[Onthebarricades] Repression news, Police State Britain, Apr-Aug 2008

[Andy]

*  UK:  Pensioners arrested for proetst T-shirts - now even the right-wing press is starting to realise how bad things have become
*  UK:  Police ban musician for getting crowd excited
*  UK:  Petty bin regulations:  "I'm waiting for riots in the streets"
*  UK:  Bogus "conspiracy" charges used to target EDO protesters; houses raided, searched
*  UK:  Draconian sentence for graffiti artists
*  UK:  Lawyer speaks out on "terror" crackdown
*  UK:  Police misbehaviour at Trafalgar Square - flag deemed "protest"
*  UK:  So much for free speech - Scientology protester charged for "offensive" sign
*  UK:  Plan to scrap constraints on state "development" projects
*  UK:  Norwegian punished for not showing deference to airport goons

[He argued with security for harassing him.  So what?  Why would they fear him saying he DIDN’T have a bomb?!  These little Hitlers are totally out of control nowadays]


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1026496/Pensioners-seized-Heathrow-police--inflammatory-protest-T-shirts.html
 
Pensioners seized by Heathrow police - over 'inflammatory' protest T-shirts
By Martin Delgado
Last updated at 10:50 PM on 14th June 2008
Three pensioners were questioned and escorted from Heathrow after police decided the Stop Airport Expansion slogan on their T-shirts was ‘inflammatory’.
Mike Lacey, John Wilding and his wife Tessa were stopped as they tried to join a demonstration against plans for a third runway.
Police took their names, addresses and descriptions and followed them out of a bus terminal, warning they would be arrested if they returned within 24 hours.
Have the anti-terror laws gone too far? Tell us your view below...

Inflammatory: Pensioners Mike Lacey and John Wilding, both in their 70s, were held by police who said their t-shirts breached airport bylaws
Now the three have written to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, accusing the officers of harassment and abuse of their ‘stop and search’ powers.
They were stopped despite police knowing that a demonstration against the extra runway was taking place nearby.
Mr Lacey, a 71-year-old grandfather who used to work for Christian Aid,  Dr Wilding, also 71 – a retired academic and emeritus reader in psychology at the University of London – and his English teacher wife Tessa, 60, live in Slough, which will be badly affected by noise and pollution if the runway is built.
They were on their way to join a march to the village of Sipson, which is likely to be flattened if the runway goes ahead.
As they walked into the main bus terminal at Heathrow to catch a connecting service, they were stopped by five Met Police officers who accused them of breaching airport bylaws.

Protestors gather outside Hatton Cross underground station on May 31 before marching around the perimeter fence of Heathrow Airport to demonstrate against the plans for a third runway
In a ‘stop and search form’ officers wrote that Mr Lacey was questioned because he had been ‘seen in the bus terminal wearing inflammatory clothes’.
Mr Lacey said: ‘The process took half an hour and the police were unable to give any justification for their behaviour.
‘When we asked why we had been stopped, they said the bus station was private property and only airline passengers and people meeting flights were allowed to use it.
'If that is the case, thousands of people broke the law that day.’
Dr Wilding said: ‘Their manner was overbearing and arrogant. My wife in particular felt intimidated. 
'I have no doubt we were singled out because of our T-shirts.’
The protest on May 31 attracted 3,000 demonstrators. 
Scotland Yard said a 1996 bylaw enabled police to stop people and ask them to explain what they were doing at the airport, as it was private property.
A spokeswoman added: ‘Three people were stopped and asked to account for their presence. They were not searched. 
'The officers correctly interpreted the bylaws.’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/aug/20/petedoherty.festivals

Music: Doherty banned from headlining festival

Singer Pete Doherty has been blocked from performing at a music festival amid fears his band would "gee up" the crowd into a dangerous frenzy.

The decision came after police asked an intelligence officer to research Doherty's band, Babyshambles, who were booked to headline Moonfest festival in Westbury, Wiltshire, next week. They concluded that the band's tendency to "speed up and then slow down the music" could create a "whirlpool effect" and spark disorder.

Lawyers acting on behalf of Wiltshire police convinced magistrates to provide a closure order for the festival on the night the band were scheduled to perform.

John Green, Moonfest's organiser, said he was "livid" at the decision and accused police of waging a vendetta against Doherty, who lives locally.

But Superintendent Paul Williams said the ban was designed to preserve public safety. "Experts are telling us that the profile of fans that follow Pete Doherty and Babyshambles is volatile and they can easily be whipped up into a frenzy, whereas the profile of someone that would follow around Cliff Richard or Bucks Fizz, for example, is completely different."

Williams said "other organisation changes" at the festival meant security provisions were no longer adequate.

Police were alerted to the potential perils of a Doherty performance, Williams said, after learning about his solo performance at the Royal Albert Hall last month. Some fans mounted the stage and police were called, but no arrests were made.

Chief Superintendent Julian Kirby, the divisional commander, told Wiltshire's Gazette and Herald: "We carried out an analysis of what Pete Doherty and his band does. What he does as part of his routine is to gee up the crowd.

"They speed up and then slow down the music and create a whirlpool effect in the crowd. They [the crowd] all get geed up and then they start fighting."

Those present at north Wiltshire magistrates on Monday on behalf of police included a barrister, an acting chief inspector and an "industry expert". It took the court a day to reach its decision to support the force's application, which Green contested. It is believed to be the first court to issue section 160 of the Licensing Act (2003) to stop an act performing.

Green said the revocation had cut the festival a day short. He said Doherty was "absolutely devastated and furious". He added: "He's very kindly offered a free gig for everyone who has bought a ticket and won't be able to see him."

Green said police had offered him a deal during a pause in court proceedings to allow the night to go ahead if he agreed to spend more on security and removed Doherty from the lineup but he refused the "offer". "They told me privately they hate the fact he lives in Wiltshire and they don't want him on their patch," he said.

Williams denied his force had offered a deal or had anything against the singer. He had never heard Doherty's music, he said. "Public safety is our primary concern."
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/waste.pollution?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
 
'I'm waiting for riots in the streets'
Britain is at war over rubbish. Exasperated householders are attacking refuse collectors and stealing their neighbours' bins. What's going on? Why can't we change our dirty habits? And since when was waste such an emotive issue anyway? Jon Henley reports

Food blog: Jay Rayner on waste and food prices
Jon Henley 
The Guardian, 
Monday June 23 2008
Article history

