Tony Blair admits he can't count up to 100

This brief report in the British newspaper The Independent reveals why Prime Minister Blair had such difficulty in 2002 and 2003 calculating the actual odds that Iraq had WMD: He can't do basic math. Blair backs police '101%' over London terror raid

This was the raid in which the Metropolitan police burst into a house and shot one of its inhabitants, allegedly as he came down the stairs unarmed, to see what the commotion was.

Mr Blair said: "I support the police 101 per cent - and the security services. I think if they have a reasonable piece of intelligence they believe they have got to investigate - take action on - they should. You can only imagine if they fail to take action and something terrible happened what outcry would be then, so they are in an impossible situation."

The semantic manipulations in this paragraph are nearly priceless. Evidently if the police have a single reasonable piece of evidence and don't shoot somebody in his home, then the public will berate them, which can't be allowed.

The Prime Minister also insisted that combating crime will have to take precedence over civil liberties. He said: "There is an ugly side to today's crime that is different from when we were growing up....

I am quite sure you cannot solve some of these law and order problems unless you are prepared quite profoundly to change and rebalance the system of criminal justice so that you have more summary justice, more summary powers, more ability for quick and effective action to be taken, even if it will cross the line that most people normally think of as there in terms of civil liberties.

Those civil liberties were intended for the good old days when murderers were wandering the streets, handing out sweets to the kiddies. Now the coppers have to be allowed to hold people down and blow their heads off in the Tube, ask questions afterwards.