Starting Points: UK

Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts

Jan 10, 2010

In Britain or France, my aging mother would have gotten better health care

By Sara Mansfield Taber
Sunday, January 10, 2010; B01

In the final months before her death in May, my mother kept her shoes on all day, even when napping. She had to -- at her assisted-living facility in Mitchellville, Md., three certified nursing assistants looked after 39 residents. My mom couldn't depend on one of them to have the time to put her shoes on when she needed to get out of bed. Only in the mornings and evenings, when one of her private aides was with her for about 30 minutes, did she have personalized care.

Disabled by heart disease, two hip replacements and depression, my mother was often groggy when I visited. She needed me to take her hand and pull her up so she could grab the bed rail and maneuver into a sitting position. Though she brightened when I told her stories about her grandchildren over lunch in the facility's dining room, her joy vanished as soon as we returned to her unit. A blank look on her face, she would lay back on her bed, prone and helpless.

Like many American women of my generation, I struggled to figure out how to best care for my aging mother. As the end neared, I compared notes with my friends Fiona and Juliette. Fiona lives in Canada, but her mother lives in their native England, while Juliette lives with her mother in their family home in France. How could we establish safe and comfortable environments for our ailing mothers? How could we find high-quality medical care within reach of their incomes, and our own? And how could we preserve their mental health and sense of well-being while limiting our stress?

My mother's plight made my stress considerable. Each month, Lois Taber paid $4,069 to reside in her assisted-living community, $1,400 for private aides and an average of $140 for medications. Just before she died at age 82, she liquidated assets from her 401(k) to pay for a $5,800 hearing aid. At $169.50 per ride, the retirement home's fee for transporting her to medical appointments was prohibitive. Other than Medicare, my mom had no government-subsidized elder-care services. Already, the lack of affordable in-home support had forced my parents to leave their beloved house in Chevy Chase, Md., to receive the basic care they needed.

Overseas, things are different -- that is, better. In England, which has a national health system similar in structure to our Veterans Affairs system, Fiona's mum, Pat Reid, suffers from disabling arthritis and diabetes, and cannot move without great pain. But a government-supplied home health aide visits Pat at breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. This costs the family 120 pounds a week (approximately $785 per month), a little more than half of what my mom paid for private aides. Lower-income patients receive this service free. The National Health Service provides general practitioners, nursing care, ambulance services, diabetic clinic visits, medications and hospitalizations for no charge. Doctors and nurses make home visits.

In addition, Pat's son Simon, who has no work at the moment and lives in his mother's converted garage, receives 50 pounds a week (about $325 per month) from the government to help him look after her. With this government support, Pat is able to stay in the home where she lived with her husband for more than 35 years. The cost of her care is well within her monthly income of 2,000 pounds.

In France, Juliette's maman, Madeleine Fournot, has Alzheimer's disease. She receives assistance via a national health reimbursement system similar to Medicare as well as through a special program for the elderly and disabled called l'Allocation Personalisée à l'Autonomie ("Personal Autonomy Allocation"). Since the government refunds 560 of every 1,200 euros Juliette spends on her mother's medical expenses, she is able to hire a caregiver who looks after her mother around the clock 3 1/2 days per week. This allows Madeleine to stay in her suburban Paris home, where her family has lived for three generations, and provides Juliette a regular respite from elder care.

Madeleine receives one free doctor's visit per month, and the doctor makes house calls when needed. Four days a week, a physical therapist visits her, charging a one euro co-pay per visit -- less than the cost of a cup of coffee on the Champs-Élysées. Because Madeleine is on blood thinners, a hematology technician comes each week to check her blood levels. If she is in bed when he arrives, she can stay snug under her covers while he takes the sample. All medications related to Madeleine's Alzheimer's are free, as is transportation to her neurologist in Paris. Her doctor simply fills out a form stating that she cannot stand without assistance, and she is reimbursed for the 30-minute taxi ride into the city.

Other services available to Madeleine include daily medication-administration house calls by a trained nurse, daily meal service (a three-course lunch and soup for dinner) and a specially designed activity program for Alzheimer's patients. The total monthly cost of Madeleine's care is 1,500 Euros, or $2,205.

I am struck by all that Fiona's mum and Juliette's maman can take for granted. They enjoy access to services far beyond free and full medical and prescription drug coverage. In England, my mother's $5,800 hearing aid would have been free. While Mum and Maman get house calls from their doctors and cash compensation for family members who care for them, I often had to take time off from work -- an expensive proposition for a self-employed psychologist and writer -- to help Mom. Taking her back and forth to her medical appointments ate up entire days and, with her disabilities, she could barely get in and out of my car. This was hard work, not quality time with an aging parent.

Mom, Mum and Maman were not very different people. All three married civil servants, led middle-class lives and retired on government pensions. Pat and her husband, a BBC editor and translator who escaped five Italian prison camps during World War II, sought to create a peaceful life for their children. After her husband died, Pat took a job on the local council for village planning. Madeleine spent most of her middle years in Afghanistan, where her husband was posted with the United Nations. My mother worked in orphanages and schools in Asia, Europe and the United States as she followed my father, a CIA officer, across three continents. All three women eventually became widows and developed significant medical problems. Illness and enfeeblement limited their lives, and they came to require help with their daily activities.

There, the similarity ends. As seniors, each woman's quality of life was shaped by her government's health-care policies. The services offered to older people in Britain and France seem, to this American observer, straightforward, logical and humane. These countries provide the basic help their elders need to remain in their homes and in their communities, close to family and friends. It upsets me to think how much more peacefully my mother's life might have ended had she had the support available to older people in Britain and France. Why should Mum and Maman be able to grow old at home, but not Mom?

Many Americans protest that Europeans pay high taxes for medical care. It is true that people in other countries pay more in taxes, but, between out-of-pocket expenses and private health insurance premiums, many Americans spend much of their tax savings staying alive. Of course, high-quality health care costs money. Treating Mom like Mum and Maman is expensive. But Pat and Madeleine both have much lower living and medical expenses than my mother had, and, unlike Americans, they never had to pay for health insurance in their prime.

If our taxes were somewhat higher but we received dependable services that enabled us to spend less out of pocket on doctors' visits, medications and nursing care -- services that helped us remain independent, at home, and that relieved our families of financial and emotional burdens -- wouldn't peace of mind outweigh the additional cost?

