Antony Loewenstein

The record of private security company G4S is deeply troubling (including in Papua New Guinea, from where I recently returned).

So this news is both worrying and a sign of things to come globally. For some privatisation propagandists, everything should sold to private interests:

Private security company G4S is about to sign a deal which would see it building and staffing the first British police station run by a private security contractor.

The deal with Lincolnshire Police Authority – expected to be signed within days – represents the most radical outsourcing of law enforcement so far, according to a report last week in the Financial Times .

The contract will see G4S take over jobs previously handled by police officers including custody and ID duties (but with custody sergeants still on hand), control room staffing, town enquiry officers, the crime management bureau, the criminal justice unit and firearms licensing.

But Simon Reed, vice-chair of the Police Federation, told the FT that he had some reservations about the scheme, as private employees may not have the same enshrined sense of public duty as police officers.

“Our concern is the resilience of the companies doing this,” he said. “When we have national emergencies or unforeseen events, will they be able to bring their staff in to work long hours, regardless of what their contracts say?”

The police station move is part of a £200m contract with G4S over 10 years. Other police forces are said to be considering similar moves.

In a joint statement announcing the contract last December , Lincolnshire Police Authority chairman Barry Young and chief constable Richard Crompton said:

“Over the period of the contract this new approach will make significant savings, whilst also providing investment in key areas like IT infrastructure. The subsequent streamlining of processes will free up officer time to concentrate on operational policing.

“This new approach will mean that the leanest police force in Britain, which already provides its services at the lowest cost per head of population, will be able to meet the challenges laid down by the government, whilst also meeting the high standards rightly expected by the people of Lincolnshire.”

John Shaw, managing director of G4S police support services, said:

“Lincolnshire is leading the way in responding to the challenges of the economic environment and this transformation project will mean many of the services provided by Lincolnshire Police will now be delivered externally by specialists who can deliver greater savings and improve efficiency.

“We believe that the combination of Lincolnshire’s policing model and our expertise in delivering middle and back office functions will improve services and deliver the savings the Authority needs.

More here on the outrageous case of Khader Adnan (who is apparently ending his long hunger strike).

Rupert Murdoch laughably claims The Sun is one of the finest newspapers in the world. Oh sure, if you hate everybody:

Columbia Journalism Review ask the right questions about this murky investigation:

The New York Times piqued my interest by writing this on Sunday:

“Dozens of people — lawyers, forensic accountants, forensic computer technicians and, sometimes, police officers — gather daily at a site in Thomas More Square here, where News International is based, searching through 300 million e-mails and other documents stretching back a decade.”Here we are presented with the spectacle of police and News Corp. cheek-by-jowl investigating together a scandal that the company covered up for years and which involves the police themselves. If you think that sounds a bit awk, you’re not alone.

Behind it is a sticky question: What happens when an organization accused of systematically breaking the law is a news publisher with legitimate interests in protecting confidential sources? The tension is thick on the ground: News International’s newspapers are under criminal investigation for thousands of alleged crimes, including deadly serious ones like bribing police and other public officials, but the company also has sensitive information regarding its legitimate newsgathering.

On one hand, giving cops free run of the place could easily result in the exposure of confidential sources and the chilling of future whistleblowers, who would understandably think twice about ever talking to the press.

On the other, after years of News Corp. stonewalling, police can’t simply trust the company to sift through its own data on the cops’ behalf.

Interesting comment here, and undeniably true, in the UK Press Gazette. There are so few truly courageous journalists from the Murdoch stable who would know this to be true but refuse to speak out; gotta pay the mortgage on that charming 4 bedroom place, remember?

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre yesterday said other Fleet Street editors are not given freedom to edit and that Britain could not have invaded Iraq without the support of News International proprietor Rupert Murdoch.

Dacre revealed that he has turned down opportunities to edit The Times and the Telegraph because he believes that other proprietors would not have given him the freedom that Daily Mail and General Trustowner Lord Rothermere has.

He said: “Rupert Murdoch has been a very great proprietor in his time, but I don’t think he would have given me the freedom I wished to have as an editor…

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that he had strong views which he communicated to his editors and expected them to be followed. The classic case is the Iraq War.

