2008 November 28

As an MP is reportedly arrested for trying to leak information in the public interest, and royal assent is given to a bill that carries up to ten years in prison for gathering information on a police officer, new CCTV cameras in Portsmouth will be able to identify ‘unusual’ incidents and alert their operators to them. Such unusual and suspicious behaviour includes loitering, other causes for alarm include cars going ‘too fast’.

The makers are keen to stress with a some jocularity, that it is not of course the camera that can decide if the situation in question is about to spiral into criminal deviance - it is only the camera operator that can weigh up the evidence and make this ‘human’ decision. This does not of course make the slightest bit of difference to the fact that people in Portsmouth will now constantly be watched for anything that could possibly indicate them doing something illegal. Considering how low the bar seems to be before the cameras register alarm, and how many things are now criminal offences, this virtually amounts to people being watched all the time, under constant suspicion.

It’s quite interesting to follow the logic of this scheme to it’s only real conclusion. The cameras are not just designed to predict crime based on certain criteria of behaviour, although this is of course a massive loss of liberties in itself. Essentially, they are designed to monitor behaviour that falls outside of the state appointed norm, and even in the cases where security guards choose not to interpret this behaviour as criminal, they will still constantly highlight those whose behaviour falls outside of these boundaries. By this logic, the deviance will, officially, become the same as the crime, highlighted in the same context, dealt with in the same framework, and ultimately the two become associated in the minds of the camera operators, as if security guards weren’t pseudo cops enough already.

Little information exists as yet as to what will be done with images of those who are flagged but turn out to not be about to rob a bank, mug an old lady or stand on the pavement with a flyer (post up if you know), but it would make sense for all these images to be kept, the way the state and police currently keep information on all the ‘deviants’. This creates a situation where people are scared of doing anything that isn’t state-stamped as ‘normal’ for fear of being considered criminal, and even more so than happens already, begin to police themselves. For things like standing about.

So will it really come to the point where everyone, once outside their home, is constantly on the move, not stopping, not looking up, not pausing to consider, not stopping to think, not thinking, not choosing where to go, just going?

‘Historic’ UK climate laws ushered in

Three laws aimed at fighting climate change come into force in Britain today.

by JOEL TAYLOR

The legislation provides the world’s first legally binding targets for a country to reduce carbon emissions.

Its aim is to cut 1990 greenhouse gas levels by 80 per cent in 2050.

Environmentalists welcomed the ‘historic’ laws but called on the government to go further by developing a low-carbon economy.

They were also concerned that one of the statutes - the Planning Act - would make it easier for large projects, such as new airports, to be given the go-ahead.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, said the new legislation ‘will be instrumental in reducing carbon emissions and removing barriers to enable industry to invest in important new infrastructure’.

It would also give people an incentive ‘to use energy more efficiently and generate their own heat and energy’, he added.

Friends of the Earth said the government should now set up a low-carbon economy by investing in green energy and lowering energy waste.

‘It will create exciting business opportunities, thousands of jobs and help lead Britain out of recession,’ said executive director Andy Atkins.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England was concerned about decision-making powers being given to the ‘unaccountable and unelected’ Independent Planning Commission.

No More Shop till You Drop

By Ruth Conniff | Black Friday is only a day away, and it doesn’t look good for retailers. A front-page story in The New York Times, “To Buy Children’s Gifts, Mothers Do Without,” describes a trend away from shopping responsible for an 18.2 percent drop in women’s clothing sales from a year ago. People are curbing the Christmas binge, buying less, forgoing gifts, and generally avoiding the bottomless pit of consumerism that drives our economy.

That might be good for those of us who care to withdraw voluntarily from the rat race at the mall. Buy Nothing Day also happens to be the Friday after Thanksgiving–a day of nonshopping organized to spread the word that, as Adbusters –http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd–puts it, “There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less.”

