EU President & Foreign Minister

No, not him, Tony Blair didn't get the job. Nope, some bloke from Belgium called Herman van Rompuy got the job, the Belgian Prime Minister. Yep, I'm sure you've heard of him, a household name. The Foreign Minister is Baroness Catherine Ashton from the UK, so well known that our Prime Minister could even remember her name.









“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”

Jean Monnet, Founder of the European Movement,
3rd April 1952.

Personally, I don't remember voting for either of these two, in fact Baroness Ashton has not been elected to any position in the UK, she has been appointed to her position, so she has no mandate. So the EU federalist super state moves ever closer, as more and more powers are absorbed into the EU from national governments. This is the first result of the Lisbon Treaty, the next stage will be EU embassies followed by an EU army. The UK is likely to lose its permanent seat on the UN security council which will be replaced by an EU representative.

Our foreign policy will be set by the EU, no doubt we will be railroaded into joining the Euro in the next few years and then our financial policy will be set by the European Central Bank. All of these policies will be set by unelected unaccountable EU representatives. Taxes will be set by the EU, they are pushing for EU wide road tax that will be pay as you drive. This will mean a black box in your car to monitor your distance and location for charging purposes, but you can guarantee that it'll be used by our government to monitor your movements and whereabouts as well.

On the EU army front, the EU has already previously called for the UK's nuclear submarines to be assimilated into the EU force. You can also guarantee that France & Germany (they are the driving force of the EU) also have an eye on the city of London's financial market and would want to have that integrated into an EU stock exchange.

All of this from a corrupt organisation that for the last 14 years have not had their annual accounts signed off by their auditors. We have had mission creep from the EU for a number of years now, but with the Lisbon Treaty this will accelerate at quite a pace. Neither of the two main parties Labour or Tory seem interested in stopping the EU spread of powers and the man in the street either doesn't know or doesn't care what is happening.

One day Joe Public will wake up and think, where did Great Britain go to. On the plus side he'll be able to buy a ticket to go into the tourist attraction that is the House of Commons & House of Lords that used to be home to the Mother of all Parliaments and birth place of democracy, exit via the gift shop for that souvenir (with made in the EU sticker on each gift).

RIP UK/GB

Thought crimes and stopping the blogs

So we now enter into the realms of thought crime or pre-crime as the 2002 film Minority Report calls it. I'm all for prosecuting criminals, but there seems to be something wrong about sending people to prison for a bad thought. I'm sure most of you have all had bad thoughts about someone at some stage in your life, maybe even wanted to kill them, for brief second. You may even have said it to them in a middle of a row or even typed something out on the Internet.

Does that mean you're going to do it, probably not, we all issue threats in life, some in the heat of the moment we may mean, but for most of us that is all it is, a few words, nothing more. For the UK, that maybe changing, now our thoughts or words, may make us criminals. We recently had the case of Mrs.Roberts who found out that her husband was using to chat rooms to communicate with schoolgirls or so he thought, until he found out that his wife was posing as one and shopped him to the police. Now I don't for one minute condone what Mr.Roberts was doing, dirty old men trying to chat up young girls is not right but he didn't actually do anything other than communicate with his wife (albeit not knowing it was his wife). I wish next time some
chav kids were hanging around my car threatening to damage it, I could call plod out and he'd arrest them for thought crimes instead of telling me that there is nothing they can do until they actually do cause damage.

It's a slippery slope when we go down this route, where do you draw the line on when you can be done for thinking about a crime and when not? Last week week (12th Nov) we had more thought crime legislation introduced.

Coroners and Justice Bill 2008-09
http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2008-09/coronersandjustice.html

• Extends the law proscribing possession of child pornography to
include NON-PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES.

(excerpt from the draft Bill) -
(7) References to an image of 'a person' include references to an
image of an IMAGINARY person.
(8) References to an image of 'a child' include references to an
image of an IMAGINARY child.

Penalties (extract) -
(b) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not
exceeding 3 YEARS or a fine, or both.

This new law - that of criminalising people for committing imaginary
offences against imaginary children - comes on top of previous new
laws outlawing 'extreme pornography'.

