The wife of Mohammed Sidique Khan (Ringleader of the 7/7 attacks) was arrested last week in a blaze of publicity. Yesterday she was quietly released without charge. The only thing it seems to have achieved is pissing off the Muslim community even more, and added yet another reason for having a public enquiry into the attacks.
A last hurrah for "Dr" Reid
Go on John - play that song just one more time... Yes, John Reid is going to deliver one final criminal justice bill before he stands down as Home Secretary at the end of this month. And thank heavens he is, as the other 53 Criminal Justice Acts that New Labour have passed in the last decade were starting to get a bit lonely. One might have thought that "Dr" Reid might have actually run out of things to criminalise, but he's pulled through and clearly wants this to be his authoritarian swansong. Still on the hunt to stamp out "yobbish" behaviour, the New Act includes:
-Police Powers to shut and seal premises. It also gives people the power to simply evict neighbours they don't like. If only this law had been passed sooner then Gordon Brown might have got into number 10 much quicker.
-Violent offender orders. Lots more on this in the Taking Liberties book, but these are police powers to put restrictions on people who they think might commit a crime in the future.
-Introducing Tasers to the police force. These are weapons that deliver a debilitating electrical charge and are very popular in the US, so naturally we have to have them in the UK. The Arizona based company that makes them (that's shortly going to make a ton of cash courtesy of the British Taxpayer) defends it's product by saying that they "save" hundreds of lives. This amazing backwards logic is based on the reasoning that if the police didn't use a taser then they'd just shoot the person instead with a gun. This is rather like running someone over with a car and seriously injuring them, but then claiming that you have in fact saved their life as you could have run them over with a bus. The statistics speak for themselves - 220 people have died from being "Tasered" in the US and Canada according to Amnesty international. But they look really cool on the US TV show "Cops" so who do we make the cheque out to?
When "Dr" Reid announced these measures to the Police Federation in Blackpool he was booed and heckled by the audience - though mainly over pay and working hours. Surely this yobbish behaviour warrants them all being evicted from their homes and given a 50,000 volt electrical charge?
And a great running debate on the political affiliation of Taking Liberties on Chris Paul's Blog. For the record we have kept Taking Liberties apolitical - hence we have got contributions from the 3 main parties in the film.
2 comments:
What grounds did they have for arrestng the widow?
none whatsoever as far as anyone can make out - if they had anything on her the usual course of action would have been to leak it to The Sun just before the arrest - which didn't happen. The security services and the police have just come in for a roasting following the Crevice Trial revelations, so there's nothing like a series of highly publicised "Terror Raids" to show the world they are doing something.
According to the BBC, the police had been for some time in possession of evidence that "unequivocally" proved she had known nothing about what her husband was planning two years ago.
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