If it wasn’t for the tragic loss of dozens of lives, the intellectual gymnastics which have followed the shootings in Norway would actually be quite funny. As it is, they’re just the icing on a particularly depressing cake. It’s not just the screeching u-turn the punditocracy (and the editorial staff at the Sun) performed after realising the attack wasn’t actually carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. It’s not even the way an atrocity magically stops being “terrorism” as soon as people realise it wasn’t masterminded by a bloke with brown skin and a beard. No, what really gets me is the blame game, and the glaring inconsistencies which get ignored on all sides as a result.

Over at LibCon, Adam Bienkov takes Boris Johnson to task for denying that Anders Behring Breivik’s rightwing political leanings had anything to do with his decision to carry out the shootings, pointing out the obvious discrepancy between his denial that rightwing anti-multicultural and anti-Islamic rhetoric were a causal factor in this case and his assertion in the Spectator in the wake of 7/7 that Islam – rather than a few isolated fanatics – were “the problem”. Now, if you were feeling charitable you could perhaps interpret Johnson’s assertion that “[Breivik] killed in the name of Christianity – and yet of course we don’t blame Christians or “Christendom”. Nor, by the same token, should we blame “Islam” for all acts of terror committed by young Muslim males” as a renunciation of his previous position, rather than evidence of inconsistency. If he has altered his views however, he clearly doesn’t have the gumption to make this change of heart explicit, so it seems fair to assume Bienkov’s right to criticise Johnson for this. The trouble is, Bienkov doesn’t really do so well in the consistency stakes himself.

The news that Breivik was a fan of Melanie Phillips and seems to have had links to the EDL is taken by Adam Bienkov as evidence that

“the hard-right ideology pushed by certain pundits in the press has questions to answer now…whilst we shouldn’t entirely blame right-wing ideologues for helping form those packs, we shouldn’t entirely absolve them from their responsibilities either”

…which is fair enough. Except that he’s also derisive of this now-notorious Jerusalem Post editorial which suggests that Breivik was motivated by an aversion to multiculturalism – a view which, the editorial makes clear, he shares with much of the mainstream Right across the Western world. So rightwing commentators in the mainstream media who are vocally opposed to multiculturalism and whom Breivik admired shouldn’t be “entirely absolved” from responsibility for his actions, but suggesting that his actions are an expression of discontent with multiculturalism is a disgraceful attempt to make political capital out of a tragedy? Please. We can do better than this.

Here’s what we need to remember. First, when someone performs a voluntary action, there’ll be a number of reasons why they do so. Those reasons might be good or bad (morally or otherwise), as might the action itself. Seeking to explain the reasons for a morally reprehensible action is not the same thing as justifying or excusing it, whether the person performing that action is an Islamic fundamentalist or a far-right Christian. Second, when someone writes something that motivates someone else to do something terrible that the writer wouldn’t condone, how far the writer is responsible for the actions of their more deranged violently fanatical readers is pretty much impossible to state with any certainty. Any attempt to do so is almost inevitably going to be coloured by one’s ideological leanings. Is Marx responsible for the gulags? Hayek for sweatshops, or the murders of trade unionists in Latin America? Jesus for the Spanish Inquisition? The Prophet Muhammad for 9/11? It’s easy to be self-righteous when it’s not your set of cherished values being called into question, but it doesn’t do much to advance the debate.

[Edited to remove a pejorative term related to mental illness, in response to this article]

For all the Government’s many faults, one thing a lot of us could comfort ourselves with as the Coalition really got going was that at least they’d be better than Labour had been on civil liberties. They might be dead set on hacking chunks out of the State safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, they might be totally out of touch with the reality of life for millions of citizens, but at least they – and the Lib Dems in particular – didn’t give the impression of seeing habeas corpus as nothing more than an anachronistic joke. And there were some encouraging signs. The Vetting and Barring Scheme went in June, (to cheers from Reuben). ID cards followed, and restrictions on the fingerprinting of children and storing the DNA of the innocent were brought in.