You might just be struggling to get your head around exactly what that is. Well (think: Japanese comics), check Manga Comics Wiki

There are I think a few South Park episodes which will need to be
pulled? Think Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset episode with Paris
Hilton... Or the various anal probe episodes including the episode
entitled "The Death of Eric Cartman"

On top of all that, UK MPs are wanting to regulate blogs, because they don't like us reporting uncensored what they're up to. It just shows you how out of touch that MPs are if they think that you can regulate blogs, many of which are located overseas and out of reach of UK jurisdiction.

Baroness Buscombe, the new chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, has ambitions for her organisation that go beyond the traditional newspaper companies.

"She wants to examine the possibility that the PCC's role should be extended to cover the blogosphere, which is becoming an increasing source of breaking news and boasts some of the media's highest-profile commentators, such as the political bloggers Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. Do readers of such sites, and people mentioned on them, deserve the same rights of redress that the PCC offers in respect of newspapers and their sites?"

"Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated," Baroness Buscombe told me. "Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it's news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It's a very interesting area and quite challenging."

Yes Baroness, they work because you can't poke your nose in, so go find yourself something else to do.

Original article

Government continues to infringe on our civil liberties

It seems the attack on our civil liberties gathers pace especially to combat new technology. The first is ACTA Internet Chapter, which is in essence a copyright infringement directive but you can bet that like all laws it will be abused, much law the UK RIPA (a law to give the State extra powers to snoop on people suspected of being a terrorist) which councils use to spy on members of the public for reasons that are nothing to do terrorism.

The main concern is for bloggers. Don't think that this is a US thing, the EU is in on it as well. So start complaining about the government on you blog and you may find that all of a sudden those pictures you've had on it for ages or the video clip suddenly belong to someone and you've breached copyright.

ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

More info here

And here

The second article refers to pre-pay mobile phones. This refers to Spain but you can guarantee it will be coming to the UK sometime soon either directly or via an EU diktat. Pre-pay mobile give you an anonymity unlike contract phones which are always registered to the owner and can be very by the contract and pay method. So if you have a contract phone, you can be tracked by you phone signal, as every mobile phone has a unique identifier, a bit like a car registration number. At the moment the technology, it only pinpoints to about 500 yards accuracy, but as technology improves that'll come down to next to nothing.

So, at any given time, when your mobile is switched on, your exact position will be known. Of course that didn't matter if you had a pre-pay, that is until now, if you're in Spain. If you've got a pre-pay phone and you have registered  it, it was switched off today by the service provider. This has been done in the name of terrorism but you can bet that it'll be abused (incorporated into government systems) at a later date.

Read the full article from The Register

The first comment in the comment section is quite funny. What happens if the terrorist brings in his own phone from abroad?

Lastly, we're all being databased if we're deemed to be of interest to the police/government, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), runs a central database which lists thousands of so-called domestic extremists. It filters intelligence supplied by police forces across England and Wales, which routinely deploy surveillance teams at protests, rallies and public meetings. The NPOIU contains detailed files on individual protesters who are searchable by name.

Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. One man, who has no criminal record, was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after a "protest" marker was placed against his car after he attended a small protest against duck and pheasant shooting. ANPR "interceptor teams" are being deployed on roads leading to protests to monitor attendance. So, you don't have to do too much to get on their database, be careful if you go to protest about the closure of local services, you could be classified as a domestic extremeist.

Original article here

So, one day they'll be able to link all of these and others together. It might not happen any time soon, but it will happen eventually and some of the freedoms that we took for granted will have disappeared, it's going to be a very controlled monitored society.

The Dark Sith Lord Returns

So, as widely predicted, now that the Lisbon Constitution Treaty has been ratified, the move to ditch Brown has begun. Miliband is off to the EU to be Foreign Secretary and Mandelson is to resign his peerage so that he can contest his safe seat and then be elected leader of the Labour party. Proof if ever that politics is all about lining your pockets or helping your career and has very little to do with serving those that elected them in the first place, the public.

Original article here

Guido also breaks with news this morning.

"Guido has been told that three weeks ago Margaret Thatcher wrote a personal plea to her great admirer Václav Klaus, to stand firm, in the hope of strengthening his resolve. It was to be delivered by William Hague. It still rests on his desk."

