On Roger-the-Dodger's Official Website

ROGER Pearce, the former editor of Freedom the anarchist newspaper, has degrees in Theology from Durham University and Law from London University.   He is also a barrister-at-law. Married with three adult children, he has homes in London and Miami and, until 2012, was European Security Director of a high profile global company.

The former Commander of Special Branch at New Scotland Yard, Roger Pearce was responsible for surveillance and undercover operations against terrorists and extremists, the close protection of government ministers and visiting VIPs, and other highly sensitive assignments.

He was also Director of Intelligence, charged with heading covert operations against serious and organised criminals.

After leaving the Yard he was appointed Counter-Terrorism Adviser to the Foreign Office, where he worked with government and intelligence experts worldwide in the campaign against Al Qaeda.

In Agent of the State, The Extremist, Javelin and future titles the author draws upon his knowledge and first hand experience of a career in national security at every level.

Roger's novels have been translated into Dutch under the titles Explosief and Extremist by Luitingh and Russian by Centrepolygraph.

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Home Secretary says she doesn't know how many Brits have returned to UK after fighting with ISIS!

 Manchester Bomber - Salman Abedi

IT seems quite extraordinary that when the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, was recently questioned about the Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, she admitted that the authorities didn’t know how many Britons had returned from fighting with ‘Islamic State’ or other extremist groups, and declined to say, how many times ‘exclusion orders’ had been used; “We have started to use them”, she said. Such an admission, is astonishing, from a government that claims that Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is ‘soft on terrorism’.

What many British people will find bewildering, is how a 22-year-old Manchester man of Libyan origin, who grew up in the Whalley Range area, could have carried out such a cowardly attack. After fleeing Libya, Abadi’s family, had been given political asylum in the UK. They were given housing, state benefits and their children were educated. Salman Abedi, had been a former student of Salford University.

Described as the “worse terror attack to hit northern England”, many of his victims who were injured in the bombing, were innocent young girls who had gone to the M.E.N. arena in Manchester to watch the American pop idol, Ariana Grande. Of the 22 people killed, his youngest victim, Saffie Roussos, was only eight-years-old. Another 120 people were injured, some, suffering serious life-threatening injuries.

Friends have described Salman Abedi, as:

“A young man quick to anger, who was involved in drink and drugs and supported Manchester United. A young man who found it difficult to fit in and cut a contradictory figure, who reacted violently to western sexual norms – once punching a woman for wearing a short skirt – and got into random fights.”

Investigators believe that Abedi, may have had help in making the explosive device, storing the materials, and buying the chemicals. People who knew Abedi, have claimed that they do not believe that he had the ‘acumen’ to “formulate the terrible plan he enacted on Monday,” (22^nd May 2017).

Yet, it is known, that teachers and religious figures in Manchester, who knew Salman Abedi, had raised concerns about his extremist views with the authorities on multiple occasions over several years using the ‘Terror Hotline’ and the ‘PREVENT’ strategy, introduced by the government. US intelligence sources also told NBC News, “that some members of his family had alerted officials and told them he was ‘dangerous’. It is also known that five years ago, students at Salford University, had called the terrorism hotline after claiming that Abedi had allegedly said “being a suicide bomber was OK’.

Before his arrest, Ramadan Abedi (a.k.a. Abu Ismail), the father of Abedi, who has been in Libya since 2011, protested his son’s innocence. He told the press: “We don’t believe in killing innocents. This is not us.” However, another son, Hashem Abadi, who was arrested in Tripoli while waiting to receive a transfer of cash from is brother Salman, is reported to have told Libyan anti-terror forces that he “Was aware of all the details of the terrorist attack,” and that he and Salman, were members of ‘Daesh’ (ISIS). Following the attack, ISIS claimed responsibility for the Manchester bombing.