Normal black bin bags and rubbish on Islington side of Southgate Road. Photograph: Linda Nylind
It's starting to get nasty out there. In Preston, the Lancashire Evening Post reports, refuse collectors have recently come under a barrage of abuse from householders furious at "changes to the way their rubbish is collected". In some cases, it appears, residents have hurled burst and stinking bin bags, forcing bin men to flee.
In Lynn, west Norfolk, according to the Lynn News, long-suffering refuse operatives have been "verbally and physically abused at least three times in the past month". Residents angry that overfull wheelie bins are not being emptied have been warned in no uncertain terms to cease attacking bin men or face prosecution.
In normally staid Cannock, meanwhile, the Birmingham Post relates that decent, law-abiding family men, unable to cope now the council has switched to fortnightly collections, have been seen stealing into their neighbours' gardens at dead of night and nicking their wheelie bins. "It's like something out of Mad Max," says resident Paul Nicholls. "Every man for himself, scavenging for an extra bin."
We are in the grip, it would appear, of a national crisis. "I'm waiting for the riots in the streets," Doretta Cocks of the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, which has grown from nothing to 22,000 highly vocal members in the space of three years, says ominously. "Though in fact, in some places we've already had them. An awful lot of people are very, very angry."
The object of all this ire, rather oddly, is household waste: how we collect it, how we dispose of it, how much of it we reuse. The trouble is, we're rubbish at rubbish. Or at least, we were. In 2000, we were bottom of the European league table: only Portugal and Greece dumped more stuff in holes in the ground (the technical term is landfill) than we did. We were recycling barely 5% of what we threw out; the likes of Holland, Germany and Switzerland were at 60%.
Over the past few years, however, stimulated by the prospect of swingeing £180m-a-year EU fines and dire warnings that if we carry on as we are, all of our island's landfill sites will be completely full within the next eight or nine years, we have started to get a bit better. Unfortunately, it's proving to be a painful process.
"I'm afraid change is unpopular," says Phillip Ward, director of the Waste Resources Action Programme (Wrap - get it?), the government's chief advisory body on the issue. "We're moving from an easy, familiar system where we just slung everything into a sack and once a week someone came and took it away for us - we neither knew nor cared where - to one where we actually have to do something. Some people will always find that difficult, for whatever reason."
Judging by the media coverage, to say that some people are finding it difficult may be something of an understatement. The following, for example, is a by no means complete list of the principle rubbish rage incidents reported by the conservative press in recent weeks:
· In Broxbourne, Herts, the local council has begun rationing households to one officially approved, free purple bin bag a week and is charging 28p for each extra one; residents who continue to use black bags face a possible £1,000 fine. 
· Mid-Sussex council, for its part, has employed "snoopers to sift through residents' rubbish" and see exactly how much they throw away. "It's a gross invasion of privacy," fumes one opposition councillor.
· In Bolton, Zoe Watmough has been fined £275 for daring to put her rubbish out the day before it was due to be collected. 
· Poor Katie Shergold of Warminster, Wiltshire, has been told her bin was too heavy to be emptied because collectors could not move it with two fingers. 
· Plucky June Key, 80, who lives in Bolton-by-Bowland, Lancashire, is now supposed to drag her wheelie bin "half a mile down a steep hill" for collection by the cold, uncaring operatives of Ribble Valley council. "I don't know how I'm supposed to manage," says June. "I'm too old."
· Gareth Corkhill of Whitehaven, Cumbria, has been fined £225 because his bin was too full and its lid raised by four inches (or seven - there is some dispute). It would have been considerably cheaper, Gareth complained, just to "dump the rubbish in the garden and get done for fly-tipping". 
· And in the ultimate affront to all right-thinking Englishmen, Colin Harrold, a war veteran, was ordered to pay £70 by Scarborough council after he was foolish enough to "put his rubbish out in the wrong colour bag". 
Why, though, have we suddenly become so inordinately touchy about what happens to our waste? Why is rubbish, of all things, the new hobbyhorse of middle England? In part, suggests Cocks, because one of the marks of a civilised society is its capacity to deal with its waste. In part, too, because refuse collection is just about the one service used by every household in a borough; draconian new collection schemes tend to be seen merely as an attempt to get away with doing less in return for an already exorbitant council tax bill. 
In part, also, because we do not take kindly to being told what to do at the best of times - and never by town hall officials. "We used to be clients," she observes persuasively, "and the council was there to provide a service. Now we're the persecuted. We're an easy target, you see. And all we want to do is get rid of our rubbish. It can't be that difficult, can it?" 
In fact, though, rubbish has reached the top of our collective agenda principally because boroughs, driven by government targets and financial penalties for failing to meet them, find themselves having to substantially increase the amount this country recycles. Having raised that proportion to 33% in eight years, Britain - along with the rest of the EU - is now looking at a target of recycling 50% of its household waste by 2020. That means sending a lot less to landfill, which means changing people's habits. 
Now there are, of course, many ways to change people's habits. You can inform them of the benefits of a new behaviour pattern, and trust that their rapid comprehension and generous goodwill will induce them to cooperate by recycling more of their paper, glass, cans, cardboard, plastic and food and garden waste than they do at present. 
Then, when everyone who is willing to cooperate is doing so, you have to address the change-averse, by obliging them to recycle more. One obvious and highly cost-effective way to do this, local authorities argue, is to take steps to constrain the amount of residual, ie non-recyclable, waste that householders produce and that you collect. This is the stage that many English local authorities have now reached. Some of them (see Broxbourne, above) have begun providing smaller or fewer bags for residents' landfill rubbish. Others (nearly half in fact; around 180 authorities at the last count) have moved instead to what is known in the waste trade as AWC, or Alternate Weekly Collection.
As the name suggests, this implies that they now collect recyclables only one week, and non-recyclables only the next. In both cases, a whole lot of new rules are attached to the scheme in order to make sure it works. For householders who don't recycle as much or as sensibly as they might, that unfortunately means being landed, in the worst instances, with an overflowing, malodorous and maggot-infested bin. Plus, if they're really lucky, a fine.
For some people, this is self-evidently a national scandal. "It's a national scandal," says Cocks, whose campaign is based on public health concerns and dedicated to eradicating the scourge of AWC. "In public health terms we're moving back to the middle ages. In this climate we need a weekly collection of all waste otherwise you get maggots, flies, rats, the lot. I've had horror stories: one man had to use a blowtorch to get the maggots off his driveway. This country first introduced weekly refuse collections under the Public Health Act of 1875 precisely to break the breeding cycle of the house fly; now we're getting rid of them. It's beyond absurd."
For others, it's the only way forward. "The bin fairy is dead," proclaims a breezy Paul Bettison, Tory leader of Bracknell Forest borough council and, as chairman of the Local Government Association's environment board, the nation's number one bin baron (or, if you prefer, trash tsar). "From now on we're all going to have to do a little bit of her work, and that's all there is to it. And in any case, the maggot problem is almost invariably exaggerated." 
Bettison relates, with some relish, the entertaining story of a mystery series of photos of wheelie bins overrun with flies and maggots that appeared in his local newspaper soon after Bracknell Forest first introduced AWC. "We had a young ranger on the team who had a degree in entymology or some such," Bettison says, "and he had a good look at the pictures and he said, 'Those are not the maggots of any fly found in Great Britain.'
"So he investigated further, and he found that they were in fact a breed of maggot particularly favoured by fishermen. So this householder had gone out and bought a load of maggots from the bait shop, and emptied them into his wheelie bin. Just goes to show the lengths some people will go to avoid change. It was just the same when we introduced wheelie bins, mind: I got more hate mail that summer than I've ever had before or since."
According to Bettison, the key to the problem is good communication, and an understanding that one solution will not fit all circumstances. "AWC has been shown to boost recycling rates by 30%," he says. "It won't work everywhere; it may not be appropriate in areas with a very high proportion of flats, multiple occupancy, that kind of thing. But where it is appropriate you just need to educate people properly. Look, anyone calls us up to complain they can't fit all their rubbish in their non-recyclables bin, we offer to send someone round and empty it onto a tarpaulin in their garden, show them what they could have recycled. They don't have to do it very often."
But still, some council behaviour has been a tad over the top, wouldn't you say? Not exactly guaranteed to engender the full and willing cooperation of the great British public.
At Wrap, Ward accepts part of the problem is that, as it so often is when rapid change is introduced, "not always done in the optimum way". Waste recycling in Britain, he stresses, is still very much a work in progress: "You have to realise we had no stock of people who knew how to do it. A lot of mistakes have been made along the way." Nor has it necessarily helped, he acknowledges, that some 300 different local authorities, all independent and all with their own ideas, are in charge.
Nowhere is what Ward calls this "confusing patchwork of exactly what is collected, when, and in what receptacles" more evident than in one corner of north London. On the boundary between the boroughs of Islington and Hackney, Southgate Road is a fine street: busy, but not excessively so; big handsome houses, not all converted into flats; a couple of decent-looking pubs. And outside every front door, a magnificent display of assorted bins, bags and recycling boxes.
On the Islington side of the road, residents can choose between brown boxes (kitchen waste), green boxes (paper, glass, cans, cardboard, plastic bottles), black bin bags (non-recyclable refuse), and grey sacks (garden waste). That all gets collected on Fridays. 
On the Hackney side, there are green boxes (paper, glass, etc), blue boxes (kitchen waste), and black bin bags or dustbins (other refuse), all for collection on Tuesdays. Plus brown wheelie bins (garden waste, alternate Tuesdays). Friends of the Earth last week dubbed Southgate Road "the most confusing street in the country for waste collection". 
Mark Penbury, one resident, agrees: "It is a bit of a nightmare," he says. "You want to do the right thing, but people inevitably get muddled and put stuff in the wrong bin, or leave it out on the wrong day, then it gets left there and stinks. I think it could be made a bit easier." Agnes, from Poland, is more forthright: "It's completely crazy. How do they expect people to do it right? And of course, you make a mistake, you can't argue with them. No way."
It's the kind of situation that drives Cocks mad. Most people, she believes, now understand that we need to recycle more, for economic as well as environmental reasons (according to Bettison's figures, the UK sends as much rubbish to landfill as the 18 EU countries with the lowest landfill rates combined, and every tonne of waste that gets recycled in future will save local authorities as much as £80 in landfill taxes and fees).
"Most of us are on board," Cocks says. "Most of us are prepared to do our bit. But I can't tell you the number of emails I get from people saying they're giving up - they're afraid of being fined, they don't understand the rules, they've been upset once too often, they can't use their back garden because of the swarm of flies round the rubbish bins. It's all too complicated, and too fiercely enforced. People end up driving their rubbish to the tip or the recycling centre themselves - how environmentally friendly is that? They're trying to educate us into change, but they're ending up alienating us."
The bin baron's riposte is typically robust. "To those who say they can't do it," says Bettison, "I say they have to. The days of easy waste disposal are over. No change is not an option. To those who say it's too complicated, I say it really isn't rocket science. To those who say waste food smells, if you've got a garden, there are ways of reducing kitchen waste to little more than water, at home. It all just takes a bit of extra effort, that's all - and it should even lead to lower council tax bills."
Across at Wrap, Defra adviser Ward promises that things will get easier. Wrap is about to start a major public consultation process around just what constitutes a good recycling service, with the aim not only of "really making it work for everyone" but convincing sceptics that materials really are being recycled, not secretly dumped. 
"And we need more uniformity," he says. "We need to refine further exactly what is collected for recycling, and coalesce around maybe five or six different models. There are too many at present; it is confusing." But to approach future recycling targets, he warns, "more motivation, more incentivisation" is going to be needed. We could soon be looking at pay-as-you-throw systems and, once recycling has really taken off, even at once-a-month residual rubbish collections. That, I imagine, really will be fun.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/08/405280.html

Support Campaigners in Court 
Five campaigners against Brighton arms manufacturer EDO MBM were arrested after some of them locked themselves to the doors of the factory on October 3rd (see previous press release) in protest against the sale of weapons for conflicts in Iraq and Palestine. 