My mother, a physical therapist and teacher with a blow of cumulus hair, was a hard-working person whose motto was: "If, at the end of the day, I can say I've helped someone's life to be better, then I've had a good day." It would have been nice if, at the end of her days, she could have taken her shoes off.

Sara Mansfield Taber, a psychologist and writer, is the author of "Bread of Three Rivers: The Story of a French Loaf."

Jan 7, 2010

Britain's Labor Party shaken by challenge to Gordon Brown

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By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 7, 2010; A10

LONDON -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Wednesday sought to fend off a surprise challenge to his leadership from within his own ranks, a blow to him and his ruling Labor Party just months before general elections.

The revolt marked Brown's toughest challenge since the summer, when a flurry of senior cabinet officials abandoned him and rumors swirled that he would be forced to step aside. The man viewed as Washington's closest ally in Europe survived that confrontation, and Brown supporters took heart in signs that the call for a vote on his leadership by two senior Labor lawmakers appeared to be gaining only limited traction.

Labor officials dismissed any notion of an internal vote, saying there was no legal precedent to change the party's leader so close to general elections, which must be held by early June. Most leading members of Brown's cabinet lined up behind him, though some waited until evening before issuing statements of support.

Even if Brown quells the rebellion -- most analysts here think he will -- the public display of discord could further damage Labor's chances in upcoming elections against Britain's recast Conservative Party, now tantalizingly close to ending Labor's 13-year-old rule.

"Labor is turning the gun on itself with this," said Jonathan Tonge, head of politics at the University of Liverpool. "Instead of talking about how they're going to beat the Conservatives, they're showing deep divisions just as there were some seeds of hope that they might be getting back into the race."

At stake is the future of a man who took office from Tony Blair in 2007 through an internal party process -- as opposed to a general election -- that left many rivals and Blair loyalists bitter. Brown has had a stormy tenure. In recent weeks, however, his administration has appeared to win at least a measure of new public support after slapping fresh taxes on bankers' bonuses. Now, analysts said, Brown's ability to manage rising public opposition to the war in Afghanistan and cope with a deep recession and runaway budget as a result of the financial crisis may be diminished.

Two of Blair's former senior ministers launched the revolt. Geoff Hoon, Britain's defense minister in the buildup to the Iraq war, and Patricia Hewitt, a former health secretary, sent a letter to fellow Labor lawmakers calling for a secret ballot on Brown.

"We're very concerned that we're simply not getting our message across," Hoon said in an interview with the BBC. "Going into a general-election campaign, there are continuing questions [about Brown's] leadership."

One of Brown's closest allies, Children's Secretary Ed Balls, said the cabinet was "fully behind" Brown. Some Brown loyalists decried the maneuver as vindictive grandstanding by two lawmakers whose careers are on the downswing, with one of them set to step down in the coming months.

British political parties have turned on their own before. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was pushed from power not by British voters but by her own Conservative Party about two years before she was set to face elections. But analysts said there has never been an internal revolt like this in modern British politics so close to an election.

If Brown is forced out, the Labor Party will grapple for a leader with almost no time to spare. Possible contenders include Foreign Secretary David Miliband; his brother, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband; House of Commons Leader Harriet Harman; and Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

The Conservative Party expressed delight at Labor's public division, with its chairman, Eric Pickles, telling the BBC: "It's irresponsible to have such a dysfunctional, faction-ridden Labor Party running the country."

Dec 11, 2009

Last Chance for Justice in Malaysia

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By JON GORVETT

On the anniversary of the 1948 killing of 24 unarmed workers by British troops on a rubber plantation north of Kuala Lumpur, the victims’ families are once again calling for a full inquiry and compensation.

“We are calling for justice to finally be done,” said Quek Ngee Meng, a lawyer and coordinator of the Batang Kali Massacre Action Committee, a group representing the families. “It is very urgent that justice be done, too, as the survivors are getting old and frail. We are not looking for criminal prosecutions, either, as the survivors can forgive, although they cannot forget.”

The shootings on Dec. 12, 1948, at a settlement of plantation workers by the Batang Kali River, took place during the early days of the conflict known as the Malayan Emergency, when British and Commonwealth troops, along with their Malay allies, fought guerrillas from the Communist Party of Malaya.

The incident was at first praised by the British colonial authorities as a major military victory, with the plantation workers described as terrorists. British troops had been engaged in a weeklong operation in the area after receiving reports of Communist guerrilla activity there. The workers, like many of the Communist guerrillas, were ethnic Chinese, a community widely suspected of Communist sympathies by many in the security forces.

Even at the time, though, the account of a “victory” failed to ring true for many.

“I remember it very clearly when the report first came through that day at brigade intelligence,” said Anthony Short, who was a young soldier serving in Malaya at the time.

“I thought, ‘Christ, this is extraordinary.’ There was no report of prisoners taken or wounded, and no exchange of fire,” said Mr. Short, who later taught history at the University of Malaysia and was commissioned by the post-colonial government to write the official record of the Emergency (“The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948-1960”).

A few weeks after the shootings, a brief inquiry was conducted under the supervision of the colonial attorney general, Sir Stafford Foster Sutton. It found that all the workers who were killed had been unarmed. Most were shot in the back. But it concluded that they had been shot while trying to escape.

Tham Yong remembers it differently, though. Now 78, she is one of the few surviving witnesses to what happened that day at Batang Kali.

“When the soldiers came that day,” she recalled in a recent interview at her home in Ulu Yam Bahru, “they were much more aggressive than we were used to, much more angry.”

When those soldiers left the village the following day, 24 of Tham Yong’s neighbors, family and friends — including her fiancé — lay dead. “I am still angry,” Ms. Tham Yong said. “Why shouldn’t I be? They killed these people. They killed them, and nothing was done.”

The men were separated from the women and children, and both groups were locked into different sides of a partitioned kongsi, or hut, for the night.

“The next day, the soldiers told the women to pack all their belongings and leave, because they were going to torch the village,” she said “They took us and placed us on a truck. Then I saw the men being led down from the other side of the kongsi and divided into three or four groups. The soldiers led them out toward the trees of the rubber plantation. Then I heard the gunshots from five different places. We knew they had all been killed.”

The revelations of U.S. military killings of unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968 revived interest in Britain in similar episodes in their own earlier counterinsurgency campaign in Southeast Asia.

In 1970, Britain’s Scotland Yard opened another inquiry, after several of the soldiers who had been there that day — all members of the elite Scots Guards regiment — signed sworn testimonies that they had indeed killed unarmed villagers.

