Trevor Kavanagh cries 'police state' (with backing of the Culture Secretary)

So after decades of implying if not assuming guilt on the basis of arrest if not suspicion alone (e.g. Forest Gate), The Sun have taken to defending... erm, themselves:

'Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom'; The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh on the biggest police operation in British criminal history

And to prove his point, here's Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary of that supposed police state, playing lapdog for Murdoch (again) and pulling out all the stops to support this false prospectus, both in The Sun itself and in the wider media that he claims is under a threat all of a sudden now his chums at the Downing Street Echo are subject to arrest.

(Roll over. Play outraged. Good boy!)

Earlier in the 'Hackgate' scandal, The Sun had their Page 3 girl deliver a special message to police. Now it's Trevor Kavanagh's turn to be a massive tit for Murdoch. His editorial self-serving rant is repeated in full below. We post it here and invite comment because The Sun have decided to disallow comments on their version. For some reason.

Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom

The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh on the biggest police operation in British criminal history

The Sun is not a "swamp" that needs draining.

Nor are those other great News International titles, The Times and The Sunday Times.

Yet in what would at any other time cause uproar in Parliament and among civil liberty and human rights campaigners, its journalists are being treated like members of an organised crime gang.

They are subjects of the biggest police operation in British criminal history — bigger even than the Pan Am Lockerbie murder probe.

Major crime investigations are on hold as 171 police are drafted in to run three separate operations.

In one raid, two officers revealed they had been pulled off an elite 11-man anti-terror squad trying to protect the Olympics from a mass suicide attack.

Instead of being called in for questioning, 30 journalists have been needlessly dragged from their beds in dawn raids, arrested and held in police cells while their homes are ransacked.

Private

Wives and children have been humiliated as up to 20 officers at a time rip up floorboards and sift through intimate possessions, love letters and entirely private documents.

It is important that we do not jump to conclusions.

Nobody has been charged with any offence, still less tried or convicted.

Yet all are now on open-ended police bail, their lives disrupted and their careers on hold and potentially ruined.

Is it any surprise that Britain has dropped nine places to 28th, behind ex-Soviet bloc states Poland, Estonia and Slovakia, in the international Freedom of Speech league table?

So when the police get matters so far out of proportion, we are entitled to ask: Who polices the police?

Why should questions about police procedures be handled solely by the so-called Independent Police Complaints Commission, which is notoriously reluctant to rule against police?

This inquiry has even begun to disturb those of our critics who have been at least partly responsible for what many see as a "witch-hunt".

The Guardian has raised questions about freedom of the Press. Its media analyst, Steve Hewlett, says that when it comes to paying for stories, no newspaper — "tabloid or otherwise" — is exempt.

Yet in a quite extraordinary assumption of power, police are able to impose conditions not unlike those applied to suspected terrorists.

Under the draconian terms of police bail, many journalists are barred from speaking to each other. They are treated like threats to national security. And there is no end in sight to their ordeal.

Their alleged crimes? To act as journalists have acted on all newspapers through the ages, unearthing stories that shape our lives, often obstructed by those who prefer to operate behind closed doors.

These stories sometimes involve whistleblowers. Sometimes money changes hands. This has been standard procedure as long as newspapers have existed, here and abroad.

There is nothing disreputable about it. And, as far as we know at this point, nothing illegal.

Without good sources no newspaper could uncover scandals in the public interest.

Certainly, the world would never have learned about the expenses scandal that landed so many politicians in jail.

Which brings us to a sensitive domestic issue within the News International "family" which we cannot ignore.

Nabbed

It is absolutely right the company co-operates with police on inquiries ranging from phone and computer hacking to illegal payments.

We are right to hand over any evidence — emails, expense claims, memos — that might aid those inquiries.

It is right that those inquiries are carried out separately from the journalists under investigation. Nobody on The Sun was aware in advance that ten colleagues were about to be nabbed.