The five were arrested for minor charges on October 3rd at a protest at EDO MBM. However, their charges have were raised to 'Conspiracy to Commit Criminal Damage' which carries a maximum ten year sentence and must be tried in a Crown Court before a jury. They will appear in Brighton Magistrates this Wednesday at 9.30am. The trial will last for ten days. 

Please come along and show your support 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
Update on arrests following the Smash EDO Carnival Against the Arms Trade which was held in Brighton on 4th June (see  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/southcoast/2008/06/400163.html) 

Arrests have been made and houses searched in Southampton and Brighton last week over the Carnival Against the Arms Trade in Brighton. Two people were questioned over various alleged offences including the tipping of paint over a policeman during the carnival. 

They were also asked questions relating to 'conspiracy to cause criminal damage' charges. 

No charges are made and both have been bailed to later this year 

Two houses were searched. One search involved PC Sean Mcdonald from Sussex police and an officer from the London FIT team, the other included plain clothes and uniformed officers including one Stephen Webb, claiming to be from Sussex Police. 

The warrants were for the entire property and communal areas and other residents rooms were searched. Mobile phones, PCs, laptops, political stuff and clothes were seized. 

If you have had your home raided or been questioned relating to Smash EDO protests contact the campaign through www.smashedo.org.uk,  smashedo at hotmail.com. 

Kellys Solicitors (01273 674898) have dealt with EDO related cases for years and are the best bet if you are arrested. It is possible to swap to Kellys after release from the police station even if you have used another solicitor when arrested. 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Rough Music Outlawed in Brighton 
On 23rd July 2008 in Hove Crown Court Judge Hayward and two lay magistrates dismissed the appeal of an anti-arms trade protestor against his conviction under a council bylaw enforced under section 235 of the Local Government Act 1972 which makes it an offence not to desist from shouting, singing, drumming,or playing loud music in a street or public place when asked to do so by a police constable or anyone else. Marcus Wise is the first political protester in Brighton to be convicted under the bylaw since it came into force in 1998. 

Marcus Wise was found to have refused to desist after a request by a police officer to turn down a sound system under his control playing an assortment of musical compositions at a demonstration outside the EDO MBM arms factory in Home Farm Business Estate, Brighton, at around 4.45pm on 17 July 2007. 

The police acted on the complaint of an employee of the arms company (who has since resigned) who said that the factory’s air conditioning was inadequate and she was forced on the day to leave a window open in hot weather. While the music was ‘entertaining at first’ it changed to ‘Reggae’ and became a nuisance. This meant the music was too loud to allow her to concentrate on her work assisting in the manufacture of weapons to kill civilian men women and children in the Middle East. 

The defence counsel raised the issue that the bylaw should not be used in the context of political demonstrations as its introduction by the local Council was for other reasons. 

A witness for the defence Alderman Francis Tonks, a former councillor on Brighton Council for 22 years, presented minutes of the meeting where the bylaw had been passed ten years ago. 

The bylaw came into force in August 1998 was introduced to deal with alleged nuisance caused by groups of ‘drummers’ assembling by the West Pier, as well as street buskers, and car windscreen washing touts in the town. The bylaw was never intended to deal with political protests Alderman Tonks explained 

Judge Hayward ruled that the bylaw was intended for ‘the prevention and suppression of nuisance’ and could be used at political demonstrations when music was being played loudly simply to cause nuisance rather than convey a 'relevant argument or message', otherwise it was clear that rights under the European Convention articles 10 and 11 did apply and protesters had a positive (though not absolute)right to make their political opinion heard even it if it was done in such a way as to be ‘irritating, contentious, unwelcome or evocative.’ 

The bylaw does not prohibit the use of megaphones, airhorns, or sirens, but does apply to singing, drumming and musical instruments, and amplified music that is played so loud as to cause a ‘nuisance’. 

On hearing the judgement Mark Wise congratulated Judge Hayward on ‘criminalising peaceful protest while helping EDO continue in making bombs that will be used to kill and maim women and children.’ 

Judge Haywards findings appear to empower individual police officers to make a judgement that noise produced by shouting, singing, playing musical instruments or sound systems, is a 'nuisance' rather than a political protest yet leaves open the possibility that if political songs are sung in an irritating way or politically conscious music is played loudly enough to evoke an emotional response by the employees inside the factory, they remain exempt from the bylaw since these would be protected under ECHR Article 10 Freedom of Expression. 

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/08/405333.html

Artists jailed for bringing colour to shitty cities. 
zcat | 04.08.2008 11:29 | Repression | Social Struggles | London 
Members of the DPM crew were jailed for up to 2 years for making dull shitty city scapes brighter and more colourful spaces. 
As they start a prison sentence, pictures of their work are to be exhibited in a New York art gallery. So are they vandals or frustrated artists? 

myspace page explaining more www.myspace.com/supportdpm 

Petition to present at appeal to try and get reduced sentences here <!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--> http://www.gopetition.co.uk/petitions/graffiti-artists.html 

