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Richard Norton-Taylor and Clare Dyer report for The Guardian on Defence Secretary John Reid’s comments about how The Geneva Conventions are hindering the ability of British troops in the War on Terror.

John Reid demanded sweeping changes to international law yesterday to free British soldiers from the restraints of the Geneva conventions and make it easier for the west to mount military actions against other states.

In his speech, the defence secretary addressed three key issues: the treatment of prisoners, when to mount a pre-emptive strikes, and when to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis. In all these areas, he indicated that the UK and west was being hamstrung by existing inadequate law.

I have to say that I’m very troubled by this, true laws need to change with the times if they are now out of step with the needs of society. But I really cannot see the case for any changes needing to be made to the Geneva Conventions. In fact John Reid has made no case at all and has not outlined in any way what changes he envisions are necessary.

What John Reid has done is to yet again raise the boogeyman of the 21st century that of ‘barbaric terrorism’ as he phrased it. Plus also straying into the game of I can imagine a worse imaginary threat than you.

“But what if another threat develops?”, Mr Reid asked. “Not al-Qaida. Not Muslim extremism. Something none of us are thinking about at the moment.” Terrorist groups were trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, he said.

We can all play the ‘what if’ game but surely it is only realistic to legislate for known threats or else there’s no end to it. Should we legislate for any movie threat that the defence secretary has seen such as zombificating viral infections, invasion by hostile extra-terrestrial beings or marauding gigantic creatures. Of course terrorist organisations are seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction, but how realistic is it that they could actually acquire them. We live in a world where even nation states with all their resources are facing huge technical hurdles let alone political ones in their struggle to acquire them.

I have a struggle to understand what John Reid is actually advocating here in terms of changes to the Geneva conventions. Is he advocating the torture and mistreatment of prisoners? Does he seek the right for the UK to launch pre-emptive attacks on sovereign nations based on the mere belief that they pose a threat to Britain?

Tags: terrorism

At a time when we’re told by the industry that the average gamers are pushing 30 rather than 13 how is it that a pair of bare naked breasts and the thought of hardcore sex got more people riled up about Grand Theft Auto than the fact that is one of the most reprehensively violent games out there?

read more | digg story

Tags: Digg, games, sex

Now that the House of Lords have stopped their opposition to the National Identity Card having forced the Government to make some meaningless concessions it looks like nothing can prevent the bill being passed. Chicken Yoghurt asserts that our list of allies has grown very thin and our only hope is that this massive IT project goes as badly wrong as all previous huge government IT projects.

As Longrider says over at Europhobia: “incompetence is now our most valuable ally“. We must now hope that the procurement and implementation of the National Identity Register is as cack-handed, expensive and late as the rest of the technocratic turds this Government has to seen fit to foist on us in its rudderless quest for a subjugated Utopia.

In that, at least, the odds are in our favour. We democrats grudgingly placed our faith in the hands of the unelected Lords. We must now, reluctantly yet with hope, put it in the hands of big business.

Can a Home Office that apparently cannot do their accounts properly be trusted with the massive funds needed for procurment and implementation of a National Identity Card System.

Tom of Blairwatch and Charlie Stross have done the maths on the time needed for the registration of the entire adult population of Britain and have calculated given the number of people divided by the number of regional registration centres each registration needs to completed in an unworkably short 72 seconds.

Given the technical problems people are predicting perhaps Perfect.co.uk is truly prescient with these two pieces of news from the future, more news from the future.

I forsee the biggest practical problem will be the failures due to the use of biometric data as a way of preventing a person getting multiple cards for different fake identities. I wrote about this a couple of years ago in my analysis of the national identity card scheme in the subsection Is biometrics a silver bullet?

Tags: ID cards

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow wrote an angry letter to American Airlines following a security check that he believed exceeded sense and decency.

This has now been hilariously remixed with the premise of the forthcoming Samuel L. Jackson movie Snakes on a Plane in the following Metafilter thread.

Tags: security

UMN News: Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority, according to new U of M study

American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology.

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

My first thought bizarrely to this was I wonder how atheists would rank against other American bogeymen such as the French, communists or even terrorists. Why is it that atheists are seen as a threat to the American way of life?

Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.

This is probably the answer to my question and I believe that the study’s respondents have been misled or misinformed. Lack of belief in deities does not mean that one is lacking in morals. I believe that you don’t need religious doctrine to tell you how to lead a moral life.

Tags: atheism, religion, US