It is also important our parent company, News Corp, protects its reputation in the United States and the interests of its shareholders. But some of the greatest legends in Fleet Street have been held, at least on the basis of evidence so far revealed, for simply doing their jobs as journalists on behalf of the company.

Meanwhile, a huge operation driven by politicians threatens the very foundations of a free Press.

We have three separate police inquiries — Elveden, Weeting and Tuleta.

There is a Parliamentary inquiry and of course the free-ranging Leveson Inquiry into newspaper practices.

The field is open to almost anyone with a grievance to deliver their two cents' worth, even touching unrelated issues such as Page Three.

The process, costing tens of millions of pounds, threatens to roll on for at least another year and probably two.

Interestingly, nothing on this scale is envisaged for the banking industry which has brought the nation to the brink of bankruptcy.

Before it is too late, should we not be asking where all this is likely to lead? Will we have a better Press?

Or a Press that has been bullied by politicians into delivering what they, not the readers, think fit?

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(Psst! In other news, that memo sent aorund by SKY News recently looks almost prescient, doesn't it?)

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UPDATE - Just a quick note about The Sun comparing their situation to the uncovering of the expenses scandal (to the point where some cynics might suspect they seek to associate themselves with same in the eyes of the weak/lazy-minded...

The relevant source turned them down because they wanted to go soft on Cameron's Tories, and he did not think that appropriate. The Sun then acted in bad faith by publishing a story based on what was supposed to be a confidential authentication sample; they were clearly trying to cash in on the story before a real newspaper got to the evidence, and they did not care if their efforts derailed or undermined the publications of this evidence. With what little contact they did have with the expenses scandal, The Sun did not act in the public interest; they acted out of self-interest.

A storm in the propaganda cup.

You get the feeling the Sun isn't even bothering to actually look at the results of its snap poll carried out after the "snowstorm coup". Proof is in today's leader comment:

A STORM in a teacup. A distraction. We're just getting on with business.

Those were the reactions from ministers, including the Prime Minister, to Wednesday's attempted leadership coup.

But however hard Labour try to play it down, the botched plot has been a disaster for the party.

As The Sun predicted, voters have been massively turned off by the spectacle of Labour feuding while we are in recession and at war.

By massively turned off, the Sun presumably means that according to their very own poll, Labour's support has dropped by a truly cataclysmic, err, 1%. By the same yardstick, the botched plot was presumably also a disaster for the Liberal Democrats, whose support also dropped by 1%. The other disaster is the paper's truly terrible graphic depictions of the leaders, with Clegg coming off the worst:

That's Alfred E. Neuman, isn't it?

Mine Fuhrer, 25 years later.

Only just been alerted (ht: John B) to a rather famous Sun front page which never was: the Mine Fuhrer Arthur Scargill front page from the height of the miners' strike in 1984, courtesy of the-sauce:

It never saw the light of day thanks to the production chapels mass-refusing to set it - something which Murdoch and MacKenzie ensured would never happen again when News International moved to Wapping two years later, smashing the print unions, something which continues to be contentious to this day.

Do have to disagree with John B's additional comments, therefore, that "printworkers shouldn't have a veto over editorial content, however vile." The old motto is "publish and be damned", but if say the printworkers could have blocked "THE TRUTH", as they perhaps could have done had the unions not been crushed, it would have certainly prevented additional pain being piled upon an already grieving city. They would have been the only ones capable of keeping MacKenzie in check - something which the hacks themselves either couldn't or were unwilling to do. More recently it has still taken union power rather than individual power to stop the Daily Star from running a "Daily Fatwa" page, which promised a page 3 lovely in a niqab, while the union reps on the same paper complained also to the Press Complaints Commission that they were under pressure to write "anti-gypsy" reports. Overruling the editorial staff when they go too far, by threatening strike action if necessary, is better than the alternative.

Pure Propaganda

The Sun:

HARRY REDKNAPP believes Sky TV’s new £2billion deal with the Premier League “secures the game’s future”.

Manchester United star Rio Ferdinand joined the Tottenham boss and a host of top football names in hailing the three-year contract.
...
SunSport columnist Harry said: “It’s a great relief to the game to get this deal in the bag.”