“I’m not sure that the Blair government or Tony Blair would have been able to take the British people to war if it hadn’t been for the implacable support provided by the Murdoch papers. There’s no doubt that came from Mr Murdoch himself.”

In written evidence, Dacre expanded on the theme of editorial independence:

“In my time I have turned down editorships of The Times and The Telegraph. One reason I did so is that at the Mail I enjoy total freedom from proprietorial and managerial interference, a freedom that is not necessarily found in other newspaper groups.

Seriously, this is the BBC (via Electronic Intifada):

This week, the BBC issued its final ruling on a controversy which has been raging for nearly a year after the words “Free Palestine” were censored from a freestyle rap played on Radio 1Xtra.

Appearing on the popular Charlie Sloth Hip Hop M1X last February, the artist Mic Righteous performed a rap which included the lyrics: “I can scream Free Palestine for my pride/still pray for peace.”

BBC producers replaced the word ‘Palestine’ with the sound of breaking glass and this is the version that was aired and which can be seen on a video on the BBC website(the censorship occurs at 2:59).

The edited performance was repeated in April on the same show.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has spent the last eight months trying to find out why the decision to censor an artist who raised the issue of Palestine was made.

During the course of a long correspondence, the BBC’s head of editorial standards for audio and music, Paul Smith, wrote that the show’s producer “did not edit out the word ‘Palestine’ because it was offensive — referencing Palestine is fine, but implying that it is not free is the contentious issue.”

In that single sentence, a senior BBC executive revealed the BBC’s complete disdain for the Palestinians and their suffering, and its shameful disregard for international law when it is being broken by Israel.

How many more breaches will it take for global governments to realise that Serco aren’t fit to run prisons, detention centres or the local chicken shop? (via the Guardian):

The unlawful use of restraint was widespread in privately run child jails in Britain for at least a decade, a high court judge has ruled for the first time.

Mr Justice Foskett said statutory agencies had failed to take action to stop the unlawful use of force against the large numbers of children held in the network of secure training centres run by G4S and Serco.

He singles out the youth justice board for its “apparent active promotion” until 2007 of restraint techniques which were subsequently banned.

The high court judge stops short of legally ordering the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, to inform hundreds, if not thousands, of potential victims of their right to claim compensation. But he does say that ministers need “to consider whether something ought to be done”.

In a damning ruling, Mr Justice Foskett, said: “The children and young persons sent to [secure training centres] were sent there because they had acted unlawfully and to learn to obey the law, yet many of them were subject to unlawful actions during their detention. I need, I think, say no more.”

The judicial review case was brought by the Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) to challenge Clarke’s refusal to contact former detainees dating back to 1998 when the first privately run secure training centre opened in England.

The judge said the legal action had shone a light into a corner that might otherwise have remained in the dark and described the decade-long abuse of children in custody as “to say the least, a sorry tale”.

The legal battle follows a second inquest last year into the death of 14-year-old Adam Rickwood, who was found hanging in his room at Hassockfield secure training centre, where he was on remand, in 2004. The inquest concluded that a serious system failure had given rise to an unlawful regime at the jail.

But here in Australia, Serco continues to turn on governments and bureaucrats with sweet talk about “efficiency” (via the West Australian):

The private company set to operate WA’s new youth offender centre has been criticised by the British High Court in a decision which found young people had endured a decade of unlawful abuse while in its care.

In a judgment handed down this week, High Court Justice David Foskett said youths held in the “secure training centres” had been restrained by staff inflicting a sharp blow to the child’s nose or ribs or yanking back their thumb.

The disciplinary techniques were outlined in a 2005 manual, which suggested they could be used to control fighting juveniles.

Judge Foskett said the techniques were used on as many as 350 children a month over the decade, and about 25 per cent of the time were used unlawfully.

This week’s revelations of the full extent of the abuse at the Serco and G4S facilities come after a previous British inquiry into the suicide of a 14-year-old who had been subject to unlawful restraint at a Serco unit.

The Community and Public Sector Union yesterday called for Serco to be disqualified from its bid to run Perth’s young adults centre.

