Special Ed: Conservative Hero

Wait..... did I sleep through Conference Season?

No, it just seemed that way. It says something about the pointless of the modern party conference that the closest we got to an actual conservative point during the whole nightmare came from Ed Milliband.

Personally, I liked Special Ed's idea to divide businesses into 'good' and 'bad' categories with different laws and tax rates for each. It's like a liberal version of the Flat Tax, a way to sweep away bureaucratic complexity in favour of a more streamlined system. True, you could say it's a little arbitrary and open to corruption, but not noticeably more so than what we have now, and at least we won't have the pretence that it's anything other than the raw exercise of government power.

All that's without considering the other upside. In so far as the leader of Britain's main party of the left has called for the state to abandon the whole 'equal under law' thing in favour of the legal equivalent of a blank cheque, with nary a dissenting voice on the left, Special Ed has exposed the true nature of the left's civil liberties frauds. What could be more injurious to liberty than the state claiming an open-ended right to arbitrarily victimise any business it pleases? Don't ask Shami and pals though - they're too busy investigating allegations that a terrorist was given lukewarm milk on his coco-pops.

And, No, Civil Liberties Nuts Don't Support Actual Civil Liberties Either

Good news: we've now found a new source of renewable power. Stick magnets on Cast Iron Dave and his constant U-turns could power a small city.

Of course, the real question is this: which is the greater force of nature? Cameron's gutlessness, or Harperson's stupidity?

Say, what you like about Mad Hattie, but at least her room temperature IQ means she keeps letting the truth slip out. Here she is on the case against anonymity:

[Harperson] said: 'We know that it is often only after many rapes that a defendant is finally brought to court and it is only at that point, often, when previous victims find the courage to come forward.

'By making rape defendants anonymous you are going to make it harder to bring rapists to justice.'

Errr...OK.

Hey, apart from anything else, can you imagine what Harpic's like playing Cluedo:

It was Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Dagger.... or in the Kitchen with the Revolver.... Dining Room with the Spanner. How about the Garden with the Chainsaw? Listen dammit, as a member of the Rape-Industrial complex, he's clearly guilty anyway. Stop whining about the specifics!

Needless to say, the requirement that citizens be charged with committing a specific crime, at a specific time and place, is designed precisely to stop the State cobbling together Frankenstein's Case. Stripped of its Grrrrl Power! blather, Harmful's position is nothing more than the legal codification of the belief that there's no smoke without fire.

This is an actual civil liberty issue, not one of the approximately eleventy million totally, vital liberties that lurked undetected until 1997. So where are the Gitmo Groupies when we need them?

Rights Round Up

Apparently, 'free speech' now requires that you post your cv on-line.

See, that's the problem with a political monoculture: there's no one around to tell liberals that their arguments don't make a lick of sense. Try this:

The public was entitled to know how police officers behaved and the newspaper's readers were entitled to come to their own conclusions about whether it was desirable for officers to communicate such matters publicly.

So the public is enitled to find out how police officers behave but it's not desirable for police officers to tell them. A-huh!

On the other hand, some people deserve their privacy.

Civil rights group Liberty is backing the relatives of two convicted killers who claim their human rights have been breached - after police used the criminals' faces in a poster campaign.

The number of shootings in Greater Manchester dropped by 92 per cent following the arrest of gangsters Colin Joyce and Lee Amos, so they were featured in a billboard which thanked the public for coming forward with evidence against them.

But members of the two men's families are now seeking compensation from the police, claiming they weren't warned about the posters in advance, or given a chance to object.

Hmmmm.... I guess we'll never know why people call Liberty a bunch of leftist kooks.

Needless to say, the moral absurdity of the case has no impact on its likelehood of success. No, siree, Jack! It turns out that the police will be required to show they considered the impact on the rest of these dysfunctional clans of psychopaths beforehand or else (although, in their defence, neither killer has been known to express 'strong opinions').

Still, we must not let the specific absurdity blind us to the more general one:

The relatives say they've suffered increased hostility as a result of the posters which graphically show how old Joyce and Amos would look by the time they were released from jail.

Good. The mark of a civilised society is that being a scumbag does bring consequences. True, it may be impossible to prove beyind reasonable doubt that the relatives are criminals themselves (so far) but then again, no one's talking about jailing or fining them. Nope, we're talking mild social stigma, or, as I like to think of it, treating low-life vermin like the sub-human filth that they are. When exactly did we decide that gangsta baby mammas had the fundemental human right to be treated as worthwhile members of the public?