And then there were Control Orders. The Lib Dems’ views on these were pretty clear before the election, and even then-Tory Shadow Security Minister Dame Neville-Jones said in March that “eliminating the control order regime” would be a Conservative policy. And it’s easy to see why. As things stand, this is what can be restricted – without charge and for an indefinite period of time, simply on the say-so of the Home Secretary – through a Control Order:

• Possession and/or use of specified objects and substances.
• Use of specified services and/or facilities.
• Certain occupations and employment.
• Carrying out specified activities.
• Restriction on association and communications with specified people, or people in general.
• Restriction of place of residence, and visitors to the residence.
• Movements at certain times of the day, or to certain places.
• Passport must be surrendered.
• A requirement to admit specified persons to certain premises.
• A requirement to allow specified persons to confiscate and/or scientifically examine any object on premises owned by the subject.
• A requirement to allow electronic surveillance to be carried out and photographs taken.
• Any other restrictions whatsoever for up to 24hrs, when it is deemed necessary.

It’s easy to understand why someone with even a passing concern for personal liberty would find all that pretty discomfiting. Big Brother Watch also point out that they haven’t even done what they were intended to: 7 of the 45 people who’ve been subject to Control Orders ‘absconded’ (and being under a Control Order didn’t stop them), while the other 38 Orders have been lifted, strongly suggesting that their imposition probably wasn’t justified in the first place. Lucky freedom’s an issue so close to Nick Clegg’s heart then really, isn’t it? But what’s this we read?

Faced by growing calls from senior former cabinet members to retain control orders, it appears that the Liberal Democrat leader is willing to seek a compromise, and will recognise that some form of replacement to control orders is necessary – even though in opposition he called for their outright abolition.

…

[Theresa] May is backing a two-tier system of control orders in which suspected terrorists regarded as less of a threat would be subject to travel bans overseas and inside the UK. The ban on overseas travel would require a beefed-up watch list at ports and airports. Suspects might be banned from visiting community centres, gyms, mosques or other places where young men gather. They would also be subject to tagging.

A second, more serious group would be subject to tighter restrictions.

Oh. Never mind then. Wonder if Clegg’ll go for the same “we didn’t know stuff was this bad until we got into government, honest” schtick he tried over tuition fees?

“Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets… Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”

So says an insane nihilistic clown to a severe burns victim with a dual personality. But there’s a certain tragic truth to the Joker’s words in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man accused of trying to blow up an aeroplane en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day, appeared in court yesterday to plead not guilty. But whilst the bomb plot failed, it was, in many ways, a resounding victory for al Qaeda.

The purpose of terrorism, after all, is not really to kill people. Nations don’t go to war with the primary objective of obliterating as many enemy soldiers as possible; it’s just a gruesome means to a more important end. As Tony Blair so succinctly said on July 7^th 2005, “The purpose of terrorism is just that, it is to terrorise people.” And as Western governments scramble to introduce increasingly drastic security measures, turning air travel into an ever worsening nightmare for millions of commuters, the terrorists have succeeded in doing exactly that.

The British government is already rushing in controversial new scanners which threaten to breach child porn laws, the Americans want air marshals on every flight coming into the US, whilst Labour MP Khalid Mahmood has told us that racial and religious profiling is the price we’ll have to pay for our safety.

It goes without saying that everyone wants to feel safe whilst traveling, especially when they’re in a metal tube three miles high. I for one will never forget standing outside King’s Cross on the morning of 7/7 feeling very thankful that I hadn’t woken up twenty minutes earlier. But are there full body scanners at every ticket counter? Are there armed police officers in every carriage? Is every brown skinned man with a beard stopped and searched? Should we fear for our lives every time we get on the underground? No, because for all the millions of people who travel on the tube day in, day out, the four who took bombs on with them have not made us all paranoid with fear.

It is, of course, important to have security at airports, just as it is important to have intelligence services working to prevent terrorist plots. But it’s also important to keep a sense of perspective and not to allow one thwarted attempt to make us lose our minds. Making air travel ever more stressful for commuters for the sake of their safety is one thing. But by introducing measures that attack the human rights and civil liberties free society holds dear, we are doing the terrorists’ jobs for them.