DPM tag 

EIGHT men were sentenced on Friday11th June in what was one of the biggest prosecutions for graffiti the UK has ever seen. 
All admitted conspiracy to cause criminal damage as part of a graffiti crew called DPM that tagged and painted trains and stations costing rail networks an estimated £1 million. 
Detective Sergeant Michael Field, who led the inquiry described it as a “major crime on a vast scale”. 
“Graffiti is an attack on the community and the environment,” he said. “It is anti-social and destructive and it’s a crime we take very seriously.” 
Indeed, the courts took it just as seriously, with the two year investigation culminating in sentencing five members of the group to a total of eight years in prison. 
On the day that the court opened its case against DPM, London’s Tate Modern was installing massive pieces of street art on the outside of their South Bank gallery to celebrate artists who made their names by ‘decorating’ streets and buildings in much the same kind of illegal activity. 
Hundreds of thousands of visitors have already filed past the installations, admiring work by Blu, an Italian graffiti artist who uses buildings as “sheets of paper”, JR who illegally painted his initials around the streets of Paris and Brazilian Nunca who started tagging at the age of 12. 
One member of the Tate’s audience was Ziggy Grudzinskas, a 25-year-old art student and member of DPM who alongside his friends admitted the conspiracy charge between 2004 and 2006. 
“I stood there completely baffled for about an hour outside of the Tate to tell you the truth,” he said before he was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment at Southwark Crown Court. 
“I quite like it but it really confused me a lot. I know that half, if not all of the graffiti that is on the Tate Modern building is done by people who do illegal graffiti or have done illegal graffiti and have made their name doing that. 
“It is like they’re saying ‘yeah we’re on the edge of the law yet we’re being shown by one of the biggest galleries in London.’ And it’s sponsored by Nissan!” 
According to Andrew Gillman, the 25-year-old so-called ‘main mover’ of DPM who was jailed for two years, the exhibition just highlights the mixed messages surrounding graffiti. 
He said: “If you can make money from illegal graff or a gallery does it off your back, then it’s okay. 
“It’s in advertising and fashion as well. There is graffiti on trainers, hoodies, hats, t-shirts, everything you can think of. People want to wear illegal graffiti that is on the trains and the street. 
“How come you can wear it and buy it, use it in advertising, marketing, music and every album cover and as soon as you do it you’re f***ed, so where’s the message? If they don’t want people to be involved, don’t popularise it.” 
Graffiti is so popular in fact that not only has it made its way onto the catwalk but it is now been propelled from the street into (or onto) galleries. 
The Tate’s Street Art exhibition is the first major display of its kind and since its launch last month has been accompanied by street tours, workshops and even talks with professional street artists like Rough and Blek Le Rat. 
One, on August 15, entitled Graffiti – Utopia or a bit boring? will see critics Ossian War and Ben Lewis debating whether graffiti is “glorified vandalism or a legitimate cultural movement”. 
Curator of the Street Art exhibition, Cedar Lewinsohn said: “I hope that we are there to challenge what people think about street art.” 
Despite the widening debate on the value of urban art, courts are still cracking down on the artists, branding them malicious vandals. 
Just weeks before DPM was sentenced, Gary ‘Daze’ Shields was given leave to appeal after being sentenced to 28 months behind bars. 
On his interim release, he told the Glasgow Evening Times: “I totally understand what I did was vandalism, but I like the artistic side of it.” 
Lewinsohn said: “There may be some mixed messages in society. I think the main thing is that it’s a real culture difference. In some countries it is legal and street art is more accepted. Brazil for instance is more relaxed about it. But in parts of Australia, they are like the UK and people really hate graffiti and tags on vans and trains. But in Melbourne, van drivers compete with each other as to whose is more decorated.” 
Lewinsohn’s book, Street Art – The Graffiti Revolution, that accompanies his exhibition, charts the history of urban art from New York subway graffiti in the 1980s to today’s mainstream artists like Banksy, whose work is now auctioned for thousands of pounds. 
Lewisohn said: “Every artist in the Street Art exhibition has made that leap into galleries, but it’s not a big leap. Although their art is available to see in the street, they also do a lot of studio practise beforehand, that is one of the main differences between street art and graffiti. Most of the artists have a studio and have gone to art school and have had their work in an exhibition.” 
DPM, it seems have already made that leap despite their conviction. 
An exhibition is to be launched a week after their sentence on July 19 in Soho, New York hosted by artist Elura Emerald and Hip Hop promotional company End Of The Weak. 
Called DPM – Exhibit A the exhibition in the loft space in 440 Broadway in Grand Street will display large photographs of their work plus copies of their charge sheets questioning whether the young men are criminals or, in fact, artists. 
Emerald said: “The exhibition in NYC is to give the recognition to the artists that I believe they deserve and to accentuate the fact that they are not at all criminals, and do not at all deserve to be put in jail for their creative force. 
“I want to give them a platform to exhibit their art on a "legal" basis, and to spread the message that artists who paint on the street are merely expressing themselves through an artistic channel, it is not hurting anyone. 
“I do not believe the creators of art should be punished, but appreciated and celebrated.” 
End of the Weak’s Padraic Mccroudi, who last summer hosted an event in association with the Tate Modern called the Art of Freestyle, said: “Jailing artists for criminal damage, although it may seem to be a deterrent, does in fact only serve to gain kudos and notoriety for the artist. 
“This in turn means that the criminal justice system in this case is fundamentally flawed and counter productive. 
“It's important that the criminal justice system, the courts, the judges, the police and the greater community understand this and that if they ever really want address graffiti as an issue then we all need to explore avenues together, avenues other than jail time.” 
Many local authorities are already exploring these avenues funding street art workshops to connect with young people. 
In fact, Greenwich council and Tower Hamlets commissioned DPM’s Grudzinskas and Jack Binnie, who was handed a 12 month suspended sentence, to lead summer workshops as Street Art Tutors for young and vulnerable people. 
According to the references each council sent to the court to support Binney and Grudzinskas, their work with young people was “positive” and “inspirational”. 
A source at Greenwich council said: “They showed the young people who aren’t able to do reading or writing that they can use artistic ways to express themselves. 
“Their skills are obviously needed, it doesn’t make sense to send him down, we should use it.” 
Matthew Pease, 24, and Paul Stewart, 26, also of DPM who were sentenced to 18 months and 15 months respectively, took part in a five-day workshop in the Czech Republic to work with disadvantaged youths as part of an event organised by music and art organisation Community Music (CM). 
Pease said: “For the first day we got them sketching to see what they could do and tried to teach them a few different things about how to go about building up a piece. 
“Gradually, through the week, we were getting them painting. By the end of the week, every single person in the class had a quite sizeable piece and a finished product.” 
One member of DPM in particular made the headlines when he was hired by the BBC to tag the set of the country’s best loved soap while he was on bail. 
Gillman, who worked full-time at his family-run funeral service, was commissioned to tag Tanya Branning’s ‘Booty’ nail salon in EastEnders and other parts of Albert Square. 
He said: “They knew I was a writer. I said to them, the tags I am putting up, are the tags I see in London so it’s realistic. And they said ‘great, realistic tags, just what we want.’ 
“And they said ‘maybe you could come up with three tags for EastEnders, you know, three writers that are just around the square, you could put up East 13 crew, one could be Rocky!’ They were getting really into it.” 
But DPM have vowed never to pick up a spray can again since their conviction but their friendship will clearly remain. 
“It was more about friendship than graffiti,” Gillman said. “We knew what we were doing was wrong but when you are painting a piece, all your worries just fall away. 
"Trains were like a moving canvass, it goes underground it goes over bridges. And if you’re standing there amongst the crowd and you see everyone looking at it, it gives you a huge feeling of gratification. 
“We tried to create something that was artistic, made people look, something that’s thought provoking, makes commuters look up from their paper. 
“But I don’t think I could call myself an artist, I’m a vandal, I’ve admitted that.” 
DPM’s “brains of the group”, Slav Zinoviev, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison had a different opinion. 
The 25-year-old, who recently graduated with a Masters in Information Technology, said: “People are not really educated on the whole graffiti thing. But now that Banksy has come around, people see it as one of the purest art forms, which it essentially is. And so to that extent I would say that I was an artist. 
“To train writers, tags are actually much more valuable to the graffiti community than a Banksy painting is. 
“We were all brought together by some sort of passion and this is one of the things that has created stronger bonds between us, and perhaps given us richer memories than the average person possesses.” 
Sentencing, Judge Christopher Hardy said he had to acknowledge that some of the graffiti written by DPM showed “considerable talent”. 
He added: “It seems to be on the way to being recognised as a valued form of art. 
“But in this case, it has been sprayed all over property without their permission, that’s simply vandalism.” 
Gillman, 25, of St John’s Hill, Battersea was jailed for two years; Zinoviev, of the same address, Grudzinskas, 25, and Stewart of Manor Lane, Lewisham received 18 months in jail; Pease of Manor Lane, Lewisham was jailed for 15 months. 
As they were led to the cells, members of a packed public gallery shouted, ‘We love you boys, stay strong’ and applauded them until they were out of sight. 
Other members of DPM, Matthew Tanti, 23, of Holmsbury Court, Upper Tooting Road, SW11 and Jack Binnie, 26, of Adelaide Avenue, Ladywell, were each sentenced to 12 months suspended for 12 months. 
Alex McClelland, 24, of Croxted Road, West Dulwich was sentenced to nine months suspended for 12 months. 
Outside court, Ziggy’s father Professor Gedis Grudzinskas said: “Ziggy has been sent to prison for 18 months having pleaded guilty to a crime not involving violence, terrorism, knives or drugs but vandalising public property. 
“British Transport Police declined to arrest him and others when they knew they were breaking the law, presumably to develop their case for this show trial costing the tax payer thousands and thousands of pounds unnecessarily. 
“Now they have sent him to jail instead of getting him to do community service for example to clean and help restore the trains and stations. 
“This is not justice is it?” 