This is another reason why the hipster's faux libertarianism doesn't work. These people claim to hate Big Government, but they absolutely despise the idea of communities regulating themselves through tactics such as shaming, social ostracism and the like. It's all too suggestive of squaresville morality for these rebel tigers. The trouble is abscent that moral framework all you're left with is government, and that can never be enough - which probably explains why they're so desperate to stop anyone talking about how their idiot ideas work in practice.

The MSM: Even Sleazier Than We Thought

I realise pretty much everyone reads Laban anyway, but there may be some folks who didn't catch an incredible quote over over there a few days ago:

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council - Tameside holds regular meetings with local newspaper editors to gather information and stop sensationalist reporting which might otherwise start or add to rising tensions, e.g. in response to a Kick Racism out of Football campaign, an extremist political group wanted to picket a local football stadium. A local newspaper was going to print the story on its front page – an action that was likely to bring unwanted publicity to the picket and fuel rising community tensions. The intervention of the Community Cohesion Partnership prevented the story from being run and in the event no-one turned out for the picket.

Berwick-upon-Tweed Borough Council - The Berwick Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership (CDRP) is working with the local press/media to vet stories involving migrant workers from eastern Europe and Portugal employed in the food processing and agricultural sectors to prevent stigmatisation.

No room for misquote there. Government officials are scrutinising the media's output to prevent reporting of the wrong truth.

If nothing else, I hope folks in Tameside and Berwick aren't paying full price for their newspapers. After all, they're only getting half the news. But where are the usual suspects ? Amnesia Intentional ? Libertard ? Human Wrongs Watch ? These folks have spent years talking about the looming night of fascism, but now we have state functionaries defining what can and can't be reported, that's apparently not oppressive at all.

I guess this is what leftists mean when they talk about the Blogosphere being used for irresponsible rumour-mongering: people reporting stuff what happened without proper authorisation from the authorities.

More Fun With The Talibin

The council wants to increase fixed penalties from £50 to £110 for those who put bins out early, fail to recycle, overfill wheelie bins or put the wrong rubbish in the wrong containers.

They are asking each household to nominate one person as responsible so it will be easier for them to prosecute without having to prove who put out the offending bins.

The council is also considering interviewing suspected bin offenders under caution in procedures similar to the way police question criminals.

The draft letter, which has been seen by opposition councilors, also asks how many people live at each address, whether they have any medical conditions and if their families use disposable nappies.

So, nothing objectionable there then. Just consider what it says about modern Britain that someone can use the phrase 'suspected bin offenders' outside the field of comedy.

Apparently, householders aren't part of the solution, not part of the problem. Ditto, don't expect the civil libertards to rouse themselves. The only way Liberty and the rest of the freaks would ever take an interest is if terrorists are hiding in the bin. Until then, Mi Bin, Su Bin.

And now the punch-line:

Officials from the Conservative-run council hope the information sent back by families will make it easier to prosecute or impose fixed penalties.

Yep, it's Dave's Happy, Fun Party that's doing all this.

Tories: this is why we question your party's bona fides.

Outrage D'Jour: Safety At Work (Felons) Act 2008 Edition

Talking of state-sponsored lawlessness, PC Plod's continuing his jihad against that whole 'right to self-defence' thing. How come none of the civil liberties freaks are ever steamed about a law that all but requires innocent citizens to lay down their life or face years of legal harassment by the state ?

Oh wait...I've worked it out: they're all liberal kooks - much like the Nu Police. And again, note that no matter how much public money is wasted on pursuit of a law-abiding citizen, none of these low-lifes will so much as score a verbal reprimand.

Civil Liberties 101

What Worries Civil Liberties Freaks: Surveillance on a terror 'suspect' (ho, ho!) picks up a meeting between the scumbag-in-question and an MP

What Doesn't Worry Civil Liberties Freaks: Agents of the state kidnap a newborn child without any legal authority whatsoever.

See ? I don't know why anyone thinks these people are a bunch of liberal kooks.

Mind you, I am just shocked to find that a surveillance operation aimed at dangerous subversives ended up taping a Labour MP. Seriously though, you have to question the strategy here: if they wanted to catch him making pro-terrorist statements they should have just listened to his speeches.

Needless to say, even the folks responsible for all manner of weird and wonderful interpretations of human rights laws can't find any actual law that have been broken. The nearest the left can get is a weenie convention from the Sixties that only mentions phone tapping and commits the government not to do it, unless they really need to, in which case they'll inform Parliament, sometime.

Call it a hunch, but I'd guess an MP hanging out with the mad bomber is what these guys had in mind when they made the language used so flexible - and that's before you consider the likely response if conservatives started citing conventions from forty years ago. We'd be accused of wanting to chain homosexuals to the kitchen sink and force women back into the closet. Or something.

