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Issue #110. August 19th - September 1st, 2005 Preston Station
For Kate / Caravan / A Night in LA
Persian Paper Tiger
Thickly Padded Stories
Record review #1: Decoration (Escape Route - Single Review)
Record review #2: Math and Physics Club (Movie Ending Romance - Single Review)
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Preston Station I fell in love on Preston Station on a crazy cold day towards the end of November and nothing has been the same since. I arrived at the station in a state of disorientation. Too many people, too many sounds, too many signs all pointing in the same direction. My teeth were chattering my hands were blue and air was coming out of my face in soft smoky clouds. I had arrived at the station with a full bladder, an aching stomach and acute awareness of exactly where my kidneys were. Train toilets fill me with fear. The new sort I mean. The sort that have automatic doors and only buttons to lock them. How can a person feel at ease with just a button? How can you really be sure it is working? It's not as if you can see the lock slide into place, and it's not as if you can keep your leg against the door to make sure it stays shut. "Did I tell you about my mum's friend who had gone into one of those new train toilets?" "Umm no" "Yeah, she forgot to press the lock and so someone opened the door while she was sitting on the toilet. "Oh God no! Seriously?" "Yeah, and you know, its not as if you can just slam the door behind you after making the mistake. All they could do was press the close button and wait for the door to slowly slide shut while she sat there with her knickers around her ankles." So there I was stood on the platform freezing to death and desperately trying to find my bearings when this guy came up to me. He was all drunk, but wearing a suit like he had just finished work. He looked about 30 years older than me, but acted as though he hadn't looked in the mirror for a long time because he didn't seem to realise how old he was. He kind of stumbled over, but I imagine that in his mind he walked over with grace and elegance. He started asking what my name was and what I did and where I was going. He didn't even bother with an introduction or anything like that. Just started asking these questions as if it was normal for him to come up to me and keep talking. I smiled faintly. I think he imagined I was impressed, but actually I had finally seen the sign for the toilets. I edged away gradually, and his eyes were drawn to someone else: thinner, prettier, younger. I became invisible. As I left the toilets the conductor announced: "The nineteen forty train to Glasgow Central is now running fifty, that is five, zero, minutes late. We apologise for this delay and any inconvenience this may cause" And I found myself awash with tiredness swimming through a sea of angry, crazy cold, unhappy people. My teeth were chattering my hands were blue and air was coming out of my face in soft smoky clouds. And that is when I saw you standing 3 to 5 metres away. My teeth stopped chattering, my heart stopped beating and suddenly it felt like we were the only two people in that station. The crowds of people fell away and everything became slow and silent. Sometimes you watch this kind of thing happening in a film, and cynically laugh because life isn't really like that. Except that at that moment it was. You had seen me moments before I had seen you and you were smiling. I looked straight at you and at that second I fell in love. On Preston Station. On a crazy cold day towards the end of November. Nothing has been the same since.
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Persian Paper Tiger Pakistan continues to develop nuclear weapons. Iran’s nuclear programme is in its infancy by comparison. Pakistan’s government is no more democratic than Iran’s and elements of Pakistan’s military intelligence aided the Taliban. So why is Musharraf getting increased military aid from the Bush administration while Iran faces the threat of war? Is the supposed threat of nuclear proliferation putting warheads in the hands of ‘rogue regimes’ or Al Qa’ida a paper tiger to hide the real motives for threatening Iran? The Bush administration is attempting to forge a consensus that the Iranian government must be prevented from gaining nuclear weapons. As with Iraq the story goes that diplomatic means of preventing this supposed WMD threat would be preferable – but the use of force can’t be ruled out (and will probably be ruled in fairly soon if the British government again gives Bush the fig leaf of its support for another war in which the US will find itself otherwise isolated) . Their argument is simple. We have democratically elected governments that can be trusted with nuclear weapons while the Iranians don’t. . Yet there seems to be one rule:call Cream_saveas() for Iran and another for Pakistan . In Pakistan President Musharraf came to power in a military coup. His ‘democratic reforms’ are about as democratic as Iran's. In Iran despite Presidential and parliamentary elections real power remains with the Guardian Council of hard-line Shia clerics. In Pakistan Musharraf has allowed an elected parliament but has also amended the constitution so that as President he has the powers to veto parliament’s decisions or even dismiss it at any time. He also has an informal