General Chat

I have just come back from an excellent afternoon at the theatre, only to receive a phone call from a friend of 65 years standing, to tell me that he has cancer. At the moment I don't really care what happens to these people.

Brilliant idea Newby!

Solution..
all UK citizens who chose to leave the UK and fight for IS have their citizenship revoked with NO return.
I have to ask ..those UK IS victims.. do you think that they give a flying fig about people who may die back here due to their actions?
Wonder if they have even given it a thought that maybe a member of their own family could become a fatality due to their actions

I understand the reasons given but I still feel uncomfortable regarding the process.

I do not know where the intelligence came from that helped to pinpoint with accuracy the location of those IS people. It could have been British, European, American or Middle-Eastern information - or even a traitor within IS for all I know.

I do know that I am pleased that I did not have to make a decision based on it without being able to check myself as, in the back of my mind, I would have been thinking of people with ulterior motives.

I'm afraid we will just have to agree to differ. We both have our own opinions so best to leave it at that.

magpie - you have completely misunderstood that the actions of a country at war are not the same as going after an individual and executing him.

I doubt that anybody in England has much sympathy for William Joyce. The case is a major precedent in the rights and obligations of the state v subjects.

My mother and a rellie who was one of the "few" found him very funny. She can still quote some of his stuff which she found an especial joke. Fwiw she worked as a nurse in Portsmouth looking after bombed civilians, downed airmen both RAF and Luftwaffe and later the second front. She thought then and still does that the just cause of the allies was not only the defense and survival of the country but rule by law.

Cameron is trampling all over it.

"how on earth can anyone go out to the middle east, arrest these people and bring them back for due process?"

Well you can, the Americans call it rendition and the Brits have co-operated with therm. It takes good intelligence, nerve and the right stuff. Osama bin Laden was lifted from a safe house next door to Pakistan Army HQ ... a spectacular example but don't imagine it cannot be done for smaller fish.

The demise of language teaching in schools and universities is not helping GCHQ at all. When you are working with intelligence in the Middle East even small errors in your Arabic or Farsi can have dour consequences.

I don't think a single tear was shed for William Joyce at the end of the war! particularly not by us who lost family members and parents in that conflict, and I can't quite see the point of bringing that up now particularly as the situation is completely different.
Self defence doesn't apply to a country?! Wow, well we certainly could be in trouble!!
presumably those battle of Britain pilots were breaking the law?! That's certainly a revelation!
I don't regard being a British Subject as a lifetime affliction, in fact I love this country, and am proud to be a lifetime citizen, warts and all. Better here than in a worse place!

The state did not bend the rules. Joyce obtained a UK passport and was thus bound by it. Read the application form - if you lie then that does not revoke yr rights and duties as a passport holder unless and until it is revoked. If you want to read a big hefty transcript of the House of Lords decision then go ahead but a long thread about Joyce irrelevant here. The Law Lords were and are probably better qualified to make judgements than anybody else.

In any case whether he lied or not it was established that a UK passport holder (a) is entitled to UK Govt protection including the right to fair trial and (b) the holder cannot on a whim void his obligations and take up arms against the crown.

Given the fallout of such cases as the Derry shootings by the British Army and dodgy dossiers one might imagine that by now the executive would be a bit more careful. Obviously not.

If justice and retribution was decided down the pub we would still have hang'em high and tooth for a tooth. We don't and what Joe and Edna down the Fox & Ferret think is neither here nor there. Same for the red top press.

William Joyce was born in NY to an Irish father and British mother who both renounced their citizenship of those countries before he was born. They all moved to Galway in 1909, and Britain in 1921. William fled to Germany before WW2. He thereafter falsely obtained a British to travel to US. So technically, he was not a British citizen. So how can the state bend the rules in his case, but not in the case of Britons in Syria who pose a clear and present danger?

William Joyce was the holder of a British passport and as such was a British subject. Accordingly he was entitled to the protection of the British government but was also bound to give allegiance to the crown. He failed in this duty and was brought to court for treason. The Crown fulfilled its duty of protection to him by giving a fair trial and leave to appeal all the way to the House of Lords. He was quite properly executed.

Much the same applies to the British jihadists executed by drone attacks. Like it or not as British subjects ( a lifetime affliction once acquired ) they had on ongoing duty of allegiance to the Crown. If the UK jihadists had been randomly killed that would have been that. They were not but targeted using undisclosed intelligence.

There is no defense in English law for the executive to execute British subjects without due process whatever the extenuating circumstances. For the executive to claim that it had evidence which it cannot disclose for security reasons is a nonsense especially as the American concept of "clear and present danger" is not recognised in British law.

"Self defence" only applies to individuals and even then is tightly applied. You may not chase a burglar down the street and brain him with a cricket bat for instance.

Turning to just the practical matters. The De'esh do not particularly trust those who have joined its ranks from Europe inc the UK. That they would put a couple of young Brits in charge of a terrorist act 3 000 miles away is stretching things quite a bit. In any case how would they have carried out the operation from a distance? The usual modus operandi is a suicide attack which cannot easily be linked back such as the recent De'esh attack in Tunisia.

An executive which feels it can execute its citizens anywhere in the world with impunity based on undisclosed evidence is an executive gone feral. All I can say is that it is consistent with UKGov refusal to comply with law and treaties on a great many other matters.

Air strikes have not got a hope in hell of dislodging De'esh / ISIL, Nurah and so on. They are now entrenched to such a degree that only "booots on the ground" will make any difference. The only armies likely to do such are Turkey which would like to snuff out the Kurdish Syrian enclave along its border and the Russians who would defend a rump Syria for the Alawites and Christians thus guarding their crucial warm water naval base.

What UKGov now does or does not do is irrelevant regarding both applied force and help to refugees as the available force and offered help are too pusillanimous.

magpie - just a matter of time, I suspect.

Not sure that IS possess Drones!!!!!

FHS, how on earth can anyone go out to the middle east, arrest these people and bring them back for due process?!! The idea is quite ridiculous! What more do these monsters have to do to convince us that the world would be a better place without them? For me democracy is like freedom of speech, yes we all embrace it, but not to the point that the N word and worse can be used with impunity. Insulting, homophobic, threatening or totally unacceptable language is quite rightly against the law, therefore freedom to say exactly as you please is not paramount. The same with democracy, of course we all embrace it but not to the point where when evil threatens us all world wide we are reduced to paralysed sitting ducks in the name of democracy unable to lift a finger to defend ourselves even if these monsters were beating on our doorsteps without the obligatory parliamentary shouting match, then a vote, by which time it could be just a tad to late!

Any reciprocal drone attacks expected to happen in the UK? Or is it just one-way traffic?

Oh I know Lyndi.......take a look at Gaza :-(

Not many are playing by the rules at the moment Supercrutch.

Some of you agree with me then.

When this news first came to light, my first thought was of another WMD scenario.

The legal clearance may be a bit murky, but on the other hand the men in question had rejected their British citizenship and embraced the Caliphate.