I guessing we're not allowed to ask what it means when a supposed moderate pals around with jihadis, and I'll guess we're definitely not allowed to wonder what it means that Mr Moderate has no qualms about revealing this to the public. Say what you like about MPs, but they're masters of reading public opinion. I guess his constituents must be equally moderate, right ?

Meanwhile, even as liberals revel in ostentatious angst over the fact the security services treats MPs like ordinary people (socialism's not as straightforward as you'd think), the case of the Nottinghamshire baby napping disappears down the memory hole.

Let's check the scorecard here: agents of the state tapping what the victim assures us was just a conversation with an old pal: scandal! Agents of the state abducting a child: business as usual.

If nothing else, in so far as the left has reconciled themselves to the idea of an unrepresentative and unaccountable group of fanatics, protected from public scrutiny, using the power of the state to destroy families, could they at least stop warning darkly about the 'thin end of the wedge' and the like - we're pretty much up to the middle of the wedge by now. Ditto, they can drop the portentous references to Pastor Niemoller as well. For the average citizen, if they do come for you, they're more likely to be social workers than anyone in the security services.

Outrage D'Jour

Doubtless, all those folks in the civil liberties lobby will be taking this case up anytime now, right ?

I'm thinking we can safely say PC has gone pretty much out of control when laying a wreath counts as a controversial gesture.

Still, you can't blame the Prison Service for refusing to fund the wreath themselves - not when they've got sound investments like this to support.

Don't Mention It

While Trevor Philips was taking on all those fascists who want to exclude stuff from the history books just because it never actually happened, his minons were providing the yang to that yin, by trying to ban simple expressions of fact.

Even if you accept the insane PC tenet that there are words which are so evily evil that merely to utter them is worthy of public execution, this guy didn't use any of them. He simply called things what the dictionary does. But no - turning public debate into a game of verbal minesweeper was only ever a fringe benefit of PC. It was always aimed at fencing off whole areas of public debate.

Hey, not to ram the point home, but here's what the Thought Police's spokesmoron actually said:

The organisation's director Chris Myant said they were taking action under section 31 of the Race Relations Act which "made it unlawful to bring pressure on someone to act in a discriminatory way".

Well, firstly, libs: if you don't want us to call you a bunch of snivelling wimps, you might want to think again about claiming a petition constitutes 'pressure'. But. Still. Let's think about what we're discussing here: huge amounts of public money being used to provide freebies for the people who shall not be named. So now opposing a massive boondogle for a Designated Victim group = discrimination. Presumably, if Call Me Dave announced a proposal to give lesbians free trips to Santa Barbara - and who's to say he wouldn't ? - it'd be equally discriminatory to oppose that, right ?

The CRE's position isn't just anti-free speech, it's anti-democratic. If people aren't allowed to discuss what the government does, what's left ? In fact, the CRE's position is so extreme, I understand that Liberty offered to represent the guy concerned, until they found out he hadn't tried to murder anyone.

Still, we do get the perfect example of liberal fascism:

Chris Myant said the act existed to "enable solutions to be found through debate" in which public expressions of prejudice play no part.

Yes, it's public debate, but you'll be arrested if you disagree with them. See ? Nothing totalitarian about that.

(and a tip of the hat to JuliaM)

Civil Liberties Campaigns ? It's All A Shami

So farewell then, David Copperfield. In retrospect, it stands to reason that he wouldn't have outed himself until after he'd finished digging an escape tunnel, except not really.

Copperfield was never a bomb thrower, an ideologue or an activist. True, there was a vaguely social conservative point to some of his posts, but compared to the agenda-driven nonsense emanating from some of the other players in the legal system, this was very thin gruel.

Of course, we should never underestimate the ability of the left's Offense Mining Squad to find something objectionable even in a Christmas cracker, but the point is that Copperfield was no political firebrand, he was a public servant, writing about how a public service goes about serving the public. In a democratic society, the mere act of writing about how the government goes about its work should not place a man in danger of losing his livelihood, and that goes double where those overtly pushing more politically palatable messages are given somewhat more latitude.

All of which is by way of saying that the persecution of people who question the official figures for tractor production is far more offensive to the spirit of liberty than anything to do with counter-terrorism, yet the supposed civil liberties campaigners metaphorically chaining themselves to the railings outside Tora Bora have nothing to say about the naked suppression of free speech. So screw them.

"We Want To See More Anguish"

You know what's most annoying about libs ? Everything. But if I had to choose one thing, it's would be their constant insistence that holding liberal principles in modern Britain is exactly like being a dissident in Soviet Russia. Please - telling Jew jokes at the Hamas Annual Dinner takes more courage.

