A chilling quote from US Solicitor General Elena Kagan on aid to terrorists:
Ms. Kagan gave examples of prohibited conduct. A lawyer would commit a crime, she said, by filing a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a terrorist group. Helping such a group petition international bodies is also a crime, she added.
Aaronovitch Watch draws my attention to the latest Decent crusade against Amnesty International for having the audacity to actually, you know, work with an ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner in getting this prison and torture site closed as well as persuading European countries to take in ex-prisoners. According to The Times AI is “damaged” by their partnership with Moazzam Begg, providing as evidence the innuendo and assertions of “A SENIOR official at Amnesty International”, one Gita Sahgal:
Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages†the organisation’s reputation.
In an email sent to Amnesty’s top bosses, she suggests the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his “jihadi†group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.
Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Talibanâ€. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.
It’s all the usual guilt by association and scary buzzword — Taliban, Al-Qaeda, jihadi, served up in that undercooled semi-objective writing style the Times is so good at; all done nicely and proper with both sides of the story presented, but you still know what to think just from the headline. That said, it’s still a lot more sane than Martin Bright’s rant about it, as noted on Aaronovitch Watch:
Bright’s prose is somewhat over-caffeinated: “… blowing the lid… rightly sick of the lazy alliance… blown the whistle [hmm, lots of ‘blowing’ going on here – Ed] … Begg is now an integral part … she has been deeply frustrated by the way the British liberal intelligentsia gives house-room to right-wing Islamists … Jamaat-i-Islami, the south Asian blood-brothers of the Muslim Brotherhood… It is Gita Sahgal who should be the darling of the human rights establishment, not Moazzam Begg.” What, I wonder, is giving “house-room”? Until today, when, according to Bright, Ms Sahgal was suspended she was a ‘senior official at Amnesty’ (Sunday Times). So which of them, if either, was a ‘darling’ of the “liberal intelligensia”?
All the usual stuff from those who want Amnesty International to be the cheerleader for US-led human rights imperialism, who want AI to denounce the enemy-du-jour and then shut up, who want AI to mention Iranian torture, not Israeli torture. It infuriates somebody like Martin “not too” Bright, that AI does not distinguish between torture done in the name of Allah or torture done in the name of anti-terrorism. With his Us vs Them mentality, his worldview of a civilised west in conflict with barbaric Islam he’s the spiritual descendant of the Cold Warriors who in the seventies and eighties accused AI of being communist dupes, as he now accuses them of being jihadist dupes. What has changes is the reification of human rights — back then Cold Warriors could still argue that the fight against communism justified the occasional human rights violation, even if they tried to bagatalise them, but today Bright and others like him have to pretend they are the real human rights defenders.
Accusations like these are nothing new therefore. hey tend to pop up whenever AI or HRW or any other human rights organisation focuses attention on the wrong sort of human rights violations, those perpetrated by the US or its allies (especially Israel). First these crimes are denied, then once that becomes impossible they’re minimalised, then AI is accused of paying undue attention to them and not enough to other crimes (usually said by people too stupid to even scan their website which always proves the opposite) and finally it is accused of being a (willing/unwilling) tool of the enemy. Lather, rinse, repeat; concern trolling on an international scale. It’s a transparent ploy that has never worked in the past, but as long as you sling enough shit something will stick in the end. And that’s the real crime, if fake scandals like this persuade people not to support AI anymore.
The last two weeks we’ve been watching the BBC2 documentary series Who’s Watching You? about how Britain has become “one of the most watched places in the world”. For anybody paying attention to privacy issues there was little news, but what it did well was providing concrete examples of what for most of us is a fairly abstract fear.
The loss of our privacy through ubiquitous surveillance is one of the greatest hidden issues of the early twentyfirst century. It’s not just that new technology has made it easier to spy on us, but the way in which both government and business have embraced this technology, especially in the last decade or so, without too much public protest. For most of us this remains a theoretical issue unless it interferes with our daily lives. Which is why speed cameras are so much more loathed than CCTV cameras: one gets you fined, the other doesn’t. (And why there are so many fewer speeding cameras than CCTV cameras: one gets voters mad, the other doesn’t). What the programme did well was showing how this hidden surveillance could and did impinge on the lives of ordinary, middleclass people. What it did less well was taken a moral stand beyond “it’s complicated”.
One example I noticed in the second episode was that of the AA driver sacked for “making fraudelous use of company time”. The company’s timekeeping software reported that he had signed off too late after helping a customer, claiming a few minutes more than he needed, as well as arriving back from lunch three minutes late. That was enough for his managers to go over his record with a fine tooth comb, finding more “irregularities” and finally sacking him over it. He took his case to tribunal and won, as he had been smart enough to keep his own records. The narrator then went into his spiel about how this showed that surveillance can get you the cold facts, but not the context and that just relying on these facts can lead to the wrong conclusions. What he misses is a much more important point: that employees shouldn’t be subject to this sort of time management system in the first place.
