Britain wants FBI-style force

[dArKeR]

London - The British government, determined to crack down on drug trafficking, people smuggling and fraud, unveiled its blueprints on Monday for a new, FBI-style police force to tackle organised crime.

The elite Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca), staffed with 5 000 specialist officers, should be up and running by 2006, according to a strategy paper from Home Secretary David Blunkett.

Other measures would include, for the first time, plea bargaining for gangsters who turn against their bosses, and the admissibility in court of taped phone calls and intercepted e-mails.

"I am now convinced that every means at our disposal should be examined in order to get what is now a cross-boundary international scourge tackled," Blunkett said on BBC radio.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1505132,00.html

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To follow opposition citizens like Kerry?

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Lost In Translation
Edmonds says that the supervisor, in an effort to slow her down, went so far as to erase completed translations from her FBI computer after she'd left work for the day.


“The next day I would come to work, turn on my computer and the work would be gone. The translation would be gone,” she says. “Then I had to start all over again and retranslate the same document. And I went to my supervisor and he said, ‘Consider it a lesson and don't talk about it to anybody else and don't mention it.’”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/25/60minutes/main526954.shtml


FBI official charged with obstruction after concealing Ruby Ridge report
(Harp was in on this too and now he heads the anthrax cover-up.)
http://www.cnn.com/US/9610/22/ruby.ridge.final /


Busting the FBI
The Judi Bari verdict bares government lies and deceit
They found that six agents of the FBI and the Oakland police twisted a murder attempt against Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, two Earth First! activists working to reform logging practices
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/31/news-kuipers.php


Fighting an FBI frame-up
An Earth First! member relates how she and Darryl Cherney were framed by the FBI for a car bombing that nearly killed them. The frame-up was one of a long series of events in the FBI's campaign against the environmental movement. It has been four years since Darryl Cherney and I were nearly killed in a 1990 car-bomb assassination attempt, then arrested for possession of the bomb
http://www.wildrockies.org/cove/news/62194nw.html


Did The FBI Destroy Evidence?
The FBI and prosecutors ordered the destruction in 1999 of evidence from a bank robbery they once suspected linked Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to white supremacists who were threatening before McVeigh's bombing to attack the government, documents show.
The evidence included a surveillance videotape of a bank robbery by some of the supremacists that occurred in Ohio five months before the bombing. The FBI lab compared the tape to pictures of McVeigh, but concluded a match was "inconclusive," internal memos show.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/12/national/main540266.shtml



FBI Whistleblower Harassed
Special agent John Roberts says he was threatened, intimidated and humiliated for exposing what he said has become a pattern of misconduct at the highest levels of the FBI and that has gone unpunished.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/25/60minutes/main530750.shtml



FBI Meeting Called A Sham
A Justice Department investigation into a 1997 retirement dinner for former FBI Deputy Director Larry A. Potts said senior bureau executives used a sham conference at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Va., to justify using taxpayer funds for cross-country travel to Washington.
http://www.americansovereign.com/newsarchive/fbisham.htm



Phone records: Link from state official to FBI
Deputy AG reportedly sought federal aid to find missing Democrats
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dallas/politics/state/stories/...


The FBI is conducting an exhaustive review of each of its thousands of human intelligence sources to ensure the information they provide is accurate and that their relationships with FBI handlers are proper.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/28/national/main551346.shtml

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Earth Threatened, Wen Ho Lee Released
http://unquietmind.com/wenholee.html

Wen Ho Lee is Just one more example of FBI Misdirection. Many elements of the case are similar to Unabomber Charade. Together they are textbook examples of Government tactics on Black Ops.
http://www.unabombers.com/z23.htm

http://www.wenholee.org /

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FBI Agent, Turner, blew whistle on Ground Zero, 911, theft.
She says she immediately reported the problem to a federal prosecutor, then to her supervisor, and waited for him to act.
Two weeks later, after nothing apparently had been done, Turner seized the globe, bagged it as evidence and took it to Justice Department officials in Washington.
(She's being fired.)
http://www.msnbc.com/news/907004.asp?0cv=CB10

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Poll: 4 out of 10 Americans don't trust FBI
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-05-22-mcveigh-pollstory.htm

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With defense lawyers stepping up challenges to genetic evidence, the Justice Department inspector general is examining the FBI lab unit that analyzes DNA in hundreds of cases a year after a technician was caught failing to follow proper procedure.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/11/tech/main543575.shtml

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FBI says it withheld evidence from McVeigh lawyers
http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/05/10/mcveigh.evidence.02 /

Nichols: FBI Withheld On Purpose
A lawyer for Terry Nichols, who was convicted as Timothy McVeigh's assistant in the Oklahoma City bombing, claimed the FBI may have intentionally withheld documents from defense lawyers and misled federal prosecutors.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/05/14/national/main291113.shtml

FBI report on agents released after long delay

An internal FBI report kept under wraps for three years details dozens of cases of agents fired for egregious misconduct and crimes, including drug trafficking, attempted murder, theft, misuse of informants and consorting with prostitutes.

