Do You Know This Man? The Police and their Agent Provocateurs

I have been on demonstrations and marches for a variety of entirely peaceful causes in my time. What has frequently been striking is the heavy-handedness of the policing of these - even when no violence occurs, you are filmed by cops in full body armour. On the anti-Iraq War protest way back in early 2003, the most sinister aspect of the day was the men in black outfits on rooftops with long lens cameras snapping at citizens exercising a legitimate, democratic right to call on the Government not to go to war in our name. But yet again, without permission or explanation, thousands and thousands were filmed, photographed and filed.

The police use face recognition software to identify people, categorise them and eventually act against them. The "anti-terror" laws brought in both in the UK and the USA following 9/11 were allegedly to protect us from wild-eyed bearded mullahs intent on wrecking our "civilisation". The Bush Administration even spent many hours with a speak and spell working out a handy acronym for the new laws called the PATRIOT Act. Geddit? Anyone opposing that was immediately a suspicious potential spy or traitor. And Obama of course has done nothing to reverse these rules, and nor have the supposedly freedom loving Con Dems in the UK.

And in consequence, who have these rules really been used against?

No, not al-Qaeda, its supposedly James Bond-villainesque web of power a largely fictitious invention - indeed, isn't Bin Laden increasingly akin to the "Emmanuel Goldstein" hate figure Orwell warned of? Far more a foil to shut up opposition rather than any real threat? Even Colonel Gaddafi finds him a useful bogeyman to invoke.

The anti-terror laws have instead been used to criminalise political opponents of the British Government. There have been some ludicrous examples in 2005, the arrest of Holocaust-survivor Walter Wolfgang for daring to boo the Home Secretary during a debate at the Labour Conference; Derby Council used the laws to allow them to tape record "noisy" children in secret; and the case of the man arrested and prosecuted as a terrorist for tweeting a joke about his frustration at an airport delay. There was even the recent case of a 12 year old boy pulled out of his class to be warned off picketing outside PM David Cameron's constituency office about cuts to his local youth centre, with the threat of armed police attending if he want ahead. These represent dreadful breaches of human rights and the right to privacy, and they are far from the only instances the laws are also being deployed to remove the right to dissent and freedom of speech.


Not exactly "good evening all" any more.

For example, the laws are written in such a way that the cyclist groups that sometimes meet to "reclaim the streets", especially in London, by undertaking mass cycling to protest about city motor traffic, can be declared terrorists. Indeed, environmentalists as a whole have increasingly become a target for police using the terror laws, in spite of the almost entirely pacific nature of the green movement. Mirroring developments in the USA , including the appalling case of Marie Mason, jailed for 22 years, British laws have been deployed to convict people with "crimes" such as reading out the names of the British soldiers killed in Iraq at the London Cenotaph , or to restrict environmental protesters at energy plants.

Even more insidious of course have been the agent provocateurs embedded by the police in the green movement. The most well publicised case was the recent one of Mark Kennedy. Kennedy infiltrated the movement, encouraged and organised protests and worked to up the ante in terms of potential violence, before calling his police mates to come and arrest people who were then charged with planning violent activities, even although none of them had been involved in discussing any such with Kennedy. The trial collapsed at great cost to the taxpayer after Kennedy himself had a change of heart, but it then emerged that there were five more of his ilk, hidden in the green movement, plotting and winding up aggressive protests to the chagrin and opposition of many of the people they were seeking to get charged. One of them had even married someone he was spying on - the Stasi would bow down to the sheer gall of the British police.

This may be but the tip of the iceberg in terms of police manipulation of protesters. In both the student demonstrations before Christmas and the recent anti-cuts demonstration, many of those taking part have described strange groups of people and individuals who suddenly turned up, fomented violence against the police, and then vanished. Organisers of the protests insisted these were police agents, but what little coverage was given to their claims was met with howls of derision from the Government and the media - the BBC being especially complicit in this.

And yet the footage below, broadcast live by the BBC, suggests the truth of the organisers claims. Watch how one of the protesters is particularly aggressive towards the police, then steps back for a moment, then walks up to a policeman, shows him a card, receives a pat on the back and goes through the police line to stand at the back.

The implications, if this footage is what is appears to be, are immense, though in the light of previous cases, hardly surprising.The Police Commissioner of London on the same day called for more police powers to handle the "mob", even although by any standards it had been a fairly peaceful day - with just 200 arrests out of 250,000 people taking part.

But of course, if the gentleman in question would come forward, perhaps he could be eliminated from suspicion, along with some of the concerns of peace and freedom loving citizens as to just where this is all heading.

From the USA, an even more obvious attempt to infiltrate a G20 demonstration fails spectacularly:

Who Guards the Guardians?

A dreadful story appeared in today's "Daily Mirror" - a British Immigration officer was so disenchanted with his wife that, while she was on a holiday in Pakistan, he placed her on a Terrorist Watch list so she could not get back to the UK. As with many of our pernicious anti-terrorist laws, when she was refused permission to board a plane back to Britain, she was not allowed to know why.

And so it continued for THREE whole years until he was found out purely by chance. Proving the old adage that crooks are not half as clever as they think, the officer applied for a higher level job requiring a review of his security clearance and at that stage it was noticed that his wife was on a list of suspected terrorists. Cornered, he had to confess what he had done and was duly sacked.

In spite of his appalling acts, he was described by a former colleague as "a bit of a legend" in Immigration Officer circles - yes, they do have such a droll sense of humour, don't they?

There is no mention of him facing criminal charges for excluding someone from the UK even although his wife had every right to be here. No suggestion he might be jailed or fined for abusing her rights or misuse of his position. He has lost his job, but after the most dreadful abuse of State power against a helpless individual - all the more tragic in that at first she trusted him to sort out what she understood to be some sort of mistake.

The case raises a number of troubling questions about the Immigration service and the supposedly robust state surveillance system which increasingly intrudes on more and more citizens' activities with less and less need for any justification for doing so. How often we are assured that this frontline defence of our homeland is designed in such a way that no innocent will suffer, no arbitrary action will go unreviewed and no unnecessary breach of anyone's freedom will occur.

Yet here we have a system which did not notice that one of its' staff's spouses was now on a terror watch list. Here we have a system clearly with no checks being made of decisions with momentous impact on individuals - this man was able to exclude his wife purely by his own actions, no second opinion or senior approval required, no periodic review of her case, no need even for anyone to meet her and question her. All he had to do was label her presence in the UK as "not conducive to the public good", type her name into a database and she was conveniently out of sight and out of mind.

Pakistani Police: no laughing matter

Doesn't it beggar belief? And is it not even more disturbing that although his employers had no real choice but to dismiss him, his wicked actions are seen as, well, rather amusing?

Never mind that his wife was stuck in Pakistan, not exactly well-known for its kindly treatment and liberal questioning of people designated as terrorist suspects. Has anyone bothered to check on her well-being or whereabouts? Or was it just a quick disciplinary hearing chaired by some embarrassed civil service manager and case closed?

The Coalition claims to take civil liberties and human rights seriously. This poor woman's case demonstrates how shallow their commitment is, and how wicked the last Labour Government was in foisting such draconian laws on us allegedly in order to protect freedom and democracy. Quis custodiet custodies?