Their statements were printed in a now-defunct British tabloid, The People. “Once we started firing we seemed to go mad,” the People article quoted William Cootes, one of the soldiers, as saying in his testimony. “I remember the water turning red with their blood.”

Yet the commander of the patrol, Charles Douglas, a sergeant at the time, continued to deny that a massacre had taken place.

The 1970 inquiry ended, however, when the newly elected Conservative government said there was insufficient evidence to warrant further proceedings. A plan to send investigators to interview Malaysian witnesses was canceled.

Then, in 1992, a BBC TV documentary titled “In Cold Blood” re-examined the case, prompting the Malaysian authorities to open their own investigation.

This time, the Malaysian witnesses were interviewed, but the inquiry was also dropped before Malaysian detectives could travel to Britain to interview the surviving soldiers. The Malaysian attorney general’s office said that insufficient evidence had been found to charge anyone, and in 1997 the case was closed.

“What we want to do now is put the two halves of the puzzle together,” said Mr. Quek, the lawyer. “Half the inquiry has already been done in the U.K., and half in Malaysia.”

His group is petitioning the Malaysian authorities to release their files to Scotland Yard, and vice versa, creating sufficient evidence to warrant a new inquiry.

Rosalind Britton-Elliott, a spokeswoman for the British Ministry of Defense, said in an interview this month that the ministry stood by a statement it made to the families’ lawyers last August. The statement said that while the ministry recognized the seriousness of the allegations made by the Batang Kali Action Committee, “Very little documentary evidence survives and previous investigations identified concerns about the reliability of this evidence.”

The ministry statement said there were no plans to hold an inquiry, but it also noted that a final decision on whether any further action would be taken on the case had yet to be made. No date has been set for that decision, although lawyers for the victims’ families are planning to open legal proceedings in Britain, if the decision is not to their liking.

“There is no doubt in my mind that it was a massacre,” said Mr. Short. “It is also a disgrace that nothing has been done all these years.”

A frail Ms. Tham Yong — now using a wheelchair after a recent fall — agrees.

“I have been through a very difficult life,” she said. “We were not Communists. We didn’t even know what one was. All these people were killed, but we have never even had an apology.”

Oct 25, 2009

Britons Weary of Surveillance in Minor Cases - NYTimes.com

Image by orbz via Flickr

By SARAH LYALL

POOLE, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.

A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore.

But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).

It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules. Her daughter was admitted to the school. But she has not let the matter rest. Her case, now scheduled to be heard by a regulatory tribunal, has become emblematic of the struggle between personal privacy and the ever more powerful state here.

The Poole Borough Council, which governs the area of Dorset where Ms. Paton lives with her partner and their children, says it has done nothing wrong.

In a way, that is true: under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.

But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.

“Does our privacy mean anything?” Ms. Paton said in an interview. “I haven’t had a drink for 20 years, but there is nothing that has brought me closer to drinking than this case.”

The law in question is known as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA, and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies — including the Ambulance Service and the Charity Commission — powers once held by only a handful of law enforcement and security service organizations.

Under the law, the localities and agencies can film people with hidden cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and Web site visits and enlist undercover “agents” to pose, for example, as teenagers who want to buy alcohol.

In a report this summer, Sir Christopher Rose, the chief surveillance commissioner, said that local governments conducted nearly 5,000 “directed surveillance missions” in the year ending in March and that other public authorities carried out roughly the same amount.

Local officials say that using covert surveillance is justified. The Poole Borough Council, for example, used it to detect and prosecute illegal fishing in Poole Harbor.

“RIPA is an essential tool for local authority enforcement which we make limited use of in cases where it is proportionate and there are no other means of gathering evidence,” Tim Martin, who is in charge of legal and democratic services for Poole, which is southwest of London, said in a statement.

The fuss over the law comes against a backdrop of widespread public worry about an increasingly intrusive state and the growing circulation of personal details in vast databases compiled by the government and private companies.

“Successive U.K. governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world,” the House of Lords Constitution Committee said in a recent report. It continued: “The development of electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information have become pervasive, routine and almost taken for granted.”

The Lords report pointed out that the government enacted the law in the first place to provide a framework for a series of scattershot rules on surveillance. The goal was also to make such regulations compatible with privacy rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights.

RIPA is a complicated law that also regulates wiretapping and intrusive surveillance carried out by the security services. But faced with rumbles of public discontent about local governments’ behavior, the Home Office announced in the spring that it would review the legislation to make it clearer what localities should be allowed to do.

“The government has absolutely no interest in spying on law-abiding people going about their everyday lives,” Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, said.

One of the biggest criticisms of the law is that the targets of surveillance are usually unaware that they have been spied on.

Indeed, Ms. Paton learned what had happened only later, when officials summoned her to discuss her daughter’s school application. To her shock, they produced the covert surveillance report and the family’s telephone billing records.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re within their rights to scrutinize all applications, but the way they went about it was totally unwarranted,” Ms. Paton said. “If they’d wanted any information, they could have come and asked.”

She would have explained that her case was complicated. The family was moving from their old house within the school district to a new one just outside it. But they met the residency requirements because they were still living at the old address when school applications closed.

At the meeting, Ms. Paton and her partner, Tim Joyce, pointed out that the surveillance evidence was irrelevant because the surveillance had been carried out after the deadline had passed.

“They promptly ushered us out of the room,” she said. “As I stood outside the door, they said, ‘You go and tell your friends that these are the powers we have.’ ”

Soon afterward, their daughter was admitted to the school. Ms. Paton began pressing local officials on their surveillance tactics.

“I said, ‘I want to come in and talk to you,’ ” she said. “ ‘How many people were in the car? Were they men or women? Did they take any photos? Does this mean I have a criminal record?’ ”

No one would answer her questions, Ms. Paton said.

Mr. Martin said he could not comment on her case because it was under review. But Ms. Paton said the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners, which monitors use of the law, found that the Poole council had acted properly. “They said my privacy wasn’t intruded on because the surveillance was covert,” she said.

The case is now before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which looks into complaints about RIPA. It usually meets in secret but has agreed, Ms. Paton said, to have an open hearing at the beginning of November.

The whole process is so shrouded in mystery that few people ever take it this far. “Because no one knows you have a right to know you’re under surveillance,” Ms. Paton said, “nobody ever makes a complaint.”

Oct 8, 2009

We need to be certain sacrifice of lives in Afghanistan is justified - Times Online

Image by tanakawho via Flickr

There could be few bleaker visions posing the question “Is it worth it?” than those of the shattered, maimed and broken young soldiers rushed on stretchers into the operating theatre of the British-run hospital in Camp Bastion, Helmand.