Serco was given preferred tender status two months ago and was expected to win the contract next month.

The 80-bed facility for 18 to 24-year-old men will operate on the same site as the Rangeview Juvenile Remand Centre.

The Department of Corrective Services said the successful bidder would be tied to key performance measures and other controls to ensure standards.

A Serco spokesman said the firm took its responsibilities “very seriously” and that British centres had stopped using the physical controls in 2008. A court accepted the officers believed they were acting lawfully when using the techniques.

If true, this would be yet another example of the culture created by Rupert Murdoch. His legacy is some fine journalism and a whole heap of trash and bigotry. The International Herald Tribune reports:

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, relatives of some of the victims began suspecting that someone was eavesdropping on their telephones.

Some heard mysterious clicking sounds on their home and mobile phones. The fiancée of one man who died at the World Trade Center remembers listening to snippets of someone else’s conversation on her line. A husband of another victim recalls hearing somebody remotely accessing his home answering machine, which still held the final, reassuring message left by his wife shortly before the crash of Flight 93. Others say they are baffled as to how details about their loved ones appeared in British tabloids within days of the attacks.

Ten years later, their long-held suspicions aroused by The News of the World phone-hacking scandal in London, dozens of relatives of victims contacted the Justice Department. On Aug. 24, eight of them met with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and asked him to determine whether their privacy had been violated. As a first step, they asked him to see whether Scotland Yard had a record of their names or phone numbers among the material seized from a private investigator who hacked cellphone messages for the tabloid.

Four months later, they are still waiting to hear back and are frustrated by the Justice Department’s silence.

“It’s not that hard to find out — it’s quite a simple thing, really, isn’t it?” said Patricia Bingley, a British citizen whose son, Kevin Dennis, a 43-year-old trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, worked on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower.

Ms. Bingley said she was stunned to see, in the Sept. 18, 2001, issue of The Sun, a photograph of her son reading a bedtime story to his two sons, which she did not give to the paper. The story also contained details about her son that she said no one from her family had provided to The Sun. “It never made sense to me,” she said, adding that she suspects hacking or worse by the paper. “I’d like very much for the government to tell us whether this happened or not. Celebrities seem to have no trouble finding out.”

In July, as revelations about widespread phone hacking by the tabloid were spilling out, another British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, reported that a private investigator said that News of the World reporters had offered to pay him to retrieve phone records of Sept. 11 victims. After the report, which was not confirmed by other news organizations, the Justice Department opened an investigation. To date, no evidence has emerged publicly that Sept. 11 victims were hacking targets.

Jodi Westbrook Flowers, a lawyer at a South Carolina firm that represents more than 6,700 relatives of Sept. 11 victims, said she and her colleagues had scoured the British tabloids and found scores of details about the victims. Relatives were not certain how the tabloids found out so much so quickly after the attacks.

One of the relatives, whom she declined to identify, said that five days after Sept. 11, The Sun published the words from a voice mail message left on his cellphone by his son, who was aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. (British authorities are also investigating whether hacking occurred at The Sun, which, like The News of the World, is owned by News Corporation.)

Interesting, if true (via the Independent):

Police investigating computer hacking by private investigators commissioned by national newspapers have uncovered evidence that emails sent and received by Gordon Brown during his time as Chancellor were illegally accessed.

This is the inevitable push by the “war on terror” crowd who have no problems with war propaganda from our side – the glorious fighting machines of Israel, America, Britain or the West – but the evil enemy must be silenced:

American congressmen are calling on Twitter to block Taliban propagandists from the micro-blogging site.

Senators want to stop feeds which boast of insurgent attacks on Nato forces in Afghanistan and the casualties they inflict.

Aides for Joe Lieberman, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said the move was part of a wider attempt to eliminate violent Islamist extremist propaganda from the internet and social media.

The Taliban movement has embraced the social network as part of its propaganda effort and regularly tweets about attacks or posts links to its statements.

The information has ranged from highly accurate, up-to-the-minute accounts of unfolding spectacular attacks, to often completely fabricated or wildly exaggerated reports of American and British casualties.