England defender Rio added: “It’s great Sky will show all the drama of the Premier League for another three years.”

Richard Bevan, chief exec of the League Managers’ Association, said: “Sky’s investment has revolutionised viewing.

Who owns the Sun? Who owns Sky? Here's a pencil, join the dots.

H/T

More Algerian anti al-Qaida psy-ops.

On occasion, you fail to see the wood for the trees. Doing my daily pathetic trawl of the Sun's website, I came across Tom Newton Dunn's exclusive "Al-Qaeda in gay rape horror" and just dismissed it as the typical Sun nonsense which isn't worth bothering with or challenging. The excellent jihadica though has joined together the dots:

I would not normally bother with this kind of nonsense were it not for the fact that it sheds light on the recent reports about AQIM’s alleged plague experiments, covered previously on Jihadica. Both stories were broken in the West by The Sun, and both stories relied on Algerian security sources. We are most likely dealing here with an anti-al-Qaida psy-op, and a very poor one at that.

Which I also had covered and dismissed as most likely being complete and utter nonsense. I didn't however note that the story had been officially denied by the Algerians and also the WHO, despite a separate report appearing in the equally authoritative Washington Times claiming that it had been the result of a failed weaponising attempt.

It is indeed, as jihadica suggests, a very poor psy-op. The idea that al-Qaida and its connected franchises have to rape their recruits in order to shame them into becoming suicide bombers is completely absurd; there are, as Iraq and Afghanistan have sadly made all too clear, more than enough willing "martyrdom seekers" without them having to descend to such tactics. This isn't to discount the idea that, like with many other organisations, especially ones where young men spend plenty of time together and are encouraged to become fraternal brothers, even those who thelogically consider homosexuality to be abhorrent, that such relationships might develop, but it doesn't seem very likely. There have been cases where young teenage boys have been suicide bombers, but they still seem likely to be the products of madrasas and careful personal radicalisation rather than sexual abuse.

The Algeria connection does however seem to be the key. Perhaps borne out of the fear that al-Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb is growing in strength, these stories seem to be meant to further demonise them and nip in the bud any support both within Algeria and the outside world for them. Likewise, the idea that al-Qaida is running out of recruits, as "experts believe", is nonsense. In Iraq maybe, where the jihad has fallen on hard times, mainly as result of the other insurgent groups joining the Awakening councils having became tired of the Islamic State of Iraq's brutality, and where the routes which the foreign fighters came in on have been closed, but elsewhere the Taliban is growing in strength, as is the insurgency in Somalia, both now more favoured among jihadists than Iraq.

Again, we have to question why these stories are being passed to the Sun if indeed they are anything approaching accurate. It seems simply that the Sun's being given them both because they'll print them and because no one else with any sense or with an authority they want to keep will. As we saw with the plague story, none of that bothers the rabid jihadist watchers, or the Muslim-bashers who are inclined to take such accounts at face value, and that may be all that matters.

Facebook-bashing rears its ugly head.

One of the things we look out for on this blog is not just articles that are obvious bullshit or propaganda, but signs that the Sun is cleaning up its act. It was therefore in a fit of good vibes that the above banner suggested that the Sun was dropping its animus towards News International's main rival in the social networking game, Facebook, and coming clean about its own shortcomings. After all, the last time there was a purge of "pervs" from MySpace, the Sun strangely didn't so much as print a single word about it.

It soon becomes obvious why the Sun has decided to trumpet the fact that so many "sex offenders" have been removed from MySpace - because, obviously, they're all now on Facebook instead!

MYSPACE has banned 90,000 sex offenders from its site — but the pervs may be turning to rival Facebook.

New measures to make online social networking safer resulted in the MySpace purge.

But technology experts claimed last night to have found 8,000-plus sex fiends on Facebook.

John Cardillo, a former New York City cop who runs internet security firm Sentinel, said: “We’ve identified and removed 90,000 sex offenders from MySpace.

