End torture by the US and British armies/police
The
prosecutions for torture by three members of the British Army are just the tip
of the iceberg. There are over 164 investigations at present involving British troops
involving 20 deaths of Iraqis in British custody. Mass torture and abuse by US
troops have been exposed in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and Afghanistan. For
both the US and Britain, the torture and abuse has been authorised from on high
as a way of getting confessions (which are useless, since a tortured inmate
will say anything to get more lenient treatment).
There have been a series of programmes recently on Channel 4 on torture, starting on the 28th of February with two programmes primarily on Guantánamo Bay (see www.channel4.com/torture). It was revealed from a leaked US memo that their government defined torture only where abuse resulted in organ failure or death!
Torture has also been commonplace in the British police force. The first programme on torture also talked about the techniques of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad in extracting confessions from the Birmingham Six. One of the Six, Paddy Hill, showed that he doesn’t have any teeth left and it was pointed out that they still have not yet received an official apology from the British government.
End house arrest and “control orders” without trial by jury
The New Labour government was finally forced to release
the foreign “terrorist suspects” held for years without trial in Belmarsh
prison. It was claimed that they had the right to return to their own countries
but of course they would have faced torture, if not death, if they had taken up
this option. They proposed that the Home Secretary can order house arrest
without trial, or less severe control orders, even for British citizens. House
arrest was a method adopted by the apartheid regime of South Africa in the
past, and in the Philippines now. Unfortunately, most Labour backbenchers and
Liberal Democrat and Tory opponents of this policy restricted their demands to
one that a judge should make the decision, and the compromise reached reflected
that. Judges may generally be more liberal than New Labour politicians at
present, but that is a sign of how far to the right Labour has gone in recent
years. Judges must be elected, and jury trials should be required to condemn a
citizen of any country to detention, whether in jail or at their home, or
control orders which severely restrict their freedom. The real target is
working class Muslims, not Islamic fundamentalists, and the laws could be used
against socialists in the future.
Steve thinks that there is a massive web of infiltrating organisations (see the back page), which should protect Western civilians from serious acts of terrorism. The US government allowed 9/11 to happen, with a lot of insider trading on Wall Street and a senior Republican advised not to travel to one of the cities. See www.oilempire.us.
ID cards and the increasing surveillance state – stop Big Brother watching you!
A
huge amount of data is held about everyone on computers, but it is distributed
amongst them. Identity (ID) cards would
centralise it on a huge database, making it easier for big business to remain
in power by increasing the powers of the ‘secret services’ to monitor the
activities of left-wing activists.
New Labour is scared of mass civil disobedience, which defeated ID cards in Australia. They have tried to take the history of the anti-poll tax campaign into account, where the fine for not registering was only £50 and about one million people “disappeared” (but that served the Tories’ purposes to a certain extent, as well as not being decisive in the campaign’s victory, because those people dropped off the electoral register too). They plan fines of £2500 for not registering and £1000 for failing to inform the government of a change of address. If the state tried to enforce such fines, especially against unemployed people or low-paid workers, it would cause outrage.
ID cards would be not be compulsory at first, but would probably be required to access the NHS or claim benefits for example. Crime would probably get worse, since one form of ID would be sufficient and the biometric methods (fingerprinting and iris scans) are not foolproof. They would also be very expensive, to the taxpayer and the holder.
A socialist campaign on crime – against ID fraud
Steve Wallis campaigned against ID fraud due to his postman repeatedly putting letters hanging out of letterboxes (shortly after since a programme on national TV showed how easily ID fraud can be done if you get access to someone's mail). Royal Mail and the police refused to do anything about it when Steve pointed the problem out. He is now setting up a Residents Association, to force the flat management company (who asked people to avoid putting ID details out in their rubbish that are being taken by non-residents) to provide secure recycling facilities.
6