Link

Cameron fudges - Dan Hannan resigns front bench

So there we go, there's Dave's 'cast-iron guarantee' replaced by some other not so cast iron promises. Fool me once Dave, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Good luck to you, I think you're going to need it, but meanwhile I'm switching to UKIP.

With the mainstream parties at the moment it's a choice of Nu or Blu Labour and I don't like either. If the mainstream parties keep kowtowing to the EU, we won't have a government, parliament as we know it in 10 years time. Westminster will be a tourist attraction, "come see the world's oldest democracy, the mother of parliaments, RIP 2009".

I don't want that, which is why I'll shall be abandoning the mainstream parties for the first time and voting for a party that still wants to do something about it. I feel that the anger about this is much stronger that Cameron believes or cares and there will be shock as to the reaction.

Dan Hannan has already resigned the front bench and as I predicted yesterday, I suspect that he will defect to UKIP shortly as his views will not be compatible with Cameron's.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100015753/we-must-have-a-referendum-and-not-just-on-the-eu/

Roger Helmer MEP is also standing stand from the front bench today (5th).

Blog Power!

In a victory for a small time blogger from Somerton in the UK. Muck&Brass blogger Niall Connolly managed to get 11 out of the 15 town councillors to resign after highlighting their shortcomings and lack of transparency. It made the national news headlines, I'll leave you to read his story.

BBC News

Muck&Brass Blog

Lockerbie

So, the Lockerbie bombing and the release of Al-Megrahi is hitting the news again. As there are many who visit these pages that are not from the UK, I will be writing this from an international view point.

And quite rightly too. This is one of worst outcomes of British justice. The British public like to think of themselves as having a sense of fair play and being honest. The conviction of Al-Megrahi goes against this.
Personally I'm not one for conspiracy theories but with the bombing of Pan Am 103 and the subsequent trial and conviction of an innocent person, I'm somewhat unhappy with what my government has done and my view point has changed.

For the rest of you who still don't government lie or are economical with the truth, consider these documents. The British government said that the release of Al-Megrahi was down to Scotland, not the UK government. Well, read these letters from the British government to the Scottish government and then the requests from the Scottish government. It is quite clear that the Scottish government was asking the British government to exempt Al-Megrahi from the prisoner extradition treaty and the British government wasn't interested.

In 1988 (July) Iran Air flight 655 was shot down, (it was an A300 Airbus passenger plane) by the US Vincennes Aegis missile cruiser. The weapons officer mistook it for an F14 Tomcat. All crew and passengers were killed, 290 in total. The Iranian government insisted that it was a deliberate act, and I kind of tend to agree with them, I struggle to see how you can confuse a (relatively) slow moving large A300 with a (relatively) small fast moving (over 1,500mph) jet fighter. The US never admitted liability or apologised to Iran for it and no one was reprimanded for the incident.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Vincennes_(CG-49)#Iran_Air_Flight_655_Tragedy

That's your 'why' answered. With the Iranians severely p1ssed off, they wanted revenge and the best revenge was to bring a US airliner down. Obviously they didn't have the military capability and secondly they didn't want an all out war with the US. So, they looked towards a terrorist activity, a bomb. Still keen to distance themselves from it, they contacted their friends the Syrians and asked them for they help. $10 million dollars were paid to a Syrian businessman (again the Syrian government didn't want to be directly involved for fear of retaliation) who had contacts with terrorist organisations operating in Lebanon and Palestine. The group was the PFLP-GC and led by Ahmad Jibril.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/unanswered-questions-lockerbies-legacy-270-dead-no-one-behind-bars-1775216.html

There's a bit of a side story that the CIA were running an operation out of Cyprus (it's a not a million miles from Lebanon/Palestine) which also involved drug running for black ops. The money drugs were channelled through Frankfurt airport where they had immunity from customs (diplomatic immunity for luggage).

The terrorists inflitrated Frankfurt airport and got the CIA diplomatic black bag switched at the last minute for the bomb, which is how it got past security. The bomb itself had both a timer and a mecury pressure switch. This had the affect of stopping the bomb going off too early, but if the plane got delayed, the mercury pressure switch would stop it going off on the ground. The idea was that the plane exploded somewhere over the Atlantic, which would make it almost impossible to find any evidence. Unfortunately the flight was delayed at Heathrow for the best part of an hour and for some reason the pilot was anxious to make up time and increased altitude earlier in the flight than he would normally have done.