The latest example of liberals lauding each other for heroically yapping the party line is the Indie's hagiographic profile of terrorist groupie Shami Chakrabarti. It's great to see that she's finally found an issue on the right scale for her world view - of which, more later - but as for the rest....mearrrrgh!

Shami Chakrabarti is squirming as we end our interview. "I feel as if I just shopped a friend," she says. That this champion of individual rights over the might of the state would ever turn into a rat, a stoolie, a blower or a grass seems preposterous.

Yep, Little Miss Not-Anti-Police takes the same position on helping the police as is recommended by gansta rappers.

Since she joined the civil rights group Liberty in 2001, on the day before 9/11, this tiny, determined, second-generation immigrant has been one of the biggest irritants for New Labour's authoritarians this side of Afghanistan's Tora Bora caves.

Yowser! She really is stuck in September 10.

It's not that she's spouting fiery rhetoric of the sort heard during peace protests, climate change camps or anti-globalisation riots.

No, she just enables the lunatic fringe.

I get no sense that an army of activists is ready to follow her on to the streets, chanting slogans such as "Give us liberty or give us death".

I guess that's the closest we'll ever get to an acknowledgement that there is, to a rough approximation, no public support whatsoever for Liberty's vile, pro-terrorist drivel. Fortunately, Liberty - the touchy-feely, human rights group - doesn't need to soil itself dealing with actual members of the public. Nope, they take the direct route:

Chakrabarti, 38, is very much part of the establishment, a former Home Office lawyer and member of the board of governors of the British Film Institute who was made a CBE in the Queen's birthday honours this year.

Yep, final proof of the kabuki theatre nature of the government's anti-terrorism policy, based as it is on headline-grabbing initiatives which, gosh darn it, keep getting blocked by non-adversarial lawsuits from lunatic fringe groups like Liberty.

Indeed, she likes to stress the things that she's not against. "I'm not anti-American," she says, twice, perhaps mistaking my Canadian accent.

Like I keep saying, conservatives should try that - we should claim we're not 'anti-lawyer', we just think you should be allowed to kill them with impunity.

Then a while later: "I'm not anti-police; I'm anti-police state."

Further proof that liberal ideology is driven by bumper stickers. What exactly does it mean to say that you're 'anti-police state' ? Who isn't ? If nothing else, could these people at least stop yapping about how nuanced they are ?

She's not even anti-killing, pointing out that it's allowed, in tightly constrained circumstances, under the global human rights framework that emerged after the Second World War.

You know, if a conservative based his legal philosophy on a document produced in the 1940s, he'd be accused of wanting to bring back the days of 'no Irish, no blacks, no dogs'. I guess traditional values aren't so bad after all.

Of course, libs need to argue by quoting hoary, old bits of post-war nonsense - once they get pinned down to the specifics of what they really believe, their support tends to drop off, so it's either pillaging the History Channel, or outright lying - as exemplified next:

But what isn't allowed, ever, is torture, she says. "It's unforgivable."

Hence the latest friction between Liberty and the Government. Britain intervened last month in a case before the European Court of Human Rights which, if it goes Whitehall's way, would make torture at least excusable if not forgivable. "The British Government is trying to persuade the court that, in the context of deportation, the absolute prohibition on torture shouldn't be so absolute."

Really ? Are we actually talking about 'torture', or are we talking about the vague possibility of torture at some unspecified future time and place ? To endorse Liberty's position is to believe that the burden of proof is on Britain to prove there is no possibility of terrorists being tortured - a logical, let alone legal, absurdity.

That's without considering other issues. Consider that the underlying assumption of Liberty's position is an essentially Victorian one, namely that anywhere that doesn't fly the Union Flag is a barbaric hellhole. Ditto, surely the right of countries to control their own borders is pretty basic ? Or, to put it another way, if the 'human rights framework' really meant countries were obliged to offer sanctuary to dangerous criminals, it wouldn't have taken fifty years for anyone to find that out.

The Government might yet succeed; by the time Liberty and other civil rights groups found out about the hearing, it was too late to get permission to put their arguments to the court.

Yep, these are the guys we want running our counter-terrorism policies.

The case, being heard before 17 justices in the Strasbourg court's Grand Chamber, was brought by Nassim Saadi, 23, a Tunisian legally resident in Italy. Rome, armed with a promise from the government in Tunis that Saadi won't be hurt, has been trying to deport him since his conviction on charges of criminal conspiracy and fraud, which he is appealing.

Apparently, the threat of torture is so serious, he's prepared to do anything to avoid deportation - except stop committing loads of criminal offences.

His lawyers contend that the Tunisian promise is unenforceable, and that torture is a matter of daily routine in the North African state, where Saadi, the brother of a suicide bomber, has been convicted, in absentia, of terrorism.