What imagined nirvana of good Afghan governance would justify the loss of his legs to the double amputee? However may “development and stability” explain to the young soldier his missing lower face?

And what of the wives, mothers or children of the three dead British soldiers carried into “Rose Cottage”, the hospital mortuary, on Thursday? What possible outcome in such a faraway land could mollify their loss and leave them less grief stricken?

None, of course, for all are casualties of war in their own different ways and casualties of war, like victims of crime, seldom get to sit on the jury in deciding a war’s worth.

Yet the question “Is it worth it?” should haunt the rest of us over the coming week more so than usual because of two events. First, it is a near-inevitability that within this time the 200th death of a British soldier in Afghanistan will occur.

There is a certain rounded resonance to the figure of 200 dead soldiers: a suggestion of milestone or even meaning. You can almost imagine the graves in the mind’s eye — ten rows of twenty.

Predictably, the 200th death will provoke a transient flare of interest, followed by various assertions by soldiers, true enough, that their morale in Helmand is strong, that 200 is just a number, and that they are motivated by abstract concepts such as a sense of craic, professionalism and espirit de corps that will keep them fighting on in the face of increasing casualties and the absence of any notable improvement in Afghanistan for some time to come.

Their voices should be heard. It should also be noted, though, that British soldiers are getting killed and wounded in greater numbers in Helmand than ever before.

Forty-seven have been killed during the past four months of 19 Brigade’s tour — a higher count than that of any previous brigade during the standard six-month deployments. Forty-one of these soldiers have been killed by roadside bombs, which suggests that the Taleban, utilising cheap explosive and circuit materials to deadly effect, are fighting their war in a more cost-effective fashion than the coalition with its mass expenditure.

We should not necessarily be prepared to have our soldiers lose their lives in such numbers indefinitely, even should they be prepared to do so, without asking two more questions. Is the fight necessary? Has it a reasonable chance of advantageous conclusion?

Critics of the war suggest any number of countries that pose terrorist threats to Western interests, some greater than that posed by Afghanistan. Alternatively, the war’s supporters offer a doomsday scenario in which a failure of the coalition mission results in a new round of civil war and the re-establishment of large-scale terrorist training facilities in the Pashtun south, which will disseminate an al-Qaeda-based ideology and skills at a rate far beyond the capabilities of localised radical cells already in Europe.

Assuming that you accept this latter argument and can stomach the level of British soldiers’ deaths, then you will likely see any chance of an advantageous conclusion stand or fall in the second key event of the week: the presidential election of August 20.

There is little of the brave hope that accompanied Afghanistan’s last presidential election. Already the run-up to this one has been dogged by widespread allegations of fraud. Outside the main urban areas in the south there is a chance that Taleban intimidation will deter huge numbers of Pashtun voters from visiting polling stations at all.

There are fears that a second-round run-off could provoke a new cycle of nationwide ethnic violence. And even should President Karzai win a second term of office alongside his warlord running-mates the future will look far from secure.

Personally, I could just about stomach seeing those wounded soldiers on Thursday by holding on to the fraught hope that even a modest form of stability and peace may yet unfold as a result of their efforts in Afghanistan.

But if, eight years on from the first deployment of British troops here, the presidential election tangles the country into an even greater level of insecurity then I am almost sure that I could no longer believe that the price is worth it or success achievable.

Sep 22, 2009

Officials to Close Calais Camp of Migrants Headed to Britain - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By NADIM AUDI and CAROLINE BROTHERS

CALAIS, France — French officials this week will shut down a camp on the northern French coast where hundreds of Afghans, Pakistanis and other illegal migrants have gathered for years in the hope of making clandestine journeys across the English Channel.

The camp, labeled “the jungle” by migrants and this city’s residents alike for its location among the thorn bushes and sand dunes of Calais, has been a source of tension since late 2002, when migrants started to camp out around the port after the closing of a Red Cross center in nearby Sangatte.

The move to eliminate the tents and ramshackle housing around the port is designed to halt migrants without papers from getting into Britain, and to crack down on the smuggling networks that assist them.

“Smugglers will not lay down the law,” France’s immigration minister, Eric Besson, said last Wednesday, adding that the camp would be closed by the end of this week. He first announced the plan in April, responding to complaints from local businesses.

The closing of the camp, which may begin as early as Tuesday, is taking place as European countries increasingly use force to crack down on unwanted migrants. On July 12, Greece eliminated a makeshift camp in the port city of Patras; in May, Italy struck a controversial accord with Libya allowing it to turn back migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean. The European Union estimates that 500,000 people cross its borders without papers each year.

In an interview on Monday, Pierre Bousquet, the prefect for the Pas-de-Calais region, who is directing the operation to shut the camp, said a riot police contingent that rotates permanently through Calais had been reinforced, giving him some 500 officers to ensure that the clearance operation went smoothly.

“I hope to end this situation in a dignified and honorable manner,” he said.

The number of migrants in the camp swelled to around 1,400 in August, according to Vincent Lenoir at Salam, an aid group whose volunteers have operated a soup kitchen for the migrants over the past seven years. But the number of migrants has dropped to under 300 currently, Mr. Bousquet said, in part because officials have swept some of the areas where they gather.

Frustrated at the difficulties of getting to Britain — attractive because of its large communities of Africans and South Asians and its underground economy — more migrants are now trying to reach Scandinavia, according to asylum data from the United Nations refugee agency and national ministries.

On Monday, migrants in Calais said that they were aware of the imminent police crackdown but that they were unsure what they should do. Many said that they had fled strife in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Pakistan and Iran, and that they had nowhere else to turn.

Mohammed Bashir, 24, a teacher from Logar Province in Afghanistan, said he had been at the camp for a month. “Let the police come,” he said. “Where are we going to run away? There is nowhere to go.”

Moustafa Tcharminian, a 38-year-old from Tehran, moved from the camp to under a bridge recently. He said that closing the camp would have an impact on the migrants now in Calais because they would be put in detention or deported. But he insisted that it would have little impact on the smugglers. “The smugglers are in love with money,” he said. “They will keep sending people and lying to them, telling them to go.”

Asked whether the closing of the Calais camp would send migrants elsewhere in Europe, Mr. Bousquet, the official, conceded that the issue of how to deal with the migrants was a broader problem. “I am at the end of the chain,” he said.

