Tim hates you

Extremism task force to be set up

A task force to tackle Muslim extremism “head on” is being set up in the wake of the London bombings.

Tony Blair said after meeting Muslim leaders and opposition politicians at Number 10 that it was time to confront and defeat “this evil ideology”.

The network will seek to dissuade young Muslims from turning to extremism.

More of this article can be read at the BBC News website here

Oh good grief I’m going to vomit now.

I mean seriously. Just seriously. An “Extremism Taskforce”? What on earth is that supposed to be? Are we going to find ourselves surrounded by crack teams of SWAT Hare Krishnas and New Agey Christians humming kum by yah, searching for unhappy people?

Now call me a cynic, and I am, but all I see from this “Taskforce EXTREME!” (cue: sound effects of armor clangs and explosions in the background) is a group of middle aged old farts sitting around with expenses paid for lunches on government tabs who will end up writing a 70,000 word report that no one but politicians and advocacy groups will ever read and quote endlessly in their interminably droning voices and complete boredom will settle upon all. The government will then say they would like to follow these recommendations but due to budgetary requirements, be unable to fulfill all but the most limited versions of the programs and initiatives that this report would actually recommend.

Follow it down to it’s logical conclusion of a few years later and then you’ll see that nothing will have happened, nothing will have actually changed and nothing will have been done. Unless that is they decide to tell the truth about things in this country. Yeah, right.. Bugger all chance of that ever happening.

P.S. Does anyone else remember the Centurions cartoon that was on Saturday mornings? BTW I thought the wild weasel was the best thing since sliced bread.

Welcome back and I hope you enjoyed the previous read.

Please bear with me, I think I need to reiterate previous issue I touched upon some more and then I’ll move on to my thoughts about what possible solutions there are.

My major problem with these and any of the current legislation we have in effect is that these Anti-terror laws do nothing. As such they could be called post facto laws, or in other words laws that will only apply to you after you have committed a crime. Now you could argue justly that almost all criminal laws can only be acted upon after a crime has been perpetrated and I agree this is the case but none the less we still act in an attempt to prevent the crimes from happening before hand.

But in dealing with a crime like terrorism this is in my opinion akin to trying to shut the barn door after the horses have bolted and particularly ineffective when dealing with people for whom death is not to be feared. If they’re not scared of dying I doubt they’ll be that terrified of sitting in prison for the rest of their lives.

What this means is that us trying to find even more ways to make sure we can keep these people in jail for what conceivably will be capital crimes in countries which still practice capital punishment or life sentences in others will not be much if any kind of deterrent.

So where does this leave us?

As I said before and has been uttered by many doctors throughout the world, “Prevention is better than the cure.� We must start utilising our intelligence gathering capabilities in a much more intelligent and targeted fashion. Whilst I disagree with racial/ethnic profiling on principle, I do also agree and understand that in limited, please note that I did say limited, and certain circumstances it could be a valid tool amongst others. Also increasing the funding that we have for our human intelligence gathering functions and relying less upon our electronic information gathering capabilities (Which we relied upon to almost certain disaster previously, is in my opinion foolish and dangerous.) You can’t beat a good pair of eyes and a smart brain on the ground. We need to start increasing the HUMINT (Human Intelligence) gathering capabilities a lot. We can do this a variety of ways and means and using the methods that work, we’ve got to stop recruiting fresh eyed faces from the university campuses who will only ever end up as paper pushers sitting behind desks without a real understanding of the risks involved and start using retired police officers and detectives, people who will already have a very good idea and understanding in how to go out into the world, work with a broken and fractured picture of events that have just happened and try to piece them together into something that can work. These people already work under stringent evidentiary procedures and understand and know how important it is to get it right or a major criminal case could fall apart. (Yes I do admit to ripping this idea off and if you recognize where I got it from congratulations. But a good idea, no matter where it comes from, is still a good idea.)

I’m not completely blind either to how an organisation like this could become perverted and a danger to the society they wish to protect but that is why governments and their agencies have checks and balances. It would be hard to do this in a way without stifling the organisation or creating a group without peer that is open to abuse but something that is worthwhile is never easy.