“But Facebook could still be a haven for such people. We found 8,487 registered sex offenders on Facebook in just a few days by doing a basic search that any user can access.

“So that’s a small percentage of what is there.

“If you look at the size of its community, there could be as many as 100,000 sex offenders or paedophiles on Facebook.”

Yep, that's right, this entire piece is only appearing for two reasons: to crow about MySpace's great success in deleting the scourge of modern life from their site, while at the same time acting as PR for John Cardillo's company, employed by MySpace; and to bash Facebook for not being so cautious. Also, incredibly coincidentally no doubt, today just happens to be Facebook's 5th birthday; its rival wouldn't be trying to spoil the party, would it? Surely not.

If Facebook is telling the full story, than Cardillo's programme seems to be incredibly crude in any case: it seems to search for the names of registered sex offenders and little else, which MySpace then removes. Either that, or Cardillo, when applying his software to Facebook, just searched for the names and didn't remove the false positives for propaganda reasons.

The Sun had actually seemed to be letting the rivalry with Facebook go, perhaps because Murdoch himself is wondering whether his purchase of the company was worth it when Facebook is both far more popular and objectively a better site. That might still be the case, and the Scum was just determined to pop Facebook's own publicity bubble. Regardless, any real newspaper when dealing with such a story would have pointed out the obvious huge conflicts of interest: the Sun instead just treats its own readers as fools and ciphers in their own propaganda war.

Propaganda or just convenient dead terrorists?

Imagine for a moment you're some sort of security asset. You have a major story: 40 militants linked to al-Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb (formerly the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) have apparently died of the plague. Either they were the victims of diseases inherent to living in the middle of nowhere in Africa, where outbreaks of plague are still reasonably regular, or, more frighteningly, they were possibly experimenting with weaponising plague, and were struck down themselves in the process. Whatever the truth, it's still a reasonably big story. Who then do you leak this to? A well-respected newspaper, such as the Times, Telegraph or Guardian? Or, on the other hand, the Sun?

Silly question, really. As you might expect, the report splashed on today's Sun front page reeks to high heaven. All the signs that it's either propaganda or complete nonsense are apparent: firstly, that it's been handed to the newspaper over the weekend, to go in the paper on the slowest and generally least busy news day of the week, Monday. Second, it seems to be based on a single source. Third, it's a story which is completely impossible to verify: you could try talking to government health sources in Algeria and see if there have been any recent cases of plague reported to them or which they're aware of and go from them, but that's a lot of effort, especially for today's churnalists. Lastly, the actual details are sketchy while the background information is remarkably, for the Sun, rather well defined: it hasn't just described them as al-Qaida fighters but correctly as AQIM, it directly names the area where they were when apparently infected as Tizi Ouzou province, and where they apparently fled to, and names their leader correctly, even using his less well-known real name Abdelmalek Droudkal rather than his nom de guerre Abu Musab Abdel Wadoud.

In short, it provides you with everything except actual evidence. It claims that up to 40 were killed by the plague, yet apparently only one body was actually found, and rather conveniently by the roadside, while the others are meant to be in mass graves in Yakouren forest. There are no photographs, and no confirmation of what type of plague the man had died from. The article claims that plague can kill in hours, but this is only true of the rarest form, pneumonic plague, which if not treated within 24 hours of symptoms developing greatly increases the chances of death. Bubonic plague, the most common, can be treated, and due to its longer incubation period of 2 to 6 days and well-known symptoms is often identified in time. While all forms are increasingly rare in the West, there are still usually a few cases each year in the United States, a recent one of which killed a biologist in the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, apparently contracting pneumonic plague after performing an autopsy on a mountain lion.

