Three new reasons to leave the country

In the absence of much else happening, a triumvirate of bad news for your digestion:

1. Flying Robot Spies UK police are planning to use 'military spy drones' to hover and criss-cross the skies of Britain in an attempt to better control and spy on people fight crime. You can bet that as this hits opposition, some nasty terrorist plot will be 'foiled' just in time to show how necessary it is. Too Orwellian for words.

2. Secrecy is the Order of the Day Lord Hutton, the man who exonerated the government of any wrong-doing in the death of Dr David Kelly has now decreed that details of his death, including the post mortem, be kept secret in the "interests of national security" (somehow) for the next 70 years. Any semi-functioning democracy holds as one of its core tenets the necessity for independent, public autopsies and coroner reports. Apparently in the UK, this requirement (like many other basic human rights) are subservient to 'national interests'.

3. We Knowingly Facilitated Torture (and Benefited From It) In a parallel universe, where world leaders are held accountable for minor indiscretions like the pointless massacre of a million people, someone has the guts to state once-and-for-all that we knowingly facilitated the torture of terrorist suspects being flown around the world by the CIA and that we happily reaped the 'benefits' that this barbaric practice brings. Oh hang on, that person is Craig Murray. There's hope yet ... (EDIT: More hope here, if you can call it hope).

In slightly (OK, very) unrelated news, War on Terror got a glowing review in the Morning Star the other day. As you know, we're commies at heart, so this made us right proud.

P.S. This month marks FIVE YEARS of TBG blog posts. To mark this quite unlikely achievement, let's, you and I, take a little spin in the TBG time machine and revisit that very first post. The time is January 2005; War on Terror is emerging from a rather rocky period of development, while the real war on terror is going from bad to worse...

Posted by Andy S on 26 January 2010 - 0 comments