Here is the conundrum of the financial meltdown: we are all living in a world fueled by unsustainable spending. Every day there are new stories about the hubris of the last few decades of financial boom. A long profile of Fed chair Ben Bernanke in The New Yorker describes how he and other disciples of Alan Greenspan refused to see the housing bubble even as economists like Dean Baker were warning of an imminent mortgage market collapse. Michael Lewis has spent years documenting corruption and stupidity on Wall Street. In a current piece on portfolio. com, he sums up the reasons for Wall Street’s collapse, in highly readable prose: “To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue. I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous.”

Much of the last several decades on Wall Street looks preposterous now. But the bankers and their cronies in Washington, including Greenspan, were convinced that the housing boom, lax credit, and oceans of easy money would never dry up.

Unfortunately, some of the intellectual architects of unfettered recklessness and speculation are getting key jobs in the Obama Administration.

As Bill Greider puts it in The Nation, “A year ago, when Barack Obama said it was time to turn the page . . . I, for one, failed to foresee Obama would turn the page backward. . . . Virtually all of his leading appointments are restoring the Clinton presidency, only without Mr. Bill. In some important ways, Obama’s selections seem designed to sustain the failing policies of George W. Bush.”

The economic crisis calls for massive, bold action, not pouring money into firms that now have the temerity to pay out the taxpayer-financed bailout money as dividends, which is what they are doing. Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, who helped create the lax regulatory environment that led to this crisis, as well as the bailouts that followed, can’t be counted on.

The problem confronting Obama and, one hopes, the more thoughtful and less tainted members of his economic team, is how to address the crisis in a way that helps the people at the bottom of the great pyramid scheme of our economy, rather than just wasting more money on bailouts for the mismanagers at the top.

Meanwhile, even if there is a certain amount of understandable schadenfreude for the Wall Street titans and auto company execs who are taking a beating from members of Congress and the public, they are pulling a lot of innocent people with them on their way down.

I was struck by two recent stories in The New York Times. One, a business section article of several days ago, quoted a leading labor economist on how the UAW would have a hard time justifying its generous retirement and benefits packages for laid off autoworkers in the current economic crisis. The other, a front-page piece in the National section on Michigan, described a state so hard hit by the auto industry’s woes that “desperation” has spread to every sector of the economy. Some 20 percent of Michigan residents now rely on some form of public assistance.

The logical outcome of the economist’s argument seems to be that even more people should be on the dole in Michigan.

Just as unemployment benefits dry up for millions of laid off workers, the UAW is taking a beating for its support for the auto industry bailout and the perceived fat-cat status of union members (not management CEOs who flew to Washington on private jets, mind you, but the line workers who continued to get health care and retirement pay after being laid off).

There is a danger that the worse off people are, the easier it is to stir up resentment toward the unions and members who benefit from basic security won by the labor movement. The collapse of manufacturing and the mismanagement and shortsightedness of the auto industry have driven Michigan into the ground. The rampant greed and speculation on Wall Street have destroyed the housing market and left us with a lot of poor people facing home foreclosures. To make matters worse, a race-to-the-bottom mentality — that if some people are suffering, no one should have job security or health care benefits– is toxic. If that sort of sentiment, often stoked by the right, grows, it will only make the rest of the country look more like Michigan.

There’s a lot to think about while you are not out shopping on Friday. How do we build a more sustainable, humane, and just economy? And how do we push an Administration loaded with the architects of the current disaster to do the right thing?

Iraq: Security pact ‘puts detainees at risk of torture’

Baghdad, 27 Nov. (AKI) - Thousands of Iraqis detained by US forces will be at risk of torture or even execution if they are handed over to the Iraqi authorities, top rights Amnesty International warned on Friday. The warning came as the Iraqi Parliament overwhelmingly ratified a controversial security pact with the US under which around 16,000 prisoners held by the US will be transferred to Iraqi custody from the end of the year.

The pact (Status of Forces Agreement or SOFA) allows American troops to remain in the country for three more years. It has already been approved by the Iraqi Cabinet.

“The SOFA does not provide any safeguards whatsoever for prisoners transferred to Iraqi custody,” said Malcolm Smart, Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

“These prisoners will potentially be moving from the frying pan into the fire,” said Malcolm Smart.