The report, released Wednesday by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, found that about one in 1,000 agents was dismissed for serious misconduct or criminal offenses by the FBI during the period examined, from 1986 to 1999. The average was between eight and nine per year.

Although the numbers were small, the FBI’s attempts to prevent the report’s disclosure from the public and Congress since its completion in June 2000 is raising questions among FBI critics about an attempt to avoid embarrassment.

Grassley, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a letter Wednesday to FBI Director Robert Mueller that he was concerned about “a lack of response to the findings and recommendations, a general lack of support for the project and even efforts to prevent its completion.”

Grassley said the report “almost never saw the light of day.” It was only provided to lawmakers in July 2003, months after it was requested, and was accompanied by a Justice Department letter urging that it be kept confidential.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4312671/

[Media_Lies_Daily]

1. I thought Scotland Yard was an FBI-like organization. No?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Primarily it's the police force for London

but it does have a couple of national responsibilities - anti-terrorism (though MI5 has the main responsibility for that now, I think), and politician/royal protection - a bit like the US Secret Service. http://www.met.police.uk/so/index.htm

[Pert_UK]

5. I might be wrong, but I think that.....

Scotland Yard (or actually New Scotland Yard) is the name of the building which is the home of the Metropolitan Police, who look after London. But, as you rightly point out, they do have specialist units that have a national role.

However, we do have the National Crime Squad:

"The establishment of the National Crime Squad in April 1998 represented a significant milestone in the 170-year history of British policing.

The new Squad came about directly because of a July 1995 report by the UK Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee on the threat of organised crime and its impact on the United Kingdom, which stated, inter alia:

“If the response to serious and organised crime is to be sharpened and made more effective, the present structure of separate Regional Crime Squads ... needs to be replaced by a more nationally co-ordinated structure.”...

The National Crime Squad targets criminal organisations committing serious and organised crime which transcends national and international boundaries, typically drug trafficking, immigration crime, illegal arms trafficking, money laundering, counterfeit currency, kidnap and extortion.

Currently approximately 75% of operations involve drug trafficking in whole or in part, but the criminals targeted by the Squad are entrepreneurs, who will traffic in whatever commodity they think presents the least risk and the greatest profit at any one point in time."

http://www.nationalcrimesquad.police.uk/04_About/main_opening_frame.html

So then......we're setting up ANOTHER new body, rather than tweaking this one, or what?

P.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Yes, you're right

(New) Scotland Yard is the building/address of the Met headquarters, but people sometimes use it as the organisation (like 10 Downing Street).

I'd forgotten about the National Crime Squad; The Guardian says this new body is absorbing it:
The government bill also sets out details of the recently announced Serious Organised Crime Agency, a crime-busting superforce combining the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the National Crime Squad, Serious Fraud Office and customs investigators, with specialist prosecutors and financial and technology experts.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,11026,1180751,00.html

Crime-Busting Superforce, eh? Does it include Batman?

And I bet Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) will get confused with Scene Of Crime Officer (SOCO). Well, they always use the acronym on TV, anyway.

[Pert_UK]

3. This is kind-of pointless, really...

There have already been a number of people on TV saying that this is just a gimmick, or publicity stunt.

There are already various teams within the Police force and military who are set up to deal with serious crimes and terrorism in a co-ordinated manner, both internally and internationally. Unlike the US, the UK police don't have to worry too much about regional differences in the law or crossing a border and losing their authority. In addition, the UK is so much smaller than the US that an FBI-style authority is an OTT reaction.

This is just Labour spin - yes, OK, re-organise some resources and refocus your efforts, but don't pretend that you're setting up the FBI because you're not, and anyway we don't need it as far as I can tell.

[BiggJawn]

4. What, they want their own "Keystone Kops"?

They can have ours. Hell, they don't do anything but harrass people with anti-Bush bumperstickers anyway...

[goforit]

7. He wants the one that Bush SR. has!!!

The one no one is suppose to know about!!!