Terrorist suspects to be held in isolation in the Big Brother House
22 Nov 2005 by Peter Placeserver
Confidential cabinet documents leaked to DeadBrain show that barely a fortnight after parliament decisively rejected the government's plans for a 90-day detention period for suspected Muslims, Tony Blair's inner coterie are already discussing ways of circumventing the widespread opposition.
The documents, believed to be No. 10 internal briefing papers, discuss a number of ways of winning the public over to the government's position on this issue. Focus groups and polling organisations have already been employed to identify what the general public views as "acceptable reasons for imprisonment". Some of these, such as "being found guilty of a criminal offence" have already been discounted by the Prime Minister as impractical.
Keen to put a positive spin on accusations of a "police state", the research done has identified the perfect justification for confining individuals for long periods and carefully observing their every move and recording their every word. In the future, it is planned to hand suspected terrorists over to Channel 4 for detention in the human-sized hamster maze the channel constructed for its reality TV programmes and which is currently standing empty.
A psychologist involved in the drafting of the papers notes that "research has shown that close confinement without adequate sensory or intellectual stimuli leads individuals to freely reveal personal information and otherwise closely guarded secrets", although he cautions that the test sample (consisting entirely of foghorn-voice South Londoners and gormless Geordies) may not be wholly representative.
To ensure that the intelligence value of information thus revealed is not compromised by entering the public domain, the documents recommend that the recordings of the housemates' goings-on should only be shown on E4.
An additional advantage, as far as Number 10 is concerned, is that this strategy may allow even longer detention periods as, when surveyed, most people said the last series of Big Brother seemed to go on for well over a year.
SATIRE from
Deadbrain