The left's new position: you can't trust the wogs.

"It would reopen the Chahal problem," says Chakrabarti, referring to a 1996 ruling by the court that the possibility of torture could never be balanced against other issues, such as the threat to national security that a prisoner might pose.

Or, to put it another way, no amount of innocent deaths can justify a known terrorist being inconvenienced.

You can understand why these people feel the need to lie about what they believe.

Karamjit Singh Chahal, a suspected Sikh separatist, feared he would be tortured if Britain returned him to India. The court agreed. "This is the seminal judgement on deportation to a place of torture," she says.

'Separatist' ? Is that in the sense of separating people's limbs from their bodies ? Victimhood poker strikes again. Libs in general, and the BBC in particular, slobber over the Subcontinent, but when it comes to protecting explosively-minded psychos, suddenly the world's largest democracy is 'a place of torture'.

The 1996 ruling has had far-reaching consequences. "It led, in a way, to the Belmarsh policy." Unable, because of the Chahal ruling, to deport people it thought were potential terrorists, the Government instead locked them up, indefinitely, under the legal fiction that they might someday be deported under immigration law.

'Potential' in the sense of 'convicted', but only by dirty wog courts.

"Then they went to the House of Lords and that lovely man Lord Goldsmith said this is a three-walled prison, because they are free to leave at any time."

Well, yeah! If you're free to leave at any time, you're not locked up, are you ? The only place these terrorists could not go was Britain. Again, it's a basic duty of government to protect the citizenry from foreign invaders.

Chahal is also at the heart of the row over "extraordinary rendition" or, as Chakrabarti insists with a call-a-spade-a-spade bluntness, "kidnapping and torture".

This must be 'call-a-spade-a-spade bluntness' in the sense of 'lying'.

Chahal established that it wasn't enough to say "I'm not torturing anyone". The state has an obligation to make sure that no one else does it either.

So, they're still coming up dry on actual proof that the government is involved in torture, but some other folks might be, so that means the British government is still guilty, but we're still not allowed to menton how Liberty helps enable terrorism. No obligation on them not to help blow people up.

Britain's role in extraordinary rendition – the "turning of a blind eye" to US flights carrying detainees to countries that practise torture, – still hasn't been properly investigated, she complains.

Conservatives should do this too - claim that our opponents are involved in bestiality, only we don't have any actual evidence because it hasn't been 'properly investigated'.

"It leaves a bitter taste. If we don't acknowledge what happened, how do we prevent it happening again?"

So the lack of evidence is actually proof of guilt. Maybe we ought to apply that principle to suspected terrorists ?

The ruling may be the biggest legal weapon in her arsenal, but it is also the cause of her discomfort this morning. It is the last day of her summer holiday but she's already busy responding to journalists about the fate of Learco Chindamo, the murderer of headmaster Philip Lawrence. And she's taken time away from her husband and five-year-old son to talk to me. Wearing a moss-green velvet jacket, she sits beneath a bust of Plato in the library of County Hall, the former home of the Greater London Council, now a Marriott hotel.

See, that's what 95% of liberal intellectualism boils down to: pointless name dropping. She's sitting under Plato, so we know she's smart - and never mind whether or not an allusion to the author of 'The Republic' really meshes with a supposed interest in civil liberties.

So far, so ludicrous. But what's coming up next is too perfect for parody:

Behind her are oak bookcases stuffed with statute books and encyclopaedias dating back to the 19th century. But it's the books on the table, between the latte glasses, that are making her feel a turncoat.

"I'm probably the biggest Harry Potter fan over the age of 12," she says as I pass her one of J K Rowling's heavier volumes. "Yes," she says finally, biting out the words with disappointment. "Yes, Harry Potter has tortured someone. That was a war crime."

You know, I'm thinking that if Sir Andrew Green at Migration Watch gave an interview in which he cited 'Lord of the Rings' as an example of the dangers of open borders, you wouldn't need to wait for a fat blogger to tell you about it. Instead, we get paragraphs on the vital issues raised by wizardry, with the sole compensation of a too-perfect-for-Shakespeare insight into the liberal worldview:

".....There is a strong moral tale running through the books," says Chakrabarti. "But they're not Bible stories; Harry has all sorts of flaws." Still, she thinks, the final book should not have breezed over this central ethical issue so lightly. "There could have been more reflection. We want to see more anguish. Even just a passage of guilt, his reflections about using the Unforgivable Curses, would have been a good thing to include.

Well, quite. It's gets better:

"And, it wasn't even the ticking-bomb scenario," she says. "That's the big question that is supposed to wobble people like me: 'But look, it's a nuclear bomb and Paul is sitting there and he's gloating that he knows where it is and it's going to go off in an hour but only if you don't get the information out of him.'"