Interviews with residents of Calais, which has seen migrants flock to the region since Poles came to work the mines in the 1920s, indicated that few believed that a police action would put an end to clandestine arrivals in the port, from which England is visible across the water, about 20 miles away.

“They’re only taking the problem somewhere else,” said Fabrice Lecoustre, 52, a cafe owner in the center of the city. “Where are they going to go now? Downtown? At least in Sangatte they had showers and toilets.”

Nadim Audi reported from Calais, and Caroline Brothers from Paris.

Sep 21, 2009

Deception Over Lockerbie? - The New York Review of Books

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By Malise Ruthven

In his new book Terrorism: How to Respond,^[*] Richard English, a historian who has written the definitive history of the IRA, argues that terrorism is best understood as a "subspecies of war" that embodies—among other things—"the exerting and implementing of power, and the attempted redressing of power relations."

The furor over the Scottish government's decision to release Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, and the speculations surrounding the whole affair prove his point. The festive welcome Megrahi received from President Muammar Qaddafi himself on arrival in Libya was met with predictable fury on both sides of the Atlantic. The explosion aboard Pan Am Flight 103 on December 21, 1988, which caused the Boeing 747 to disintegrate in flames over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, was the worst terrorist atrocity ever to have been perpetrated on British soil. Two hundred and seventy people died, including eleven Lockerbie residents. The majority of the victims, 189 of them, were US citizens returning for the Christmas holidays.

President Obama's spokesman, Robert Gibbs, described the jubilant crowds that greeted the frail figure of the returning Libyan intelligence agent as "outrageous and disgusting." Robert Mueller, director of the FBI—who as assistant attorney general had been involved in the investigation that led to Megrahi's indictment and conviction by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands—took the unusual step of releasing the text of a letter he had sent to the Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, in which he complained that MacAskill's action, "blithely defended on the grounds of 'compassion,'" would give "comfort to terrorists around the world."

The devolved Scottish government —under the Scottish National Party (SNP), which has announced its intention to hold a referendum on full independence—has robustly denied claims that business interests or pressures from the UK government had any part in its decision to release Megrahi. Its position was supported—after a lengthy and deafening silence—by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whom the opposition has accused of "double-dealing" over the Lockerbie affair:

I made it clear that for us there was never a linkage between any other issue and the Scottish government's own decision about Megrahi's future.... On our part there was no conspiracy, no cover-up, no double-dealing, no deal on oil, no attempt to instruct Scottish ministers, no private assurances by me to Colonel Qaddafi. We were absolutely clear throughout with Libya and everyone else that this was a decision for the Scottish government.

In an effort to support their position, the UK and Scottish governments released a pile of documents, including previously leaked correspondence between MacAskill and Jack Straw, his counterpart in London. The British justice secretary explained that in his dealings with the Libyan authorities he had been unable to persuade them to exclude Megrahi from a prisoner transfer agreement between Britain and Libya under which prisoners would serve their sentences in their respective countries. The documents also reveal that when the Libyan minister for Europe told his British counterpart that Megrahi's death in a Scottish prison would have "catastrophic effects" on UK–Libyan relations, he was told that "neither the Prime Minister nor the Foreign Secretary would want Mr. Megrahi to pass away in prison but the decision on transfer lies in the hands of Scottish ministers."

In fact the medical prognosis giving Megrahi less than three months to live provided both governments with a loophole in their dealings with Libya. Scottish prison service guidelines state that compassionate release "may be considered where a prisoner is suffering from a terminal illness and death is likely to occur soon," with a life expectancy of around three months an "appropriate time" to consider release. Doctors had earlier concluded that Megrahi might have a year or more to live, rendering him ineligible for release in time for the celebrations marking the fortieth anniversary of the coup on September 1, 1969, that overthrew the Libyan monarchy and brought Qaddafi, a twenty-seven-year-old army captain, to power.

The three doctors—two British and one Libyan—who produced a revised prognosis in July were paid by the Libyan government. One of them, the British oncologist Professor Karol Sikora, medical director of CancerPartners UK, a private health care organization, admitted that the period of three months had been suggested by the Libyans. After examining Megrahi in prison and looking at the clinical details "in much greater depth" than previous doctors, Sikora concluded that Megrahi's tumor "was behaving in a very aggressive way, unlike [tumors afflicting] most people with prostate cancer" and that "the three-month deadline seemed about right." The Libyan doctor concurred. The third doctor would only say that Megrahi "had a short time to live." After it became clear that Megrahi could not be excluded from the prisoner transfer agreement, it seems the Scottish and British governments actively encouraged him and his legal team to seek a release on compassionate grounds.

At stake, for the British, were contracts for oil and gas exploration worth up to £15 billion ($24 billion) for British Petroleum (BP), announced in May 2007, as well as plans to open a London office of the Libyan Investment Authority, a sovereign fund with £83 billion ($136 billion) to invest. Libya refused to ratify the contracts until Straw abandoned his insistence on excluding Megrahi from the prisoner transfer agreement. Shortly after Brown's statement, Straw admitted—in apparent contradiction to his prime minister—that oil had been "a very big part" of his negotiations. British leaders were also warned that trade deals worth billions could be canceled. "The wider negotiations with the Libyans are reaching a critical stage," Straw wrote to MacAskill in December 2007, "and in view of the overwhelming interests for the United Kingdom I have agreed that in this instance the PTA [prisoner transfer agreement] should be in the standard form and not mention any individual." Within six weeks of the British government's concession, Libya had ratified the BP deal. The prisoner transfer agreement was finalized in May of this year, leading to Libya formally applying for Megrahi to be transferred to its custody.

For the SNP government in Edinburgh, the "compassion loophole" made it possible to avoid authorizing Megrahi's release under an agreement negotiated by London. The decision was widely condemned in Scotland, with the minority SNP administration losing a vote by 73–50 in the Scottish parliament on a government motion that the release of Megrahi on compassionate grounds was "consistent with the principles of Scottish justice." But there was a further twist to this story. Before his release from Greenock prison near Glasgow and his flight to Tripoli in a chartered Libyan jet, Megrahi agreed to drop his appeal against the life sentence he received from the specially convened Scottish court sitting at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands in 2001.

