[Jacqui] Smith tabled a series of concessions yesterday which ministers were keen to portray as significant without appearing politically weak.
The amendments were intended to improve parliamentary scrutiny by requiring the home secretary to report to parliament within a week of taking the power to detain beyond 28 days. The power is also to be up for renewal every 30 days instead of every 60.
In the most contested amendment, to go beyond 28 days the home secretary would be required to have received independent legal advice that the country faced an event or situation that amounted to “a grave exceptional terrorist threat”.
The home secretary would also have to tell MPs that such a threat had occurred or was occurring.
The Home Office claimed this significantly raised the threshold and was equivalent to the phraseology in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 on emergencies.
If the threat is that serious, then why not use the Civil Contingncies Act 2004? Because frankly, the ‘Trust me, I’m a Home Secretary’ concession doesn’t wash.
I am really not that happy with the fact that every news outlet is splashing around the news that Prince William, second in line to the throne, is going to be sitting on a boat in the Caribbean for a few months.
We are at war on a number of fronts, with terrorists having access to weaponry and technology equal to that of our allies.
Am I alone in thinking this level of openness may be a tad rash?
Fuck me!! How shrill are you nadine?
I don’t think you need to worry about the hier to the throne just yet.
You say we are at war with terrorists who have access to arms equal to ours. But from what I’ve heard, they don’t have aircraft carriers, destroyers, fighter jets, tanks, laser guided missiles, torpedoes, intercontinental missiles and a fuck load of the little gadgety things that soldiers have.
What they do have are mortars, rocket launchers, suicide bombers using homemade explosives, some of which gets as far as the detonator going off before going splat in a soggy lump on the ground and they could probably get their hands on a boat if they wanted to. All of which is not really comparable to a modern standing army.
You could say that for all their technological disadvantage they’re not dong too badly. But then, they’re still not as successful as the pIRA were and secondly it’s a fuckload harder to sneak up on someone in the middle of the carabean when there’s no one about that it is to drive a car or lorry, packed with explosives, through some gates.
1) He can’t be fucking arsed to find out where his target is.
2) He’s going to use a, shall we say, method of blowing people up that doesn’t have the most reliable of histories.
And we’re supposed to be scared of these clowns? The only thing I’m bothered about is the standard of the education this twats’ been giving.
With reference to the recreation of the ‘liquid bombs’. Obsolete:
…this is the experts who know what they’re doing using the exact same materials as the rank amateurs were meant to, and the danger of rather than explosives blowing up a plane but instead going off in the face of the bomb-maker was so great that the detonator had to be inserted using a remote-controlled machine. We’re meant to assume that if this plot was going to come to fruition that the 8 men were going to overcome the volatility of the materials they were using, something the experts couldn’t, succeed in smuggling the bombs onto an airplane without the explosives going off prematurely on the journey to the airport and then the plane, and then again manage, after fully constructing the bomb, to detonate it without anyone else noticing what they were up to with an explosion so successful that it would result in the deaths of everyone on board.
The Government’s powers to freeze the bank accounts of people it declares to be terrorist suspects are unlawful, the High Court has ruled.
Mr Justice Collins said that asset-freezing orders, introduced by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, had the “most drastic effect” on the lives of British citizens, who were not allowed to know the detail of the allegations against them.
In a fiercely critical judgment, he added that the financial sanctions were unfair and absurd, and breached the fundamental rights of individuals.
This judge seems to have his head screwed on right, doesn’t he.
The judge said: “I take the view that the Orders in Council [the Terrorism Order and the Al-Qaeda and Taleban Order], as they stand, are not lawful. So far as the Terrorism Order is concerned, (this is) largely because it applies a far lower threshold – suspicion – than is justified by the UN resolution.”
“On the al-Qaeda order, it is because there is no fair means of enabling the individual to obtain any relief against the listing, because he doesn’t know what is alleged against him.”
He added that he had real concerns that the orders had introduced a criminal offence, of assisting a listed person, without consulting parliament
