UK Police a chicken in their own country

[MastanKhan]

Police feared 'airport stand-off'
By Dominic Casciani
BBC News



Major General Doron Almog refused to leave the plane at Heathrow
An Israeli general wanted for alleged war crimes escaped arrest in the UK because British police feared an armed confrontation at Heathrow airport.
Documents seen by BBC News reveal how Major General Doron Almog managed to fly back to Israel when police failed to board his plane in September 2005.

He stayed on board for two hours after a tip-off that he was facing detention.

Police were concerned about a potential clash with Israeli air marshals or armed personal security on the plane.

Maj Gen Almog had flown to the UK for social and charitable visits to Jewish communities in Solihull, in the West Midlands, and Manchester.

Lawyers acting for Palestinian campaigners lobbied the Metropolitan Police to act over allegations he had ordered the destruction in 2002 of more than 50 Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip.

Campaigners say the homes were destroyed by the Israeli army as retribution for a Palestinian militant attack, in contravention of the laws of war protecting civilian property. Israel says destruction of Palestinian houses is among the necessary measures it takes to protect its citizens.

The Met initially refused to get involved, citing massive pressures on counter-terrorism teams in the wake of the London bombings.

But the legal representatives successfully applied to a judge for an arrest warrant for a private prosecution.

Decisions log

A decisions log prepared for the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which has investigated the incident, shows officers decided to detain the general at Heathrow's immigration control.


Destroyed: Palestinians accused Maj Gen Almog of an attack on homes

They then planned to take him to a police station to consider executing the warrant.

However, news of the warrant leaked to the Israeli Embassy.

Officials tipped off the general and he and his wife refused to leave the El Al flight for the two hours it sat at the London airport's terminal.

The documents now show Det Supt John MacBrayne, a senior counter-terrorism officer who was responsible for the operation, could not get confirmation that his team had the right to board the plane.

El Al, Israel's national airline, had refused permission.

In his log, he wrote: "Another consideration [was] that El Al flights carried armed air marshals, which raised issues around public safety.

"There was also no intelligence as to whether Mr Almog would have been travelling with personal security as befitted his status, armed or otherwise."

The officer concluded there were real risks to the police and public and also had concerns about the "international impact of a potentially armed police operation at an airport".

Apology to Israel

When Maj Gen Almog arrived back in Israel, the planned arrest caused a minor diplomatic storm, with Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom describing the incident as an "outrage".

In turn, the then UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw apologised to his counterpart for any embarrassment caused.

Hickman and Rose, lawyers for the Palestinians, demanded an inquiry.

A spokesman for the Independent Police Complaints Commission said its review had not identified the source who leaked details of the planned arrest.

It also concluded police had not broken rules by failing to board the aircraft to execute the warrant.

John O' Connor, a former head of Scotland Yard's flying squad, told BBC One's Breakfast programme: "All they needed to do was to stop the plane from taking off and negotiate through the Foreign Office."

He said he felt the arrest had been "written off", putting "British justice is in the dock."

 

[MastanKhan]

Another nugger from UK



UK sought to keep criticism of Israel secret: paper




By Our Special Correspondent

LONDON, Feb 21: A secret document revealed by the Guardian on Thursday shows how the Foreign Office successfully fought to keep secret a remark that Israel has flouted the UN authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussain contained on the first draft of the controversial, now discredited Iraq weapons dossier.

At the heart of it was nervousness at the top of government about any mention of Israel’s nuclear arsenal in an official paper accusing Iraq of flouting the UN’s authority on weapons of mass destruction.

The dossier was made public this week, but the Foreign Office succeeded before a tribunal in having the handwritten mention of Israel kept secret.

The Guardian said it has seen the full text and a witness statement from a senior Foreign Office official, who argued behind closed doors that any public mention of the candid reference would seriously damage UK-Israeli relations.

The Information Tribunal, which adjudicates on disputes involving the Freedom of Information Act, agreed to remove the single reference to Israel when it ordered the release of the draft of the Iraqi weapons dossier written by John Williams, the FCO’s chief information officer at the time.

Along with unfavourable references to the US and Japan, the reference to Israel was written in the margin by someone commenting on the opening paragraph of the Williams draft. It was written against the claim that “no other country (apart from Iraq) has flouted the United Nations’ authority so brazenly in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction”.

In statement to the tribunal, Neil Wigan, head of the FCO’s Arab, Israel and North Africa Group, said: “I interpret this note to indicate that the person who wrote it believes that Israel has flouted the United Nations’ authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Its disclosure would seriously damage the UK’s relations with Israel, Wigan said. The comparison with Saddam and the “implied accusation of a breach of the UN’s authority by Israel are potentially very serious”. It was “inevitable” that relations between the UK and Israel would suffer if the marginal note were allowed to enter the public domain, he added.

In the same newspaper on the same day in another article ( Israel’s weapons a diplomatic no-go-area) it is mentioned that nuclear weapons are seen as the last resort of Israel’s security, the so-called “Samson option” to be used in desperation like the biblical character who died with his enemies when he brought down the temple on the heads of the Philistines.

Developed secretly from 1956 after France built a nuclear reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert, the weapons were seen by Israel’s first generation of leaders as designed to prevent a second Holocaust an argument that was translated into a formidable arsenal outside any international controls. Seymour Hersh, the American writer, has reported that the words “Never Again” were welded, in English and Hebrew, on to the first Israeli nuclear warhead. Apocryphal or not, the story hints at the thinking behind the programme.

Israel, unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the 1970 agreement which allows countries to develop civilian nuclear power in exchange for forgoing weapons. These are supposed to be the preserve of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. In recent years India, Pakistan and North Korea have swelled the ranks of the weapons states, but unlike them Israel has never come out of the nuclear closet, preferring a policy of so-called nuclear ambiguity keeping its enemies guessing.

By the mid-1980s when whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona reactor, gave his sensational inside story to the Sunday Times, the expert assessment was that Israel had up to 200 nuclear warheads and the ability to “deliver” them by plane, missile and submarine. If true, that makes a country of 7 million people the world’s fifth or sixth ranking nuclear power.