Megrahi has always insisted on his innocence, and doubts about his conviction have been expressed by several influential figures, most notably Dr. Jim Swire, a spokesman for the UK families of Flight 103, whose daughter Flora died in the crash, and Professor Hans Köchler, official UN observer at Megrahi's trial at Camp Zeist. In his reports to the UN secretary-general, Köchler deplored the political atmosphere of the trial and the failure of the court to consider evidence of foreign (i.e., non-Libyan) government involvement that formed part of a special defense—inculpating others—that is available under Scottish law.

He was even more forthright in condemning the rejection of Megrahi's first appeal in March 2002—calling it a "spectacular miscarriage of justice"—which took place at the same time as discussions with Libya over compensation for the victims' families. The presence of a Libyan "defense support team" hampered the efforts of the Scottish defense lawyers, who failed to raise vital questions about the withholding of evidence and the reliability of witnesses. Two notable omissions Köchler highlighted were the alleged coaching of a key prosecution witness by Scottish police and the appeal court's failure to consider evidence of a break-in at the baggage storage area in London's Heathrow airport on the night before the bombing.

Conspiracy theories have plagued the bombing ever since the clearing-up operation when unidentified Americans, thought to be CIA agents, were seen sorting through the debris alongside officially authorized Scottish police. The most plausible theories do not necessarily exonerate Megrahi, but do suggest that at most he was little more than a small cog in a much larger and more complex machine.

A widely held suspicion at the beginning of the investigation pointed toward the culpability of a Palestinian faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC), working under the protection of Syria. The theory held that the PFLP-GC, who specialized in aircraft hijackings using semtex bombs concealed in tape recorders, may have been "sub- contracted" by Syria's Iranian allies to bring down Pan Am Flight 103 in revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes in July 1988, just months before the bombing of Flight 103.

At the time Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini vowed that the skies would "rain blood" in revenge for the loss of 290 civilian lives, including 66 children. Two defectors from Iranian intelligence agencies—or alleged defectors—subsequently accused the Iranian government of being behind the attacks for which the PFLP-GC was said to have been paid $10 million. Some analysts have argued that leads pointing toward the Palestinian-Syrian-Iranian connection were purposefully deflected after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when Syria became—albeit temporarily—a US coalition ally. Libya, the only Arab state to support Saddam's invasion, remained a more tenable target for exacting exemplary justice.

After a decade of sanctions and interventions by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and South African President Nelson Mandela, the Libyans in 1999 gave up Megrahi and his alleged associate Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, who would later be acquitted. The case against Megrahi hinged on a fragment recovered at Lockerbie of a timing device traced to a Swiss manufacturer, Mebo. The firm had sold timers to Libya that differed in design from those allegedly used in cassette bombs of the type attributed to the PFLP-GC. The clothing in which the bomb was said to have been wrapped inside a suitcase was traced to a shop in Malta that Megrahi was alleged to have visited, traveling under an assumed name, on December 20–21, 1988.

Although the evidence was purely circumstantial (there was no direct evidence that either he or Fhimah had placed the device aboard the aircraft), the judges wrote in their decision that the preponderance of the evidence led them to believe that Megrahi was guilty as charged. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommended minimum of twenty-seven years, to be served in a Scottish jail. A major reason for US anger at Megrahi's release has been the repeated assurances given by the British government that he would serve out his full term.

In December 2003, as part of its campaign to end UN sanctions and abandon its pariah status, Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing, and agreed to pay compensation to the victims' families—although it continued to maintain Megrahi's innocence, as he had done throughout his trial. His position divided observers: some see his continuing denial as the standard response of a professional intelligence officer, as summarized by the unofficial motto of the CIA's Office of Technical Services—"admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations."

Others, including a significant group of Scottish lawyers and laypersons, take a different view. In June 2007, after an investigation lasting nearly four years, the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission delivered an eight-hundred-page report—with thirteen annexes—that identified several areas where "a miscarriage of justice may have occurred" and referred Megrahi's case to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh. The commission considered evidence that cast doubt on the dates on which Megrahi was supposed to have been in Malta as well as the testimony of the Maltese shopkeeper who claimed to have sold clothing to Megrahi. He had changed his testimony several times, and had been shown Megrahi's photograph before picking him out of a line-up. It was expected that the fresh appeal would also consider new evidence about the timing device, as well as the reported break-in at Heathrow airport, which indicate that the bomb could have been planted in London rather than in a suitcase checked from Malta to New York, as the prosecution had claimed.

In July 2007, Ulrich Lumpert, a former engineer at Mebo and a key technical witness, admitted that he had committed perjury at the Camp Zeist trial. In a sworn affidavit he declared that he had stolen a handmade sample of an MST-13 Timer PC-board from Mebo in Zurich and handed it to an unnamed official investigating the Lockerbie case. He also affirmed that the fragment of the timer presented in court as part of the Lockerbie wreckage had in fact been part of this stolen sample. When he became aware that this piece was to be used as evidence for an "intentionally politically motivated criminal undertaking," he said, he decided to keep silent out of fear for his life.

Although it would have been necessary for Megrahi to drop his appeal under the prisoner transfer scheme, this was not a precondition for release on compassionate grounds. Nevertheless it seems likely that he was pressured into abandoning the appeal. Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, has suggested that the dropping of the appeal, rather than "a deal involving business," was the real quid pro quo behind Megrahi's release. According to Miles, Scottish legal sources had been talking of a mood of "growing anxiety in the Scottish justice department that a successful appeal...would severely damage the reputation of the Scottish justice system."

Although many British and American victims' families are demanding a fuller inquiry, Megrahi's decision means the end of any formal legal investigation into the Lockerbie atrocity. However, this is unlikely to be the end of the controversy, whatever the unpublicized hopes of the Scottish, UK, and US governments. Mark Zaid, the Washington lawyer who represents thirty American families and launched a lawsuit against the Libyan government, securing compensation of up to $2.7 billion, has announced that he is filing suit under the Freedom of Information Act to try to ascertain what agreements and discussions have taken place between the US and the UK, not just with respect to the release of Megrahi, but dating back to before the 1991 indictment. "It is ironic," he told the BBC, "that in the latest release of documents from the British authorities the US viewpoint was redacted [i.e., parts of it were omitted] at the specific request of my government."

In retrospect, the connection between the downing of the Iranian Airbus in July 1988 and of Pan Am Flight 103 five months later has never been adequately established, and probably never will be. In settlements ending hostilities, justice is often the victim.

— September 9, 2009

Sep 15, 2009

World's Wealthy Pay a Price In Crisis - washingtonpost.com

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Nations Raise Taxes, Tighten Regulations

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 15, 2009

LONDON -- In this land of inherited privilege and celebrity billionaires, it no longer pays as much to be rich.

