Saturday, January 29, 2005

THE CONUNDRUM AnAlternativeView: "When the House of Lords ruled that detention of terror suspects without trial contravened the European Convention on Human Rights, it did so mainly on the grounds that the existing legislation did not apply to UK citizens and was therefore discriminatory. The Government's answer? Let's apply the same law to everybody. If the Bliar has his way, Britain will throw off the legal restraints of the last few hundred years and return to the days when Star Chamber could order the detention of any subject, without disclosing a reason." See also here. I have never really understood why Blair supported a neocon like Bush. I think his ambition to follow in the footsteps of Churchill and Thatcher has some relevance. It is clear his vision was faulty. Slate: "Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Council - the 'center of strategic thinking' inside the U.S. intelligence community. The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, 'Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project'. It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site." Now Britain seems to be sliding into a police state. Guardian: "The home secretary, Charles Clarke, is transforming Britain into a police state, one of the country's former leading anti-terrorist police chiefs said yesterday." Greg Dyke: "The evidence is now overwhelming; Blair, Campbell and Scarlett produced a public relations document, a piece of propaganda, called it an intelligence dossier and used it to persuade the Labour Party, Parliament and the country to support Blair's war in Iraq. Their problems came when no WMD were found and people began to look more closely at the dossier, people like Andrew Gilligan, the journalist working for the Today programme who, by having an innocuous chat with Dr Kelly, hit upon the story of the decade. He was savaged by Campbell for his trouble. But Blair is still Prime Minister and is likely to remain so for some years. So why has he not paid the price for misleading, even deliberately deceiving, the nation?" The situation in Britain is more complex than the American situation. There seems to be no political alternative, which is bad for democracy. In the US the mainstream media lent a helping hand to the madness of Bush. There the jukebox journalism rules (you pay we write). 12:31:30 PM

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