- Al-Q & Saddam: permissive coupling
- Joined up government - asylum seekers
- Doctors refute asylum infection claims
- Send-A-Slug Success?
Al-Q & Saddam: permissive coupling
Quite the most astonishing claim in the Orwellian built-up to War (sorry, Peace) with Iraq must be the foreign secretary Jack Straw's insistence that Iraq was linked to al-Qaida, saying that Saddam Hussein allowed a "permissive environment" in which Osama bin Laden's organisation was able to operate. It's not every day that the names of Saddam Hussein or Al-Qaida are linked with the word "permissive", so perhaps we should take a moment to savour this historic conjunction.
The Government's defence intelligence staff agency (DIS) concluded that relations between President Saddam's regime and Bin Laden had "foundered" due to ideological differences, thus rather undermining the claim that murdering half a million Iraqis (sorry, bringing peace to Iraq) was a necessary self-defence against those responsible for September 11th.
Since the mere existence of Al-Qaida sympathisers is enough to bring down a rain of bombs, perhaps those living near Finsbury Park (or in Manchester, Birmingham, etc) should check out their fall-out shelters. He's not call the Strawman ("If I only had a brain") for nothing.
Joined up government - asylum seekers
Joined-up government remember that idea? Like joined-up writing but slightly less grown-up. General idea being that what one department was doing ought to bear some relation to what others were doing, at least that they were pushing in the same direction.
Under the terms of a "restricted" joint Cabinet Office-Home Office policy document most asylum seekers would lose their right to claim asylum in Britain and would be returned to "regional protection areas", where their applications would be processed.
Among locations mentioned for the regional protection areas, as part of a "new global asylum system", are Turkey, Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan for Iraqi refugees; northern Somalia for refugees from southern Somalia; and Morocco for Algerians. It also suggests Ukraine or Russia to stem the flow of economic migrants from the east of the new enlarged EU border.
Asylum seekers would stay in the UN special protection areas for six months while the position in their home country stabilised. The report also sets out a case for international intervention to reduce the flow from the main refugee-producing countries with a graded response ranging from aid packages through sanctions to armed intervention as a key element of what it calls a "new vision for refugees".
Just to remind you, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates 900,000 new refugees will be created by the War (oops, Peace) and starvation (sorry, Aid) will affect 3 million. The WHO are expecting half a million casualties (sorry, beneficiaries of infrastructural adjustments).
Doctors refute asylum infection claims
Doctors have called for voluntary health checks to be offered to all refugees as the medical establishment hit back against claims that immigrants are responsible for spreading infectious disease.
Department of Health officials said they did not recognise figures purporting to show immigration was doubling the rate of HIV and increasing the risk of hepatitis B twenty-fold, describing statistics used in the Sun newspaper and Spectator magazine as "manipulated".
Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics at the British Medical Association, said that far from importing disease, many asylum-seekers' health was damaged by coming to Britain and living on the breadline.
Racist lies, we love 'em.
Send-A-Slug Success?
Tessa Jowell has backed down on her attempt to ban 15 February's huge anti-war march from Hyde Park, on the grounds of grass-preservation. We have no idea whether this decision was in any way connected to the call by the Slug Preservation Society to send her congratulatory slugs through the post. In case this new form of political activism develops into a trend, we'd like to advise that when sending live gastropods (or other organic material) they should be placed in sealed containers and clearly labelled. We wouldn't want innocent postal workers putting squidged slugs through the automated postcode reading machines.