Ramadan Abedi, fought with the ‘Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’ (LIFG) in Libya. The group was opposed to Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and sought to replace him with an Islamic state. It also proclaimed allegiance to Osama bin Laden. In 2004, LIFG, was classified as a terrorist organisation, when the U.S. sought to break-up ‘al-Qa'ida's’ network of sympathisers. On 28 May 2017, it was reported in the ‘Guardian’ newspaper, that “Abedi senior’s Facebook page shows that he supported the ‘Shura’ Council, a bitter enemy of ISIS in Libya’. The same article also claimed that earlier this year, Ramadan Abedi, had summoned Salman Abedi to Libya, because of concern about his son’s “erratic behaviour” and had confiscated his passport.

Given the reports about Abedi, and the ease with which, he shuttled back and forth between Manchester and Tripoli over many years, it is extremely surprising that the security services didn’t have him under closer scrutiny. He was known to the security services, but was “not one of the 3,000 people under active investigation’. Some reports have suggested that he was in Libya for the uprising in 2011 and “was injured in Ajdabiya in eastern Libya while fighting for an Islamic faction.” French intelligence sources have also claimed that Salman Abedi, was one of 3,500 Libyans who went to Syria to fight, an allegation that “has been played down by British intelligence.” Moreover, Abedi, had travelled back to England from Libya via Turkey and Düsseldorf, just four days before the attack.

In spite of his background, Ian Hopkins, the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police (GMP), told BBC Radio Manchester that the local authorities had been unaware Abedi’s ‘radicalisation’ and he was not known to the PREVENT anti-radicalisation programme. He was only known to GMP because of a conviction for theft, receiving stolen goods and minor assault in 2012.

Since the bombing in Manchester, people have rightly sought explanations for why Salman Abedi, carried out the attack at the M.E.N. Arena. His sister, Jomana, told the ‘Wall Street Journal’ that her brother had been angered by what was happening in Syria:

“I think he saw children – Muslim children – dying everywhere, and wanted revenge. He saw explosives America drops on children in Syria and he wanted revenge. Whether he got that is between him and God.”

If this was the motive that drove Salman Abedi to carry out his cowardly attack, then it seems to have been driven by a most twisted and perverted kind of ‘Jihadi’ logic. Few of us, cannot help but feel appalled at the suffering we have seen meted out to innocent children and Syrian civilians, by various factions fighting in the Syrian conflict. But it isn’t just American and English bombs that kill Muslim children! Russian bombs and the barrel bombs of the Syrian ‘Shia’ Muslim leader, Bashar al-Assad, also kill Muslim children. And how many of us, would feel, that the way to avenge the deaths of Muslim children, is by murdering other people’s children in the west?

‘Jihad's’, like Abedi, may well feel outrage at western intervention in Muslim countries, but turn a convenient blind eye, when ISIS bomb schools, mosques and markets in those very same countries. This week, an Islamic State car bomb targeted families eating ice cream, after breaking their Ramadan fast, in the Karrada district of Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding 32 more. This month, a bus carrying Egyptian ‘Coptic Christians’ was attacked leaving 29 dead and 20 more injured. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, declaring Christians in Egypt, “Our first target and favourite prey.” It is a fact, that ISIS regularly target civilians, including children, Shia shrines and Christian churches.

Many on the British left, are loathe to condemn the atrocities carried out by ISIS and their adherents, and to do so, runs the risk of one being accused of ‘Islamophobia’. Like the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the journalist John Pilger, they feel that it’s all the fault of western foreign policy and that if we didn’t involve ourselves in foreign wars, these things would be less likely to happen. No doubt, groups like ISIS have benefited from the campaigns waged by western governments to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and have taken advantage, of the chaos, brought about by the collapse of the State of Iraq. But this, ‘it’s all the fault of the west’ attitude, has seen some on the left, defending radical Islamist movements like ISIS, who decapitate apostates and unbelievers, enslave women, murder homosexuals and Jews, and are prepared to wipe out whole communities that will not submit to their ultra-fundamentalist and twisted interpretation of Islam. Notwithstanding, western foreign policy, it should be clear to most people who are not deluded, that groups like ISIS are ‘anti-western, anti-democratic, and anti-human rights’.