“We receive persistent reports of gross human rights violations – including torture – taking place in Iraqi prisons and detention centres. The US must ensure that no one is transferred to Iraq custody if they would face a real risk of torture or other human rights violations.”

The Iraqi authorities are already holding thousands of people, many without charge or trial, and often in appalling conditions, Amnesty said.

Many of these prisoner have no access to lawyers, while others have been sentenced to death after trials which failed to meet international fair trial standards, Amnesty stated.

The US is currently reported to hold around 16,000 prisoners in Iraq. Most are detainees who are held without charge or trial, some for more than five years and without recourse to any independent review of their detention.

Prisoners include former Baath party officials and former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime who could be at particular risk.

Ali Hassan al-Majid and two others sentenced to death for crimes committed under Saddam Hussein’s rule are likely to be executed if handed over to the Iraqi authorities.

Amnesty said it is also concerned that the agreement contains no reference to the more than 2,000 Iranians living in Iraq who are opponents of Iran’s hardline government.

The Iranians belonging to the People’s Mojahedeen Organization of Iran (PMOI), are based at Ashraf Camp in northern Iraq, where they have been under the protection of US forces for several years.

Some Iraqi officials have suggested that the Iranians will be forcibly expelled if they fail to comply with orders from the Iraqi government to leave the camp by 31 December 2008.

You Cannot Pardon a Crime You Authorized

Statement from the Steering Committee for the Prosecution for War Crimes of President Bush and His Subordinates

Never before has a president pardoned himself or his subordinates for crimes he authorized. The closest thing to this in U.S. history thus far has been Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence. Bush is widely expected to follow that commutation with a pardon. Not only did Libby work for the White House, but he was convicted of obstruction of justice in an investigation that was headed to the president. Evidence introduced in the trial, including a hand-written note by the vice president, implicated Bush, and former press secretary Scott McClellan has since testified that Bush authorized the exposure of an undercover agent, that being the crime that was under investigation.

There are widespread concerns that Bush might pardon other subordinates for various other crimes that he authorized, potentially including torture, warrantless spying, a variety of war crimes, taking the nation to war on fraudulent evidence, and the abuses of the politicized Justice Department. Voices in the media advising Bush to issue such pardons include: Stuart Taylor Jr. (Newsweek 7/12/08) and Alan Dershowitz (Wall St Journal 9/12/08), while many additional voices have urged Obama to commit to not prosecuting.

The idea that the pardon power constitutionally includes such pardons ignores a thousand year tradition in which no man can sit in judgment of himself, and the fact that James Madison and George Mason argued that the reason we needed the impeachment power was that a president might some day try to pardon someone for a crime that he himself was involved in. The problem is not preemptive pardons of people not yet tried and convicted. The problem is not blanket pardons of unnamed masses of people. Both of those types of pardons have been issued in the past and have their appropriate place. The problem is the complete elimination of any semblance of the rule of law if Bush pardons his subordinates for crimes he instructed or authorized them to commit.

1. Immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney and various pardonees, even if they are out of office. (Here are arguments for the permissibility of such impeachments: http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/37834 )

2. Overturning of the pardons by the new president or by Congress, as Bush’s lawyers told him he could do to Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, which was a far more minor abuse of the pardon power.

3. Legislation banning self-pardons and pardons of crimes authorized by the president.

4. A Constitutional Amendment banning self-pardons and pardons of crimes authorized by the president.

With thanks to all who have aided over the past millennia in the establishment of the rule of law.

Lawrence Velvel, Dean of Massachusetts Law School, chairs the Steering Committee whose members include Ben Davis, Marjorie Cohn, Chris Pyle, Elaine Scarry, Peter Weiss, David Swanson, Kristina Borjesson, Colleen Costello, Valeria Gheorghiu, and Andy Worthington.

Lord Bingham says Iraq invasion was a violation of international law

By Robert Stevens | Lord Bingham used the occasion of his first major speech since his retirement as a senior law lord to describe the 2003 invasion of Iraq as “serious violation of international law”.