Algeria last had a major outbreak in 2003, where there were a total of 11 confirmed cases and 7 suspected, all of bubonic plague with 2 later developing into septicemia. A later study trapped rats in the area of the outbreak and found 9 of the 95 fleas collected to be infected with Yersinia pestis. Despite this attesting that the country most likely still has such fleas and rats in abundance, especially in the apparent remote forest where the fighters were supposedly training, not to mention the possibility of it spreading from southern Africa where it is even more prevalent, all the far from paranoid self-cast jihad watchers have immediately jumped to the conclusion that this means they just must have been experimenting with plague as a weapon. The Sun has nobly followed-up such speculation in tomorrow's edition, with the paper contacting Dr Igor Khrupinov, of Georgia University, who immediately without the slightest of information further suggests this could be the case.

There are just a few problems with this. Firstly, if al-Qaida was experimenting with biological weapons again as it has very amateurishly done in the past, why would one of the least respected and smallest of its groups have been given the "contract" to do so? Moreover, plague is incredibly difficult to weaponise: the United States never managed it, although the Russians did. Famously, it has been used crudely in the past: first at Caffa and later by the Japanese, who dropped ceramic bombs filled with infected fleas on China in the early 1940s. The idea of weaponising plague, or at least bubonic plague has fallen down the list of feared outbreaks, mainly because of the relative ease with which it is treated. It would cause panic certainly, and some deaths most probably, but nothing on the scale of which al-Qaida would be interested in, especially considering the difficulties in spreading it in the wild. Pneumonic plague would be of more interest, especially if it could be spread by aerosol, but fears of its high infection rate have possibly been exaggerated: a study of an outbreak in Uganda in 2004 found a transmittance rate of only 8%. One of the authors had previously published a paper analysing the risk of person to person infection, which also appears to have come to a similar conclusion. That knocks the idea on the head of "suicide" infected walking around cities spreading the disease merely by coughing, and considering the quick onset of symptoms of pneumonic plague, also greatly reduces the time in which to spread it. That none of those involved apparently sought treatment gives the inclination that they were behaving deviously, but again that's if we believe that there are 40 bodies buried in a mass grave, when only 1 body has supposedly been definitively identified, with again no indication of the plague type.

If there was an outbreak then, and as could have been easily established by using the trusty Occam's razor, the most likely cause would have been our old friend Rattus rattus and his pals the fleas. It doesn't quite answer why they wouldn't have sought treatment, as not all of them would probably have been identified as militants, although they could have been "discouraged" from leaving.

That is of course if we accept the story at all. To return to the beginning, why would the Sun be given such a scoop? One answer might have been pay, naturally, not available from the more respected papers, but it still means that if it is completely false and instead an example of the tabloids being supplied with propaganda, that a significant minority, if not majority, are not going to believe a word of it. Why also has it been supplied now? When we last examined what seemed an almost certainly similar piece of unverifiable propaganda, it came at a time when the war in Afghanistan was going through a rough patch. Likewise, the threat from al-Qaida has been talked down of late, including by the head of MI5 himself. This doesn't suit the agenda of some politicians and security officials, who rely on the continuation of the "war on terror" or whatever name it is now masquearding as for both their own dubious ends and for their own employment. Only last week David Miliband was talking about the phrase "war on terror" being a mistake, something which the Sun itself denounced. It's also doubtless a coincidence that Barack Obama becomes US president tomorrow, and with it new policies on that very same war. Even better if the Sun itself doesn't immediately spin on how they might have been experimenting, with the outbreak being the result of weapons tests; let the jihadist watching blogs and forums do that.

Propaganda or not, the story has of course spread like the proverbial plague itself, all without anyone bothering to check it, although an article in the notoriously accurate Moonie-owned Washington Times is building on the story with another "intelligence source", claiming it was a weapons experiment that went wrong, which is helped by the article referring to the non-existent ricin plot without mentioning it being err, non-existent. Churnalism has done its work again, and because it spreads to more respected sites like the Torygraph, even if the story is based entirely on the Sun's original, it becomes more based in fact that it otherwise would. Either way, it's a good news story. Dead terrorists = good. Dead terrorists messing about with plague = good and SCARY, which is even better. The more you loathe the press, the more you come to respect its potential as a propaganda tool, and this article only furthers that.