Thursday, June 15, 2006

What’s Suspicious About That ?

Three good signs of guilt: DNA evidence, fingerprints and a sympathetic editorial in the Guardian. Or to put it another way, it now turns out that when the Filth raided the home of the Forest Gate Kittens, they found £38 000 in cash. As Andrew says, clearly the proceeds of their lucrative careers as postal worker and shelf stacker respectively.

Of course, this is a second career for one of them. With an impressive nine convictions, including possession of an offensive weapon, it might be thought that having the police stop by might not be the traumatic experience for him that we were led to believe. More to the point, it turns out that an elder brother (yep, that one) previously resident at that address not only has convictions for offences involving a firearm, but the piece in question was never recovered.

To sum up then, the MSM told us that a perfectly ordinary Muslim family (lie) was raided by police who were armed for no reason at all (lie) but nothing suspicious was found (lie). Other than that, MSM reporting was bang on.

To use a favourite cliché of the MSM: what did they know and when did they know it ? When exactly did, say, the BBC learn that the family has links to Islamic extremists (and for the limited purposes of this argument, we’ll pretend the looney rantings of the suspects' sister weren’t something of a clue) ? When did they learn that one of the ‘innocent’ suspects had multiple convictions (for extra credit, they can also answer as to whether the suspect's long history with law enforcement strengthens or weakens his claim to be left traumatised by contact with the police) ? When did they learn that, far from being an overreaction based on bogus intelligence, the deployment of armed officers was at least in part a response to the address being known to have been used by a convicted armed robber with an unaccounted for firearm ? When did they realise that the search, which ‘found nothing suspicious’, had in fact uncovered large amounts of cash completely out of whack with the known earnings of the suspects ?

Folks, there’s only one answer: we need a public enquiry.

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