A Great British Injustice: the Maguire Story

When Gerry Conlon’s conviction for the 1974 Guildford pub bombings was quashed in 1989, after he had been in prison for 15 years, he gave a furious statement outside the Old Bailey, vowing to continue the fight for justice. “I’m a totally innocent man. I watched my father die in a British prison for something he didn’t do. He is innocent. The Maguires are innocent,” he shouted. Daniel Day Lewis gave a version of the speech when he played Conlon in In The Name of the Father, which told the story of the Guildford Four. A Great British Injustice: The Maguire Story(BBC Two) focuses instead on the family who were also caught up in the miserable saga and whose lives were devastated by the same shocking miscarriage of justice.

It is an outrageous story told by those at the centre of it, and it is a testament to the strength of the surviving Maguires that they are able to talk about it with such clarity. Conlon’s false confession implicated his father’s sister-in-law, Anne Maguire, who was arrested in Kilburn, north-west London, by police who insisted the Maguire family home was also a bomb factory. The use of archive footage does a remarkable job of conjuring up the atmosphere of the 1970s, when anti-Irish sentiment in the UK had been whipped up against a backdrop of IRA bombings. One news report from the time painted Anne as “Auntie Annie”, a sleeper agent who had disguised herself as a quiet family woman, storing bombs in the kitchen “as you might store corned beef”.

“I couldn’t even put a fuse in that plug,” says Anne Maguire today, still incredulous, admitting that she weeps even now over the long, wasted years that followed. Along with her brother-in-law Giuseppe Conlon, her brother Sean Smyth, a family friend Patrick O’Neill, her husband Patrick, and her two teenage sons, Vincent and Patrick, she was eventually convicted of possessing nitroglycerine, based on traces of explosives found underneath their fingernails, or in Anne’s case, on a pair of gloves. The Maguire Seven, as they became known, served sentences ranging from four to 14 years, apart from Giuseppe Conlon, Gerry’s father, who died in prison in 1980. Their convictions were eventually quashed in 1991, the forensic evidence, the only evidence, widely dismissed.

Presenter Stephen Nolan is not quite an impartial observer, and this is an emotional, invested documentary, in which he has fostered the trust of the surviving Maguires, who open up to him about the terrible effects these wrongful convictions wrought upon their lives. The younger Patrick [photo, top] was 14 when he was sent to a category A adult prison. His face cracking with pain throughout his story, he explains that he believes his childhood ended there. Anne remembers being so affronted by what they had been accused of she asked the police van to let her out into a crowd of anti-Irish protesters bearing placards that called for her to be hanged. “Let me out and I’ll tell them we’re not those people,” she said. They talk of violent beatings by the officers who questioned them; Anne says she had a gun held to her head. “None of you broke,” says Nolan to Vincent Maguire. “We had nothing to break for,” he replies.

In among the layers of corruption and incompetence – other confessions that were not investigated, alibis ignored – there are moments that would be written out of a potboiler for stretching credulity. Nobody bothered to find out that Anne and her husband Patrick were members of the local Conservative club, or that he had served in the British army. Anne talks of being punched and kicked by interrogating officers, but even in her recollections of what they said to her, she can’t bring herself to use their language. “Get up, you Irish ‘B’, you murdering ‘B’,” she reports, instead.

In 2005, the then prime minister Tony Blair offered a formal apology to the Maguires, but, as with the quashed conviction, they do not see it as a cause for celebration. Nolan presses the point that, even now, justice has not been done: nobody has been held responsible. And yet, it manages to end on as touching a note as is possible, when, at the close of a brutal testimony, Patrick declares himself to be lucky to have had Anne as his mother. This is a harrowing story, infuriating and awful and tragic, but the participants have found what light they could, where they could find it.

Watch it on BBC iPlayer.

Source of review.

Wright Brothers Ion Drive version?

H/T Farmer John.

Stop the Presses: Nigel Farage has moment of lucidity, calls Tommy Robinson 'a thug'

Former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson has been appointed as an adviser to Ukip leader Gerard Batten (David Mirzoeff/PA)

But Mr Farage said Mr Batten was taking the eurosceptic party in a “shameful” direction.