alliance with the Islamic fundamentalist nationalists of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal party. Pakistan already has nuclear warheads and missiles capable of delivering them with a 1,500 km range and recently began test launches of cruise missiles which can also mount nuclear warheads. Meanwhile US military aid to Pakistan has increased and the US has supplied Musharraf with F-16 jets capable of carrying nuclear bombs - which was one of the unusual demands of the ‘Islamic terrorists’ who held hostage and killed American journalist Daniel Pearl . The International Atomic Energy Agency has found that enriched uranium discovered on Iranian centrifuges is contamination from their use in Pakistan before they were exported to Iran. Even assuming Iran is developing nuclear weapons how much actual threat would this pose to the rest of the world? If the worry is the risk of Al Qa'ida getting hold of these materials why is Pakistan's far more advanced nuclear programme not considered a threat – especially since Pakistan's ISI military intelligence agency helped the Taliban into power in Afghanistan (see footnote 1 ) and retains links with Islamic extremists like Omar Saeed Sheikh who was involved in kidnapping Pearl? When your enemies have nuclear weapons using yours becomes suicide. That’s why despite governments possessing nuclear weapons having included one party states like the Soviet Union and North Korea , military governments like Musharraf’s in Pakistan and religious extremists like the Hindu Nationalist BJP in India not one government, democratic or undemocratic , religious or secular , has used nuclear weapons against another since President Truman bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which he could do only because no other country had such weapons yet.. Iran is no exception. If the Iranians used nuclear weapons they would face annihilation by Israel’s counter-strike – or by America’s , Britain’s and France’s. Saddam could never have used WMDs on Israel or countries allied to the US or Britain even if he had had them for the same reason - which is why he only used conventional warheads when he fired scud missiles into Israel during the first gulf war when he did still possess chemical warheads (see footnote 2). There are also serious questions about how nuclear and other WMD proliferation has taken place. The anthrax Saddam's regime possessed in the late 80s to early 90s was provided by the Reagan administration -shortly after Donald Rumsfeld was sent as Reagan's ambassador to the Middle East. In 2000 the ABB engineering firm provided nuclear reactors which could be used to manufacture weapons grade material to the North Korean government. Donald Rumsfeld was on ABB's board of directors at the time. Iran's uranium contaminated centrifuges come from Pakistan whose nuclear programme was funded partly by the notorious and now defunct Bank of Credit and Commerce International. A US Senate Inquiry in 1992 found that BCCI was involved in laundering drug money and acted as a conduit for CIA funding (footnotes 3,4,5 & 6). The CIA and Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence still have close links developed during the 1980s Afghan war against the USSR. Senior officials in the Pakistani government and friends of the nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan told the Associated Press last year that Pakistani military intelligence facilitated both Pakistan's nuclear programme and the export of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Pakistan's nuclear scientists were under constant surveillance and their movements restricted by the military. Certainly the cost of nuclear weapons is prohibitive and the by-products of nuclear power and nuclear warheads are highly toxic – and we have no means of safely storing or disposing of them – or certainly none that we can afford. Replacing our own nuclear industries with more affordable technologies which don’t threaten our health would be the best way to persuade other countries not to adopt them. Nuclear weapons can only be decommissioned by international agreement. Even if we only gave up part of our arsenals we would save a great deal of money that could be better spent. Without multilateral disarmament nuclear proliferation is - as a Pentagon report concluded last year – inevitable. To persuade Iran not to develop nuclear weapons would require the existence of Israel’s large nuclear arsenal to be acknowledged. Then pressure would have to be put on Israel to reduce this arsenal or negotiate the decommissioning of its nuclear weapons in return for agreements from other countries in the region not to develop nuclear weapons. Iran’s nuclear programme, whether civilian or military, doesn't pose a genuine threat to us serious enough to make war an improvement. We can't go to war on every country which develops nuclear technologies - and in most cases we dont threaten to whether their governments are undemocratic or not. The argument – which will be coming all too soon – that we need to replace the repressive torturing Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran with a democratic one is full of holes. Iran would probably be a democracy much like India today if the CIA and MI6 in association with Anglo-Iranian Oil (now BP) hadn’t conspired to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh’s elected