The inevitable has happened, and our two greatest fears have collided, with frankly pretty hilarious consequences:

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Our hysteria over terrorism and paedophilia has finally reached the point where the ridiculous draconian measures we’ve introduced in an effort to counter the two of them are actually logically incompatible with one another. Either we install the scanners, and face the risk of exposing children to filthy perverted paedo airport security guards (who presumably also have some sort of ghost fetish, judging by the picture accompanying the Guardian article), or we  don’t install them, and we give aid and comfort to all those hordes of evil freedom-hating terrorists. How will the Sun’s editorial writers cope?

Walking through security at Portcullis House, the fabulously expensive building standing adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, is a bit like going through any airport anywhere in the world. But making your way through the spacious courtyard, past green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome towering overhead, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is still the seat of power of a great empire. The man I’m here to see, however, is one of the country’s most vocal critics of imperialism. George Galloway rises from his computer to shake my hand as I enter his office. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he says. I remind him we met once before when he came to destroy a pro-war American politician at the Cambridge Union many years ago. “You’re far too young to say that,” he laughs.

Born in 1954, Galloway joined the Labour Party at the tender age of thirteen and has been a Member of Parliament since 1987. His strident opposition to the Iraq war, describing Bush and Blair as wolves and calling on British troops to disobey orders, led to his expulsion from the party in 2003. “His comments were disgraceful and wrong,” Tony Blair said. But Galloway has never been one to lie down in the face of his enemies. The following year he formed a new left-wing anti-war party, Respect, and in a stunning victory overturned a Labour majority of over 10,000 to oust Blairite Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow. Since then, however, Respect has suffered a disastrous split, whilst Galloway has found himself having to fend off a barrage of media criticism for his famous decision to appear on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006. With a general election just months away, I ask George Galloway what he thinks his chances are of holding his seat.

“Well I’m not standing again in Bethnal Green and Bow,” he tells me. “Because I promised last time that I’d stand only once and if the people elected me, the next MP for the constituency would be a Bengali.” It’s a straight fight between Labour and Respect in Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway explains, and with both parties selecting a Bengali candidate, his promise looks set to be kept. “For the first time, the Bengali community will have a member in the House of Commons and that’s something I’m particularly proud of.” Galloway has instead chosen to stand in the neighbouring Tower Hamlets constituency of Poplar and Limehouse. “We have a fighting chance of winning both seats,” he says. Galloway also believes Respect has a chance of breaking through in Birmingham – where the party came a close second in 2005 – and of Salma Yaqoob becoming the first ever Muslim woman MP. “If we could pull those three off, I could retire a happy man four years later.” Respect was founded in 2004 as a coalition seeking to bring together the disparate strands of perhaps the greatest mass movement in modern political history. In practice, what emerged was an alliance between George Galloway, a few prominent anti-war activists and the Socialist Workers Party. In 2007, for absolutely no reason that seems at all relevant, the party split in half and the SWP walked out. I ask Galloway if the split has harmed Respect’s chances of achieving the breakthrough he hopes for. “I don’t know if it’s damaged our electability. Certainly not if we do win three seats. Even having one seat in 2005 was almost unprecedented. It had been 60 years since a left of Labour party last won a seat in Parliament in 1945. And in the same constituency by the way.” Galloway has to admit, however, that the split has definitely affected the party’s power outside of Parliament. “The departure of key activists and leaders has weakened us. About half the members left.” I ask Galloway how many members Respect still has. “I don’t have the exact figure,” he says. “It’s a small number of thousands.”

