Day of the Jackal

There is a famous scene in Freddie Forsyth's thriller Day of the Jackal (the film version having the ultra-upper class Edward Fox in it I think) where the international assassin shows how ridiculously easy it is to obtain fraudulent passports. Teardrop kindly sent me a link to this piece on the Register that he was blogging about which shows that, far from protecting us, the new biometric passports governments like the UK and US are shoving down citizen's throats (for their own good of course) as about as safe as a Kosher butcher in Beirut. And since this is the first wave of the tech Blair etc want us to have in our ID cards it blows yet another hole in that scheme, not that this will discourage a government which has made its decision and will stick to it no matter how many citizens tell them to stop and how many IT companies tell them it won't work...

Meanwhile the Sunday Herald has a great story about Lebanese folks living here in Scotland who are getting assistance from the Lebanon government's legal affairs folks to try and have charges brought against Tony Blair for war crimes by aiding and abbeting the supply of weapons to Israel. The revealtion that the UK was allowing the US to supply weapons to Israel via Scottish airports the other week caused a lot of outrage here (and was swiftly moved to RAF bases further south, but still allowed to continue, which kind of misses the point) and from my limited understanding of legal matters may well put the government into a dodgy area of international law, supplying or aiding the supply of weapons to one side in a conflict where civilians are being targeted. I doubt it will actually come off but I wish them the best of luck with it - it would be nice to see the swine held accountable properly.

Especially since the main airport involved - Glasgow Prestwick - was recently mired in the US's rendition flights moral morass and also because some of the weapons being shipped via there include the bunker buster bombs Israelie forces used to deliebrately target and murder UN observers with recently (mistake my arse, you don't shell someone for hours while they are phoning your HQ to tell you they are UN, while you have a map which show UN locations and then when shells don't get the saftey bunker call in an airstrike with a bunker buster to finish it off by mistake. Then shell the rescue party for good measure. Mistake my arse, bloody murder, plain and simple in my opinion.)