Bingham, a former Lord Chief Justice, gave the annual Grotius Lecture at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law on November 17. His speech was a devastating judicial refutation of the lies concocted by the British government and its legal advisors in order to justify the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.

His legal stance directly contradicts that of the attorney general at the time, Lord Goldsmith, and Jack Straw, now Justice Secretary and then Foreign Secretary.

Bingham has been Britain’s most authoritative legal figure over the past 15 years. Even as he stated his disagreement with Bingham’s speech, Straw felt forced to acknowledge that he was the “finest jurist of his generation”.

Bingham also condemned some of the atrocities that have been carried out by the United States and British occupying powers in Iraq. He said the British occupation had been, “sullied by a number of incidents, most notably the shameful beating to death of Mr. Baha Mousa [a hotel receptionist]”.

He added that whereas he felt that such crimes were not a result of deliberate British government policy, “This contrasts with the unilateral decisions of the US government that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the detention conditions in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or to trial of Al-Qaeda or Taliban prisoners by military commissions, that Al-Qaeda suspects should be denied the rights of both prisoners of war and criminal suspects and that torture should be redefined, contrary to the Torture Convention and the consensus of international opinion, to connote pain, where physical, ‘of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure’.”

“Particularly disturbing to proponents of the rule of law is the cynical lack of concern for international legality among some top officials in the Bush administration”.

Bingham stated that, in his opinion, the invasion of Iraq was carried out in violation of international law established following the end of the Second World War and the downfall of the Nazi regime in Nazi Germany.

Bingham said, “If I am right that the invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK, and some other states was unauthorised by the [United Nations] Security Council there was, of course, a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.

“For the effect of acting unilaterally was to undermine the foundation on which the post-1945 consensus had been constructed: the prohibition of force (save in self-defence, or perhaps, to avert an impending humanitarian catastrophe) unless formally authorised by the nations of the world empowered to make collective decisions in the Security Council.”

He continued, “The current ministerial code, binding on British ministers, requires them as an overarching duty to ‘comply with the law, including international law and treaty obligations’.”

Commenting on this “serious violation of international law”, he said, “The moment that a state treats the rules of international law as binding on others but not on itself, the compact on which the law rests is broken”.

Bingham cited a comment made by a leading academic lawyer, Professor Vaughan Lowe QC, in relation to the consequences of this tearing up of established international law. “It is, as has been said, ‘the difference between the role of world policeman and world vigilante’.”

In his remarks, Bingham gave a careful rebuttal of the legal arguments made by Lord Goldsmith immediately prior to the invasion of Iraq. He described Goldsmith’s arguments as “flawed in two fundamental respects”.

Bingham quoted from the conclusion to Lord Goldsmith’s parliamentary written answer on March 17, 2003.

“Resolution 1441 would, in terms, have provided that a further decision of the Security Council to sanction force was required if that had been intended. Thus, all that resolution 1441 requires is reporting to and discussion by the Security Council of Iraq’s failures, but not an express further decision to authorise force.”

Answering this argument Bingham replied, “First, it was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had: Hans Blix and his team of weapons inspectors had found no weapons of mass destruction, were making progress and expected to complete their task in a matter of months.”

Goldsmith’s arguments were also flawed, said Bingham, as they had not said that military action had to be authorised by the United Nations Security Council.

“Secondly, it passes belief that a determination whether Iraq had failed to avail itself of its final opportunity was intended to be taken otherwise than collectively by the Security Council.”

Bingham also rebutted the written legal advice Goldsmith sent to Tony Blair on March 7, 2003. This advice was not made public at the time.

In that communication Goldsmith stated that he considered resolution 1441 could, in principle, revive the authority to use force against Iraq contained in resolution 678.

Answering Goldsmith’s reasoning, Bingham said, “A reasonable case could be made that resolution 1441 was capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in resolution 678, but the argument could only be sustainable if there were ‘strong factual grounds’ for concluding that Iraq had failed to take the final opportunity. There would need to be ‘hard evidence’.”