In an interview with The Third Estate in June, Mark Steel told me that the feud in Respect was about nothing that anyone can work out. It has often seemed to me that whilst the left sits on the steps of the amphitheatre shouting splitters at each other and arguing about what society should look like after the revolution, it is failing to speak to ordinary people about the everyday issues that affect their lives. I ask Galloway how he would explain the split to voters who care about social justice and jobs and housing, but have little interest in sectarian squabbling. “With respect to you, and I don’t mean at all to be offensive, I wouldn’t care to explain it to anyone,” Galloway says. “I think that the arcane disputatious nature of the far-left in Britain is of interest only to the cognoscente and the cognoscente already know the reasons.” Galloway pauses as his phone rings. Sorting out a quick bit of business in ten seconds, he apologises before continuing. “For the rest of the public, Respect was always me, Salma Yaqoob, Ken Loach and so on, and it still is. So we’d rather go forward than look back.”

Respect, of course, will not be standing in every constituency at the next general election. “There are 649 seats, that’s beyond any small party of the left. We will be standing in more seats than just those three, but they’re the target seats.” In the constituencies where Respect is not standing, Galloway explains that they will back other progressive candidates. “Brighton, for example, where Caroline Lucas is standing for the Green Party and has a real chance of winning. I expect that we would support her, we haven’t made final decisions on these constituencies yet. Similarly Peter Tatchell is standing in Oxford, we would probably support him. There may be one or two other places where we would support a left, anti-war candidate.” I ask Galloway – who has branded the three main parties as “Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee and a half” – whether he would call for a vote for Labour to keep the Conservatives out, and am genuinely surprised by the firebrand MP’s response. “We definitely want the Tories to be defeated, so for the most part that would mean that we ask people to vote Labour.” It was understandable that Respect backed Ken Livingstone against Boris Johnson in last year’s election for London Mayor. But would Respect really ask people to vote for an arch New Labourite who voted for the war? “Most of them are arch New Labourites who backed the war, so we wouldn’t be able to have that as a hard and fast rule. It’s unlikely that the worst of the war criminals would attract our support, but we wouldn’t be able to use who voted for the war entirely as a yardstick.”

It’s surprising to hear Galloway say this – not least because he is Vice President of Stop the War Coalition and perhaps the most outspoken critic of New Labour’s neo-conservative foreign policy in the country – but because in June he called for an immediate election, arguing that the current Parliament is “utterly bereft of credibility.” I ask him if it’s possible that a Labour defeat at the next election could help bring back the party he once called home. “No, I don’t,” he says. “In any case, it would be too high a price to pay. The Tories will be a catastrophe for ordinary people in Britain, for the working people, the poor, the old, the sick, the disabled. So I want to see them defeated.” Galloway has to concede, however, that that’s not very likely. “Looking at the opinion polls, reading the runes, it would appear that the Tories are on course for a big victory. And if that happens, then we’ll have to see what happens to the Labour Party that I spent almost forty years in.”

Labour’s abandonment of the left goes part of the way towards explaining the success of Respect. But it is Blair’s utter betrayal of British Muslims, incensed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which explains why so many Labour voters in East London and Birmingham have turned to Respect. Not least because of Galloway’s standing amongst Muslims. When housemates on Celebrity Big Brother were asked to rank themselves in order of fame, he mused: “If we’re talking worldwide fame, I’m most famous. Virtually every Muslim in the world knows who I am.” Whether or not that’s true, George Galloway has done perhaps more than anyone else in the country to help politicise marginalised Muslim communities, introducing to them left-wing politics as an answer to racism, Islamophobia, imperialism and neo-conservatism. But there’s another, more reactionary, current amongst Muslim communities that seeks to present itself as the sole representative of Islamic identity. I ask Galloway if Respect could do more to challenge religious fundamentalism and social conservativism amongst the communities it represents? “No,” he says, “I think the first part of our agenda is big enough. The question of social conservatism within Muslim communities is a matter for them largely.”