“I was always insistent as leader that nobody could join us if they’d been members of the EDL or the British National Party,” Mr Farage told the Press Association.

“I wanted to make tough arguments about illegal immigration, what was happening in the Mediterranean and all the rest of it without any taint of racism or Islamophobia.

“I can’t believe that the current Ukip leader wants to welcome in the founder of the EDL, a man who’s done four prison sentences, lives under a pseudonym and wherever he goes there’s violence.

“The whole thing is crazy. And this at the very moment when Brexit is in a right mess, when both Tories and the Labour Party are breaking their promises to the electorate.

“There’s a massive opportunity for Ukip, a big opportunity for millions to say to the Government Brexit is not going the right way, and all Gerard Batten wants to do is get this, frankly, thug involved with the party.”

Mr Farage said he was concerned a pro-Brexit rally Mr Batten and Mr Robinson are planning for December 9 in London could undermine efforts to defeat Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement in a Commons vote in the following days.

“It’s a march through Westminster,” said Mr Farage.

“I know what will happen. It will be full of skinheads and people with tattoos to the eyeballs, they’ll all be drunk before they get there, there’ll be punch-ups and God knows what.

“And the next day, it’s the vote on the Brexit thing.

“And this is how Brexit will look, it’ll look like a bunch of far-right football thugs, and I am absolutely disgusted by it.

“I’ve held my silence as a former party leader until now but we now have to get rid of this bloke as leader because he’s not just damaging Ukip, he’s damaging Brexit.”

Mr Farage did not rule out returning as a candidate for the Ukip leadership himself but said it was “not top of my bucket list” after having already devoted 20 years to the party.

“If it had to be done, I’d consider it,” he told PA.

Source.

Khagoggi Murder: Trump says a bad (again)

PALM BEACH (FLORIDA): US President Donald Trump on Thursday contradicted the CIA's assessment that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, insisting that the agency had "feelings" but did not firmly place blame for the death. Trump, in defiant remarks to reporters from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, defended his continued support for Mohammed in the face of a CIA assessment that the crown prince had ordered the killing.

"He denies it vehemently," Trump said of the crown prince. He reiterated that his own conclusion was that "maybe he did, maybe he didn't."

"I hate the crime, I hate the coverup. I will tell you this: The crown prince hates it more than I do, and they have vehemently denied it," Trump said. Mohammed has not shown remorse for the killing, which was carried out by some of his close advisers.

Asked who should be held accountable for the death of Khashoggi, who was killed at the Saudi Consulate in Turkey on October 2, Trump again refused to place blame - instead espousing a grim view of the world that he often shares with advisers.

"Maybe the world should be held accountable because the world is a very, very vicious place," the president said.

He also seemed to suggest that all US allies were guilty of the same behavior, declaring that if others were held to the standard to which critics have held Saudi Arabia in recent days, "we wouldn't be able to have anyone for an ally."

Trump said "not at all" when asked if he was concerned that his refusal to substantially punish Saudi Arabia would send a message to the rest of the world that people in power can do as they please.

The president has grown annoyed with the constant attention on the killing, advisers say, and sought to effectively close the matter Tuesday with an eight-paragraph, exclamation-mark-packed statement that smeared Khashoggi, questioned the CIA and praised Saudi Arabia.

Stark. Raving. Bonkers. In a nutshell...

Source.

U.S. Declines to Sign Declaration Discouraging Use of Cyberattacks

WASHINGTON — Reflecting reluctance by the Trump administration to limit its options for using offensive and defensive cyberweapons, the United States declined on Monday to sign a vaguely worded international call to protect civilians against cyberattacks and discourage digital meddling in elections.

The United States was one of only a few Western nations that chose not to sign on to the nonbinding declaration, which was released by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, during the Paris Peace Forum, timed to the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

The declaration, the “Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace,” was signed by 51 countries, more than 130 companies and 90 universities and nongovernmental groups, and was the latest in a series of efforts to move toward what some call a “digital Geneva Convention.”

