Jarvis Rocks

Jarvis said yes… well he had to really. Write a song called “c*nts are still ruling the world” and you’ve got to expect penniless film-makers banging on your door asking to use it for polemical documentaries about civil liberties. And so the great music chase is complete. Better get the film released before any of the bands change their minds…

Freedom Of Speech – US military style
Isn’t it nice that the US and Britain are exporting their democratic values to the unfortunate people of Afghanistan. The US and UK backed government is now openly arresting journalists who disagree with it. They have presumably taken the lead from US soldiers who enforce censorship among the locals at gunpoint. Recently a convoy of Marines shot and killed 10 people and wounded 33. A budding reporter managed to take some pictures of the incident, but was accosted by the marines and had his pictures deleted. A US commander later justified the deletions on the basis that “untrained” Afghans might capture “visual details that are not as they originally were.” A preliminary enquiry later found that all those killed were unarmed civilians.

Full Guardian Story

Bring out your dead – just don’t count them
Clearly embarrassed by the Iraqi body count, the US backed government in Iraq has now found a cunning way to hide this embarrassment. Stop counting and not letting anyone into the country who looks like they might have a go. Dr Latfa is a respected scientist who was barred from travelling to Iraq by the British Foreign office as he was intending to carry out a study into civilian deaths. Possibly this is an existential argument now being pushed by New Labour – if no-one actually counts dead Iraqis, are they actually dead? Discuss.

iraqi death count story


John Reid attempts to sign Memorandum of Understanding with Foxes
Well it’s the next logical stage isn’t it? While Amnesty International has a fat file showing that the fox has eaten over 300 chickens in the last year, John Reid wants to deport a chicken into the foxes den, and has strict assurances from the fox that this particular chicken will not be eaten, even though the fox signed the memorandum of understanding with the blood of the chicken it ate for lunch.

This is of course New Labour’s long running attempt to deport people back to countries where they face torture. No one knows how much public money they’ve spent trying to bypass the torture conventions, but if they keep this up then the Olympics could be in trouble. Then again if they turned trying to deport people to be tortured into an Olympic sport then John Reid and Tony Blair would be in with the chance of the gold.

On April 27th the court of appeal ruled that John Reid’s precious memorandum of understanding with Libya is not worth the paper it’s written on, so he cannot deport the 2 Libyan nationals back there. This might have something to do with the fact that:
1) Libya is still run by the bloodthirsty lunatic Colonel Gadaffi.
2) The head of Human Rights in Libya is said lunatic’s son.
This is the latest in a long line of Home Office screw ups when trying to send people back to countries where they might be tortured.

John Reid loves torture story

Mouloud Shihali (who is in the film) is in a very similar position. New Labour like to pretend that Algeria is now a land of peace and harmony and it’s perfectly safe for him to return – even though the last two people that they deported (with strict assurances that they would not be harmed) have since been banged up and their show trial is any year soon.