Freesteel Blog » Whole day wasted terrorising wikipedia

Whole day wasted terrorising wikipedia

Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 7:10 pm Written by:

You’ll be disappointed to learn that none of it was machining related — I’m still waiting for enthusiastic collaborators to fix up the pages on Pencil milling and Raster passes.

It all started with a blog posting that caused me to write up the Talbot Street bomb-making haul which happened last week not far from here and involved what police believe was the largest haul of bomb related chemicals ever discovered in someone’s home in this country. At the same time in another house they discovered rocket launchers, chemicals, and a nuclear biological suit. But since the suspects are merely white guys with “some kind of masterplan”, they are not classed as terrorists, so they get filed under the List of terrorist-like incidents that were not designated as terrorism and were entirely ignored by the national press. Terrorism, it seems, is what they say it is. There is no definition. It’s a common pattern: in 1985, Tony Lecomber, also a Nazi, was caught with 10 grenades in his house after he tried to carry a nailbomb to the offices of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. He was also not a terrorist; he was simply misusing explosives.

That took until lunchtime. I went for lunch and looked in the paper, only to find that the Prime Minister-in-Waiting, Gordon Brown, had made a stupidly long blathering speech about about “Meeting the Terrorist Challenge” using the tool of financial sanctions. Obviously, Climate change and the Disaster recently determined massive mortality in Iraq aren’t as important to him as this BS.

As author of the wikipedia article on the Financial Sanctions Unit wikipedia article, I had to check it out.

Before that, I wasted several hours doing the rounds of my other favourite terrorism pages, and found a new fact relating to the Forest Gate Raid where 2 million quid of police money was blown chasing a ridiculous suicide chemical vest weapon. It seems that this farce was tipped off by the victim of an earlier terrorist prosecution who had been sent down for 6 years for having in his possession a blank-firing gun, DVDs of Osama bin Laden, and the address of a decorated British soldier whom he was supposedly planning to hunt down and kill. The actual conviction was for possessing information “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” (eg the time of day). His defence lawyer said that the man was “utterly incompetent” and had an IQ of 64. The same description could be used for the policework that lead to the initiation of Operation Volga.

So, I finally got round to looking at Gordon Brown’s speech, where he applauded the fact that he had just won a Judicial Review that decided that he could restrict the payments of any benefits made to listed terrorist suspects and their households. The case had been brought by three of the suspects wives none of whom are accused of being associated with terrorism. The report doesn’t say who these people are, but they are quite possibly be related to the ones who are held in prison on charges related to the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot. I fixed a few links in the article to reach the main New York Times story that we in England are for some reason banned from seeing.

Remember that one? It was the ring of islamofascists (President Bush’s words), some of whom didn’t have passports, who were accused all over the media of plotting to bring down 10 planes over the Atlantic using the chemicals contained in shampoo bottles. According to Gordon Brown, the police hauled in “200 mobile phones, 400 computers, and a total of 8,000 CDs, DVDs and computer disks, containing 6,000 gigabytes of data” relating to the case. Sounds like a PC warehouse. The suspects were armed with six terabytes, and the police require up to 90 days to go through it all to find out which kilobyte in it is the one that can be mixed with a stick of deodourant to produce a high explosive. The trial is not due to start till January 2008, probably because there is an embarrassing lack of evidence. Unlike with the case of the “not a bomb factory” referred to at the start of this article.

So this brought me on to the Terrorism Act 2006 page, which is a complete disaster area in terms of informational layout. But it’s 8pm now and I haven’t got all week to fix it up. Time to wind up this day. Code written: 0 lines.

2 Comments

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <strong>