Which is why the plane exploded over Lockerbie. The time line is now Dec 1988. In March 1989, Paul Channon the Transport Minister (covering Aviation) announces to a group of trusted journalists that the governments knows who the bombers were. Read the second paragraph in this link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Channon,_Baron_Kelvedon#Transport_Secretary

Why was Reagan on the phone to Thatcher (in March 1989) asking her to 'cool it'? Because at that time the US already knew that it was going to war with Iraq in the first Gulf War, which started in Jan 1990, nine months later. The US needed allies in the Middle East, to side against Saddam and to help protect Saudi from invasion. It wasn't the time to get heavy with Iran and Syria, we needed them on side. Of course someone still needed to be blamed for the bombing because of the public outrage and Libya was the fall guy.

So, on to the trial and why did Libya send their guys. Gaddafi sent his guys because he knew they were innocent and thought they would get a fair trial and be released. Then Libya would have the sanctions lifted and they could sell oil again. Libya has a fair amount of oil, but uses virtually none of it herself. Gaddafi's son is on record saying that they (Libya) never admitted liability and only agreed to hit because they had lost out on $40 bn of oil sales. The agreement was that they would be tried under Scottish law, but because of the public feeling about the bombing, it would be held in a neutral country, Holland.

Only, they changed the rules, they didn't use jurors like a normal Scottish court, they used three main judges. The evidence was so good against them, that one guy was aquitted because he had a watertight alibi that he was in Sweden at the time. I suggest you read the follwoing sections in the next link, Trial, verdict and appeals. Paying particular attention to the details about the witness and what the UN observer said.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdelbaset_al-Megrahi#Trial

So, why was he released. Partly because the then UK government wanted to do an oil deal. Secondly Megrahi's team had won the right to show some documents/information in his forthcoming appeal that the UK government didn't want coming to light. Not only would these prove his innocence, but they would also be extremly embarrassing.

The Scottish government did NOT, I repeat NOT want to let Megrahi go, because of the bad publicity it would give them. But they had no choice, as the UK had signed a PTA (prisoner transfer agreement) with Libya and only the UK government could overrule/make exceptions, which they were not willing to do. The Scots were literally begging NuLab to make an exception for Megrahi, but Blair, Brown and Straw all said no. This link shows all the requests from Scottish ministers.The second link went 404 error in April 2012, the third link is an exact copy of the letter on the BBC.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/925/0085873.pdf


http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/docs/20080211-jack-straw-to-alex-salmond-prisoner-transfer-agreement-libya.pdf

For some reason the document has been removed by the government, but here it is on the BBC website

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/01_09_09_straw_salmond.pdf


As for evidence to come out that will embarrass people involved, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/scottishnews/3627650/Lockerbie-lawman-witness-bribe-rap.html

There's a whole shedload of dodgy dealings about the whole thing. If you read some of the other reports, you see that the Scottish police say that CIA guys were at the crash site within 24 hours, taping areas off, taking evidence away. This is why the Scottish victim's families were not bothered about Megrahi's release, because they know all this and more, they've obviously spoken to the Scottish police that were involved. Lockerbie's not a big place, people know each other, difficult to keep secrets.

Jim Swire was the Scottish families spokesman, he lost his daughter on the flight, this is his view.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-11368387

Almost finished (and you've only had the very short version), a couple of links for further viewing/reading. First a documentary film about the bombing and even this has had contreversy, read the Wiki page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Double_Cross_-_Lockerbie

The full film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B5hv6scbBo

And lastly a book, it's almost thirty chapters from memory. It's by one of the CIA guys that was based in Cyprus and it gives a lot of the background into what went on, how the Franfurt operation went on and the fact that they were onto Jibril and found some of his identical bombs to the Lockerbie one. Don't be put off by the first few pages, it does get into the detail soon after.

Trail of the Octopus -- From Beirut to Lockerbie -- Inside the DIA, by Donald Goddard with Lester K. Coleman at American Buddha Online Library
http://www.american-buddha.com/trail.toc.htm