It’s a contentious point, and one that many on the liberal left will disagree with, but Galloway has never been afraid of courting controversy. In 1994, he flew to Iraq to meet Saddam Hussein in an effort to prevent war and end the sanctions which were bringing further immiseration to the Iraqi people, saluting their courage, their strength and their indefatigability. More recently he has spoken out in support of Ahmedinejad in Iran following the disputed elections, attacking the protesters as class enemies and drawing a comparison with opposition to Chavez’s reforms in Venezuela. But despite the similarity in their anti-imperialist rhetoric, is it really fair to compare the ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Ahmedinejad with the democratic socialist Chavez? “I’m not sure that Chavez would describe himself as a democratic socialist,” Galloway says. “But I do think the comparisons between them are stark. Not just in their international rhetoric, though that is a very significant thing for me, but in terms of their social base. The social base of Ahmedinejad is the poor masses; the enemies of Ahmedinejad are the English speaking, highly-educated, well-off elite. I’ve been several times to Venezuela, and that’s exactly the polarisation that exists there.”

Galloway concedes that Ahmedinejad is not a socialist, whilst Chavez is. But both, he argues, are populists. “I do think you can measure a man by his enemies, and both have the same enemies. My main interest in Iran is that is should remain an independent country and not a puppet of the West like virtually all of the Muslim countries already are, and to that extent I’m glad that Ahmedinejad won over Moussavi who, whether he liked it or not, was riding a wave of people who wished to see the return of the Pahlavi dynasty and who wished to see Iran as an outcrop of the United States. And I’m sure that he did win.”

It’s an uncomfortable prospect, that the left must lend its tacit support to tyrants opposed to Western imperialism, and even though Galloway has described Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust as “a disgrace”, I ask him, if the enemy of my enemy must always be my friend? “No,” he says. “That’s why I could never line up behind the dictatorship in Burma. It’s anti-American, but I could never say that that enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Nevertheless, Galloway tells me that Ahmedinejad is the president of an important country and we’ll just have to accept it. “Iran is much more important than the sort of knuckle-dragging ignoramuses in the British media have realised. Its geo-political position is strategically significant, it has a very young population, it has an ocean of oil and gas and soon will have a nuclear power industry, famously as we know.” It is for these reasons that Galloway argues Iran must be treated with more respect. “Ahmedinejad is the president, that’s why he was speaking at the United Nations a fortnight ago, there’s no point in second guessing other people’s choice of their leaders. I believe strongly that every people have the right to choose their own leaders and not have them chosen by their adversaries.”

It’s a position to which Galloway has remained consistent throughout his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But with violence surging in Afghanistan, what is the answer to the country’s problems now? “The opposite of what we’re currently doing,” he says. “The war is doomed, it cannot be won. No one has successfully occupied Afghanistan, not even Alexander the Great, and Bob Ainsworth definitely isn’t Alexander the Great. No matter how many soldiers they pour in there, they’ll never pour as many in as the former Soviet Union did. That occupation failed as this one is bound to.” Galloway believes that a negotiated withdrawal is inevitable. “It’s better that that starts now rather than later. Many more people will be alive, the radicalisation of the Muslim world, which is a real danger, will be lessened, we’ll be able to spend the money we’re burning in Afghanistan on our own people at home, and we’ll begin to defuse the tensions that exist in our own country between Muslims and non-Muslims.”

But withdrawal brings with it its own dangers, not least the possibility of the Taliban returning to power. I ask Galloway what he thinks will happen to Afghanistan? “The first thing I need to say, and it’s a contentious point, is that it’s none of our business what happens. British people, after several hundred years of empire, have become used to the idea that we have some right, maybe even some duty, to determine what happens in other people’s countries. I never believed that and I certainly don’t believe it now when we’re an almost bankrupt set of islands off the coast of mainland Europe. The days when the building you’re currently in ruled a quarter of all the world’s population are gone. Hallelujah!”

That’s not to say that Galloway is unconcerned with the future of Afghanistan. “I have interests in that country as a British citizen and they are this: that it must not be a base for those who wish to harm me, us, our country and our legitimate interests.” However, he believes that it is important to separate the pan-Islamist al Qaeda from “Johnny Afghan who just wants foreigners out of his country.” These, he argues, were never the same thing. “Insofar as there’s an al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, it was we who sent it there, paid for it, armed it, glorified it, paraded it at the Tory conference and at Ronald Reagan’s Republican national convention, called them Mujahedeen and all that you know. To punish the Afghans for al Qaeda when we sent it there, is double jeopardy.” Instead Galloway wants to see a negotiated outcome with the Afghan forces to ensure that the country is not used as a base to harm Britain and its legitimate interests. “I can’t guarantee that Afghanistan will be a lovely place if the foreign armies withdraw, but I can guarantee it will never be a lovely place if they don’t.”