Secondly we need to start using our security forces in a better manner than in the way they have been deployed. I would like to impress a point here in that I do not agree with the view that the press has taken upon our situation in Iraq in that everything is falling apart. I disagree. I will however come forth and say that in my honest opinion things in Iraq are not going as well as we could be doing them. We need to understand from the lessons we learned in the past in how to deal with an insurgency situation. There are many experts from previous campaigns by insurgent forces, for example in the UK from dealing with the IRA and the Irish republican cause regarding Northern Ireland, mistakes in the past were made but please let us at least try and use some of the lessons we learned there and try to see if we can apply them there.

On another note please give me any feedback on what I write here at all it’s hard to write about these things in a vacuum. I need ideas and viewpoints to bounce of off and to react to and to make me think.

Ok
So London has been attacked. Now I’m going to go into various issues here. I’ve waited a while to write this in light of the thousands of blogs and so on and so forth blabbering on uselessly about it.

So what will be different about this blog? Nothing really or maybe a lot more. I’m going to try and consider the situation in light of how it happened and how it got past our security services.

First I want schmucks like O’reilly to think and I mean seriously to just fucking THINK that maybe you can’t stop terrorism easily without encroaching on peoples civil liberties. I’m talking about constant surveillance and monitoring, giving people in governance even more power over us. That is, in my honest opinion, bloody dangerous and tantamount to living in a police state.

You have to remember 3 of the 4 people who were involved in the attacks were not flagged by the intelligence agencies. The only outward sign of their affiliation was that they were Muslim. That is it. Apart from that these people had no criminal records, they weren’t flagged by the intelligence services and they weren’t even on our damn radar.

The one man who was flagged by MI5, we simply didn’t have the resources to mount a year long operation on a man who was peripherally connected with a person of suspected terror links. When you’re in charge of a government department and you have to balance the budget how do you decide on who needs to be monitored or not? It’s an issue of these people being completely blank slates and thus they slipped through.

So what could we have done about it or in the future do about it?

Good questions but let’s look at the possible answers that the government is currently trying to bring up.

First of all is the issue of a National ID Card scheme which the government has quite intelligently kept quiet at the moment in light of the attacks. They do not wish to be seen as to be using the attacks in a manner that would be construed as taking advantage of the situation to push their agenda. The National ID Card scheme is wildly unpopular and, well, it wouldn’t have worked to stop them because the attackers were British, an ID card that the government would have issued to them would really have stopped it. Nope.

Secondly the Met (which is an abbreviation of the term Metropolitan Police Service) has been accused by various Muslim groups of being hypocritical after Sir Ian Blair the Chief of police asked for help in policing and informing the police of suspicious characters. They have accused the police of not listening to them or either treating the people who come forwards to the police as if they were suspects themselves. This kind of reaction from the police, if true, in reaction to people who are willing to come forwards with information is not helpful. But I reserve judgement on that accusation.

On to the new laws now.

First there is the law in which the offence is an “indirect incitement to terrorism�. Now I do not claim to be a lawyer nor do I claim to be a legislator. But one can see that such a term is open and rife to misinterpretation and confusion. In my honest opinion this is a knee jerk law which is rather badly written and poorly thought out.

Secondly, whilst I admit this law is well intentioned I believe again it is flawed. In that it is an offence of “acts preparatory to terrorism”. I won’t say anything here but it’s obvious where that one could fall apart. To the people in charge a little tightening up of the language please.

Finally this law is a very nice idea in which one could cover people going to terrorist camps overseas or finding out how to build a bomb through the internet, but I would like to understand why, how or in what way shape form or manner could this help in preventing an attack? This laws only purpose would be to capture if possible any terrorists who were still alive after an attack and thus increase their prison sentences. I would also like to ask how we would know exactly that certain people had been to a terrorist training camp abroad. I mean it’s not exactly like Butlins holiday camps where we can go over to the front office and check if their names are down for a place, now is it?

I’m tired of knee jerk laws which come about and wish they would improve things which would actually improve the level of security we have in our nations, without actually impinging on our civil liberties or create horribly written laws which would fall over from a good sneeze. I’ll post up my thoughts about the solutions that would work next post.

P.S. I am reminded of something my old Jurisprudence professor once said in class. “Putting an unenforceable law on the books weakens the whole body of the law.”