August 28, 2005
Lockerbie verdict unsound?
There have been persistent doubts about the soundness of the Lockerbie bombing trial verdict. New testimony now suggests that the CIA faked the evidence to incriminate Libya rather than a Palestinian group.
news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1855852005
Posted by Simon Holledge at 07:26 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
July 31, 2005
Iraq and terrorism
It is becoming clearer by the day that Iraq was (and is) a major factor in the conversion of young extremists to terrorism, despite efforts by the government to draw attention to other factors.
In that context more bad news is to follow. Further Abu Ghraib photos and video are about to be published, said to be considerably worse than those previously released. The Pentagon are currently trying to prevent them being published, but they are being challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who think the public should be allowed to see them.
news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1707652005
www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/articledisplay.jsp?vnucontent_id=1000990590
Posted by Simon Holledge at 11:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 26, 2005
Catherine MacLeod's question for Tony Blair
The Prime Minister held his monthly press conference today.
Catherine MacLeod, the UK political editor for the Herald, asked Tony Blair:
“You said earlier that you wanted to encourage a cross community cohesion and have more integrated communities. Why then are you so keen to forge ahead with faith schools? Can you point to anywhere, either in Britain or in any other part of the world, where segregated education leads to more integrated communities?”
Clearly not a question for which he had much of an answer.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4717733.stm
Posted by Simon Holledge at 08:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 25, 2005
Polly Toynbee on terrorism and religion
Polly Toynbee has a powerful article on terrorism and religion:
“It is time now to get serious about religion - all religion - and draw a firm line between the real world and the world of dreams. Tony Blair has taken entirely the wrong path. He has appeased, prevaricated and pretended, maybe because he is a man of faith himself, with a Catholic wife who consorts with crystals… .
All the state can do is hold on to secular values. It can encourage the moderate but it must not appease religion. The constitutional absurdity of an established church once seemed an irrelevance, but now it obliges similar privileges to all other faiths. There is still time - it may take a nonreligious leader - to stop this madness and separate the state and its schools from all religion. It won’t stop the bombing now but at least it would not encourage continued school segregation for generations to come.”
www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/comment/story/0,16141,1534014,00.html
Posted by Simon Holledge at 11:03 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
July 24, 2005
The killing of de Menezes
The tragic killing of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes by the police at close range at Stockwell underground station in London raises a lot of questions.
Why did the police kill de Menezes? We know that he came out of a block of flats that were under surveillance, that he was wearing an unusually thick overcoat, and that he panicked when the police shouted at him. That was not enough to confirm he was a suicide bomber. Were there other circumstances that led the police to the conclusion that he was a terrorist?
Did de Menezes fall into a trap that had been laid for someone else, or was his death the result of spontaneous action by the policemen involved in the chase? What is the operational chain of command? Does a senior officer authorize the use of fire-arms in a given situation, or do individual armed police merely follow their intuitions guided by an established policy?
We should receive some answers.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4711769.stm
www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1535224,00.html
www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2005/07/ihaveafewqu.asp
Posted by Simon Holledge at 12:07 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
July 13, 2005
USAF lift London ban
The US military have been persuaded to drop their ban on visits to London following the bombings.
This is good, but do double standards apply here? The Foreign Office is always quick to advise British citizens not to visit countries that have been affected by terrorism - when the countries are in Asia or Africa.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4673987.stm
Posted by Simon Holledge at 04:15 PM | TrackBack
July 09, 2005
Ken Livingstone to the terrorists
Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London ended his statement on the Thursday bombings with this message to the terrorists:
“Finally, I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life.
I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others - that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.
In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.
They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.”
www.london.gov.uk/mayor/mayorstatement070705.jsp
Another defiant message came from the London News Review:
www.lnreview.co.uk/news/005167.php
Posted by Simon Holledge at 10:24 PM | TrackBack
July 08, 2005
More thoughts on London
The places where two of the bombs went off are well known to me. One was next to where I once lived, one was where I both studied and worked at different times. What can one say? We live in an awful world where killing leads to more killing. We hoped that the end of the cold war would lead to a gentler, more rational world, but instead we are involved in a conflict that is primitive and irrational, where the action is dictated by the great destroyer, religion.
Instead of an intellectual argument between left and right and east and west, we now follow a trail of blood leading from Auschwitz to Palestine and from there to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, on to New York, then to Iraq for an extraordinary amount of killing including war crimes by the Americans in Fallujah, to Madrid and now to London. Where will it stop? Man’s capacity for killing increases all the time. The carnage in London could have been much worse. Perhaps next time it will be.
The best thing we can probably do is not to add to the evil. We must remain an open, tolerant and humane society. As such, we should act in accordance with our basic values when we oppose those who hate us and want to destroy us. Terrorists must be put on trial and not locked away in places like Guantanamo Bay and they must not be tortured. Inhumanity just leads to more inhumanity. And we should leave Iraq - not because we have lost our nerve - but because we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
This is what Kenneth Clarke said in the Commons on 26 February 2003:
“… . Any war will be won easily. I am glad that if we go to war, it will not take long. However, we should consider alternatives because of the consequences of war. How many terrorists will we recruit in the greater, long-standing battle against international terrorism? It will be far harder to win. … The next time a large bomb explodes in a western city, or an Arab or Muslim regime topples and is replaced by extremists, the Government must consider the extent to which the policy contributed to it. That is why hon. Members should pause and why, unless evidence is produced for a breach and a material threat, my judgement today is that we should not go to war.”
(I wrote this in response to a piece Boris Johnson has just written for his blog. He believes we should not be panicked by the government into accepting restrictions on our liberty. I agree with this.)
www.boris-johnson.com/archives/2005/07/commentonthe.html
Posted by Simon Holledge at 11:03 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack