War on Terror – Page 11

Boris The Giant-Killer

Published on July 30, 2008

Boris Johnson as Nemesis? It could happen. Anxious emails are even now winging their way round London discussing the hows, wheres and who bys of the firing of this blog’s all-time favourite plod, London Metropolitan Police Chief Sir Ian Blair.

All I can say is about bloody time, whoever it is that finally wields the axe.

You’d think there’d’ve been enough to cost Blair his job already; there’s the sickening cheerleading for Tony Blair and the War On Terror, to begin with, and the pushing of authoritarian and antidemocratic laws and turning London into a miniature police state which contradictory though it seems is almost completely lawless in some areas and for some people.

Then there’s the blatant political manoeuvreings. Then there’s the two undetected bombings and then, then there’s the extrajudicial murder of the innocent electrician Jean De Menesez – though the officers responsible were promoted. Now there’s the accusations of out and out racism by one of his own closest senior officers.

So far Sir Ian has walked away from every accusation of wrongdoing. He may have been besmirched but all his powers and privileges remain intact. He remains a member in good standing of the great, good and constitutionally corrupt and retains the support of the media.

But it’s always the little things that catch you out, and an accusation of dishonest financial dealings might prove Blair’s final downfall:

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair will face questioning this week after it emerged a company owned by a close friend and skiing partner was awarded multi-million-pound police contracts.

The company, Impact Plus, first secured lucrative police technology contracts in 2002 when it was owned by Andy Miller, whose friendship with Sir Ian stretches back over the past 30 years.

A Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) spokesman said: “The MPA internal audit is aware of concerns about single tenders concerning Impact Plus and Hitachi Consulting and is currently researching the matter.” While he is not under investigation, Sir Ian is likely to face questions over the contracts when he next appears before the MPA.

The contracts at the centre of the conflict of interest claims ran between 2002 and 2008 and were worth more than £3m in total. Sir Ian, deputy commissioner in 2002, chaired the panel which handed Impact Plus an initial £150,000 consultancy contract.

Sir Ian has denied any wrongdoing in relation to the contracts and yesterday released a letter written in November 2002 to the Treasurer of the MPA stating that Impact Plus was owned and run by a friend of his. He said: “I was open and straightforward in informing both the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] and MPA about my friendship with Andy Miller prior to any contract being awarded. I strongly reject any suggestion that I have behaved inappropriately in any way and consider I have acted with absolute probity in these matters. I also wish to make it clear that former Impact Plus employee Martin Samphire, who now works for Hitachi, is not a personal friend of mine.”

No wonder the two Blairs, Ian and Tony, got on so well. They have exactly the same public service ethos. In fact Sir Ian is so closely tied into New Labour’s 11 years of corruption incompetence and callous authoritarianism as to be inextricable from it. Let them all go down together, even if it is to the Tories, (who’ll be as bad if not worse) if only for the pleasure of watching them fall.

My only complaint about Sir Ian’s potential departure is that he’ll probably go straight to a nice, comfy, fat index-linked pension. Not sure I call that nemesis at all.

Torture porn

Published on July 16, 2008

During World War 2, Hitler and his pals liked nothing so much as have a nice little torture film after dinner, recordings made during Gestapo interrogation sessions. Would it go too far to believe Bush and Cheney may have done the same with videotapes from Guantanamo Bay, for example this video of the interrogation by Canadian intelligence agents of Omar Khadyr:

TORONTO—Burying his face in his hands, a 16-year-old captured in Afghanistan sobs and calls out “Oh Mommy!” in a hidden-camera video released Tuesday that provides the first look at interrogations inside the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay.

[…]

The seven hours of grainy footage, recorded over four days of questioning by Canadian intelligence agents in 2003, shows Khadr breaking down in tears. At one point he pleads for help and displays chest and back wounds that he says had not healed six months after his capture.

Peeling off his orange prisoner shirt, he shows the wounds and complains he cannot move his arms, saying he has not received proper medical attention, despite requests.

“They look like they’re healing well to me,” the agent says of the injuries.

“What you see in the video is a teenager begging for help and what you see is an interrogation that violates U.S. law and any international law concerning the rights of children,” said Wells Dixon, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of Guantanamo prisoners.

“If this is the way a teenager in Guantanamo has been treated, you can just imagine how anyone else has been treated.”

It honestly would not surprise me at this point if Bush, Cheney et all collectively popped a stiffy over videos like this. There seems to be a deep sexual perversion at the root of the War on Terror, ever so often surfacing in e.g. the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Supposedly the naked pyramids and forced simulated fellatio of prisoners is done to soften them up for interrogation “because Arabs are uniquely shamed by sexual matters”, but you do wonder whether the incessent fascination with sexual humiliation isn’t much more present in the minds of the interrogators themselves…. As if 9/11 gave a certain part of America carte blanche to force its power fantasies on an unending supply of helpless victims.

Meanwhile the treatment of Omar Khadr is justified on him supposedly being a murderer, but as Eli notes:

George Bush (and Barack Obama and the Congress and the media and etc.) insist the U.S. is at “war” in Afghanistan, and they don’t mean that metaphorically as in the “war on drugs,” they mean it literally. Well, if the U.S. is at “war,” then Omar Khadr is a prisoner of war and has to be treated as such. If every single person captured by the U.S. in such a “war” is an “illegal combatant” and not a prisoner of war, then the U.S. can’t possibly be at war, since there is no opponent in this war. You can’t have it both ways.

Excuse me?

Published on June 16, 2008

Gordon Brown, justifying the decision to send more British troops to Afghanistan:

He said: “We have resolved, first of all, as we did some years ago, that it is in the British national interest to confront the Taleban in Afghanistan or Afghanistan would come to us.”

Emphasis mine, obviously. The BBC doesn’t seem to have picked up on that, probably dismissing it as the usual New Labourite guff, but that little sentence is not just wrong, it’s despicable. This after all is the government that denied and still denies that the terrorist attacks on London in 2005 were caused by the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, even when the terrorists themselves said that’s why they attacked. It’s therefore quite flabbergasting to hear a British prime minister now say that if they withdraw the Taliban will follow the troops home.

Even if this was true –and notice how many terrorist attacks Russia had to endure from the Muhajedin after their withdrawal from Afghanistan– it takes chutzpah to insist that because the British decided to help their friends in Washington occupy Afghanistan they have created so many enemies the government now has no choice but to continue the occupation, continue getting British soldiers killed for fear of reaping at home what they sow abroad. A special kind of logic is required to swallow that sort of rot — unfortunately the media seems to have no trouble swallowing…

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…