statism watch

Your telescreen will shortly be looking back. Can there be any doubt that we’re being placed under the control of international ‘governance’ when world leaders are in the news almost every week now calling for the erosion or elimination of national sovereignty, and we can see the same legislation being adopted by different countries?

Flashback: UK wants industry to track Internet users as plans scrapped for state database | US Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police | New law to give police access to online exchanges | China restarts online crackdown | Australia to Implement Mandatory Internet Censorship | Sweden approves wiretapping law

Chris Williams, The Register
May 3, 2009

‘Climb down’ on central database was ‘a sideshow’

Spy chiefs are already spending hundreds of millions of pounds on a mass internet surveillance system, despite Jacqui Smith’s announcement earlier this week that proposals for a central warehouse of communications data had been dumped on privacy grounds.

The system – uncovered today by The Register and The Sunday Times – is being installed under a GCHQ project called Mastering the Internet (MTI). It will include thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers’ networks, as well as massive computing power at the intelligence agency’s Cheltenham base, “the concrete doughnut”.

Leaving aside domestic crises for a moment, let’s have a close look at Pakistan and the growing inflammation in the tribal areas. We know that the US airlifted the Taliban out of Afghanistan and into the Pakistani tribal areas during the invasion of Afghanistan, in the infamous ‘airlift of evil’. We know that the CIA funded these same insurgent groups – then known as ‘muhajideen’ – during the Russian war in Afghanistan. We know, from a Press TV report, that the CIA maintains secret bases in Pakistan for their drone fleet and god knows what else. We know that the Pakistani military intelligence, the ISI – a client organization of the CIA – is running the ‘terrorist camps’ in Pakistan as Omar Khyam revealed. And finally, we know that the CIA isn’t averse to funding ‘Al-Qaeda’ insurgent groups (within Iran) to destabilize the region, generally, as Sy Hersh has reported. So what are we to make of the insurgency in the SWAT, pitting the CIA’s former(?) fundamentalist pawns versus Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps‘ Pakistan won’t devote their regular army to the operation , since it decamped to the border with India following the attacks on Mumbai. (Another highly suspect operation.) And the CIA has been bombing the hell out of Pashtun villages in the mountains, so if they’re not covertly fronting yet another insurgency, they’re certainly flushing the players onto the field and enabling destabilization. Though the thesis of the article below is one of incompetence and corruption spawning tribal genocides and cross-border terror, perhaps the lavish amounts of foreign aid that continue to prop up the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus are simply the reward for a job well done.

Flashback: Pakistan is ‘abdicating to the Taliban,’ says Clinton | US military may escalate ‘war on terror’ by striking deeper into Pakistan | Report: CIA runs secret bases in Pakistan | Don’t-ask-don’t-tell Policy: Pakistan and U.S. Have Tacit Deal On Airstrikes | US Allowed Taliban, Al-Qaeda Airlift Evacuation

Mustafa Qadri, The Guardian UK
May 3, 2009

The answer to why Pakistan’s mighty army seems impotent against Taliban insurgents is that it is more mafia than military

No institution dominates Pakistan like its army. The armed forces account for 20% of Pakistan’s national budget, totalling $5bn last year according to official statistics. But the actual figure, already staggering for a country with high levels of illiteracy and malnutrition, is likely to be much higher. The army has been practically unaccountable since the very foundation of the country – last year’s figures were the first it has publicly released since 1965.

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Flashback: Parade of excuses continues as Ottawa denies citizen’s repatriation | Supporters defy law, buy plane ticket for Montrealer stuck in Sudan | Ottawa balks at travel permit for man trapped in Sudan | CSIS faces review in Khadr case | Family of Canadian stranded by no-fly list to make public appeal

Paul Koring, The Globe and Mail
May 3, 2009

Canadian agents secretly interrogated Canadian Abousfian Abdelrazik in a Sudanese jail as early as October of 2003, while keeping the rest of the government and his family in the dark about his whereabouts.

Newly obtained government documents, now in the possession of The Globe and Mail, also show that in a secret briefing to then foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier, officials admitted as recently as last year that Mr. Abdelrazik had been originally imprisoned in Khartoum at the request of mysterious ‘Canadian’ authorities.

The briefing note for Mr. Bernier, who had signed documents seeking Mr. Abdelrazik’s removal from a UN terrorist blacklist, was dated February, 2008. It confirmed: ‘We were not informed of his arrest until November 2003, when Sudanese authorities advised us he was detained at the request of the government of Canada (please see attached memo for more detail).’

That eight-page memo apparently detailing which Canadian authorities arranged with Sudan’s notorious secret police to arrest and imprison Mr. Abdelrazik has been cleared for release ‘ but only with every single word, including the page numbers, blacked out.

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For the UK, that’s one tiny first step to rolling back the invasive infringements on liberty that people have been subject to ever since the spectre of terror was elevated to the level of ongoing, continuous crisis.

Jamie Doward, The Observer
May 3, 2009

DNA profiles of almost a million innocent people are to be destroyed as part of a major overhaul of the police national database. They include people who have been arrested and never charged, and those taken to court but found not guilty.

Civil rights groups gave a cautious welcome to the proposals – which will be announced by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, this week – but said more needed to be done.

An estimated 800,000 of the 5.1m DNA profiles on the database belong to people in England and Wales who have no criminal conviction.

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