government after Iran was given its nominal independence from the British Empire in 1953 (footnote 7).. Then as now the real motive was control of Iran’s oil and gas industry which Mossadegh had attempted to nationalise. By sponsoring a military coup and propping up the Shah’s torturing dictatorship the British and American governments created the conditions for Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors as torturing theocrats to come to power (footnote 8).. By providing them with an external threat now we keep them in power. The threat of an American war on Iran helped hardliners greatly in the last Iranian Presidential elections. Excerpts of Bush's speech condemning the Iranian regime and elections were seen as a threat that Iran would be attacked just as Iraq was. They were replayed over and over again by Iranian State television during the election campaign and Iran's Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi thanked Bush for helping get the Islamic nationalist candidate Mahdi Ahmadinejad elected President. To go to war on Iran would – just as in Iraq – merely ensure that hard-line Islamic nationalists would gain support and their return to power in the long run would be assured. Robbed of threats from America the Iranian theocracy would struggle to maintain enough popular support to survive. Footnotes (1) = Rashid , Ahmed(2001) ‘ Taliban’ Tauris,London ,2001 Chapters 10 to 14 (2) = Nye , Joseph S. & Smith , Robert K. (1992) , After the Storm , Madison Books , London , 1992 , p211-216 (Note - Iraq possessed 30 chemical warheads for Scud missiles and chemical artillery shells but used none of them in the Gulf War) (3) = Adams, James Ring & Frantz, Douglas (1991) A Full Service Bank - How BCCI Stole Millions around the world , Simon and Schuster, London and New York, 1992 , esp 230 -239 (laundering drug money) , 326-7 (CIA use of ) , 237-9 (Robert Gates quote). (4) = Truell, Peter & Gurwin, Larry (1992) False Profits - The Inside Story of BCCI , Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1992 , esp p 133-4 (CIA man William Casey in constant contact with General Zia and Aga Hasan Abedi - founder of BCCI). (5) = US Senate 28 Jun 1995 - PAKISTAN AND THE F-16'S , Federation of American Scientists 1995 (Times quote) (6) = Nucleonics Week 29 August 1991, page 12 - Pakistan: A. Q. Khan Promises Nuclear Continuity cited as 'Abstract to Document No 6326' in Pakistan's Nuclear Related Facilities - Centre for non-Proliferation Studies Fact Sheet 1997 , Andrew Koch & Jennifer Topping (7) = Curtis, Mark (1995), ‘The Ambiguities of Power : British Foreign Policy since 1945’ ,Zed Books , London and New Jersey ,1995 , p87-96 (8) = Kapuscinski, Ryzsard (1982) , ‘Shah of Shahs’ , Vintage , 1992 copyright©Duncan McFarlane 2005
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Thickly Padded Stories Where did the false stories about Jean Charles de Menezes come from? Why did the head of the Metropolitan Police tell us police challenged him when before shooting when they didn’t ? Why are they refusing to release CCTV footage taken at Stockwell underground station on the day they killed Jean? Leaked police documents and still photographs from Stockwell underground station in London , along with evidence from relatives has shown that the initial account of his death was largely false. On the day police killed De Menzes the head of the Metropolitan Police Sir Ian Blair told the media “as I understand situation the man was challenged and refused to obey police instructions”. We now know that no warning was given. One plain clothes officer pinned De Menezes to the ground, another fired 7 shots into his head with an automatic pistol . Nor did De Menezes run from police. De Menezes had stopped and allowed uniformed police to search him on many previous occasions. He didn’t jump over the ticket barrier – he used his travel card as usual. The man seen jumping the barrier was one of the plain clothes armed police officers. He wasn’t wearing a ‘heavy jacket’ or a ‘thickly padded’ one – just a denim jacket . He didn’t run from police – because they didn’t even tell him to stop – he ran to catch a train. Some plain clothes police followed him onto the train – others were already waiting on it – they killed him. The basis for identifying him as a suicide bomber was amazingly weak. The block of flats Jean lived in (not the address he stayed at) had been ‘linked’ (by unspecified evidence) to the July 21st bus and underground bombing attempts. Only one police officer was keeping this block of flats under surveillance. He was ‘relieving himself’ when Jean left the building so apparently didn’t get a clear view of Jean – but passed on to his superiors that he thought Jean looked a bit like he might be one of the men involved in the July 21st bombing plot. Why was only one officer carrying out this surveillance if there was a genuine belief that suicide bombers might be staying in this block of flats? Who made the decision that someone maybe looking like a suspect to an officer who didn’t even get a clear view of them was sufficient grounds to order that they should be shot without any warning? Why if Jean was considered to be a suicide bomber was he allowed to get on a bus and even onto an underground train before being stopped? The police claim there is no CCTV camera film of Stockwell Underground Station from the 22nd of