http://www.campacc.org.uk/irish_peirce_070408.html

Was it like this for the Irish?
Gareth Peirce on the position of Muslims in Britain, London Review of Books, 10 April
The history of thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, as it is being written today, might give the impression of a steady progression towards an inevitable and just conclusion. The new suspect community in this country, Muslims, want to know whether their experience today can be compared with that of the Irish in the last third of the 20th century. It is dangerously misleading to assert that it was the conflict in Northern Ireland which produced the many terrible wrongs in the country’s recent history: it was injustice that created and fuelled the conflict. Before Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators who were marching to demand not a united Ireland but equal rights in employment, education and housing (as well as an end to internment), the IRA was a diminished organisation, unable to recruit. After Bloody Sunday volunteers from every part of Ireland and every background came forward. Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture (hooding, extreme stress positions, mock executions), brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant: that the state was seen to be combating terrorism sufficed. Central to the anger and despair that fuelled the conflict was the realisation that the British courts offered neither protection nor justice. The Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday, which was carried out by the lord chief justice, absolved the British army and backed its false account of 13 murders, ensuring that Irish nationalists would see the legal system as being aligned against them.
We should keep all this in mind as we look at the experiences of our new suspect community. Just as Irish men and women, wherever they lived, knew every detail of each injustice as if it had been done to them, long before British men and women were even aware that entire Irish families had been wrongly imprisoned in their country for decades, so Muslim men and women here and across the world are registering the ill-treatment of their community here, and recognising, too, the analogies with the experiences of the Irish. As good a place to start as any is 19 December 2001. On this date a dozen men, all foreign nationals, were interned in this country. Recognising the connotations of the term ‘internment’, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland, the government insisted this was not equivalent to arbitrary detention without trial, a practice forbidden by the European Convention on Human Rights except in extreme emergencies, because each man was free to leave. The premise on which they were detained was that the United Kingdom could not in fact send them back to their countries of origin, since it was accepted that they would be at the very least a target for torture, if they were not killed on arrival.
December 2001 did not in fact mark the beginning of Britain’s official interest in men described as ‘Islamists’, since some from Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria who were in this country as refugees had long been the subjects of complaints to the UK by the regimes they had fled. After 9/11, however, Tony Blair professed a desire to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with President Bush. It would have been difficult to match Bush’s executive onslaught on constitutional rights in the US, by means of the Patriot Act; the designation of ‘enemy combatants’ and their detention by presidential order; the abolition of habeas corpus; the subjection of detainees to torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo or their unofficial outsourcing via rendition flights to countries specialising in even more grotesque interrogative practices, many of them those same regimes which had pressured the UK to take action against their own dissidents. Claiming that a parallel emergency faced Britain, Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security. Each of the dozen men snatched from his home on 17 December 2001, and delivered to HMP Belmarsh, expressed astonishment: first at finding himself the object of the much trumpeted legislation and, second, at discovering who his fellow detainees were. Each asked why, if he was suspected of activity linked to terrorism, he had never been questioned by police or the Security Services before it was decided that he was a ‘risk to national security’. The sole activity which some speculated might be the reason for their detention was their attempt to support Chechens when in 1999 their country was the subject of a second brutal invasion by Russia. But thousands of others had acted similarly, and such support was not unlawful.
Each man was told that, for a reason that could not be disclosed, he was in some unspecified way thought to be linked to unspecified persons or organisations, in turn linked to al-Qaida, which was then depicted by now discredited ‘al-Qaida experts’ as taking the form of the hierarchical pyramid of classic Western military systems. At the base of the pyramid were those who had been interned, almost all of whom said that they had never heard of al-Qaida before 11 September 2001. All of this echoed other wrongful detentions, like that of John Walker in 1974, when the West Midlands police coerced an innocent Irishman into confessing that he was an IRA ‘brigadier’, ignorant of the fact that such a title existed only in the British army. This confession was nevertheless swallowed whole. Walker was one of the Birmingham Six, all of whom spent 16 years in jail before the assertions of their prosecutors were finally discredited.
There should have been no need for the Muslim community to anticipate a similar wait, since just before Christmas 2005, three and a half years after internment had been rushed through Parliament, the House of Lords gave its judgment on that legislation in what should have stood as the most important legacy of British law in recent history. The law lords swept aside what had been said by the attorney general to constitute a just system necessary for national security. Focusing on the government’s disproportionate response to a claimed emergency, and its indefinite detention only of foreign nationals, the language of the law lords was heroic in its strength. There was a sense that the ruling’s importance went far beyond its importance to the 12 detainees, eight of whom had now been driven into mental illness, four of those into florid psychosis, and had been transferred by the home secretary from Belmarsh to Broadmoor.
Since the judgment, however, signalling as it did that the government had impermissibly crossed the legal barriers guaranteed by domestic and international treaties, it has become clear that the government intends to ignore the spirit if not the letter of the decision. It has also become clear that the government had, and continues to have, a wider strategy of which internment legislation was only one part. Little by little, ripples of information have found their way to the surface, sometimes confirmed by the government, sometimes denied. While the world knows and can assess for itself what chains of reaction were created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by the enormity of injustice suffered by the Palestinians, the cumulative effect of many other policies deserves analysis. It emerged for instance that in late 2001 the UK had begun to tip off other governments, for the ultimate benefit of the US, of the whereabouts of British nationals and British residents. Moazzem Begg, who was living with his wife and children in Pakistan, was kidnapped in January 2002; within hours he was in the hands of Americans (with a British Intelligence agent to hand), and transported without any semblance of legality to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, by this time an interrogation camp where torture was practised. After a year during which he witnessed the murders of two fellow detainees, he was moved to Guantánamo Bay. Until he finally returned to this country in 2005, nothing was known of the presence at his abduction of a British agent. Instead, for the whole of that year in Bagram, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office repeatedly told his father that they had no information about Begg and that the Americans would tell them nothing.
Seemingly unrelated areas of injustice, we now learn, have all along been connected. Two British residents, acknowledged to have been seized in 2002 in the Gambia and subjected to rendition by the US as a direct result of information provided by British Intelligence, were for the next five years subjected to interrogation (including torture) primarily to obtain information about a man interned in this country. One of those interned in December 2001, a Palestinian, trying to guess the reason for his detention the next year, told his lawyers that he had raised money for many years to build wells and schools and to provide food in Afghanistan. One of those wells, he said, bore the name of the son of its donor, Moazzem Begg. The Palestinian’s lawyers, knowing by now that Begg was in Guantánamo, started to think the unthinkable. During hearings at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, at which these cases are heard, there is a brief opportunity for the detainee’s lawyer to question an anonymous Security Service witness concealed behind a curtain, before the lawyer is asked to leave the court so it can continue its consideration of secret evidence. The witness was asked: ‘Would you use evidence that was obtained by torture?’ The unhesitating answer was: ‘Yes.’ The only issue that might arise, the agent added, would be the weight such evidence should be given. Three years after this, in December 2005, the House of Lords affirmed the principle that no English court can ever admit evidence derived from torture, no matter how strong the claimed justification or emergency. The message for the government was again unequivocal: the principles of legal obligation must be adhered to in all circumstances.
Despite the strength and intended permanence of these two rulings by the House of Lords, however, many Muslims have come to see any protection from the courts as constituting only a temporary impediment before the government starts to implement a new method of avoidance. After three months of prevarication, the internees were released on bail under stringent conditions, but the Home Office was simultaneously pushing yet more emergency legislation through Parliament, this time to introduce Control Orders which placed a substantial number of restrictions on the now released detainees. Any breach would constitute a criminal offence carrying a penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment. Three of the detainees, including the Palestinian, were pitch-forked out of Broadmoor during the night and driven by police to empty flats. One of them, a man without arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact anyone without committing a criminal offence, subject to a curfew and allowed no visitors unless approved in advance by the Home Office. Two of these three detainees were immediately readmitted to psychiatric hospitals; neither of them had been hospitalised before being interned. These men had already been found to have patterns of psychological damage explicable only as a result of their indefinite detention.
Other former detainees, particularly those with wives and children, soon began to recognise the disturbing effects of the Control Orders. The electronic tag they had to wear, which registered every entry and exit from the house, was only one element of a family’s altered existence; a voice recognition system was supposed to confirm the detainee’s presence at home during curfew, but the machines, of US manufacture, often failed to recognise the accents of Arabic speakers, with the result that uniformed police officers would enter the house in significant numbers at all times of the day and night. No visitor would come near their homes because to enter required first to be vetted by the Home Office. Children could do no schoolwork that involved the internet, the use of which was forbidden. Families had endlessly to involve lawyers in the most trivial matters: to obtain permission to go into the garden; to attend a parent-teacher meeting; to arrange for a plumber to enter the house.
What happened to these men? Are they still, three years later, trying to live normal lives despite the restrictions? The answer came only five months after their release. On 7 July 2005 bombs exploded in London. Within days it was known that the bombings had been carried out by young men born and bred in Yorkshire. On 5 August Blair announced that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ and that diplomatic agreements were being made to deport the same small group of detainees to their countries of origin, although the government knew that the use of torture was still routine in these countries. It was said that an assurance would be obtained that the men themselves would not be tortured after they were returned, and that an independent monitoring organisation in each country would guarantee that this was being adhered to. Despite such assurances, these deportations flew in the face of two important legal commitments to which this country is obliged to adhere: one, to send no person to a country where there is a risk to him of torture, the central premise of the Refugee Convention, and, two, to achieve the eradication of torture (and not by negotiating a single exception, while offering no protest to a regime’s use of torture on others).
On 11 August the Algerian and Jordanian former internees were again arrested. There were soon more arrests, this time of two Algerians who had been acquitted unanimously in a trial at the Old Bailey in April 2005 of involvement in a conspiracy to use ricin, an allegation that had been seized on at the time of their original arrest by Colin Powell in his attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq to the UN. (One juror described how for him a moment of truth came early in the trial, when a witness from Porton Down nervously drank three containers of water while in the witness box seeking to explain why an early lab report said to have been conveyed to the police and confirming that there was no trace of ricin, had, curiously, never reached the Cabinet Office.)
Those detainees who remain in the United Kingdom are still in prison or under extreme bail restrictions. One has been returned twice to Broadmoor from prison before being bailed to a psychiatric hospital. There are now two more Jordanian detainees and several Algerians, while Libya rapidly became the third state to promise safe re-entry to its dissident citizens. As for the promised monitoring organisations, one was purpose-built in Jordan in 2005, a husband and wife team bankrolled by the UK, which by the summer of 2007 (when two thousand inmates in one Jordanian prison were beaten the day after the first ever visit of an NGO, Human Rights Watch, to whose representatives they had complained of torture), had still never visited a prison. In Libya, the independent monitor agreed to by Britain is the Ghadafi Foundation, headed by Colonel Ghadafi’s son.
Algeria never signed a memorandum of understanding with Britain, nor did it appoint an independent monitor, although both safeguards were said by Blair to be non-negotiable precursors to deportation. Constant prevarication was ascribed initially to the Algerian president’s ill-health, and then to meetings being postponed, until finally the detainees’ appeals against deportation could be delayed no longer. SIAC, hearing evidence in large part in secret, found that Algeria’s ‘body politic’ appeared to have moved to ‘a state of lesser danger’ for perceived dissidents, that a limited amnesty was on offer, so that the refugees would not be put on trial, and thus that it was safe to deport them. Several Algerians in prison here or under severe restrictions decided to return. As they said in a letter to a British newspaper: ‘We are choosing the alternative of a quick death in Algeria to a slow death here.’
In making this decision, two of the Algerians, Benaissa Taleb and Rida Dendani, dramatically miscalculated. Astonishingly, SIAC allows secret evidence to be given even on the issue of an individual’s future safety. Had the men properly understood the reality (or more important the fragility) of diplomatic arrangements, perhaps neither would have decided to return. Each was told that an amnesty applied in Algeria which he should sign even though he had committed no offence; indeed special arrangements were made by the Home Office for each man to have bail to attend the Algerian Embassy in London for this purpose. Each believed that he would not be detained more than a few hours on arrival and that, as the British diplomat organising these deportations had promised SIAC, there was no risk that he would be held by the infamous DRS secret police. In fact they were both interrogated for 12 days during which they were threatened and subjected to serious physical ill-treatment. They were then charged, tried and some months later convicted, on the basis of the ‘confessions’ forced from them during this time. Dendani was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, Taleb to three.