There are many far-from-lovely places in the world that Galloway is concerned about, but perhaps none more so than Palestine. He recently returned from a convoy to break the Israeli siege of Gaza, the occupied territory which would form part of any future Palestinian state. But, I ask him, is a two-state solution really the best way to achieve justice for the Palestinian people? “I’m pleased that Hamas and Fatah have signed a unity agreement,” he says. “I hope it works. The division within the Palestinian ranks has been catastrophic for them and for those of us who support them from the outside, as I have been doing now for almost 35 years of my life. As to what the final outcome is, this is really a matter for them.” Galloway says that if the Palestinians decide on a two-state solution then he, as a supporter of their cause, must accept that. “My own personal view, however, is that Palestine is too small, the issue of the refugees too great, the topographic and demographic cleansing that has occurred has been too extensive. The building of the wall, the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, the building of the settlements, which are really cities, have all been too extensive to make the separation of this small piece of land into two viable states realistic.”

Galloway is keen to point out that he does not support sectarian countries. “When Mandela was asked by the Boers at the end of Apartheid if they could have the Orange Free State as a white state, he said that he didn’t believe in white states or black states, only democratic states. One man, one woman, one vote, one government and everyone equal under the law. And if I believe that in South Africa, why should I change it for Palestine?” Instead he would like to see a democratic state, where everyone is equal, where all the existing inhabitants have the right to live, and all the people who were driven from the land have the right to return. “One state between the river and the sea is by far the best solution.”

In the meantime, Galloway believes that the convoys he is leading to Gaza to bring aid to the Palestinian people are crucial acts of defiance and solidarity. “I’m leading another one on the 6th of December to arrive on the 27th, which is the anniversary of the war. I think that these attempts to break the blockade are the most urgent priority for solidarity organisations around the world. We can march here, and protest here, and hold public meetings, but they make little difference.”

Somehow I didn’t expect George Galloway – the firebrand activist and unremitting radical who has always spoken his mind even when his opponents don’t like what’s on it – to say any different. His has always been one of the loudest voices for change and he has never lacked the courage of his convictions. I thank him for his time and make my way back through the courtyard and the green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome: the seat of power of an almost bankrupt set of islands off the coast of mainland Europe. On my way home, I pass Brian Haw, whose protest, like Galloway’s, will continue unabated till the people in power take notice.

http://www.georgegalloway.com/

Guest post by Carl Packman

102 Minutes That Changed America, the brave documentary that aired on Channel 4 yesterday, made for very tough viewing.

The camera was very intrusive, and actually seemed to infuriate people, but it did what was best in documenting some very sombre and terrifying moments. People, covered in dust and debris, would wave their hands as if to say I’ve been in there, fuck off with your camera, and against their sensitivities managed to catch both their anger and their vulnerabilities. The viewer asks themselves the important question, definitely on the lips of those commissioning the programme: is watching this programme not tantamount to voyeurism, or, should I be watching these terrified people in their terror climaxes?

The answer should be no, but what is posterity worth? When Kevin Carter, the nobel prize winning photographer, was asked about filming South African necklacing – the act of filling a rubber tyre with petrol, placing it round a victims neck and setting on fire – he replied:

“I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.”

It was in 1993 that Carter took the photograph of a small girl in famine ridden Sudan, that took him to the long road of depression. What should a photographer do, should s/he attempt to help the subject, does art trump life, what moral proximity does the artist have towards his or her subject if any, and should this jeopardise his or her art or commitment?

It was these questions, and many more that Carter suffered before he took his own life at the age of 33 by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window.

