Civil liberties – Page 12

The floating gulag

Published on June 2, 2008

The Guardian reports that the US is using prison ships to lock up terrorism suspects

The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

Now it’s true that there are several prison ships being used in the Netherlands as well, but for all their faults, these are safely moored off in a harbour, not sailing around the Indian Ocean, away from all judicial oversight. If this accusation is ture, and it seems unlikely not to be, it’s further evidence that America’s war on terror has been a dirty war, like the Argentine generals used to wage against their own population.

How Security makes us stupid

Published on May 25, 2008

Via the Yorkshire Ranter comes this lovely story of how easy it is in security conscious Britain to be arrested for nothing more than downloading and printing out the wrong document:

A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the “psychological torture” he endured in custody.

Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.

But wait! It gets worse. Sabir, being a typically broke student asked a mate a university staff member to print it out for him, and this guy was arrested too and is now under threat of deportion back to Algeria:

Sabir was arrested on May 14 after the document was found by a university staff member on an administrator’s computer. The administrator, Hisham Yezza, an acquaintance of Sabir, had been asked by the student to print the 1,500-page document because Sabir could not afford the printing fees. The pair were arrested under the Terrorism Act, Sabir’s family home was searched and their computer and mobile phones seized. They were released uncharged six days later but Yezza, who is Algerian, was immediately rearrested on unrelated immigration charges and now faces deportation.

Dr Alf Nilsen, a research fellow at the university’s school of politics and international relations, said that Yezza is being held at Colnbrook immigration removal centre, due to be deported on Tuesday.

“If he is taken to Algeria, he may be subjected to severe human rights violations after his involvement in this case. He has been in the UK for 13 years. His work is here, his friends are here, his life is here.”

The cherry on the top of this rancid sundae must be the following:

A spokesman for Nottingham University said it had a duty to inform police of “material of this nature”. The spokesman said it was “not legitimate research material”, but later amended that view, saying: “If you’re an academic or a registered student then you have very good cause to access whatever material your scholarship requires. But there is an expectation that you will act sensibly within current UK law and wouldn’t send it on to any Tom, Dick or Harry.”

Is this what we’ve come to now, that an university spokesperson of all people can argue that the police is right to harass people for what they read? That the university not only cannot be depended on to defend its student and staff against police intrusion, but will actively help them? Should “security concerns” now determine what is and isn’t legitimate research?

The worst danger of terrorism isn’t the damage a terrorist attack does to us, but the damage we ourselves can do to our societies under the guise of combatting it. Since the September 11 attacks we’ve been subjected to ever increasing restrictions on our freedom to travel, freedom of association, to have a private life, to go through our lives without having to worry about whether something innocent we did yesterday might just attract the attention from the security services. Now as a middle class white fella myself the dangers are still slight, though bad enough that I won’t risk travelling to the US anytime soon, but as this story shows, if you have a Middle Eastern name, you could end up being deported to a country well known for its torture practices for nothing more than printing out the wrong document…

It’s Not So Brilliant Here Either

Published on May 16, 2008

The US may treat European visitors like vermin (see previous post) but we’re hardly spotless in our attitude towards immigrants, as events in Naples show:

Residents of the former communist stronghold on the northern outskirts of Naples have been raising hell about the camp since Saturday, when a woman claimed a Gypsy girl had entered her flat and tried to steal her baby.

The first Molotov cocktails descended on the improvised huts and cabins on Tuesday evening, after which the 800-odd inhabitants began moving out of the area in groups. On Wednesday the fire-raisers, said to belong to the Camorra, the Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia, burnt the camp in earnest, watched by applauding local people and unchallenged by the police. When firefighters showed up to douse the blaze, local people taunted and whistled at them. The last Roma moved out under police protection.

Only then did local politicians shed a few crocodile tears: Antonio Bassolino, governor of the Campania region, declaring: “We must stop with the greatest determination these disturbing episodes against the Roma.” Rosa Russo Iervolino, the Mayor of Naples, chimed in: “It is unthinkable that anyone could imagine that I could justify reprisals against the Roma.”
More…

I don’t know enough about the state of Italian politics to say that we’re seeing a surge of modern Mussolini-ism with the reaccession of Berlusconi to the presidency – but it doesn’t half look like it. Crimes committed by Romanians are a hot political issue in Italy:

Since Romania’s accession to the EU this year, the authorities say that over 1,000 Romanian immigrants have arrived in Italy each month.

Since June last year 76 murders have been committed by Romanians.

The mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, says that 75% of arrests for murder, rape and robbery in his city this year can be attributed to Romanians.