At the heart of Britain’s reassurances as to their safety had been the confidence that the Algerians would place too high a value on their relationship with Britain to risk its disapproval. No British official has ever attempted to visit either man in prison, despite reports that both continue to be held in conditions that violate every international norm; no official attended their trials and the fact that visa applications by the men’s UK lawyers have been ignored for a year by the Algerian authorities, despite repeated requests for help from our government, has been commented on with amusement during proceedings before SIAC as evidence of Algeria’s independent spirit. A desperate letter describing how he had been tortured was sent by Dendani from Algeria to the president of SIAC. It brought no response. Despite all this, it is still maintained that it is safe to deport people to Algeria. An application on behalf of appellants for a secret hearing at which information given to lawyers by those afraid of providing it in the open could be properly and safely examined has been rejected, not because SIAC considered the proposal without merit, but because the court’s rules, it appears, do not allow for such a procedure.
Is the treatment of these two men simply a blip in an otherwise safe and lawful process? Is it reasonable for the Muslim community to see wider significance in the treatment of such individuals? Over the past year it has emerged that Britain has secretly been willing to disregard the most basic principles of refugee protection. First, we learned that Taleb’s interrogation by the DRS was indisputably based on information received by the Algerians from the UK. Not only did Algeria possess the 2003 findings against him by SIAC (under the internment legislation that the House of Lords subsequently held to be unlawful), but it has now been discovered that the asylum claims of possibly all of this small group of detainees have been passed to the regimes from which they had fled. Asylum rests on the central premise of confidentiality, and a clear promise to that effect is given by the Home Office to all those who claim asylum here. After all, the contents of the application, or the very fact of its having been made, might create danger for the applicant if he returned to his country of origin. In the case of one man whose appeal against the Home Office’s request to deport him has not yet been considered by SIAC, we have discovered that a specially commissioned medical report describing his vulnerable condition has already been prepared by Belmarsh and sent to Jordan.
Taleb, known throughout his internment only by a letter of the alphabet so that his family in Algeria would not be at risk, arrived there to find that all the information about him based on secret evidence under now abandoned legislation was held by the Algerians, un-anonymised. Taleb had decided to return to Algeria in the hope he would be safe, and so no court in Britain had ordered his deportation. Yet the Algerians possessed all the British government’s ‘evidence’ about him. His subsequent trial confirmed his worst fears. His Algerian lawyers argued, and he gave evidence of this himself, that he had signed an unread ‘confession’ after spending 12 days in DRS custody and after having been beaten by his interrogators. The presiding judge countered by referring to the ‘West’ and its ‘illusory democracy’: ‘Weren’t you imprisoned, confined to your home for several years without trial, without charge and without respect for any procedure of either inquiry or investigation in a democratic country par excellence, Great Britain? No one in this court can teach us a lesson or put to us the least complaint on this matter, since in this country no person has been subject to such treatment.’ Taleb’s claim for asylum in the UK he saw as amounting to a ‘betrayal’ of his country of origin. Asylum was accorded ‘only to those who hated their own country’, and the judge commented at length on Algerians who had gone abroad and painted a black picture of the country’s human rights situation ‘to the benefit of NGOs whose time was spent vitiating the truth about Algeria’. Taleb’s eventual conviction was, curiously, for going to Afghanistan in 1991 to fight the Russians. In fact, he went to Pakistan in 1991 as an idealistic 18-year-old, where he taught refugees from Afghanistan; the Russians had left two years earlier. As for the amnesty he had signed? Not only its relevance but its existence was denied. The United Kingdom displayed no interest in any of this. The reality is that British Petroleum has sunk £6 billion into obtaining oil from Algerian southern Sahara; the US and the EU are scrambling with the UK for a slice of Libya’s economic potential; and Jordan, one fifth of whose annual national income is provided by the US, is content to act as its most reliable provider of safe destinations for rendition and torture.
In February, a judgment published by the European Court of Human Rights in the case of a Tunisian whom Italy sought to deport, although Tunisia continues to practise torture, revealed that the UK had tried to intervene in the case in the hope of undoing one of the European Court’s most important decisions, Chahal v. UK, in which the court insisted that the claim of a risk to national security could never trump a European country’s international obligation not to return a refugee who might be tortured. The European Court rejected this attempt in strong terms.
Through a myriad other routes Britain attempts to evade internationally recognised legal restraints. Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back.’ Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’ without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence. A few weeks ago in the House of Lords, Lord Hoffman expressed horror at ‘the meanness and squalor’ of a regime ‘that monitored who had what for breakfast’. The number of such cases now multiplies daily. They have nothing at all to do with national security, they only succeed, as they are intended to, in sapping morale; they have everything to do with reinforcing the growing belief of the suspect community that it is expected to eradicate its opinions, its identity and many of the core precepts of its religion.
In December 2001 it was a small group of foreign nationals who paid the price for Blair’s wish to show solidarity with the US; and their predicament has never been widely known or understood beyond the Muslim community. But joining them in prison today are more and more young British men, and occasionally women. Many have little or no idea why they are there, although even more disturbingly, the majority were tried by the courts in conventional trials before conventional juries. Why is it, therefore, that the accused do not seem to comprehend why they are there when the prosecution has in any trial to serve all of its evidence in the form of statements, in order to inform the defendant of the case against him? The answer is that the vice underlying the internment/deportation cases is now being perpetrated in conventional trials. The accusations are similarly inchoate: defendants are said to be ‘linked to terrorism’ or ‘linked to extremism and/or radical ideology’. In these cases, the evidence before the court has time and again been found after a search on a defendant’s computer or in a notebook; the defendant is charged with possession of a certain item or this item is held to demonstrate the defendant’s desire to incite, encourage or glorify terrorism.
The right to a fair trial is in many ways difficult to articulate. If a defendant believes his or her prosecution is unjust, does he or she have any concepts to hang onto that are not entirely nebulous, unless they can prove, as those wrongly convicted in Birmingham or Guildford did, that their confessions had been brutally coerced? Or in the case of Judith Ward, when it was proved that the prosecution had withheld for 18 years evidence that disproved her claimed fantasies, or that of Danny McNamee, in which the information that circuit boards identical to those he was held to have used were in the possession of an actual bomb-maker was kept from his defence and a fingerprint was claimed to be his when it was not. In each of these cases, bad, misleading and on occasion false ‘expert’ evidence also played its part. Less well-known guarantees of a fair trial do, however, exist, just as clear protections for refugees exist, which were equally intended to hold good for all time and in the face of all emergencies. The relevant provisos, which underpin the right to a fair trial, are that the law should be clear and certain so that individuals can be confident that their behaviour does not transgress the limits society has set; that the application of the law should never be retrospective; and that there are protections intended to preserve freedom of speech, religion, thought and privacy. Young Muslims search the internet in their tens of thousands, as do non-Muslims. Any internet search, however, leaves an ineradicable trace which can and does provide material that puts its searcher now at risk of prosecution for possession of information that might be ‘of use to terrorists’. They even risk arrest for writing anything that could be said to ‘incite’ or ‘encourage’ ‘terrorism’.
This is the context of many current prosecutions. The fruits of a police search are uncovered, prosecutions mounted for the ‘possession’ of literature, films and pamphlets bought or viewed on websites, even if that viewing was swift and the item discarded or even deleted. The defendants are stigmatised as potential terrorists and their cases considered by juries more often than not without even one Muslim among their ranks to provide what the concept of 12 jurors randomly selected is intended to contribute to the trial process – a reflection of the collective good sense of the community.
Two young Muslim women were separately tried at the Old Bailey last year for having written works deemed by the prosecution to be for a terrorist objective. One was the ‘Lyrical Terrorist’, whose appeal against conviction is due to be heard shortly. The other, Bouchra El-Hor, was acquitted by her jury; she had the good fortune to have as a defence witness Carmen Callil, who witheringly described the letter that El-Hor had written as a classic example of the way devout women, whether Catholic or Quaker, Puritan or Muslim, experiment with creative writing as a means of expression while living isolated existences. The jury laughed at Callil’s savage critique, but one could see recognition and understanding follow.
This is very dangerous territory, however, where a lucky accident of interpretation is critical to a jury’s understanding of a case and where police and prosecutors, neither of them armed with any understanding of Islam, press on with prosecutions although the court struggles properly to understand what is at issue. Where the human story is straightforward, the task is far easier, but even so, now that secret accusations and secret courts have intruded into the sacrosanct forum of an open jury trial in which secrecy is not allowed, what is a jury to make of an allegation that a defendant has breached a Control Order imposed on the basis of secret evidence which holds that he is a risk to national security? On trial just before Christmas was a young Essex Muslim, Ceri Bullivant, who had been placed under a Control Order and then charged with a criminal offence when he absconded, unable to cope with the restrictions of that order. In his case the jury magnificently acquitted him on the basis that he had a reasonable excuse to breach his order. It was only later, however, in the High Court, that what lay behind the secrecy became suddenly clearer. Mr Justice Collins quashed the order itself; before he did so, an Intelligence agent giving evidence from behind a screen admitted that the tip-off which had led to the decision that Bullivant was a risk to national security and ‘associated with links to terrorists’ had come from a friend of Ceri’s mother who, after drinking heavily, had phoned Scotland Yard, which failed ever to contact the caller to ask for further explanation. Equally disturbingly, a childhood friend of Bullivant’s told the court that he had been approached by MI5 officers and asked to spy on local Muslim youths. When he pointed out this was unlikely to be productive since he was not himself a Muslim, he was encouraged to become one and told that ‘converts are given a special welcome.’
>From a distance such blundering negligence might seem merely laughable, but those affected by it feel resentment, anger and despair. Why should young people as much a part of Britain as any other citizen require what are in effect interpreters to establish their innocence? The more religiously based the evidence, the greater the opportunity for obstinate incomprehension. Conspicuous by its absence in case after case is any evidence, expert or otherwise, proffered by the prosecution that attempts to explain the most basic concepts of Islam to a non-Muslim jury. Take the instance of a saying of the Prophet Muhammad familiar to all Muslims: ‘Fight the unbelievers with your wealth, yourselves and your tongues.’ Should a man who made a supplication in those terms in Regent’s Park Mosque on the holiest night of Ramadan four years ago, in support of the citizens of Fallujah who were that night defending their city in the face of the announced eradication by US troops of all who remained there, have anticipated that he might be breaking the law, or that he could be charged and prosecuted in 2008 after a friend’s home video of his prayer was found by police in a raid? He had, after all, repeated those same challenging words many times over the years, and explained again and again to the public, to the police and politicians, one of the most fundamental concepts of Islam, the Ummah, which makes every Muslim anywhere in the world the brother of every other Muslim, so that if one is attacked others are obliged to help. Should he be surprised to be prosecuted for having reiterated these same words of support in a mosque? The answer lies in Blair’s warning: ‘The rules of the game have changed.’ Previously accepted boundaries of freedom of expression and thought have been redefined and are now in effect being prosecuted retrospectively, with the result that our criminal justice system is becoming further distorted as many truly innocent defendants plead guilty, against their lawyers’ advice, terrified by the prospect, as they see it, of inevitable conviction and ever lengthening prison sentences. Thousands of others, all of whom have searched the internet, watch with horror the process of criminalisation and punishment.
In this country we did not grow up with a written constitution and human rights legislation entered our law only recently. In times of tension we struggle to find answers to basic questions. Are there rules and can they be changed? Are there legal concepts that protect a community under blanket suspicion, or should that community’s adverse reaction to suspicion be seen as oversensitivity in the face of perceived political necessity? Should we accept the concept of the greatest good for the greatest number? The answer is again the same: we are bound by international treaty and, belatedly, by domestic human rights legislation, to hold that there are inalienable rights that attach to the individual rather than society. Article 8 of the European Convention protects not only respect for family and private life, but also the individual against humiliating treatment; Article 10 protects freedom of expression, Article 9 freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and Article 14 guarantees that in the enjoyment of these rights any discrimination is itself prohibited. Occasionally, fierce campaigning successfully sounds an alarm: the proposed extension from 28 to 42 days of the time allowed for questioning those suspected of involvement in terrorism is being energetically fought. But there are less obvious erosions of parallel rights.
If this is indeed how it was for the Irish, we should urgently try to understand how significant change came about for them. Much current reminiscence ignores vital factors, such as the inescapable responsibility of the Irish Republic and, above all, the political weight of the Irish diaspora and the far-sightedness of those who began and maintained contact, long before Blair was elected and claimed the ultimate prize. Throughout the thirty years of conflict, forty million Americans of Irish descent formed an electoral statistic that no US administration could afford to ignore. It is said that on the night before he decided to grant a visa to Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton watched a film about the catastrophic injustice inflicted on one Irish family by the British state. Here, Lord Scarman and Lord Devlin, retired law lords, joined Cardinal Hume, the head of the Catholic Church in England, in educating themselves in the finest detail of three sets of wrongful convictions involving 14 defendants. At one critical moment Cardinal Hume confronted the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, challenging the adequacy of his briefing.
No similar allies for the Muslim community are evident today, capable of pushing and pulling the British government publicly or privately into seeing sense. Spiritually, the Muslim Ummah is seen as being infinite, but the powerful regimes of the Muslim world almost without exception not only themselves perpetrate oppression, but choose to work hand in hand with the US and the UK in their ‘war on terror’. It is for us, as a nation, to take stock of ourselves. We are very far along a destructive path, and if our government continues on that path, we will ultimately have destroyed much of the moral and legal fabric of the society that we claim to be protecting. The choice and the responsibility are entirely ours. Gareth Peirce is a lawyer who has since the 1970s represented individuals accused of involvement in terrorism from both the Irish and the Muslim communities.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/08/406951.html
 