You wouldn’t have seen it in New Labour’s 1997 manifesto, though.
Labour’s deliberate policy of shutting down legal channels to justice for the average Joe and Josephine in order to crush dissent, this from an adminstration of lawyers, is something I’ve been blogging about for a long time.
I was idly rereading the ‘police’ post archive this morning in light of the G20 police brutality reports when I was reminded of this 2000 Schnews article, which made me wonder: how many of those peaceful protestors arrested at Kingsnorth or Nottingham or the G20 or Plymouth or on misapplied terrorist legislation have had, or can get access to legal advice?
Not too many, I’d wager:
Sweeping changes to the legal aid system are going to mean that thousands who find themselves dragged into the legal system are going to find themselves without proper legal advice. Despite the fact that this government has created 6,000 new criminal offences in the last ten years, and is hauling record numbers before the courts and off to chokey, they’re now keen to restrict access to legal advice. All in the name of cost-cutting and reducing inefficiency of course. What is actually happening is a massive erosion of hard won rights and the end of the legal aid system, which helped achieve some degree of parity in court cases. (OK, so SchNEWS is obviously against the system, man, but meantime still not keen to see what few civil liberties we have taken away!)
The changes came in on January 14th. Prior to this, on arrival at the police station you would be offered contact with a solicitor of your choice. From now on you will be directed to the Criminal Defence Call Centre (CDCC). This is staffed, not by solicitors but by accredited representatives who’ve done a training course, many of them actually ex-coppers. You will only be allowed to contact your own solicitor if you pay privately. Needless to say the call centre advice is probably going to be different to that of a specialist defence solicitor.
While I have met at least one accredited representative who was an ex-copper and did a fantastic job, to put so many of them (they’re cheaper than actual lawyers) in charge of dispensing legal advice to the arrested might lead one to think the government’s given the police control of the independent legal process – though no doubt Jack Straw would deny that to his dying breath.
One Brighton-based solicitor told SchNEWS, “Previously we could intervene in the process earlier – warn people to make no comment, not to sign police notebooks and not to answer any questions off the PNC1 form*. We could act as an outside guarantee of people’s rights while they were inside. Now, the system is in meltdown. If the call centre is too incompetent to get hold of your brief then you may end up using a duty solicitor or remaining unrepresented. If you’re not going to be interviewed then you can be fingerprinted, DNAed and booted out of the door without once receiving any independent advice.”
While there was never a Legal Aid golden age Labour’s deliberate blocking of justice and dismantling of low cost legal advice networks and legal aid over the past 12 years has created a legal advice desert. So far it’s only been affecting those nasty, nasty druggies, petty crims, burglars and crusty anarchists, so there’s been little outcry about it from the bourgeoisie. They’re criminals, who cares?
But if there’s no justice for criminals, there’s no justice for anyone. As I wrote at the time:
Should citizens, empowered by knowing what their rights are and how to enforce them, start to challenge the boss, who knows where it might lead?
The overthrow of New Labour – and that would never do.
Why, such an informed populace might start enforcing their rights on other things too. They might even start to challenge the everyday petty tyrannies of Labour’s incompetent and authoritarian government, like, say, the deaths of children in custody or the illegal invasions of other sovereign nations or the selective imposition of swingeing terrorist legislation on people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion.
Maybe now a few of the comfortable middles at legitimate protests like the G20 have had theirs or their kids’ heads batoned, been kettled by aggressive paramilitaries or arrested on trumped up ‘terrorism’ charges for merely expressing their right to free speech, we’ll see a bit more outrage and a lot more challenge.
I see that anarchist rag The Sunday Times (prop. R. Murdoch) is featuring more video of police brutality at the G20.
Rupert Murdoch’s the champion of the oppressed masses now? Who knew? Fight the power, Rupe!
As if.
Commenter GnosticMind responded to Henry Porters’ column on public order policing in today’s Observer and he hits the bullseye when he says:
19 Apr 09, 5:36am (about 2 hours ago)
What is also interesting here is the media treatment of those attacked by the police : The second victim to come forward, the woman from Brighton, has now hired Max bloody Clifford of all people, to represent her : Anyone well versed in Situationist dialectic and critique will see exactly what is happening here — the state media machinery absorbs the threat to the status quo, by repackaging the threat — and selling it back to its own people — as spectacle and entertainment.
The society as spectacle wins yet again — if , that is, most people are fooled and pacified by it yet again.
All that Situationist theory is old hat by now, and very overdone, years ago — but by God they got it right.
They certainly did.
I bet TimesOnline’s hitcount is well up. The management (R. Murdoch) and the advertisers must be loving it. Do I smell an advertising revenue spike?
Dissent and violent repression;not only poliitical theatre but the saviour of the economy.
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