EARLY yesterday morning 21 people were arrested and charged under the various terrorism acts, while Scotland Yard said that the 21 were engaged in a plot to blow up planes and ‘commit mass murder on an unimaginable scale.’
While the state has said that it cannot be sure that it has apprehended all of the people allegedly engaged in this plot, the Prime Minister remains on his holidays, as does the Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, as do all the MPs, with parliament remaining unrecalled.
The state is obviously in charge and running the show. Despite the fact that officials have said that as many as 10 US planes were due to be blown up in mid-flight with thousands of people perishing, this is not a crisis worthy of the recall of parliament or the recall of the premier.
The situation is still designated as ‘critical’ meaning that a ‘terrorist’ attack is imminent. Meanwhile armed police are being dispatched to the ports, all of the country’s airports are at a standstill, flights to Europe have been cancelled, and mothers are being forced to taste their babies’ supply of milk in front of officials, to prove that the liquid is not explosive or poisonous, but the PM and assorted MPs are cavorting from the Bahamas to the Riviera.
There have been three meetings of Cobra, the state security committee, in the last 24 hours. The committee met and included leading civil servants, police chiefs and military officers, but no Prime Minister, in what we are told is a life and death situation.
Meanwhile, not a shred of evidence has been produced for the allegations of ‘mass murder on an unimaginable scale’, and the production of such evidence is highly unlikely.
We are told that this virtual state of emergency is intelligence driven. But so was the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes and the raid for WMD on Forest Gate.
It is therefore highly likely that what we are witnessing is an organised and orchestrated capitalist state exercise to create the necessary panic conditions for the government to bring in even more draconian legislation to extinguish basic liberties and basic rights.
Yesterday’s sensational developments follow on nicely from Home Secretary John Reid’s speech demanding the right to put security before basic rights.
He said on Wednesday: ‘As the Prime Minister said only last week: “The nature of organised crime or social breakdown in parts of our communities, not to say the threat of global terrorism bent on mass slaughter, means traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age’. Basic rights are definitely 20th century, as they say.
Reid moaned: ‘We can’t always prosecute individuals due to the difficulties in obtaining sufficiently cogent admissible evidence for a criminal trial.’ This means replace a criminal trial with summary justice.
He added: ‘Often we can’t deport them, even if they have no proper basis for claiming asylum here, due to concerns about the treatment they might receive in their home country.’ There is obviously nothing wrong with torture, provided it is properly administered of course.
And finally: ‘Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short-term in order to prevent their misuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms.’ This is called the slippery slope to military police dictatorship.
As far as Reid and his ilk are concerned, yesterday’s sensational events must seem timely.
However, if it turns out that such a plot was actually in preparation, all this proves is that the Bush/Blair war on the people of Iraq, the Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iran is creating a school which reasons, ‘since they are slaughtering us, we must slaughter them.’
News Line calls for the defence of basic rights and liberties. The road to a peaceful planet is through the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism, currently headed by Bush and Blair, and the establishment of fraternal and friendly relations with the Arab and Islamic peoples.
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