July – the day they shot Jean Charles de Menezes. Their latest explanation for this is that they had removed the film from the cameras to study footage of the attempted bombing suspects from the day before. So we are meant to believe that they left all the CCTV cameras at this station empty without putting new tapes or film into them. So in the middle of a state of high alert the day after an attempted terrorist attack they left cameras at an underground station empty. If this were true it would show amazing negligence and incompetence worth some resignations or sackings on its own by leaving London underground vulnerable to another terrorist attack– but it’s just not believable. It also conflicts with a BBC report that accounts of CCTV footage of de Menezes inside Stockwell station have already been leaked to the IPCC investigation. The Independent newspaper quoted Scotland Yard sources (i.e London Metropolitan Police force as saying de Menezes had been stopped by police as he got off a number 2 bus outside Stockwell underground station.If this had been true why was he shot on board a train in that station ? There is no answer to any of these questions so far. Whether it’s the police , ‘eye witnesses’ or other (strangely unidentified sources) they can’t get their story straight. . What we can be fairly sure of is that we have been lied to and are still being lied to. . Who provided the stories about the heavy jacket, about De Menezes jumping the ticket barrier and running down the escalator, about him ignoring warnings from police to stop? . Was it Metropolitan police officers or their press officers or Sir Ian? . Who are the eyewitnesses who have given all the various , conflicting and false accounts of the shooting ? Commuter Mark Whitby interviewed on the BBC claimed De Menezes was wearing “a baseball cap on and quite a sort of thickish coat - it was a coat you'd wear in winter, sort of like a padded jacket. He might have had something concealed under there, I don't know. But it looked sort of out of place with the sort of weather we've been having, the sort of hot humid weather.” The photograph below - leaked to ITN news from the Independent Police Complaints Commission into the shooting - shows that Jean was wearing jeans and a denim jacket. Many people are now wondering what led Mr Whitby to describe this as ‘padded’ or ‘a coat you’d wear in winter’. Was he just seeing what he expected to see? Shouldn’t we be told a bit more about who Mr Whitby and the other eyewitnesses are and what their jobs are so that any possible bias in their testimony can be accounted for? Another of the eyewitnesses interviewed on the day was Anthony Larkin who said “I saw these police officers in uniform and out of uniform shouting 'get down, get down', and I saw this guy who appeared to have a bomb belt and wires coming out.” Jean had no wires coming out of his coat and not thick belt on. He’d left his electricians belt at home that day. Now this could just be a co-incidence . I’m sure there’s more than one Tony Larkin in London – but it would be helpful if the media could tell us whether speculation that this Anthony Larkin was Tony Larkin – a Metropolitan Police forensic scientist is accurate or not. The three eyewitness accounts reported by the BBC also conflict with the accounts of other eyewitnesses like Lee Ruston who say the police gave Jean no verbal warning. Who made the decision that a wildly uncertain identification that Menezes ‘might’ be a suspect was sufficient grounds for killing him without giving him any chance to surrender ? On the day of the shooting the BBC’s Home Affairs correspondent Margaret Gilmore also reported that after the shooting de Menezes the police “…brought in the air ambulance. They did everything they can to revive him. He died at the scene.” Given that we know from the post-mortem that they had shot Jean 7 times in the head and once in the shoulder any claim by the police that they ‘did everything they can to revive him’ couldn’t be anything but a lie. No-one shot 7 times in the head could possibly be ‘revived’. This casts further doubt on the trustworthiness of the police’s claims. We need the answers to all these questions and then we need those responsible to be sacked or resign before facing criminal charges of manslaughter or else none of us will be able to feel that we can trust the police again. They will become just another threat to face rather than the defence standing between us and terrorism. And they won’t get the information they need to prevent further terrorist attacks because no-one will trust them enough to give it to them. If Sir Ian Blair lied he should resign or be sacked. If he was lied to be other officers they should be sacked and face criminal charges. The only person held to account for anything so far is the one person who has released the actual evidence to counter the misinformation that’s been disseminated – a secretary for the IPCC investigation suspended for leaking documents and photographs to the press. Above all the shoot to kill policy must be ended now. It has failed and by reducing trust in the police it reduces the amount of information they get and their chances of preventing more terrorist attacks. . If you want to support Jean’s family’s campaign email justice4jean@hotmail.com copyright©Duncan McFarlane 2005
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