UK’s Labour Party conference is being held at Brighton this week. The UK Labour Party is currently enjoying huge support and is likely to form the next government. UK’s Labour Party is a Socialist party.
One aspect of Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s speech today is getting reported: his commitment to end Public Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts.The NHS is burdened with many PFI debts.
The international director of the campaign group Cage has appeared in court charged with obstructing or frustrating an examination under counter-terrorism stop-and-search powers for refusing to hand over passwords.
Muhammad Rabbani was stopped coming back into Heathrow by police, who had advance information of his travel plans, Westminster magistrates court was told.
Rabbani, 36, was arrested at the airport on 20 November last year under the Terrorism Act. He refused to hand over passwords to an iPhone and laptop he was carrying.
Rabbani said that to hand over such details would breach his privacy, and that schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 did not give officers the right to demand that he hand over the passwords.
The director of Cage has pleaded not guilty to a charge that “on 20 November 2016, at Heathrow airport, he did wilfully obstruct, or sought to frustrate, an examination or search”.
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9.30pm update
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Rabbani said in a statement after the verdict that the judgment highlighted the “absurdity of the Schedule 7 law” and called for it to be reformed. “If privacy and confidentiality are crimes, then the law stands condemned,” he said. “They accept that at no point was I under suspicion, and that ultimately this was a matter of having been profiled at a port … Schedule 7 actively discriminates, and this will hopefully be the start of a number of legal challenges as more people take courage to come forward.”
During the trial, Rabbani’s lawyer, Henry Blaxland, questioned three police officers who were responsible for carrying out the search at the airport. The most senior officer acknowledged that Rabbani had not been randomly stopped, and was instead deliberately targeted for reasons that were not disclosed. Prior to the trial, Rabbani had told The Intercept he believed the authorities may have wanted to obtain a copy of the information provided to him by his contact in the Middle East. He had been searched on several prior occasions, he said, but never before had police seemed so determined to gain access to his electronic devices.
Schedule 7 is supposed to be used solely to determine whether a person is directly involved in the “commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.” In 2013, however, the power was used to detain David Miranda, the partner of Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald, in an effort to impede reporting on documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Miranda’s detention caused controversy in the U.K., and aspects of Schedule 7 were subsequently changed. Police were issued with a revised code of practice that told them they must not review or copy information which they have grounds to believe is attorney-client privileged, is journalistic material, or is another kind of information held in confidence, which a person has “acquired or created in the course of any trade, business, profession or other occupation.”
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The shadow home secretary experienced the vast majority of online abuse sent to women MPs, and had 10 times more abusive tweets sent to her than any other figure in the run up to the election. She also suffered eight times more abuse in the whole six month period which was analysed.
The research, conducted by Amnesty International, looked at messages sent in the period between January 1 and June 8. In this time she received almost a third of all the abuse directed at women political figures.
The list of the five female politicians who received the most abuse included two other Labour MPs, with Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, and Jess Phillips, chair of the women’s PLP, coming in third and fourth respectively. Joanna Cherry, SNP MP, got the second most abuse and Anna Soubry, Conservative MP for Broxtowe and a prominent Europhile, being placed fifth in the ranking.
However, Abbott’s level of abuse far outstrips those mentioned, with the trailblazing Hackney North MP receiving 31.6 per cent of abusive tweets, and the rest of the top five getting nearer three per cent of abusive tweets. She also received more abusive tweets than all the women in the SNP and Conservative party combined in the six month period.
Ethnic minority women politicians, excluding Abbott, received 35 per cent more abuse than white women. Some 5.8 per cent of all tweets sent mentioning Abbott’s twitter handle were classified as abusive.
The report found that “intersectional discrimination” meant that a figure who had more than one identity, e.g. if LGBT, BAME or disabled, meant that they were then more likely to face abuse.
In a New Statesman article describing the report, Amnesty’s researcher in technology and human rights Azmina Dhrodia writes: “Diane Abbott standing out in our analysis is an acute example of how intersectional discrimination works. The abuse that she faces is not just sexist and misogynistic; it’s also incredibly racist.”
“Nearly 90 years after women won the right to vote, there is a real danger that the high levels of online abuse against women MPs will have a chilling effect on women taking part in public life — particularly women of colour. This is not only detrimental in terms of the possible long-term effect on the representation of women in politics in the UK but also continues to deepen societal inequality between genders.”
©LabourList
Related to my recent post What it’s like to be a suspected terrorist
The article quoted below reports that the FBI creates terrorists and promotes the false narrative of a terrorist threat.
I think that it’s done differently in UK and Europe – it’s more about staging an act and attributing the blame to suspected terrorists. Suspected terrorists can be arrested apprehended beforehand or the act can be set to coincide with his/her arrival (fancy that, there may even be CCTV in such a case). later edit: Jean Charles de Menezes returned onto the bus and travelled to Stockwell tube station where he was murdered because Brixton tube station was closed.
Once you’re arrested in UK e.g. for criminal damage which can be quite minor, your home is routinely searched. They’re going to be straight round there in an apparent terrorism case to get your passport for when you’re shot dead to avoid any awkward trials.
They know your every movement and intended movement of course because they following your every move in real-time. You routinely go to the pub every Saturday afternoon, then it will be on the way to the pub. You text or ring someone “I’ll meet you there at 3.30”.
Gathered surveillance data is shared far and wide almost instantly. The US and Mossad will have it probably within seconds. This is what is meant when terrorist anti-terrorist spooks and politicians talk about information sharing to defeat the terrorist threat.
ed: I didn’t emphasize enough how widely surveillance data is shared almost instantly. Everyone and their dog will have it – it will be available to all UK, US and other allied states agencies concerned with terrorism.
David Murdoch-Cameron: Poisonous ideologues, conspiracy theorists are extremists …
Nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the United States since 9/11 featured the “direct involvement” of government agents or informants, a new report says.
Some of the controversial “sting” operations “were proposed or led by informants”, bordering on entrapment by law enforcement. Yet the courtroom obstacles to proving entrapment are significant, one of the reasons the stings persist.
The lengthy report, released on Monday by Human Rights Watch, raises questions about the US criminal justice system’s ability to respect civil rights and due process in post-9/11 terrorism cases. It portrays a system that features not just the sting operations but secret evidence, anonymous juries, extensive pretrial detentions and convictions significantly removed from actual plots.
“In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act,” the report alleges.
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Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman explain the pattern followed by the FBI
The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots.
First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the “radical” political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups.
They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target.
Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully invoked.
Very few corporate media outlets are covering this story – it exposes their promotion of a false narrative during the general election campaign.