Professor Gareth Stansfield, professor of Middle East politics at Exeter University, believes that Abedi is typical of many second generation migrants drawn to Islamist groups -

“It’s the classic thing of being dispossessed, of having no roots. They see the perceived immorality of the west around them and these seeds are planted and become extremely toxic and poisonous.”

Since the bombing, thousands of people across Greater Manchester have attended vigils to remember the victims of this terror attack by the suicide bomber Salman Abedi. Far from spreading fear, hatred and division, as he intended, we have seen people of all communities and faiths in Greater Manchester coming together to show solidarity with everyone affected by the events in Manchester. A ‘JustGiving’ page set up to support the victims and their families, has so far surpassed £1.5 million. The “We Love Manchester Emergency Fund” has raised £6 million for people who have been injured or bereaved following the bombing. And this Sunday, Ariana Grande, is to perform a benefit concert for victims of the bombing at ‘Old Trafford cricket ground’. The ‘One Love Manchester’ concert includes Justin Bieber, Coldplay, Katey Perry and Miley Cyrus.

Joanne Cox: Political Class gets priorities right,

as a miner dies in relative obscurity

by Les May

EARLY last Friday morning, a miner called John Anderson was killed in an East Cleveland potash mine.  His death was relegated to page 13 of the 'i' newspaper and merited just a quarter of a page of newsprint.  Last Thursday an MP called Joanne Cox was killed in the street.  So far the same newspaper has devoted eleven pages to her death which today included the fact that £800,000 has been donated to a charitable fund set up by her friends.

For the families of both of these people their deaths are an ongoing tragedy.   But that is all that they have in common.  Mr Anderson's death has been reported to HM Mines Inspectorate and no doubt there will be an inquest.  That may merit a few lines in the national press or it may not.  Local Labour MP, Tom Blenkinsop, has spoken of his concerns following the death and intends to meet the mine owners ICL Ltd and the mine unions.  There is no reason to suppose that Mr Anderson's death was anything other than a tragic accident.  But history suggests that if that presumption were to prove to be wrong no one would appear in the dock charged with causing his death.  A man has already been charged with the murder of Joanne Cox.

There's a bandwagon rolling and lazy journalists are determined to scramble aboard before its too late.  A particularly inept sub-editor at the 'i' managed to confuse Joseph Priestley who in 1733 was born in Birstall where the murder happened, with author J. B. Priestley who was born in Bradford in 1894.  A day before in the same paper Joan Smith in an otherwise sensible article decided there was a bit of mileage in referring to 'an apparent normalisation of the most grotesque misogyny' and Andrew Grice took yet another opportunity to have a go at Jeremy Corbyn just as he did the day after.  It seems no one can resist the temptation to use this tragedy to further their own agenda.

But it's not just the media which have tried to use the killing to their advantage.  The organisation 'Unite Against Fascism' which sees a climate of 'racist discussion' on immigration having been 'stirred up' during the EU referendum campaigning.  Whilst the Tories, Lib Dems and UKIP all announced they would not contest the seat at the forthcoming by-election the Liberty GB prospective candidate, a former BNP member, announced his intention to stand by saying 'We cannot let Jo Cox's death be in vain'.  The North-east branch of 'National Action' took the opportunity to post on Twitter, '#JoCox would have filled Yorkshire with more subhumans'.  I usually think that invoking the word Nazi means you know you are losing the argument, but for this comment it seems entirely appropriate.

Eager not to be labelled as 'Stirrer up in Chief' Nigel Farage turned psychiatrist saying the killing was the act of 'one man with serious mental health issues'. This line will no doubt play well with those papers which have done so much to use immigration to stoke up resentment against the EU,  'It wasn't me gov it was him'.