Tibetan "protestors" removed from trafalger square 
riku | 17.08.2008 18:48 | Repression | Social Struggles | London 
police being twats 
 
On Saturday after the main authorised tibet protest march, two protestors stopped to watch the olympics, they happened to be carrying two tibet flags but werent protesting. After a couple of minutes the heritage wardens (the people who supervise the square) asked them to leave, and then proceeded to get the police involved when they said they werent protesting and wouldnt leave.... 

anyway...5 policeman eventually came down and asked them to leave and threatened to use force...stating that they were enforcing local by-laws (which do exist).... 

the irony was that they really werent protesting....yet because the police turned up and treated it as such, thats what it became....! 

yah! another ridiculous example of police activity in london.... 
riku 
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18.08.2008 21:48
thanks for putting this up Riku.To clarify a little.when we first entered the square there were 7 of us but five left after the intervention of a couple of Heritage wardens,some lurking security and a community police officer,which left two of us.After singing a line from the current Madonna single "if its against the law arrest me" (at which the Heritage Warden looked horrified ,possibly at my sentiment but more probably at my vocal chords) & a bit of relatively friendly chat with the community police officer i said i intended to stay watching the olympics until 3.00pm.After the 5 police arrived it appeared that they were 4 to 1 in our favour,but had to act on the Heritage Warden's say so.They asked to see the bye law and then showed it to us where it said under Trafalgar Square bye Laws 2002 section 5 part 10 that noone should "take part in a display".we disputed that we were doing any such thing . as i pointed out to the police inspector "what about every design on a T-shirt and the bloke who i saw passing by with an England flag over his shoulder".As far as we were concerned we were just watching the Olympics with our Tibetan flags.After more conflab the police told us they would have to remove us by force.There was no suggestion of arrest so i continued to assume we were not doing anything illegal.however as it was now 5 to 3.00pm the police decided to just wait for our time to leave.i didn't feel that overall the police wanted to be there. 
After discussion between the two of us we felt that we were the victims of political discrimination by the GLA.This bye law ,if it means anything,(& such a catch all phrase as "display" hardly suggests it does)is clearly only implemented when it suits the GLA reps. 
i'd be surprised if they order out people wearing T-Shirts displaying their affections for football teams or coca-cola.So it depends on the bias of the GLA as expressed through its employees. 
As a result of this we decided to go to Parliament Square the next day and raise the Tibetan Flag.This we did yesterday & spent nearly two hours waving Tibetan flags opposite the Houses Of Parliament & Big Ben.About 50 people asked to be photographed with us including people from Russia,Pakistan,and Hong Kong....but no interest whatsoever from the police (& SOCPA).We had wondered whether Tiananmen square & Parliamen square were similar (ie that its illegal in both places to raise the Tibetan flag) but thankfully we found that they are not. 
The UK Parliament is a very suitable place to raise the Tibetan Flag because 

UK invaded Tibet in 1904.This is important because it means that the UK is the only Western nation that knows that Tibet was an independent nation before its occupation by China.The UK therefore has a huge responsibility to Tibet which the UK avoids. 

Gordon Brown failed to meet the Dalai Lama at Downing Street in May.(Since 1959 John Major is the only UK Prime Minister to have received the Dalai Lama at Downing Street).So Gordon Brown its way past time to act for Tibet. 

~~^^~~simon 
 
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Scientology-protester--faces-court.4191420.jp
 
Scientology protester faces court over 'ambiguous' sign
Published Date: 17 June 2008 
By ALAN McEWEN
A PROTESTER has been charged with breach of the peace after carrying an "ambiguous" sign during a rally against the Church of Scientology.
The 57-year-old was arrested after taking part in a protest at Hunter Square, near the controversial church's Scottish base on South Bridge.

The protest was organised by campaign group Anonymous, which has been fighting for the right to describe the church as a cult. The protester who was arrested was wearing a Mexican wrestler's mask and carrying signs which read "Stupid Cu*t" and "Greedy Cu*t".

The banner had flaps with letter "l"s on which could be folded down over the stars.

Police decided the message on the banner was "too ambiguous" and could be taken as offensive.

Around 60 people took part in Saturday's protest, policed by eight officers, while Scientologists ran a recruitment tent in the square.

Last month, Edinburgh councillors said they had "no objection" to the use of the word "cult" in referring to the church.

The decision followed a teenager taking part in a London protest being handed a court summons for refusing to put down a sign which read "Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult".

In an online blog, the protester who was arrested said: "Following the recent arrests of protesters who displayed the word "cult", I decided to make the point that the word "cult" was being treated as an offensive profanity when applied to Scientology.

"The arrest when it came was swift and non-negotiable. I was told, 'That's going too far, I'm arresting you'. I never received a warning.

"I think it's a waste of taxpayers' money to arrest me over a joke. 

