Catching Up With The News, Item #1: DPP Tellin' It Like It Is

So, Mr. Steve has been busy lately - very busy - preparing for a disastrous interview for a position as an international currencies dealer with a major UK bank. More on that some other time, as it was an interesting experience if a highly unsuccessful and inherently unsatisfying one.

In the meantime, there is plenty of recent news to catch up with, including the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, tellin' it like it is to the scare-mongering, war-mongering, freedom-hating New Labour government and, by extension, its masters in Washington.

To quote possibly the best bit:

"London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.

"The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement."

As the Woodpecker cider ads used to say (and possibly still do, for all I know about the cider industry's current marketing campaigns): "What a refreshing change!"

History is likely to expose in full the absolute folly of the Bush/Blair axis' military approach to what have essentially been criminal acts of mass murder on 11 September 2001, 11 March 2004 and 7 July 2005, and attempted mass murder on 21 July 2005. While a military response to the 9/11 atrocities was probably appropriate in the case of Afghanistan under the Muslim Taleban, the Christian Taleban who run the White House and exert a more subtle but no less alarming influence within Downing Street - creationism in PFI-financed state schools, anyone? - have since upped the ante considerably, with the Iraq War being the foremost, but by no means sole, example of just how "successfully" our Dear Leaders have turned a tragedy into a farce and back into a tragedy again.

So, here's to Sir Ken Macdonald for speaking truth to power, even though, as long-time activist, disgraced academic and faux-Native American Ward Churchill points out, power already knows what it's doing. If Sir Ken's words can remove the wool from the eyes of even a few sleepy politicians and media commentators, he will have done more in the interests of the public good than pretty much the rest of Whitehall combined.

Sir Ken: Information Landmine salutes you!