Robert Capa, the Spanish civil war photographer famous for his photograph Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, was held in very high esteem for his very graphic and personal display of the other war against fascism. This year a Spanish professor, José Manuel Susperregui, published a book titled Shadows of Photography, which demonstrated that Capa’s photograph could not have been taken where it was alleged to have been, using separate photographic evidence.

Tough as it may be, sometimes, in order to save your corner, you have to come clean on your allies. In order to keep the Spanish Republican message alive, and by saving the right from using it to their advantage, the truth of Capa had to be released. Similarly, two Canadian documentary filmmakers were once making a film on Michael Moore, the leftwing polemicist, from a supportive bent. However, after weeks of specialising in the remit of Moore, they soon realised that much of his work was born out fiction, covered behind the gonzo-esque, perverting the realm of the anti-war movement in America – which obviously needed all the support it could gather. The point of the filmmakers’ – Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine – efforts could not have been better summed up by the title of their film; Manufacturing Dissent.

The above references – if they have any common theme – is to try and communicate a truth, even if using methods that don’t exactly weigh up as such. Kevin Carter’s profile as one who captures a truth haunted him until his dying day, Capa was willing to stage events in order to send a message across the world detailing the horrors of the Francoist regime – even if this event was fictitious. Sometimes the only way an artist can record the nearest representation to truth, is by recreating it, sometimes truth is not real enough. Perhaps Michael Moore could argue this case also, but two leftist documentary filmmakers were willing to spill the beans to save their corner.

These are the criteria for infiltrating the truth as its happening, for limiting ones own remit to that of the artist – the bearer of the potentially worldwide message – and not the saviour, or at least not in any immediate sense. Does Channel 4′s 9/11 documentary do just that? I’d risk saying not in this instance, the location shots seemed brave, and there was no fear of tweaking the truth of the events, only it seemed to mostly interfere. For what it’s worth, it did capture emotion fraught with fear, but did this hold the same weight as say Kevin Carter, or was it perversion, a glimpse at vulnerability for a public energised by action? I’d risk an accusation of the latter.

Often, when making legal decisions, there is a clamour that we consider the opinions, feelings and position of the victims, and (especially in cases of murder) often this is defined loosely so as to include the victim’s family and friends. Over the past decade or so this has become increasingly enshrined in the actual making of decisions, with things like statements from the victims family becoming part and parcel of the legal process. During the debate over the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi last week these tried and tested invocations made many appearances. Most opponents of his release accused the Scottish Justice Minister of some disrespect or other towards the victims family.

But surely there’s a problem here. For every one of the victim’s families outraged by the decision there seems to be another who was in support of it. There seems to have been a split broadly correlating to the Atlantic Ocean, and last week ITV News had an extraordinary row between the mother of an American victim and the father of a British one (sadly I can’t find a clip online) over whether he should be released. This is no doubt in part due to the opinion of many of the British families that Megrahi was innocent, but even beyond that many are motivated by forgiveness and some sense of natural justice.

So how is ‘taking the victims’ families into account supposed to work in this case? Do we, as seems to be implied by the opponents of his release, give a veto to any member opposed to his release? Do we get them all in a room, caucus and take a vote? Perhaps they cancel each other out, or perhaps only some of their opinions should be considered, maybe some sort of representative panel? Or maybe, just maybe, should we think very, very carefully before giving the victims’ families any greater weight than anyone else in this decision?

Guest post by Ashen Rues

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is not a name that trips easily off the tongue, but over the past few weeks his name has been mentioned more than any other. There is nothing better during a quiet summer than a small diplomatic row between allies and right now we have one mighty row, which will be over and done with by October, if not September. And Megrahi is at the heart of it.

Not to dwell on the actual terrible incident, but in 1988 a Pan Am jet was blown up over northern England and southern Scotland with most of the wreckage landing on the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. 270 people died. It was a terrible incident and no one can ever forget those images. But now, 21 years later, after a major trial, compensation claims and no clear indication of who actually did it, the wound has been opened up again by the release of a prisoner on compassionate grounds. This is a normal, if not frequent, happening under Scottish Law and would generally go un-noticed if it had not been for the prisoner in question. Megrahi was extradited from Libya and put on trial in 2000, sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole. So he has served 9. UN observers felt the trial was unfair and Megrahi appealed and was refused and further attempts to appeal were delayed by the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal possibly in the hope that Megrahi would be dead before they had to deal with such an emotive case.