Bingham also cited three senior legal figures who had opposed Goldsmith’s line of argument. Lord Alexander QC had described it as “unconvincing”. Professor Philippe Sands QC, as a “bad argument” and Professor Vaughan Lowe QC said it was “fatuous”.

Bingham sent copies of his speech to Goldsmith and Straw before he spoke in order to allow them to respond.

Straw said, “I do not accept Lord Bingham’s conclusions, which do not, I am afraid, take proper account of the text of Security Council Resolution 1441, nor its negotiating history”.

Goldsmith attempted to downplay the significance of Bingham’s comments stating, “I stand by my advice of March 2003 that it was legal for Britain to take military action in Iraq. I would not have given that advice if it were not genuinely my view. Lord Bingham is entitled to his own legal perspective five years after the event, but at the time and since then many nations other than ours took part in the action and did so believing that they were acting lawfully.”

Goldsmith was well aware of such international opinion at the time. As far back as July 2002, Goldsmith himself warned cabinet ministers that a war against Iraq could not be justified on self-defence or humanitarian grounds, and that the goal of regime change would be unlawful.

On March 7, 12 days before the war against Iraq started, Goldsmith authored a 13-page memo in which he advised Prime Minister Tony Blair that the government’s case for invasion could be declared illegal if it ever came before a court of law on as many as six counts.

Despite this advice he stated that, while a second UN resolution would be safer, in his opinion it was legal to go to war on the basis of resolutions 1441, 678, and 687.

Finally, on March 13, Goldsmith met with two Blair government officials—Baroness Morgan, Blair’s director of political and government relations, and Lord Falconer, a Home Office minister. It was at this meeting that Goldsmith abandoned all his previous warnings and approved the legality of the government’s position.

Goldsmith’s stance was attributed by a number of opposition politicians, commentators and political analysts as being the result of massive pressure placed on him by the Blair government. His written answer to parliament on March 17 contained no reference to any of his previous ambivalent legal advice to the government.

The full truth is yet to emerge about the preparation and instigation of the war against Iraq. Those responsible, the US and British governments, are continuing to utilise every possible means to ensure they are not brought to justice for a war of aggression. The Information Tribunal in Britain is presently hearing the government’s appeal against the information commissioner’s ruling that it should release cabinet minutes covering when the legality of the Iraq invasion was discussed.

Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell, Britain’s most senior civil servant is representing the government in seeking to overturn Richard Thomas’s order to disclose because of the “gravity and controversial nature” of the subject and the controversy over the attorney general’s advice.

The government appealed to the Information Tribunal, where O’Donnell is expected to argue that the release of the minutes would prevent ministers from having frank discussions and would undermine the principle of collective cabinet responsibility.

Thomas has argued that cabinet minutes are not automatically withheld from the Freedom of Information Act.

While Bingham was able to dismantle the legal arguments of Goldsmith and the British government, he was doubtful that there would be any prosecution of those responsible. He concluded that, although these states had not been “hauled before the International Court of Justice or any other tribunal to answer for their actions, they have been arraigned at the bar of world opinion, and been judged unfavourably, with resulting damage to their standing and influence.”

This is not enough. In the conclusion of a three part statement published on May 22, 2007, “The US war and occupation of Iraq—the murder of a society”, the World Socialist Web Site insisted, “The premeditated destruction of an entire society carried out on the basis of lies and in pursuit of the financial and geo-strategic interests of America’s ruling elite constitutes a war crime of historic proportions, punishable under the same statutes and on the basis of the same principles as those used to condemn leading figures of Germany’s Third Reich at Nuremberg…

“For these crimes to go unpunished and those responsible to continue acting with impunity would have fatal implications for the political, social and indeed moral life of the US and indeed the world. It would only render the next round of war crimes and atrocities that much easier and more inevitable.

“The struggle against the war in Iraq must be waged on the basis of the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops, the implementation of a massive program of humanitarian and economic aid to the Iraqi people, and the prosecution of all those responsible for this war before an independent and international tribunal”.