strategy is wrong and the war is as good as lost.

The potentially explosive views were published by Le Canard Enchaîné, a respected French weekly, which said that they were direct quotations from a diplomatic cable written by François Fitou, the French Deputy Ambassador in Kabul.

Mr Fitou reported to President Sarkozy’s office and his own Foreign Ministry that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador, believed that “American strategy is destined to fail” in Afghanistan, according to the newspaper.

It published a reproduction of what it said was the coded cable, in which the French diplomat summarised the ambassador’s main points from a September 2 meeting.

“The current situation is bad. The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the Government has lost all trust. Our public statements should not delude us over the fact that the insurrection, while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital.

“The presence — especially the military presence — of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis (which, moreover, will probably be dramatic).”

The French diplomat sent the cable to brief President Sarkozy and Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, ahead of meetings with Britain and other Nato allies over the Afghan deployment. The French deployment of some 3,000 troops there has become intensely unpopular since 10 soldiers were killed in an ambush near Kabul in August.

The allies have been thrown on the defensive over the past 18 months by the resurgence of the Taleban rebel forces, who have moved close to Kabul, where the Government of President Karzai is struggling to establish its authority.

Sir Sherard, 53, was also quoted as saying that while Britain had no alternative to supporting the United States, the Americans should be told to change strategy.

Reinforcing the military presence against the Taleban insurrection would be counter-productive, he said, according to Le Canard. “It would identify us even more clearly as an occupying force and it would multiply the number of targets (for the insurgents),” he was quoted as saying.

The allied governments should start preparing public opinion to accept that the only realistic solution for Afghanistan was to be ruled by “an acceptable dictator”.

“In the short term we should dissuade the American presidential candidates from getting more bogged down in Afghanistan,” the ambassador was quoted as saying.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office would not comment directly on the leaked French diplomatic report, but a spokesman said that the remarks did “not accurately reflect” the views of the ambassador or his deputy.

“We are committed to working in support of the Government of Afghanistan in order to deliver solutions to the challenges facing the country through civilian and military efforts,” said a spokesman.

He said that Britain would continue to work closely with Kabul and that success in Afghanistan was a “long term” goal.

Although it is understood that the meeting between Sir Sherard and the French envoy to Kabul did take place, the version of events contained in the diplomatic cable is regarded in Whitehall as a “parody” of what was said.

The British side is particularly dismayed that they reportedly support a dictatorship in Afghanistan. Insiders insist these words were never uttered. There is a suspicion that the British position was deliberately “exaggerated” to produce a version that Paris wanted to hear.

Times Online

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