Mr Prodi believes Italy is not alone in facing this new wave of crime and he has called on Europe’s home office ministers to meet and find a solution.

The Romanian prime minister has responded by sending police liaison officers to major Italian cities to help.

Of course this is Naples and there’s more to this particular outbreak of violence than just politically organised hatred; Naples is well-known to be a stew of corruption, crime and poverty and the local mafia don’t like rivals. Times are getting harder too, for the worried poor and worried-about-getting-poorer middle classes – where Berlusconi sees his support – who are looking for scapegoats for their troubles. The Roma fit the bill, as has been depressingly usual throughout their peripatetic, outcast history in Europe.

As is also depressingly usual in European history concerted government and police action intended to pander to the political base is fostering a culture of tacit approval for mob violence.

Police in Italy have arrested hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants in raids across the country.

Expulsion orders were issued for several dozen of those detained. More than 100 Italians were also arrested.

One raid was on a makeshift camp housing Roma (Gypsies), on the edge of Rome. Italian concern about immigrant crime has tended to focus on the Roma.The police crackdown was part of a week-long operation in Rome, Naples and northern Italy.

It is an apparent sign of the change of policy promised by the new right-wing government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

(Except it isn’t new policy, it was his predecessors’ policy too.)

What is important to remember is that this isn’t a case of plucky litle Italy repelling invading criminal gangs from Fortress Europe’s borders: after all, Romanians are our fellow EU citizens, with theoretically equal status to all other EU citizens, including the right to reside in other EU countries. If other EU member countries were to follow Italy’s example, in light of the spread of the mafia EU-wide we’d be expelling Italian criminals from the capitals of Europe by the planeload and Berlusconi would be complaining about ethnic cleansing – which is essentially what this is, but because it’s Roma, it’s OK.

But the first act of ethnic cleansing in the new Italy passed off with little fuss. Flora Martinelli, the woman who reported the alleged kidnap attempt on her baby, said: “I’m very sorry for what’s happening, I didn’t want it to come to this. But the Gypsies had to go.”

Wasn’t that the refrain of the Good Germans, and the Hutus too?

Reason 1,567,802

Published on May 15, 20081 Comment

Hot on the heels of the news that the US government drugs people it deports comes the cautionary tale of an Italian man who fell in love with an American woman and visited America one time too many to see her:

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

His crime? Nothing. Visitors from the European Union do not need a visum to visit the States, as long as they stay no longer than ninety days and don’t come over to work, but admission isn’t automatic, as the article explains:

Though citizens of those nations do not need visas to enter the United States for as long as 90 days, their admission is up to the discretion of border agents. There are more than 60 grounds for finding someone inadmissible, including a hunch that the person plans to work or immigrate, or evidence of an overstay, however brief, on an earlier visit.

While those turned away are generally sent home on the next flight, “there are occasional circumstances which require further detention to review their cases,” Ms. De Cima said. And because such “arriving aliens” are not considered to be in the United States at all, even if they are in custody, they have none of the legal rights that even illegal immigrants can claim.

Emphasis mine on that last sentence, which is a key reason why I won’t visit America in this lifetime. It’s an admission that everytime you cross the border you run the risk of being disappeared if some border agent takes a dislike to you, with no recourse available to you. Fortunately for Salerno he had friends in high places, friends who knew how to use their influence to get the New York Times interested in his story. But if you’re not a well connected citizen of an EU country, you’re out of luck.

Apart from the danger it puts any visitors in, this idea that because you haven’t been formally allowed into the US even though you are incarcenated on US soil, you’re not entitled to the protection of the US law and constitution, is more evidence of a worrying trend to hollow out these rights by defining more and more categories of non-citizens; the same happened with Guantanamo Bay, remember?

Deporting people difficult? Not if you drug them

Published on May 15, 2008

Reason 1,567,801 not to move to the US anytime soon:

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government’s forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the “pre-flight cocktail,” as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

“Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac,” says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was “dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose,” according to an airline crew member’s written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards “taking down” a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse’s account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, “Nighty-night.”

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 — the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security’s new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

It’s tempting to lay this yet again at the feet of the Bush administration, but I doubt it would’ve been any different under a Democratic president. The entire justice and law enforcement industry in the US operates on a level of casual cruelness that is unthinkable here. Police officers can taser or murder people with impunity, prison rape is at best seen as a joke, at worst as an extra punishment and in general there’s a culture that demands the complete and utter subjugation of a detainee or suspect and which harshly punishes anybody who steps out of line. The news that returned asylum seekers are routinely drugged therefore should come as no surprise.