I'm still deciding how I feel about being cast as a nuclear terrorist when she makes a surprising admission. "The honest answer to that question – what would you do – is 'I don't know'. The subsidiary answer is: I might well try to slap him around a bit but I would know I was doing something unforgivable and I would expect the consequences."

Saving tens of thousands of innocent lives is 'something unforgivable' deserving of consequences ? And these people want to be taken seriously when they talk about counter-terrorism ?

The ticking nuclear bomb situation has never arisen in real life, but it's often trotted out as an excuse for torture, and has been cited, in milder forms, by US soldiers surveyed in Iraq.

If libs accepted the same level of evidence for involvement in terrorism that they do for supposed US atrocities in Iraq, Cat Stevens, George Galloway and the whole of the MCB would have been jailed for life years ago.

There are other defences, too, all of them earning Chakrabarti's contempt. One proposed by the White House is that it's not really torture unless it causes organ failure. The upshot is that, in the real world as in fiction, torture can be condoned if it is used by the good guys. The problem with that reasoning, says Chakrabarti, is that members of al-Qa'ida see themselves as being on the side of righteousness, too.

It's a conundrum alright. Who are we to say that sawing someone's head off is a 'bad' thing ?

Apparently, torture is always wrong, even when its not actually torture and it saves thousands of lives, but flying airliners into buildings ? It's all a matter of perspective.

You might think that the threat of terror is the great weakness for a civil libertarian. But Chakrabarti is giving no ground. "They're cheapening everything we're supposedly promoting in the world.

You cheapen a cause by fighting for it ? I guess the only way to really defend freedom is to join Liberty and the rest of the nihilistic trash explaining why 'freedom' and 'slavery' are just words.

You cannot torture people in democracy's name," she says, adding: "They are recruiting the extremists and terrorists.

See, it's all our fault, after all. The multiple murders, rapes and, yes, even torture committed by Murdering Mo' - that's just a side-issue, unrelated to the criminality of his followers.

We are the people capable of having the argument with the angry hothead who says, 'Look at these pictures of how my Muslim brothers are being treated in Guantanamo and Chechnya.'

Hey, when you call the terrorists in Gitmo 'my brothers', you've pretty much lost the right to call yourself a moderate.

Still, I'm thinking that if the libs really had pictures of torture being carried out at Gitmo, you'd need to be living on the moon to avoid having them rammed down your throat.

But let's - for the sake of this ludicrous argument - run with the idea that there are millions of peace-loving Muslims being driven to terrorism by reports of supposed atrocities. Then let's see how Libety's claims check out:

Torture at Gitmo: Lie!

CIA Torture Flights: Lie!

Imprisonment at Belmarsh: Lie!

Hmmm..... I'm seeing a pattern here. In other words, following Chakrabarti's own logic, Liberty's bogus atrocity stories help create terrorists. True, the case may not be watertight, but if we apply the same logic to Liberty that they want to apply to the government on torture, clearly it's down to them to prove that they don't encourage terrorism.

"Like lots of British lawyers, I'm firmly of the view you're better sticking to the crime model than the war model," just as Britain did when faced with republican terrorism in Ireland, says Chakrabarti.

....because that worked so well, right ?

"The hawks should object to [the war model] as well, because it allows criminals to call themselves soldiers."

Unless the right doesn't really care what they call themselves, just as long as we can call them 'the deceased'.

See, that's kind of the big difference between left and right. For Liberty and the rest of the PoMO wasters, the war has no reality, it's all about fashionable posturing and preachy sermonising. Hence why we get this:

She remains optimistic that support for civil liberties will rise again. But her view of the future of political violence is bleak. "Terrorism will never be vanquished completely," she says, "The 'war on terror' goes on for ever."

Yes, that's the difference. The right objects to the slaughter of innocents, but to the left the problem with terrorism is that it makes it hard for libs to whine about made-up garbage like civil liberties.

Liberals intrinsic idiocy is a pest and a menace at the best of times, but in war it's positively life-threatening. Still, at least we've got one of them on record now, with the left's real position. Conservatives want to win the war, libs meanwhile have their own objective: 'more anguish'.

Big Huge Enormous Shocker! (Bumped For A Big Update)

On the plus side, at least the Learco Chindamo fiasco has shed some light on the folks running our legal system. Consider the head of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, Sir Henry Hodge. How come he's so keen to ensure a murderous scumbag gets to stay in Britain ?

Well, it's funny you should ask because....

Sir Henry is the former chairman of the National Council for Civil Liberties - now known as Liberty.

