Rioting in Tottenham - Part 1, the catalyst.

A riot has occurred in Tottenham, I am writing this in an attempt to try and quantify what exactly caused it.

Tottenham is a suburb of London, to the north of the centre. It has a large Afro-Caribbean population and is home to a wide variety of ethnicities. It is a deprived area with double the UK national average unemployment

The catalyst for this disturbance was the shooting of a 29 year old man, Mark Duggan, by an armed police officer. The police story (and the only one you'll be hearing in the media) goes that when an anti-gang task force attempted to arrest the dead man he resisted, shot at them with an illegal handgun and they returned fire and killed him.

Which you know, might be true.

The problem is the Metropolitan Police have a great deal of trouble telling the truth. Take for instance the death of Jean Charles de Menezes the way they told it he ran away from them, jumped a ticket barrier and was generally behaving suspicously. The way eye witnesses told it he was sitting on an underground train minding his own business, the police burst in, grabbed him and held him down and then shot him in the head. A slight discrepancy in the police's favour. Similarly when allegations about how police involvement in Ian Tomlinson's death began to emerge the Met forgot that a CCTV camera near the scene of the crime existed.

Lenin's Tomb has an unconfirmed eye witness report that Duggan was executed after being arrested. Now without verification this is questionable but it is far from impossible. Maybe he was killed because they disliked him or, given the endemic corruption across the British police maybe a rival drug gang paid to have him gotten rid of.

Certainly the circumstances surrounding his death are a little odd. He was cornered in the back of a mini-cab and decided to go down in a blaze of glory, if the Police are to be believed, an unusual course of action for nearly all criminals, especially alleged drug dealers with their likely access to a well paid lawyer. Illegal handguns can be placed on the scene, especially if the Police had decided to kill him beforehand. Indeed this is one of the most questionable issues of the whole affair for me, if you ever read one of those cheerleading pieces in the papers about how a cop caught a suspect there will usually be a reference to how if a story is too perfect, too without holes it is likely false and pre-rehearsed. The police officer who shot Duggan apparently was saved by his radio. It so wonderfully justifies his "returning fire" on Duggan in a way a shot lodged in a wall wouldn't do so. Indeed it must've been a wonderous radio because the injured officer didn't even spend a night in hospital.

Now it may be all as the police say, it is just very hard to trust them given the lies they've repeatedly told in the past. The worst thing is though, we have no way of trusting the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)'s investigation. The reason for this is twofold but connected. Firstly their investigation into Jean Charles de Menezes was deeply flawed with strong suspicions of deliberate coverups. The second reason we can't trust the IPCC is because in the aftermath of that investigation a senior officer directly criticised in relation to the incident was appointed to the IPCC.

With collusion and corruption like this it is difficult to trust anything the Metropolitan Police or the IPCC have to say.

The Skynet of stealing.

This is finance so I can't really speak to the content but I get the feeling it is important. Essentially the big banks are using computer programs to manipulate and control the market. Happily the US Govt is merrily looking the other way about this because it worked out so well last time.

Jonny linked by a different article about this a long time ago but I forgot to link it so thanks to him for at least making me aware this is an important issue.

MLK's plagarism and lies by omission.

This article examines the mainstream in general and NYT in particular's favourite conspiracy denier Gerald Posner. Oh hes also a massive plagarist and a self proclaimed thieving cocksucker but now he is no long a "journalist" and instead works PR for some of Hamid Karazi's relatives including Ahmed Wali Karzai a drug lord on the CIA's payroll.

So really it would be quite a leap to assume his popular lone gunman theory books about the assassinations of JFK and MLK could in any way be deliberate pieces of propaganda supporting the US government's line on the issue!


Yet this is exactly what the article does!. It is quite convincing that this thieving cocksucker omitted evidence that calls into question his conclusion that the official story that James Earl Ray killed MLK was wholly correct. The author does a much better job of explaining it than I could so you should read it.

Wikileaks founder convieniently accused of Rape.

That guy in charge of releasing all those documents the US didn't want releasing? Yeah, he's actually done some very bad things. So yeah, everything wikileaks released was patently false and you should just back to saluting the flag while watching American Idol.

How the US govt is attempting to hide real controversy.

The Propaganda model requires that if dissenting or controversial opinion is put forward in the media then good tame journalists will throw up "flak" contravening opinions presented as fact, insinuations about the dissenter's motivations and related propaganda about the subject showing that even if the disputed suggestion is true in general what the elite want us to think is true.

However the leak of ninety odd thousand government documents causes two major problems for the propaganda model. Firstly Wikileaks is too secretive and not well known enough to really pin specific blame on, its' leaks have covered a wide range of subjects. Nonetheless attempts are being made to suggest they some kind of malignant, ill defined ideology, as seen in the article I posted yesterday David Finkel, a good little journalist who despite knowing about the events of the helicopter gunship attacking civilians video for well over a year before it was released didn't make a fuss about, suggests that Wikileaks reason for leaking is suspect because "They provided artificial agenda driven context." Afterall, people merrily murdering civilians and laughing about it isn't a big deal unless you put some evil context on it.

Secondly though given the papers are government documents not meant to be released it is very difficult for the press to assert they're suspect or ideologically motivated, the sheer volume as well as the source undermines that. Unless the US military and government is deliberately lying to itself about Afghanistan (something of a controversy in itself) most of the tools of flak simply don't work.

However flak is mainly a tool of second resort, to suppress issues that have gotten past the first line of defence, the media defining what the elite talked about as the entire scope of news. But this is not the media's news, it is the governments so the US government is trying very hard to make out that while EVIL HILTER WIKILEAKS has endangered every brave Troop and destroyed Afghanistan with its' carelessness the actual information contained in those 90k documents is pretty boring and uninteresting. For instance Obama had this to say.

And yet mean old members of the media who are evil enough to point out the leaked documents do point out a range of things previously unknown or at least not acknowledged. Al Jazeera's report summarises most of the major problems but for specifics the leak revealed: a different death squad operation separate from JSOC's death squads called Task Force 373, at least 144 civilian deaths were known about but not reported by the US Military, the US government believes that the ISI (Pakistani intelligence service) is aiding the Taliban oh and we've actually known where Bin Laden was much more recently than claimed but capturing him might end the forever war and the contractor bonanza so it was kept quiet.

But yeah members of the public just trust the President and don't look too closely at what the leak actually contained, theres far more important things to do, like watching The View!