Hobbled by soaring debt and ballooning public spending amid the global financial crisis, the British government is joining others around the globe in tapping the wealthy to cover massive shortfalls. As a result, the tax rate here for those making more than $250,000 a year is set to jump from 40 to 50 percent, leaving the likes of Charlie Mullins -- the self-made king of London plumbing -- fuming. He estimates that the new bill on his $2.5 million annual income, with exemptions, will jump by no less than $236,000.

Observers say it is part of a far broader campaign in the wake of the Great Recession -- including curbs on bankers' pay and a rigorous global hunt for tax cheats from Switzerland to Singapore -- that is suddenly putting the world's wealthy on notice.

In the United States, taxes on the richest Americans are one option for covering the cost of offering health care to the 46 million who are uninsured. The Obama administration has vowed to press forward with its ambitious agenda without raising income taxes on families earning less than $250,000. But the president's current budget calls for a rollback of the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans that would increase their top marginal tax rate in 2011 from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, or the same as in the Clinton era.

In India, the government has launched an effort to track down billions of dollars in "black money" -- or hidden profits of the rich. In Germany, Parliament in July passed a law requiring the affluent to provide more information on the locations of their assets. Since the economic crisis began, there have been fresh tax increases for high-earners in the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Italy, Belgium and several other countries.

Analysts say the action marks the first time since before the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s -- when trickle-down economics led to decades of lower tax rates on the wealthy -- that the world's moneyed have faced this level of pressure from such a wide array of governments. It happens as cash-strapped governments -- even as the global economy begins to recover -- are scrambling for scarce sources of revenue to fund expensive stimulus packages, combat the recession and expand services to the less fortunate.

There has been "an absolutely direct correlation between taxes and the financial crisis," said Jon Terry, head of reward practices at Pricewaterhouse Coopers in London. "If there was no financial crisis, I would have been surprised if taxes would have increased at all for high-earners."

Given the gap between the rich and poor that widened globally during the excess of recent years, many see the wealthy as the fairest, most likely source for funds in hard times. In the case of tax cheats, the campaign to root them out, many argue, is long overdue.

But for some, it is beginning to feel like governments are piling on when it comes to the rich -- who, through lost real estate and stock values, have already shed untold billions.

"I know the public is angry and looking for someone to blame, but this [crisis] was not the doing of people like me," said Mullins, a mop-topped 56-year-old who left school at age 15 to form Pimlico Plumbers, now one of Britain's largest plumbing companies with 162 employees. "I've worked hard for what I have, and the government is taking it away because they've dug themselves into a fine mess. I know the rich have certain responsibilities, but this just isn't right."

A special hot seat has been reserved, however, for those seen as directly responsible for causing the economic crisis -- namely, bankers.

At a summit of the Group of 20 industrialized nations in Pittsburgh this month, the French and Germans will press for strict caps on extravagant bonuses at financial firms. Though such a measure has met resistance from the United States and Britain -- home to the world's two great financial centers, New York and London -- President Obama and other leaders are nevertheless expected to embrace guidelines for a level of transparency and government scrutiny of bankers' pay considered unthinkable before the crisis.

On a national level, the Obama administration's plan to curb financial bonuses is still pending before Congress. Yet other countries have already acted. The Dutch, whose taxpayers also are footing the bill for massive bailouts, have gone as far as capping bonuses at 100 percent of base salary while limiting severance packages to one-year's pay. The French have moved to defer existing bonuses and forbid multiyear bonus guarantees, making it no longer quite as rewarding to be a financial executive in Paris.

French bankers are reacting with a mix of anger and acceptance. "I would think that among the various causes you may give for the crisis, traders' pay is not a significant cause," said Pierre de Lauzun, director general of the French Banking Federation. "Of course, after a crisis, it is not bad that people reflect on how to make the market healthier. But [the bonus issue] is not the main cause, not the dominant problem. It is one dimension among others."

The push for more government revenue during the crisis has fueled what experts describe as the most serious global effort to root out wealthy tax evaders in recent history. The campaign began in earnest in April with threats to "name and shame" governments that act as tax havens. But it is now poised to markedly escalate, with G-20 leaders in Pittsburgh, according to sources close to the talks, set to take the further step of imposing sanctions on tax havens such as Uruguay and Panama if they do not move to cease shielding tax dodgers by March.

Already, the campaign has cracked open the famous secrecy of Swiss banks, which, under extreme pressure, have shared thousands of names of tax cheats with the Americans and the French. Last month, Indian officials said they would begin talks with Switzerland to track down an estimated $27 billion annually in "black money" hidden by wealthy Indians overseas, which they consider vital cash that could go toward economic development and programs for the poor.

Yet some experts caution that such efforts only scratch the surface. In India's case, for example, critics argue that the government is moving too slowly to follow up on promises to bring wealthy cheats to justice, in part because many tax offenders are believed to be government officials. Underscoring mounting public rage, on Sunday in New Delhi dozens of residents marched at the historic downtown India Gate against the "laziness" of the government in tracking down black money deposited in Swiss bank accounts.

Cheats or not, the rich are seeing governments helping themselves to their wallets in a manner not seen in years -- particularly in Britain.

Spurred by Thatcher, who came to power in 1979, Britain became a relative paradise for the wealthy, with maximum tax rates coming down from 83 percent to 40 percent in recent years. But with Britain facing one of the world's sharpest downturns and lagging behind much of the rest of Europe in recovery, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called the wealthy the fairest targets for the heavily indebted government.

Not only is the general income-tax rate for wealthy Britons scheduled to leap from 40 to 50 percent for 2010 but they will see major rollbacks on the types and sizes of permitted tax deductions. A separate tax on wealthy foreigners who live in Britain but do not pay income taxes here -- a measure partly aimed at the Arab sheiks of elegant Mayfair -- will now force them to cough up about $51,000 a year.

Some, like the Swiss, whose domestic tax loopholes can still dramatically benefit foreign high-earners, see an opportunity to lure the jilted rich of Britain. Swiss officials have begun hosting seminars in London, seeking to persuade wealthy executives to move to the friendlier environment in the shadow of the Alps.

Some appear to be taking them up on their offers. Others, like Irish packaging tycoon Dermot F. Smurfit, thought about it but ultimately decided to stay in Britain.

"It bothers everybody paying taxes, and the rich have already been hit harder than the average person in this crisis since they have more stocks or property that have lost value," Smurfit said. "But I guess you can say that it is fair that the wealthy should pay more. That doesn't mean you have to like it."