"The police treated it more like an Orange Order walk or football match, whereas previously, it was more of a carnival atmosphere. Perhaps I misread the mood."

The protester, who said he lost touch with two friends after they joined the church in the 1970s, is due to appear at Edinburgh Sheriff Court on July 3.

A spokesman for Anonymous Scotland, which has around 130 members, said: "The police had been good with us until the Scientologists started making frivolous complaints. They knew how to push the police's buttons and get them to intimidate us by taking down all our details.

"We understand the sign could be viewed as slightly insidious, but this man was not warned about it. He was simply arrested and that's why we were angry."

None of the group are former Scientologists, but some have friends or family who are current or former members. The group's next march is planned for the second weekend of July.

A police spokeswoman said: "A 57-year-old man was arrested after displaying a banner with offensive writing. Aside from this, the protest passed peacefully."

Scientologists claim to be dedicated to self improvement through counselling and rehabilitation. Famous members include Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

No-one could be reached at the Church of Scientology.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-in-our-backyard-a-bill-that-threatens-historic-right-to-protest-852824.html
 
Not in our backyard! A Bill that threatens historic right to protest
By Andrew Grice and Ben Russell
Tuesday, 24 June 2008 

PA
With an extra 100m passengers predicted to be using UK airports by 2030, there are new runways planned for four airports as part of a huge expansion programme

More than 60 Labour MPs are threatening to derail plans to weaken people's long-standing right to oppose the building of new nuclear power stations and airport runways in their own "backyards". 
Ministers want to hand the final decisions to an unelected quango, and Labour whips are trying to head off a backbench rebellion when the Planning Bill is debated in the Commons tomorrow. Sixty-three Labour MPs have threatened to vote against the measure and ministers are set to offer concessions to avert an embarrassing first Commons defeat for Gordon Brown – one which would prompt further questions about his authority. 
At present, major projects such as power stations, ports, airports, roads, railways, dams, water plants, hazardous waste facilities and critical gas and electricity works are subject to public inquiries, where lawyers for residents, pressure groups and developers do battle – sometimes for years – before government-appointed inspectors recommend whether the schemes should go ahead. Ministers then take the final decision. 
Under the Bill, an independent infrastructure planning commission would decide whether to approve such projects. Environmental groups and MPs from all parties have condemned the proposals as an affront to democracy. They say the final say on such developments should not be handed to an unelected quango but should be retained by ministers accountable to the public. 
The Campaign to Protect Rural England warned that the shake-up would remove democratic control over all the most contentious planning decisions. "This is crunch time for planning in this country," said Paul Miner, its senior planning campaigner. "Airport expansion and new power stations are huge matters of public concern. If ministers are serious about moving towards a greener future and more prudent use of resources, they should take the hard decisions this involves. MPs must stand up and be counted and use their votes to make sure we continue to have democratic accountability in our biggest planning decisions." 
Naomi Luhde-Thompson, of Friends of the Earth, added: "The Planning Bill is undemocratic, marginalises community voices and does nothing to tackle climate change. The Government's proposals mean local people will not be properly involved in decisions that could fundamentally affect them. Major projects such as roads, airports and power stations will be pushed through without local people having a proper say. 
"The existing inquiry process allows people to question the developer, call witnesses and present evidence at a public inquiry. In the new system, all of these rights are removed, with only limited opportunity for people to raise concerns, and no requirement for the developer or decision-makers to respond." 
Last night, the Labour rebels held talks with the Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, and the Planning minister, John Healey, to demand that the Government's role is strengthened. It seemed ministers were likely to give some ground, with one government source saying: "We are not seeking confrontation, we are seeking compromise." 
The vote has been delayed twice to give ministers more time to head off a defeat. Mr Brown has been telephoning potential Labour rebels, who have signed a Commons motion saying the proposed planning commission would have "inordinate and unprecedented" powers. 
Two weeks ago, the Prime Minister narrowly survived a vote to extend to 42 days the maximum time that police can hold terror suspects. A defeat on the Planning Bill, at a time when Mr Brown has an overall majority of only 67, would raise further questions about his authority. 
Labour rebels have tabled amendments to the Bill to ensure that ministers retain the final say. John Grogan, one of the leaders of the revolt, said: "You should not be able to build a new power station or a big new airport without a politician being prepared to stand up for it and being responsible. The politicians should not be able to stand up and say, 'it's not us guv, it's the planning commissions'. There is a limit to the virtues of government by expert." John McDonnell, the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, added: "This is a straightforward case of accountability. Even if you just put a secretary of state's name on the decision, it allows you to understand who is responsible. You cannot devolve these issues to a group of hand-picked bureaucrats. In my constituency there is the issue of Heathrow airport. It will be a huge issue in my constituency but also a major argument over global warming." 
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, said: "This quango is going to be almost entirely divorced from the processes of democracy. That is wrong. People need a planning system in which they feel they have a say – both at national and local level. That is why this Bill is getting such widespread opposition from so many different quarters." 
Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrat environment spokesman, said: "The Planning Bill is a Trojan Horse for airport expansion, new nuclear power plants and other controversial projects. The Government has got fed up with consultation and public inquiries. The worry is that it is about railroading through plans. If we do not get the amendments through, we will ask ministers about these projects and they will say, 'Sorry – not my decision'." 
The Government insists the new system would be more democratic because MPs would debate national policy statements on energy or transport to lay down detailed guidelines for planning decisions and set out the principle of developments such as new nuclear plants. The commission would then decide detailed planning applications on about 45 cases a year. Developers would be required to consult local communities and the commission would hold public hearings into applications. All interested parties would still have a right to put their case to the commission. Ministers say the hearings would be less dominated by lawyers. 
NUCLEAR SITES 
Expansion or renovation planned at more than a dozen nuclear facilities, despite mounting concerns over safety and waste disposal. 
RESERVOIRS 
Major development planned to expand six reservoirs in the South and South-east, where OECD says water capacity per head is lower than in the Sahara. 
INCINERATORS 
Tough new environmental regulations could lead to the building of three massive, centralised disposal units for millions of tonnes of commercial and household waste. 
AIRPORTS 
With an extra 100m passengers predicted to be using UK airports by 2030, there are new runways planned for four airports as part of a huge expansion programme. 
BARRAGES 
Hugely controversial proposals under review to generate up to 5 per cent of Britain's electricity needs from the Severn Barrage alone. 
GAS PIPELINES 
Six huge underground gas fields built after surge in imports of liquefied petroleum gas and collapse in North Sea supply. 
MAJOR ROADS 
Massive infrastructure improvements to be enacted with widening of motorways and relaying of ‘A’ roads. About 500 miles of extra roads are planned.

Stansted campaign would be silenced

The public inquiry into the expansion of Stansted airport, around which a stream of retired solicitors, teachers and other professionals have mobilised in protest, is a good example of the sort under threat from the new law. 

When hearings began last May, environment groups co-ordinated protests outside while inside, Friends of the Earth, the Stop Stansted Expansion (SSE) group and the National Trust gave statements against the plans of the airport's owner, BAA. 

The inquiry has heard both sides of the case: the plans – for a new terminal by 2015, with 68 million passengers a year by 2030 – will create up to 13,000 jobs, boosting the economy by £9bn, according to BAA. But the new runway and terminal would be built on 442 hectares of land, with 13 listed buildings being destroyed. Essex County Council is firmly opposed, while the SSE has described the plan as "going beyond environmental vandalism and ... tantamount to a declaration of war on the local community and global environment".

High-speed rail: the future?

Journey times between London and Manchester could be cut to little more than an hour under ambitious plans to build a new generation of rail routes. Network Rail yesterday announced a feasibility study into the construction of five high-speed rail links from the capital to major cities.

The new lines would be built alongside existing routes out of London in the largest rail investment since the 19th century.They would be next to the West Coast line to Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow; the East Coast line to Edinburgh; the Great Western to Bristol, the Midland main line to Sheffield and the Chiltern route to Birmingham.

London to Manchester would be 74 minutes; London to Sheffield 71 minutes. The moves follow predictions of a 30 per cent rise in passengers in the next decade. Network Rail said: "There is a huge case to be made for an expansion of the rail network."

Nigel Morris 
 
http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/edinburgh/Norwegian-fined-for-airport-39bomb39.4162934.jp
 
Norwegian fined for airport 'bomb' protest
A NORWEGIAN engineer who protested that he "didn't have a bomb" while going through airport security checks at Edinburgh has been fined £650.
Kjell Bjoennes, 52, became upset when asked to remove his belt as he passed through the security area at Edinburgh Airport on Thursday.

The contracts manager, who earns £120,000 a year after tax, yelled at security staff "I have got a belt, not a bomb".

Police were called after Bjoennes continued to shout about bombs and he was arrested.

He appeared from custody at Edinburgh Sheriff Court yesterday and pled guilty to repeatedly shouting and swearing and placing the lieges in a state of fear and alarm and committing a breach of the peace.

Paul Smith, defending, said the father-of-two had been through Edinburgh Airport with the same belt on before and "couldn't understand why a fuss was being made of it on this occasion".

Sheriff John Horsburgh QC said the fine would have been £1000 if Bjoennes had not pled guilty.
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