“Speaking on US network CNN’s State of the Union, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm Mike Mullen said: ‘This is obviously a political decision. On the same programme, influential Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Cardin questioned whether the move had been made to improve British-Libyan trade”.

There has indeed been a lot of anger from politicos etc in the USA about the release of this person on the grounds that he is expected to die within three months, and us British people have the notion of ‘compassionate release’ built into our justice system.

I trust, though, that there isn’t going to be any backlash from people in California:

“California lawmakers are to vote on a plan to release 27,000 prisoners early. The proposal is part of a solution to a $26bn dollar budget deficit and the problem of chronic prison overcrowding”.

Because that would be hypocritical of them – wouldn’t it?

“Britain is vulnerable to terrorist attack from the sea because no single body is responsible for protecting the UK’s coast, MPs have warned. Just nine Royal Navy ships along with a ‘motley collection’ of police and coastguard boats guard a shoreline more than 7,000 miles long”.

If there’s a point being made about having so few ships on patrol to guard 7000 miles of coast that we’re under serious threat, how many ships do they think are necessary?

And more to the point, what kind of sea-borne threat are they thinking of anyway? A bunch of terrorists turning up in a fishing trawler equipped with mortars, firing shells on to Brighton Beach?

Like most government / military responses to the supposed increased terrorist threat over the last 10 years, most of the scenarios they have come up with have been largely fanciful, whilst ignoring the basic scenarios of a bunch of loons climbing on to a train with a rucksack full of fertiliser.

And there’s the rub.

For all the bravado of the security services and the military, the simple sad fact is any terrorist attack is a simple matter – even for somebody to simply load up a bomb with petrol, sail up the Thames, & light a match outside the Houses of Parliament. Such a simple improvised device would almost certainly cause no damage to the building itself, but the publicity generated would be no less intense.

No plotting with others would be needed, the probability of spooks discovering the plan would be zero, and even the Thames River Police would be unlikely to see anything amiss until it was too late, let alone the Ark Royal.

So basically we have – in a time of a severe squeeze on public spending, resulting in thousands of public sector workers at risk of being made redundant, with a consequent shifted strain on to a different part of the public purse – the military wanting more shiny toys.

I wonder how many doctors, teachers, dole office workers, transport planners etc one more ship to jolly round the coast would cost?

Much has been written all over the blogosphere today about the outrage of this assault by a brutal policeman in the cause of ‘maintaining order’ causing the death of an innocent member of the public. Even had Ian Tomlinson been a protester throwing bricks at the police line, his death would have outrageous – we don’t have the death penalty in this country, not even for riot. But the fact that he had had nothing to do with the protests on the day and was simply going home after his day’s work compounds that outrage by orders of magnitude. Apart from anything else, would he have been assaulted by the policeman had he been dressed as a banker?

Nobody who believes in Civilised Society denies the need for police, and indeed nobody with any sense denies the police do a difficult job in difficult circumstances, in which mistakes will inevitably be made – and in many of those difficult circumstances, the police are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. And whatever one’s personal opinion might be of the Jean Charles de Menezes case and its outcome, it does remain the fact that it was a tragic accident caused by a failure of intelligence and poor training, rather than a wilful attempt to kill an individual.

As can be seen in this video, however, the assault on Tomlinson was wilful – he was behaving perfectly compliantly, walking along, not resisting, not rioting, not protesting. There was absolutely no need for the police officer in question to whack him with his riot stick or throw him to the ground. Obviously the police officer in question wasn’t to know – or reasonably predict – that his actions would result in Tomlinson’s death, but were anybody else to hit somebody with a stick and push them to the ground causing a fatal heart attack internal bleeding, a charge of manslaughter would almost certainly ensue. A failure to bring such a criminal charge against this police officer would be nothing short of a travesty of justice.

Ironically, this case also highlights another aspect of our increasing V-for-Vendetta society – strictly speaking, the people videoing and photographing this incident were in breach of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which since 16 February has made it a potentially criminal offence – with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison – for taking a picture of a police officer on active duty.

Never has there been such a clear example of how wrong – and damaging to a free democratic state – that law is. It deserves to be repealed immediately.

Apart from the fact that it doesn’t take Columbo to work out that it’s pretty likely that if a terrorist was going to be planning an attack in Birmingham, the Bullring is about as high profile a target as it gets, the casual reader might be especially alarmed at reading this, thinking twice about whether to nip down to Selfridges today for their Yo Sushi! lunch.

That is, if they hadn’t read a few lines further down the page:

“Abedin, aged 27, was arrested in November 2000 and jailed for 20 years after being convicted of doing an act with intent to cause an explosion”.

ie, the ‘revelation’ that the Bullring was on a list of terror targets is that the list was compiled – and the compiler convicted – when the target in question was just about to be demolished anyway, a full three years before the present building which most people would be fearing for was opened.

Here in the social media world, we tend to call that sloppy journalism.

What’s not mentioned in the BBC News article linked, but was described as what the proposal actually is on the Today programme this morning was that The Government^tm are going to ‘force’ social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to give them access to the friends lists of users. Not actually see what messages pass between them, just the lists of friends.

Needless to say, there has been an immediate outcry about how terrible this is, what a total disregard for our liberties, totalitarian state etc this is. You might expect me to be joining that outcry.

But woooaaaaaahhh there.

Erm, Facebook already allows any logged in user to see the list of friends of any user. As does Twitter. In fact, Twitter even lets anybody see what people are saying to each other – it’s the whole point of it!

So, much as I’d like to join in with the gubnint-kicking on this, I’m afraid there’s no story there.

Is this the same Pentagon in the same U.S. who said Saddam Hussein could launch a nuclear missile at Britain in 45 minutes?