Yep, the guy supposedly guarding our borders is a former head of one of the most wacked-out lefty nut groups in the known universe. Suddenly, it all becomes clear!

UPDATE:

Actually, his whole CV reads like something from Richard Littlejohn. I guess this must be what the Left means about having an independent judiciary.

UPDATE II:

Down in the comments, Umbongo points out good evidence that our man on the tribunal, the 'ordinary guy in the street Joe Six-Pack' lay member, may not be entirely impartial.

Full-Contact Writing

I enjoyed reading this article, not only because it's good in itself, but also because it's great to find an MSM outlet still prepared to carry this sort of thing. Still, I've got to quibble with one thing: despite their best efforts, lawyers aren't actually sapping the public's will to fight. If they were, they would be able to change the law the old-fashioned way, instead of needing to rely on activist judges to pull insane precedents out of thin air.

Indeed, this is one of the central humbuggeries of the whole thing. For all that these freaks talk about freedom, their whole philosophy is overtly fascistic. True, they say, elected representatives with a mandate from the public can play around passing legislation, but the actual law itself is whatever is decided on by a narrow clique of suitably-enlightened Liberals. Hence, the rise of the philosopher kings on the bench, pronouncing on the way our laws should be. What could be more inimical to freedom than that ?

Liberals In Heaven

I'm with Ross on the Conrad Black case. Even leaving aside the prosecution's Frankenstein's monster of a case, the outbreak of Tourettes this verdict has induced in the MSM speaks well of Black.

Winner of 'Best in Show' is undoubtedly the Telegraph, with its jovial allusions to prison rape. All this talk of 'arrogance' and the like just emphasises how weak the substance of the case actually was. Reading through this thread at the animal house, It seems that the main charges are that Black was right-wing, rich and married to Barbara Amiel.

Come to think of it, a man from Mars reading that thread would have trouble telling who was actually convicted, Black or his missus. According to the right-on comrades, Amiel is a 'harridan', 'Lady Macbeth' and 'Amielda Marcos'. I haven't seen such an outpouring of misogynistic lunacy since, well, the last time Liberals ran into a smart, right-wing woman. On the other hand, our progressive friends do show exceptional restraint - for them - in taking until the fourth comment for any allusion to the other reason Amiel will never get invited to speak at a British uni.

All of which is by way of saying that this is further proof for my theory that if you want to know the true nature of Liberals, watch what they do when they think they have the upper hand. It's not just the way PC falls by the wayside once a Designated Victim leaves the collective. Liberals have spent years slobbering over the piercing social insights of all manner of scumbags. Hell, kill enough people and you can even get published by the Guardian. But now they've nailed a right-winger on a charge no one can explain in less than 100 words, they've got their Judge Dredd on ?

Ditto, you'd think people that profess to lie awake at night worrying about civil liberties would be a little more cautious about the idea of the state trawling through private contracts years after the fact, claiming to detect frauds that raised not an eyebrow at the time.

At the end of the day, it's all tactical. Liberalism, being an essentially nihilistic creed, everything is expendable for the greater good of beating the right. Don't look for coherency: Black was a rightist, that's all you need to know.

Moore From The Tories

Further proof of the Tories sloughing off extremists and attracting a younger, hipper, just plain nicer crowd: top choice on ‘Webcameron’ is another contribution from the Truthers. Meanwhile, Iain Dale – a Tory A-Lister remember - continues his flirtation with Trutherism.

Let’s leave aside Dale’s absurd point that only some of the 84 BBC interviews were softball city – other than to ask if can we have some kind of hint in future if it’s going to an interview or a meeting of Sob Sisters Anonymous ? Ditto, let’s state that, yes, for the sake of argument, the suspect is totally innocent of these specific charges. Well, call me old-fashioned, but refraining from sawing off heads should not – in and off itself - qualify someone for a soft-focus interview with the BBC. To put it another way, I wonder what Dale’s reaction would be if the BBC offered this kind of kid gloves questioning to a guy ranting about gays. Of course, Abu Bakr probably doesn’t go a whole bundle on hanging out with all the boys, but that’s kind of the point: we aren’t actually told anything about him. The nuance fanatics at Al Beeb are running the story with nary a hint of context or background.

I believe the phrase that pays is ‘hoist by your own petard’. The BBC has been pushing the line that the vast majority of peaceful Muslims are terrified by the thought that they could be arrested at the drop of a hat by racist police picking names out of the phone book. Whatever could have given them that idea ? Well, how about a broadcaster which allows a suspect in a terrorism case to rant and rave without any kind of context whatsoever ?

