Coxology

Get A Few Batteries…

Police constable Zeeshaan Chaudry describes in today’s News of the World how he can “fit up” anyone he wants as a terrorist - and ten years jail time.

“Get a few batteries”, says PC Chaudry, “put wires around them, strip the wires to make it look like he is making bombs and that. Put them in his pocket. Just get a piece of paper from the internet, how to make explosives. Tell me you are meeting this geezer in the pub and I will come along and find all this stuff on him. “I can get him ten years man… ten years! We say he’s part of al Qaeda.”

So here we have an enterprising British copper carefully explaining how to use various pieces of UK anti-terrorist legislation to frame innocent people.

It is worth remembering that the government is presently trying to extend the period of time that terrorist suspects can be held without charge from 28 days to 42 days – itself a compromise after sustained police lobbying for a 90 day period. The police argue that the terrorist threat is so severe that we must all be prepared to sacrifice our rights to fight it.

PC Chaudry has already worked out for himself that planting batteries, wires and bomb-making instructions on a target is quite enough to “fast track” a conviction for just about anyone. By dispensing with the old-fashioned niceties of habeas corpus (good enough for many hundreds of years but clearly no longer adequate for the likes of Blair, Brown and Smith) our politicians are effectively colluding with bent coppers everywhere to pervert the course of justice.

I suspect that making it easier to obtain convictions for terrorism does not help in the fight against terrorism one little bit.

Rather, it leads to the “creative” use of the law in the way PC Chaudry describes.

McCarthy’s perverse logic comes to mind: the easier you make it to convict “terrorists”, the more “terrorists” we will miraculously be able to find.

On this day…

• 2007: Simon & Schuster Make Rights Grab? — There is a report that Simon & Schuster US are trying to alter their publishing contract to extend their copyright [...]
• 2007: Wikileaks — Here’s an interesting concept.  An “uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis”. It combines the protection [...]

© 2008 Peter Cox’s Blog.