UK Police at war over arrest of Tory MP

[T_i_B]

Source: Sunday Times

SCOTLAND YARD was in turmoil last night after senior police officials criticised its new boss and admitted its handling of the arrest of a Tory MP had been “catastrophic”.

A senior official on the Metropolitan Police Authority, the Met’s watchdog, said his oversight of the police inquiry into the leak of sensitive Whitehall documents to Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, raised important questions about his judgment and cast doubt over his prospects. The official said Stephenson should have told Sir David Normington, the Home Office permanent secretary who called in police, that leaks of nonclassified information were not a matter for a police inquiry.

The police official said: “Why didn’t the Met just to use discipline and misconduct rules instead of agreeing to a criminal inquiry? What this all hinges on is judgment and proportionality. Sir Paul has got a huge problem with this. This is a big problem for the Met. They have managed to get every main political party and everyone in the media against them. For the Met it’s catastrophic. I think this could damage Sir Paul’s prospects.”

The pressure on Stephenson grew as it emerged that the raids had not been approved by the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer. A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service, which will decide whether Green should face criminal charges, said Starmer had been told about the arrest only shortly before detectives moved in last Thursday.


Read more: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5258476.ece

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A big story in the UK at present is the arrest of an opposition MP over a Whitehall leak. The trouble here is that the government have made a habit of leaking themselves whenever they find it convenient so all in all this arrest is a very unwise thing indeed.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. You see? they DID learn from Rove/Bush.

with the same predictable results, when the real truth came out.

[LeftishBrit]

2. Quite a saga...

On the one hand, it is nice to occasionally see politicians getting a taste of their own medicine.

On the other hand, it will be used by Tories as an example of how LABOUR IS SUPPRESSING OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES! The present government is Labour in name only, and no respecter of civil liberties; but much of this obsession with Official Secrets (except when the government chooses to leak them!) started to be prevalent in the 80s under Thatcher. Anyone else remember the Spycatcher affair?

[T_i_B]

4. Labour's record on civil liberties is truly dreadful

And this is the latest (and one of the very worst) examples of this.

From policies such as ID cards and 42 day detention to this farce Labour has set its stall out as the party that treats civil liberites with a general air of contempt. For proof of this all you need to do really is seek out Labour bloggers such as Luke Akehurst and Chris Paul (if you can stomach all the b******t)

[LeftishBrit]

5. True. But the Tories won't be any better.

I'd say 'bank on it' but that's another thing everyone has fucked up!

[hobbit709]

3. It's ok if the government does it.

The one rule that EVERY government lives by.
Like the bumper sticker says "Don't Steal, The Government Hates Competition"

[Peace Patriot]

6. Green's lucky. They kill leakers in the UK. Example: David Kelly.

What Kelly did was to tell the BBC, after the invasion of Iraq (about three months later, in May 2003)--when the 'hunt' for WMDs that everybody knew weren't there was proceeding furiously, with Judith Miller of the NYT leading US troops here and there, where she seemed to expect WMDs to be found--that the allegation about WMDs had been exaggerated in pre-war intelligence, called the "Dodgy Dossier." He spoke anonymously. Kelly was one of the top WMD experts in the world. He was a bioweapons specialist. Thereafter, the Blair gov't hunted the "leaker" down within the government, and went to war against the BBC, which tried to protect their whistleblower. The Blairites got a tip from someone in late June, that it was Kelly. He got wind of it and went to his bosses. They interrogated him at a "safe house," threatened him with the Official Secrets Act, forced him to partially recant before a parliamentary defense committee, leaked his name to the press (which was in a feeding frenzy by this time), and sent him home without protection and apparently without surveillance.

There, on July 17, 2003, he wrote upbeat emails to his friends about his daughter's coming wedding, and his own return to Iraq (he had been a UN weapons inspector), saying it would all likely blow over by the end of the week. He also wrote a more ominous email to his old friend Judith Miller, expressing worry (or was it irony?) about the "many dark actors playing games", went for his usual afternoon country walk, sat down under a tree, slashed one wrist (the ulnar artery--not generally lethal), and bled to death all night, outdoors in the rain, under the tree near his home. So the official story goes. Among the many, many irregularities in this story is: What were this big security risk's watchers doing while he bled to death all night near his home? For surely he was under surveillance. The question was never asked or answered.

This was three days after the Bushwhacks leaked the identity of CIA WMD counter-proliferation project head Valerie Plame in a Robert Novak column (7/14/03). In England, Kelly's office and computers were searched. Four days later (7/22/03), Novak additionally disclosed the name of Plame's front company, Brewster-Jennings, putting all of the CIA's counter-proliferation agents and contacts around the world in grave danger of being killed, and completely disabling the network.

Your guess is as good as mine, as to what was going on with this. I think the Bushwhacks were trying to plant the weapons in Iraq; Kelly knew it; they feared he would disclose it--that's why they killed him; but they couldn't figure out who foiled their plan, so they outed the entire CIA network that was working, at risk of their lives, to protect us and everybody else from illicit WMDs.

Green was merely working on immigration issues, apparently. So they 'merely' arrested him and raided his office in Parliament. But if it was something worse--say, like the Bushwhacks letting terrorists run around freely in Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego and Minnesota, ignoring all warnings, and suppressing FBI-requested warrants, or disabling NORAD protection of the east coast for one day--or any one of many war crimes that the Blairites might have been collusive on, or initiated on their own, to promote war and a police state, while the war profiteers and other corpo/fascists loot us all blind--he'd better hire a reliable private security firm.