Instinct tells me that Abu Bakr has left quite a paper trail. No, that alone isn’t grounds for arrest, but neither does that mean the Left is justified in presenting him as some kind of everyman martyr to the Nu Gestapo.

But what really sticks in the throat is Dale’s characterisation of the debate as between ‘civil libertarians and authoritarians’. Really ? Personally, I’m thinking the authoritarians might be the ones lining up with Marxists and Islamofascists. On the other hand, the anti-dhimmi camp stretches from Nick Cohen to the hard Right (also known as ‘real Conservatives’). If we’re seeking to impose some kind of sinister hidden agenda, it must be a doozy to get all these folks on board. Well, you know, either that or we just want to win the war.

That’s irony number one right there. The ‘authoritarians’ turn out not to want to impose any particular agenda after all. Meanwhile, the ‘civil liberties’ crowd worships at the altar of unelected and unaccountable power, insisting that each and every effusion from the moonbat-infested fever swamps of the courts be treated as the new Magna Carta, even in the teeth of overwhelming public opposition.

Are there real ‘authoritarians’ seeking to use the war to chip away at important liberties ? Probably, but here’s irony number two: in insisting on a Stalingrad strategy whereby even the most obnoxious examples of judicial overreach are defended to the last man and the last round, these ‘civil libertarians’ make it easier for real authoritarians to argue for throwing out any number of babies with the junk jurisprudence bathwater.

Outrage D'Jour

Via the comments over at B-BBC, we learn what our PC PCs really think of political opponents:

An-ex TV host wants compensation from police over an alleged hate incident for which he was never prosecuted...

The 65-year-old says despite the case being dropped, his name is on a "homophobic incidents register" and a rude e-mail was sent out about him.

First up, let's review the 'alleged hate incident':

Mr Page was arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after a pro-hunting speech he made in Frampton-on-Severn.

He said supporters of the traditional country way of life "should be given the same rights as blacks, Muslims and gays".

The Crown Prosecution did not proceed with the case because of insufficient evidence.

'Insufficient evidence' ? Well, that's technically true, but only in the sense that there's 'insufficient evidence' that the moon is made of green cheese.

See, this is how Liberals argue. They advance absurd charges, then when they're blown out of the water, they cite the charge itself as evidence of guilt.

Come to think of it, where are the usual suspects ? Liberals keep waxing pious about how even the most depraved have their fundemental human rights, so how about folks who've never even been charged with anything. Here it is: the police have been caught keeping secret lists of people whose only crime has been to hold unapproved views. How come Shami, Cherie and the rest of the Liberal deadbeats aren't on the case ?

Like we can't guess. Not that the whole 'human rights' thing is just an excuse for judicial activism though.

But that's not even the best of it. The same people who go to absurd lengths to avoid calling a spade a spade have no qualms about laughing along at the thought of their opponents dying:

The offending e-mail, regarding a trip Mr Page was making to Kenya, said: "Hopefully, he'll get eaten by a crocodile".

A Gloucestershire Police spokesman said: "In this specific case, the officer's choice of words is unfortunate.

"The statement made was meant in a light-hearted manner and was not intended to cause offence. We would like to apologise if this was the case."

Gosh, why would public servants expressing their desire for the death of political opponents cause offense ? It's a mystery alright.

Needless to say, the bar seems to be set a little higher here than in some other cases. So what was it that Robin Page said that was so inflammatory ? Ah yes:

He said supporters of the traditional country way of life "should be given the same rights as blacks, Muslims and gays".

Life, Liberty And The Fundemental Human Right To Blow Stuff Up

Yep. Someday soon we’re going to find out that Shami Chakrabarti is being secretly employed by the Home Office. I actually think the Times is being too nice to her. She certainly pushes a crypto-anarchic view of civil liberties, but only when dealing with fellow Leftists.

Certainly, there’s been nothing equivalent to the ACLU’s famous defence of the right of the KKK Nazis to march. Au contrair, while Shami keeps a stock of onions ready for use whenever the rights of Islamofascists are impinged upon, she’s perfectly OK with restrictions on areas such as free speech, press freedom and self-defence.

Back to the main point though, namely the absolutely toxic effect of these wackos on the case for liberty. Lest anyone bring it up, Ben Franklin warned about giving up essential freedoms for temporary security. The defining characteristic of the civil liberties loons has been their belief that even the loopiest commandments handed down by judicial activists should be defended as though they were Magna Carta. The thing is though, if Judge Moonbats’ rantings have the same status as our ancient rights, then those rights have the status of wacky rulings from bewigged activists, and that makes it easier for the real authoritarians to say ‘the hell with it, let’s start again’.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Rop points out that even some on the Left are becoming disenchanted with Liberty's humbuggery.