One cannot read the recent strategy by the Association of Chief Police Officers' Terrorist and Allied Matters (ACPO TAM) without feeling a vague shudder of disquiet. The so-called "Police PREVENT Strategy" (March 2008) [see attached], is a briefing for partners within the local authorities' strategic partnerships (LSP - Local Strategic Partnership) to update them on developments within the PREVENT agenda so that LSPs can arrange their own priorities accordingly.

But, what is the PREVENT agenda? Its Strategic Aim is simply "To stop people becoming or supporting terrorists or violent extremists ". There are a variety of ways through which this will be achieved, but all of these are - at this point in time - directed specifically at Muslim males.

Against a political backdrop of 42 days without trial detentions, slavish loyalty to the US's aggression and policies of torture and abuse, and the gradual creep of terrorist labelling being applied to animal rights and environmental activists, one must keep in mind that the PREVENT agenda is but the thin end of the wedge. When it comes to the slow, but irreversible, creep of state redefinition as being "terrorists" those who challenge the alleged "democratic" consumer capitalist orthodoxy that is ecologically destructive and unmistakably unsustainable, the PRVENT agenda takes on an ominous dimension. That is, the PREVENT strategy provides the abstract machine - the blueprint - by which those who oppose the corporatist capitalist agenda can be reframed as terrorists and treated as "extremists" for their defiant refusal to participate and to swallow the dominant lies.

It is simply a matter of time before those who challenge the state machine and its corporate whoring are branded extremists, and dealt with the self-same tactics as those who are today labelled terrorists, even when those accusations are themselves fraught with controversy, state manipulation of evidence, and legalistic disagreement.

Already the stage is set for those who deny climate change, who persist in undermining the peer reviewed science with opportunistic red herrings, those who would reclassify consumerist capitalism as sustainable, who rebrand nuclear power as "green", who take advantage of ordinary concerns about the ecological future as yet another opportunity for marketing so-called "green" economies.

The battle lines are drawn. Soon one will need to choose sides. One will need to become an "extremist" in order to preserve a more sane level of development, to turn back and mitigate against the rampant devastation of our biologically common life-base. If this makes one an extremist, subject to the ACPO TAM's PREVENT strategy it is therefore wise to become acquainted of what that decision will mean, and how local governments are being increasingly recruited as allies in this onslaught of state warfare against the populous as well as against Terra. The PREVENT agenda, as well as the so-called "Borough Beat" option in London that seduces local authority workers with police training and paid days' leave to work with the police in policing and patrols ... the civitas becomes ever more stratified with legalistic, surveillance politics of command and control. We must be on our guard, for the snitches and the sneaks are upon us.