Correspondent Emily Wax in New Delhi, staff writer Lori Montgomery in Washington and special correspondents Karla Adam in London and Shannon Smiley in Berlin contributed to this report.

Sep 8, 2009

British Court Convicts Three in Plot to Blow Up Airliners - NYTimes.com

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By JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON — After two trials and the largest counterterrorism investigation in Britain’s history, three men were found guilty on Monday of plotting to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners on a single day with liquid explosives smuggled aboard in soft-drink bottles and detonated by devices powered with AA batteries.

The convictions came three years after the global airline industry was thrown into chaos by the plot. The bombers’ plan to drain plastic soft-drink bottles with syringes and refill them with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a bleaching agent also used as a propellant for rockets, led to new measures prohibiting passengers from carrying all but small quantities of liquids and creams onto flights.

With those measures still in force and causing backups at airport security checkpoints around the world, the police and intelligence agencies in Britain and the United States had waited anxiously for verdicts in the six-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court in London, where eight men were accused of conspiracy to stage the airliner bombings.

Prosecutors said the plot could have killed at least 1,500 people aboard the targeted planes, which by that measure would have made it second only to the Sept. 11 attacks as the most serious terrorist plot in modern history.

“Apart from massive loss of life, these attacks would have had enormous worldwide economic and political significance,” John McDowall, Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism chief, said after the verdicts.

In Washington, the Obama administration praised the verdict on Monday.

“British authorities have worked diligently to investigate and prosecute those involved in the 2006 aviation plot,” Mike Hammer, a National Security Council spokesman, said via e-mail. “We congratulate them on those efforts and extend our thanks to the British government for seeing these efforts through to today’s conclusion.”

Last year, a trial failed to reach verdicts on the airliner-bombing charges against the defendants then being tried. So the stakes were especially high in the second trial for the main agencies involved in uncovering the London plot, including Scotland Yard and Britain’s secret intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, as well as the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I., among American agencies involved.

The significance was all the greater because there have been no trials yet of anyone directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

After arrests in the liquid-explosives case were made in August 2006, documents found at the plotters’ homes and on a computer memory stick belonging to the plot ringleader showed that they had earmarked airline schedules for seven flights leaving London for New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto, with aircraft operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada. Evidence at the trial showed that the plot aimed to detonate the bombs nearly simultaneously, with the aircraft over the Atlantic.

The plotters’ intent, intelligence officials said, was to show that security measures adopted after Sept. 11 were insufficient to foil the kind of low-technology, “asymmetric” attacks favored by Islamic extremists in their war with the West. Evidence at the London trial showed that several of the plotters, like those of Sept. 11, had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan for indoctrination and training by extremist groups linked to Al Qaeda.

The jury found three men guilty of conspiring to kill passengers and crew members aboard the flights: Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, named by prosecutors as the plot’s ringleader; Tanvir Hussain, 28; and Assad Sarwar, 29, who was identified at the trial as the “quartermaster” of the plot, responsible for acquiring the explosives, detonators and other equipment and assembling them at a “bomb factory” in a London suburb.

A total of eight men were in the dock during the six-month trial. Four of the eight — Ibrahim Savant, 28; Arafat Waheed Khan, 28; Waheed Zaman, 25; and Donald Stewart-Whyte, 23 — were found not guilty of plotting to bomb the airliners. The eighth man, Umar Islam, 31, was found guilty of an alternative charge of conspiracy to commit murder, the charge on which Mr. Ali, Mr. Hussain and Mr. Sarwar were convicted at the first trial that ended in September 2008.

The men who were convicted will be sentenced Monday.

The jury in the second trial failed to reach a verdict on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder in the case of Mr. Savant, Mr. Khan and Mr. Zaman. It acquitted Mr. Stewart-Whyte, who was said by defense lawyers at the trial to have converted from Christianity to Islam only four months before his arrest.

The Crown Prosecution Service, responsible for filing charges in criminal cases, said after the verdicts that it would review the jury’s failure to reach verdicts in the three cases of conspiracy to commit murder, and decide whether to seek a third trial in the case.

Scotland Yard officials estimated the total cost of the case at more than $60 million, another factor that weighed heavily as the verdicts came in. Over the weekend, there had been fears the trial would end, like the first, with a hung jury on the key charges of plotting to bomb airliners. As the jury reached the end of a second week of deliberations, the judge called the jurors into court on Friday and told them he would accept 10-to-2 majority verdicts if they were unable to reach unanimous decisions, allowable under British law.

Behind the scenes, the case caused major strains between American and British intelligence agencies and investigators. The Americans were deeply involved from the start because of the role that American electronic intercepts played in uncovering the plot, and because the principal targets were American planes and passengers.

But officials familiar with the case said there were bitter disputes over the arrests in 2006, with the Americans saying they believed that the British, who staked out the conspirators for months, waited too long to round them up, raising the risk of an attack. The British, by contrast, were angered by the American pressure, which they said forced them to make the arrests before they had all the evidence necessary to ensure convictions.

A major stumbling block at both trials was that British court procedures do not allow the use of intercepted telephone conversations and other electronic intercepts. Television documentaries shown in Britain have included secret police videotapes showing some of the plotters engaged in what appeared to be preparatory work on the bombs at the suburban London bomb factory and discussing the destructive potential of the bombs.

Mr. Ali and several other defendants testified at the trial that they had never intended to bomb airliners, but planned what they called “a political stunt,” involving setting off minor explosions in garbage bins outside airline offices in Terminal Three of Heathrow airport, the London base for the three airlines they earmarked in the flight schedules. Their purpose, they said, was to frighten people, not to kill them.

But experiments by British explosives experts cited in court found that the bombs the plotters planned to use could blow aircraft apart at 30,000 feet.

Prosecutors showed the court extensive evidence showing how the men bought material for the bombs, and how some of it, including the hydrogen peroxide, was hidden in woods outside a town northwest of London. The jury was also shown so-called martyrdom videos prepared by two of the plotters, Mr. Ali and Mr. Hussain.

A common theme in the videos was exacting revenge on Britain and the United States for their interference in Muslim countries, especially the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“We have warned you enough,” Mr. Ali said. “We have warned you again and again to leave our lands.” In his video, Mr. Hussain said his only regret was that “I can’t come back and do this again and again until people come to their senses and realize, ‘Don’t mess with the Muslims.’ ”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.