London Telegraph July 11, 2007
Martin Beckford

A crime-ridden high street in north London has been branded the most spied-upon road in Britain, after it emerged that it is watched over by more than 100 closed circuit television cameras.

In one 650-yard section of Holloway Road, that runs from Archway to Highbury Corner, there are 29 cameras mounted on shops and lampposts, a church and a courtroom.

There are 102 CCTV cameras monitoring crime on the two-mile Holloway Road

There are 102 CCTV cameras monitoring crime on the two-mile road, as well as a further seven checking for speeding cars and vehicles straying into bus lanes.

Civil liberties groups are alarmed by the number of opportunities for the state to watch people in Holloway Road, particularly as they claim surveillance cameras do not always help to reduce crime.

Mark Dziecielewski, of Watching Them Watching Us, said: "Politicians like cameras because they are seen to be doing something but, just like you see birds perched on scarecrows, the hoodies and dealers come back once the novelty has worn off.

"Having so many cameras in one place actually makes police investigations harder because they have to divert so much manpower into checking footage from every single camera."

A number of murders and other serious crimes have taken place in and around Holloway Road despite its dozens of CCTV cameras. Last month, 14-year-old Martin Dinnegan was knifed to death outside a chip shop yards from Holloway Road, while two years ago Richard Whelan was fatally stabbed as he sat on the top deck of a bus travelling along the road.

At the time, police disclosed there had been 430 offences committed over six months on Holloway Road, including 29 serious assaults, 15 robberies and 32 burglaries.

In 2004, 13-year-old Hakeem Johnston stabbed Noor Kasimi to death in a Holloway Road pizza shop where he worked, after being refused a £1 special offer. The road is also plagued by illegal cigarette sellers, while a Colombian cafe raided by police in 2003 was said to be central to a £200 million cocaine-smuggling cartel.

But some residents and shopkeepers along the road feel reassured by the presence of the CCTV cameras. Gillian Adam, an art dealer, said: "This can be a dangerous area, especially at night, so I think having so many cameras is a small price to pay."

Britain has 4.2 million CCTV cameras, one for every 14 people, more than in the rest of Europe put together.

In May Ian Redhead, the deputy chief constable of Hampshire, said: "Are we really moving towards an Orwellian situation where cameras are at every street corner? I really don't think that's the kind of country that I want to live in."

Prison Planet July 11, 2007
Paul Joseph Watson

'Officials worry of summer terror attack' reads an Associated Press headline today as Americans are served up their weekly dose of bellicose fearmongering.

But officials don't worry about another attack, they crave one - to save a doomed foreign policy and bolster approval ratings that have now slumped to an all time low.

This is not the conclusion of paranoid tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists, but a viewpoint held by major University foreign policy analysts like Lt.-Col. Doug Delaney, chair of the war studies program at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, who recently told the Toronto Star that "The key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago."

It was also explicitly expressed in a 2005 GOP memo , which yearned for new attacks that would "validate" the President's war on terror and "restore his image as a leader of the American people."

This past weekend, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum suggested that a series of "unfortunate events," namely terrorist attacks, will occur within the next year and change American citizen's perception of the war.

Last month, the new chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party Dennis Milligan said that there needed to be more attacks on American soil for President Bush to regain popular approval.

"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001]," Milligan told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, "And the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country," he concluded.

Since it's now accepted that terror attacks boost both the domestic and geopolitical agenda of the Bush administration, how is it in their interest to prevent them?

We are forced to suffer Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff openly engaging in terrorist activity (defined as generating fear of another attack) by sharing with us his "gut feeling" that another big bang is coming this summer, while "Senior U.S. intelligence officials tell ABC News new intelligence suggests a small al Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be here."

Why should we expect anything other than the red carpet to be rolled out for Al-Qaeda, who are now working directly for the CIA in Iran to destabilize Ahmadinejad's government?

This point cannot be stressed strongly enough - while the White House is apparently meeting on Thursday in an urgent effort to counter Al-Qaeda's plans, they are bankrolling and arming an Al-Qaeda group formerly headed by the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which has been held responsible for a number of bombings in both Iran and Pakistan.

Chertoff is completely accurate when he says that Al-Qaeda are "rebuilding their activities" - but what he won't tell you is that they are doing so with the direct aid of the very highest echelons of the U.S. government!

Since the apparent flap over new terror is based primarily on Chertoff's "gut", we'd be loathe to forget the admission of his predecessor Tom Ridge , who revealed that the Bush administration routinely raised the color coded terror alert based on the flimsiest of evidence.

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer went further in May 2002, when he admitted that fake terror alerts were used to distract attention from mounting criticism that the Bush administration sat on intelligence warnings in the weeks before the September 11 attacks.

In January of 2003 FBI and CIA whistleblowers told Capitol Hill Blue that the White House was scripting phony terror alerts to maintain hysteria, upkeep President Bush's approval ratings and milk extra defense funding.

On May 27, 2004 John Ashcroft announced intelligence indicating that an Al Qaeda cell had been pinpointed as plotting to attack American landmarks in the summer. At least two of the terrorists named were already in jail. The 'cell' that these individuals are said to belong to didn't even exist. The Abu Hafs al Masri group was described by the Boston Globe as a 'phantom organization'. Their researchers could find no evidence that the group was real.

These are just a handful of examples proving the nexus of politics and terror and that such alerts are issued merely to prop up flagging support for the war while diverting from the latest scandal to embroil the White House.

Six months later and with the "surge" predictably having had no effect, Bush has seemingly returned to lowest common denominator propaganda by again linking the war in Iraq to 9/11.

“The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” Bush told a Cleveland town hall meeting yesterday.

So while the White House claim that Al Qaeda is driving the violence in Iraq and Al-Qaeda cells are gearing up to strike the U.S., they are actively supporting Al-Qaeda in an effort to topple Iran.

In all three instances, the U.S. government is using Al-Qaeda to further its agenda while praying for more dead Americans at home to reinvigorate popular support behind policies that are detested by the majority of the American people.