Even the usually excellent Al Jazeera news channel managed to use it as an excuse to ask why the killing had not been labelled 'terrorism' when this epithet is so frequently attached to incidents involving Muslims.

Whatever this killing was it was not terrorism.  The whole idea of 'terrorism' is to terrorise the population at large by causing panic and uncertainty about whether you are going to be the next casualty.  Like the killing of Lee Rigby in 2013 Joanne Cox's killing was a carefully targeted attack.  Terrorists see the whole population of a country as a legitimate target.  The IRA Manchester bomb of 1996, the Twin Towers attack of 2001, the London Bombings of 2005, can all be accurately described as 'terrorism'.  By the same token the targeted killing of secular bloggers and academics in Bangladesh isn't terrorism either.

I find it distasteful that after her untimely death Joanne Cox is being given the 'Sleb' treatment by some sections of the media.   It's an old trick.  Lavish praise on what someone has done.  Associate yourself with similar views, which are of course the views of all 'right thinking people', and hey presto, a nice bit of self praise emerges.

Whatever Joanne Cox's qualities personally I'd like to see fewer MPs with a background of university, working for a charitable organisation, then the House of Commons, and more from John Anderson's background.

Whatever I think of Simon Danczuk's antics as an author and MP, he is surely right to draw attention to the fact that so many of his colleagues really do form a 'metropolitan elite'.  He could have added that they inhabit the same 'Westminster Village' as the journalists who write about them.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/18/thomas-mair-charged-with-of-mp-jo-cox  

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Priestley 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._Priestley

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lee_Rigby

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

 

Terror Law Too Widely Defined

BLOGGERS and journalists could fall foul of the British legal definition of terrorism if they publish stuff that the authorities see as a danger to public safety.  That is the view of David Anderson Q.C., the official reviewer of counter terrorism laws in this country.

Mr. Anderson said that the UK had some of the most extensive anti-terrorism laws in the western world, and this gave the police and prosecutors the powers to nail al-Qaida terrorists, right-wing extremists and dodgy Irish groups.  Anderson thinks that recently there has been a degree of 'creep' in the use of the laws on terrorism, and because they are so widely drawn up the laws include 'actions aimed at influencing governments':   Anderson said British laws treated politically motivated publication of material thought to endanger life or to create a serious risk to the health and safety of the public as being a terrorist act if it was done for the purpose of  'influencing the government'.

In other European countries and in the Commonwealth countries the level of proof was set much higher in that there had to be an 'intention to coerce or intimidate'.  According to the counter-terrorism watchdog:
'This means political journalists and bloggers are subject to the full range of ant-terrorism powers if they threaten to publish, prepare to publish something that the authorities think may be dangerous to life, public health or public safety.'

He warned that bloggers and journalists could be classed as terrorists even if they had no intention to spread fear or intimidate, and even those who employed or supported them would also qualify as terrorists.   This means a religous campaigner who publicised religous objections to a vaccination campaign could be caught foul of the law on grounds that they were a danger to public health.  Anderson claimed that on hate crimes the law could make a terrorist out of a pupil who threaten to shoot their teacher on a fascist website.  Though this is clearly criminal Mr. Anderson says, but only if they intended to harm their immediate victims, and no purpose would be served by branding such a person a terrorist. 

Anderson said Britain rightly had tough counter-terror laws that the public accepted so long as they were used only when necessary.  Yet, he added:
'But they can currently be applied to journalists and bloggers, to criminals who have no concern other than their immediate victim, and to those who are connected with terrorism' but only at remotely. 

And he insisted:
'This is not a criticism of ministers, prosecutors or police – who as a rule exercise either their remarkably broad discretions with care and restraint.  But it is time parliament reviewed the definition of terrorism to avoid the potential for abuse and to cement public support for special powers that are unfortunately likely to be needed for the foreseeable future.' 