Just as the original Geneva Convention prohibits aiming attacks at civilians, the Paris statement would prohibit “indiscriminate or systemic harm to individuals and critical infrastructure,” such as shutting down an electric grid.

It also included a call to “prevent malign interference by foreign actors aimed at undermining electoral processes though malicious cyberactivities.”

All members of the European Union signed the agreement. Australia and Turkey joined the United States in declining.

Mr. Macron aimed the accord largely at democracies, which meant that the countries most often accused of conducting state-sponsored attacks — Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — did not participate in the process.

Israel, which along with the United States conducted the most sophisticated cyberattack in history, the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, also declined to sign.

[...]

But if past debates over setting norms of behavior for cyberspace are a guide, American officials are leery of any kind of agreement that might make illegal the types of activity — like espionage, data manipulation or attacks on infrastructure — that the United States may want to use in a future conflict.

Elections are an interesting example. Congress and many others have condemned the 2016 Russian attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the private email accounts of senior officials in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But the United States has interfered in foreign elections before, including Italy in the 1940s and Iran and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s, and some officials say that no American president should be forced to give up that tool if it could prevent a war.

NYT.

Trump: Making Rich Great Again

The Trump-GOP tax law was sold as a boon for the middle class. But many months after its passage, there are no signs that working Americans are getting the pay raise they were promised.

The Trump administration claimed the corporate tax cuts would eventually lead to wage increases of up to $9,000 a year for ordinary workers. But so far, workers’ wages remain stagnant.

Tracking by Americans for Tax Fairness shows that only about 400 out of America’s 5.9 million employers have announced any wage increases or one-time bonuses related to the tax cuts. That’s about 0.007 percent.

In fact, real wages have actually declined since last year after accounting for higher gas prices, prescription drug prices, and other rising costs.

If that weren’t bad enough, Trump and the GOP now want to come after the services that working families rely on.

Shortly after signing the tax cut package that will add nearly $2 trillion to the deficit over a decade, Trump proposed a budget that would cut $1.3 trillion for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Cart Act. The House Republican budget went even further, proposing $2.1 trillion in health care cuts.

Both budget proposals contained hundreds of billions more in cuts to food assistance, income security, education, and more.

Working families are seeing little benefit from the Trump-GOP tax giveaway — and would be devastated by the cuts to services that have been proposed to help pay for it. But a few people are basking in their new tax-cut windfalls:

President Trump: Though he claimed his tax plan would “cost him a fortune,” the new law will undoubtedly make him one.

Trump refuses to release his tax returns, so we can’t know his exact savings. But he’ll benefit greatly from the lower top individual tax rate, the lower corporate tax rate, and especially from the 20 percent deduction for “pass-through” business income (income from S corporations, partnerships, limited liability companies, and sole proprietorships that’s taxed at the individual rather than the corporate level).

The Trump Organization, which is a collection of 500 pass-throughs, could save over $20 million a year from that deduction alone. And the law gifted Trump’s industry — real estate — with myriad new loopholes.

Read who else is benefiting from tax-cut windfalls.

Is Stephen Pax Leonard an arsehole?

Definitely!

Paxie is the academic who got into a spot of bother over some racist tweets.

Here's what he tweeted:

He had his honorary fellowship removed by St Chad’s College after complaints were made about tweets, which have since been deleted. One said: “With so few Jews it is extraordinary that the [Swedish] print media is largely owned and edited by Jewish families.” Another stated that Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, wanted the capital “to become a mecca for Muslims” and that “millions of Muslims support Isis”.

Both first statements are the racist, paranoid rantings of an idiot who believes some minority or other is taking over a city/a country/the press/name your pick, it's just Classic racist garbage and un-befitting of an academic. Re. the last statement, Paxie might want to consider the the vast majority of Isis' victims are in fact Muslims.

Paxie claims that his statements have been "decontextualised" [gulp!] and that we should read his books [no thanks!] but has as far as I know has not provided such context. And in any case it's difficult to see what kind of context might make these statements less racist.

Was his removal from Durham justified? OF COURSE NOT! Penalising free speech that way solves nothing, quite the contrary.

Finally, SPL describes himself as a 'green Conservative', which only shows that being green does not inoculate one against idiocy.