Megrahi will now die in Libya with his family, possibly in less than 3 months. The support for the decision in Scotland is based on the principals of Scottish law and Christian morality, according to Malcolm Chisholm, a former Labour minister who spoke in support of this decision in the Scottish Parliament on Monday. The Scots are now being threatened with boycotts by the USA, whilst the Scottish justice minister received a tongue lashing from the head of the FBI in a letter dripping with sentiment and emotion and reeking of hypocrisy.

The USA is criticising Scottish Law and Scottish legal decisions, suggesting that deals were done to secure Libyan oil and other trade deals. Deals may have been done; deals are done every day between nations. In the early 1980s, the USA was selling weaponry and expertise to the Iraqis for a war with Iran. Twenty years later, Iraq was enemy number 1 and Saddam Hussain had to be put on “trial” and die. This is real-politik and it often overrides any real justice or fairness. Fr the US to be bullying Scotland now is ridiculous. Scotland remains part of the UK, so where is the UK response to this bullying? Where are the voices of support from the PM or the Foreign Office? If California had released a prisoner on compassionate grounds against the wishes of Britain and this resulted in a campaign of criticism of and threats of boycotting of California, would we not now be hearing from Obama or Hillary? We need the same from the UK for Scotland. We cannot allow a legal decision (no matter what emotions is stirs up) to become a diplomatic incident between allies. Maybe the Scots don’t need or want defending by Westminster in their stoical independent stance, but when it comes to bullying, the bigger friend needs to step in regardless of how brave the victim feels.

At the end of the day, a man who is dying has been released to spend the last few months of his life with his family, in a process that is totally legal and fair under Scottish law. He is connected to one of the worst cases of terrorism ever witnessed but there it is clear he is a bit player and a distraction from the wider web behind the Pan Am bombing. It was always going to upset someone, but for it to become a huge diplomatic row reeks of smoke screens, secret deals and overreaction in order to placate grieving relatives.

After one of the costliest weeks for British forces in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown argued today that the ongoing campaign is a “patriotic duty” to keep the streets of Britain safe.

“It comes back to terrorism on the streets of Britain,” he said. “If we were to allow the Taliban to be back in power in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda then to have the freedom of manoeuvre it had before 2001, then we would be less safe as a country. There is a line of terror – what you might call a chain of terror – that links what’s happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the streets of Britain.”

I was standing outside King’s Cross on July 7^th 2005. And as the realisation sank in that if I’d been ten minutes earlier, it could have been me, my first thought: how can this be happening here? I campaigned against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the beginning. And whilst I recognise the need to prevent the Taliban gaining influence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we should not be under any illusions. The wars waged by our government have made the streets of Britain less safe, not more.

Merseyside Police have ruined the academic career of a young muslim student.

This has totally changed what I have learned about this country and my time here,” he said. “They are clearly identifying Muslim students. It’s a big insult … The first thing I will do is leave this country as soon as possible. The police officer said your country [Pakistan] is not secure but I still prefer to live there. I love my country.”

Irrelevant of what you think of the police, the war on terror, or Islam this is clearly an impressively cack-handed action by Merseyside Police. They storm onto University campus, terrify students, and arrest and innocent man at gunpoint. I refuse to believe they could not have handled this differently.

This all happened in a part of the city I spend a lot of time in, and in fact I think I was about 100 yards away when it happened. The wider impact it will have on the student body and population shouldn’t be overestimated. Yesterday I sat in that exact spot waiting to meet someone, and overheard several conversations. The one that chilled me to the bone was a student commenting: “As far as I’m concerned he’s a terrorist until proven otherwise.”

Combine this with the events of last week, and faith in the police ought to be dropping like a stone.