Woolwich: Notions of 'Necessary Murder'

LAST week, the gruesome murder of the soldier Drummer Lee Rigby from Middleton in Greater Manchester took place on a street in Woolwich in South-East London, meanwhile Laurie Penny in the New Statesman pondered a question below that appeared on an exam paper for Eton boys: 
'(c)  The year is 2040.  There have been riots in the streets of London after Britain has run out of petrol because of an oil crisis in the Middle East.  Protestors have attacked public buildings.  Several policemen have died.  Consequently, the Government has deployed the army to curb protests.  After two days the protests have been stopped but twenty-five protestors have been killed by the Army.  You are the Prime Minister.  Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the army against violent protesters was the only option available to you and one which was necessary and moral.'

Commenting on the above question, Laurie Penny, in the current New Statesman, says: 
'The headmaster of Eton, responding to the furore on Twitter, claimed that this was an intellectual exercise, based on Machiavelli’s The Prince, and was taken out of context. It was nothing of the kind. In fact, questions like this - topics for debate designed to reward pupils for defending the morally indefensible in the name of maintaining "order" - crop up throughout the British elite education system, from prep schools to public schools like Eton to public speaking competitions right up to debating societies like the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, which are modelled on parliament for a reason.' 

Ms. Penny concludes her New Statesman article last week, thus:
'Eton trains rich young men for power. The all-boys school has produced nineteen Prime Ministers, including the current one. The Mayor of London and a significant chunk of the cabinet also attended the school. Nearly all of our most powerful politicians, in short, went to Eton, and were trained in its values. Values that include responding to a question about shooting protesters dead with clever rhetoric rather than a long, hard look at your own conscience, as well as reading Machiavelli as an instruction manual rather than a satire. Whoever set this exam question, one that obliges thirteen-year-old boys to defend the murder of protesters as Prime Minister, knew of the likelihood that one of those boys might well actually be Prime Minister one day, and be in the position to order protesters killed for real.'

The poet W.H. Auden, who didn't go to Eton but grew up in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford, before becoming a Communist Party fellow-traveller and writing a poem in 1937 entitled 'Spain' on the Spanish Civil War in which he invoked the notion of the 'necessary murder':
'To-morrow for young poets exploding like bombs,
the walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
       To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings.  But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
        To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.'

George Orwell, in his essay 'Inside the Whale' (1940), criticised this second stanza saying that it 'is intended as a sort of thumbnail sketch of a day in the life of a "good party man".'  As Orwell cruely put it:  'In the morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes' interlude to stifle "bourgeois" remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributiong leaflets.'   That's what happens when you get exam questions like the one above by folk who will never be around when the trigger is pulled, and as Orwell concludes:  'But notice the phrase "necessary murder"... [i]t could only have been written by a person to whom murder is at most a word.' 

The fact is that people doing things like attacking Mosques and chalking on war memorials, or even justifying murder is not new because politics is made up of people who believe in double-crossing each other.  This is demonstrated in the background to the current crime in Woolwich.  Evidently both of the men now accused of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, from Middleton in Greater Manchester, believed what they did was 'necessary', and perhaps even 'moral' in terms of their interpretaion of Islam.  Yet yesterday's Daily Telegraph reports: 
'Both of the men accused of hacking the soldier to death had been monitored by the security services for years, and one of them was allegedly approached with a view to acting as an informant.' 

The realm of Machiavelli and his concept of power politics, as expressed in his book The Prince, places us in a strange world indeed: with MI5 allegedly trying to seduce the murder suspect Michael Adebolajo, and asking him if he wanted to work for them about six months before the killing of Drummer Rigby.  That at least is the claim of a childhood friend Abu Nusaybah, who was arrested at the BBC shortly after giving an interview on Newsnight last Friday, and hasn't been denied by MI5.  Machiavelli is perhaps more relevant than Marx in contemporary politics, although I doubt that anyone will admit as much.