This entry was posted on
Thursday, December 8th, 2005 at
9:41 am and is filed
under It’s War! It’s Legal! It’s Lovely!, The War on Stupid, Tony ‘King Blair.
Full text: Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture (video available here): What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?
No, it’s not dead… it’s just subject to an ongoing cull.
BBC – Activist convicted under demo law: A peace campaigner has been convicted under a new law banning unauthorised protests from taking place within half a mile of Westminster. Maya Anne Evans, 25, a vegan cook from Hastings, was found guilty of breaching Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. She was arrested in October after reading out names of soldiers killed in Iraq at central London’s Cenotaph.
Independent – Acts of defiance against war turned ordinary people into criminals: In three different British courtrooms yesterday, three ordinary people stood accused of three very different crimes, but all based simply on their opposition to the war in Iraq.
You can add these names to the long list of those who have dared to stand up for what is right and been punished as a result. We’re talking arrests, we’re talking sackings, we’re talking character assassination and media evisceration.
Katharine Gun: What has to be understood is that most whistle-blowers are not natural activists – this one certainly wasn’t. We usually work in anonymous jobs, far from the spotlight. We are not campaigners, or journalists, or wannabe celebrities, craving a platform. Our conscience tells us we have to reveal what we know. We do that, we blow the whistle and, overnight, the whole media circus descends on us.
The new Tory team should be going straight for Blair’s throat, but yesterday – at David Cameron’s much-awaited PMQ debut as leader – it was left to the Lib-Dems to ask about torture and ‘rendition’.
This is not good enough.
Tony Blair can’t be waited out, or smoked out… he needs to be thrown out.
The threat of terror is real – the ‘war’ on terror is a lie: And since September 2001, Tony Blair and his cohorts have been either misrepresenting the terrorist threat, manipulating the terrorist threat, mismanaging the terrorist threat, and/or misrepresenting and manipulating the terrorist threat in a way that amounts to gross mismanagement.
If David Cameron is going to act on this, he will want to do so now. He can start by backing EDM 1088 and unleashing the new shadow foreign secretary on Jack Straw.
Tip for William: If this government is going to rely on denial-of-all-knowledge regarding torture, then Uzbekistan is the key. Start here.
UPDATE – BBC – Lords reject torture evidence use: Secret evidence which might have been obtained by torture cannot be used against terror suspects in UK courts, the law lords have ruled. The ruling means the home secretary will have to review all cases where evidence from other countries might have been obtained in this way.
The throat, David. Go for the throat.
UPDATE – I overheard this in B3ta, and it tickled me greatly: As Rob Newman says… Americans are starting to feel like there are just 2 countries in the world; the USA and ‘The Rest of The World’. Ironically the flag for ‘The Rest of the World’ is the same as the flag for the USA, except that it’s on fire.
UPDATE (9 Dec) – The cull continues… Brian Haw has just been arrested.
