Spycops "unjustified"

WorldbyStorm

Jun 30

Perhaps the only surprise is that it's a surprise to learn that:

Undercover police operations to infiltrate leftwing groups in the 1970s and early 1980s were not justified and should have been rapidly closed down, a retired judge leading a public inquiry has concluded.

In a critical report published on Thursday, Sir John Mitting found that undercover police officers collected a "striking and extensive" amount of information about the personal lives of political activists, such as their holiday plans, sexuality and bank accounts.

Note the length of time since these acts occurred. The next phase will examine the period 1982 to now.

The much-delayed inquiry was set up in 2014 after a stream of revelations about the misconduct of the undercover officers. These included spying on the family of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and deceiving women into long-term sexual relationships.

Mitting said that least six undercover officers had sexual relationships with women during their covert deployments between 1968 and 1982. The former high court judge said he believed one of the women who had accused an officer of lying about the extent of their relationship.

Between 1968 and at least 2010, 139 undercover officers were sent on deployments – usually lasting four years – and spied on more than 1,000 mainly leftwing and progressive groups.

Those that we know of.

And of all this activity was any justified in terms of state security?

He said that the unit's infiltration of only three groups – (Provisional) Sinn Féin and two unidentified organisations – were justified on the grounds that they posed a threat to the safety of the state. "The great majority of deployments by the SDS in this period" were not justified, he said.

Just three groups from the perspective of the British state. Consider too the enormous waste of resources channelled into innocuous or irrelevant groups. On so many levels, that waste and how it might have impacted on other areas that weren't examined by the police, the intrusion into people's lives, the fake 'relationships' including sexual relationships, the records of people whose activities were entirely legitimate, this is a genuine scandal.