War on Terror

The Cheek Of It!

Fashion in Action!, War on Terror, Women
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A revolution without dancing or pretty underwear is a revolution not worth having, if you ask me; especially when said nice pants cock a snook at the same time. Via Andy Worthington:

…With exquisite timing, lingerie darlings Agent Provocateur unveil their latest product, a pair of Guantánamo orange knickers emblazoned with the message “Fair Trial My Arse.”

Conceived after consultation with Reprieve, the London-based legal charity that represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees, the project arose after the farcical Case of the Contraband Underpants last August, when Clive Stafford Smith and Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve were accused of smuggling underwear into Guantánamo for two of their clients, Mohammed El-Gharani, a Saudi resident and Chadian national, who was just 15 years old when he was picked up in a random raid on a mosque in Pakistan, and British resident Shaker Aamer, a long-term hunger striker, who has been held in solitary confinement at Guantánamo for two and a half years.

More…

I can’t believe I didn’t notice those knickers (though maybe knickers is slightly too robust a word for something quite so diaphanous) back in February; my antenna for political luxury lingerie is usually quite acute.

That said, I doubt anyone who buys them will wear them; the associations aren’t exactly erotic. Not unless your name’s Mosley.

Gone Native?

Activism, Civil liberties, UK politics, War on Terror, Women
Published on 2 Comments on Gone Native?

I know you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but fine words butter no parsnips…

I’ve always admired Shami Chakrabarti, but it can’t just be me who’s noticed how soft the Liberty director seems to have become towards the Metropolitan police and other anti-terror types recently.

Although she’s never been a firebrand,

Chakrabarti takes pride in having converted Liberty from a “Labour front” into a respected, politically independent organisation that is equally critical of government and opposition. She is now also a governor of both the British Film Institute and the London School of Economics.

Recently she’s become positively emollient, honey and fine words, and lots of the best butter too.

Take this morning’s discussion on the Today programme with a senior Metropolitan Police officer and Blue Peter’s Olympic torch carrier Konnie Huq about yesterday’s anti-China demonstrations for example; Chakrabarti positively glowed with effusive praise for the Met and the wonderful job they do.

Although she did bring up the general point that the police’s job yesterday was to ensure public safety generally, not play security detail for the Chinese government, Chakrabarti seemed unwilling to even discuss larger issues about the police’s direct silencing of dissent at the protests, though she had much to say for the Met’s skill at ‘facilitating demonstrations’. Yes, the Met are successful, at least in the sense of coralling crowds of us plebs safely:

12.30pm Bloomsbury Square

Thousands of protesters are corraled into a “protest area” penned by security fences. One woman says she is told to place her banners in plastic bags after police judged them to be inflammatory. The torch and its security staff retrace their steps and climb on to a bus to be driven 200 metres to get past protesters, before re-emerging in front of crowds waving Chinese flags.

Safety is being increasingly defined in political terms by officers on the ground. Yesterday police ordered pro-Tibet protestors to remove anti-China t-shirts; arbitrarily labelled groups of people as ‘protestors’ or ‘celebrants’ and restricted them accordingly; and allowed a team of China’s security goons to physically intimidate and bully protestors, participants and runners alike, even to the point of skirmishing with Met officers themselves.

Chakrabarti was asked by the presenter whether banning t-shirts and banners like this was acceptable. Surely the director of an organisation dedicated to upholding civil liberties and the right to dissent would start from the premise that it wasn’t?

But no – instead she said that it depended on the T-shirt and its tendency to incite violence – in effect agreeing that yes, the silencing of dissent by police officers is acceptable.

The people who make the judgement whether a slogan or image on a t-shirt has a tendency to incite violence – which certainly seems like a political decision to me – are the police, and it’s fine and dandy with Liberty now for if the Met police the slogans on T-shirts according to their personal political perceptions. Shami just said so.

As I said earlier I was already wondering whether Chakrabarti (who was formerly a Home Office lawyer) had finally succumbed to the lure of the media spotlight – always a danger for young, photogenic female lobbyists – and the discreet charm of cosy Establishmentism. Has she finally reverted to Westminster type?

I was and still am prepared to be convinced otherwise, despite her acceptance of a CBE, but one sentence of hers this morning tends to demolish any lingering hope I might have had of her ever truly standing up to the police or government.

When the director of the nation’s foremost civil liberties pressure group pointedly refers to senior policemen in public as “My colleague” they’ve definitely gone native.

Much as I admire her let’s face it, despite seemingly being everywhere in the media and picking up a gong and honorary doctorates galore, Chakrabarti hasn’t had an enormous amount of actual success in opposing New Labour’s draconian laws, or against rendition or torture or the repeal of habeas corpus, has she?

Yes, she’s telegenic and articulate; yes, she’s scarily clever and very committed; and yes, she’s very nice and a role model for other young women. But the fact that she is so popular with the public and Establishment alike should tell us something; that, rather than a campaigning non-partisan political pressure group, Liberty is in danger of becoming the Shami Show.

A civil liberties pressure group should be a thorn in the side of the Establishment, not a cosy colleague: courtesy is one thing, capitulation is another. Civil liberties are about more than the cult of personality. Maybe it’s time for a change.

Another stunning success in The War Against Terror

War on Terror
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Things are not going well in Somalia:

NAIROBI (Reuters) – Forty aid agencies urged the world on Wednesday to focus attention on Somalia’s “catastrophic” humanitarian crisis where hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from war, drought and food shortages.

Their statement, issued by Oxfam, said Somalia now had one million internal refugees, their numbers swelled by an exodus of 20,000 a month from Mogadishu, where Islamist insurgents are fighting the Ethiopian-backed government.

Record high food prices, hyper-inflation and drought across the Horn of Africa nation were exacerbating the situation and will worsen if seasonal rains due from April fail as predicted.

Let’s recap. During the Cold War, Somalia was, like Ethiopia a pawn in the struggle between the US and the USSR, with the resident strongman Siad Barre first having the support of the Soviet Union, then of America. When he was finally toppled a civil war broke out, George H. W. Bush decided, high on victory in Gulf War II and the New World Order, to intervene. With their customary cackhandedness this meant the Americans taking sides and attempting to take out various warlords with little result but further antagonising the population until one day the Blackhawks came down… Since then the US was content to let the place stew, but then The War on Terror happened and since it looked like an Islamist movement was taking control of the country, America went back in. Not openly of course like in 1993, but by a) airstrikes against supposed terrorist targets in the country and b) backing the 2006 Ethiopian invasion of the country, the latter of which has now led to the humanitarian crisis described in the Reuters article.

Now I know it’s hard to believe of a country that was the butt of dubious and racist starvation jokes in the eighties, but Ethiopia has long been an imperial power in East Africa –ask Eritrea–, had already fought one war with Somalia about Ogaden, historically a part of Somalia but given to Ethiopia by the western powers at the end of World War 2 and is widely suspected in Somalia to want to subjugate the entire country, either directly or through a puppet government. No wonder their intervention only worsened an already bad situation.

But hey, at least Somalia isn’t in the hands of terrorists anymore!

Will She or Won’t She? Gitmo And Hillary

'08/12 Election, War on Terror
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Still the injustice of Gitmo goes on, while the media obsess over the primaries and a candidate’s eyebrow raised here or a tone of voice lowered there. But the media rarely ask the candidates about what they plan to do about routine kidnap, detention and torture.

Mother Jones:

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees often argue that their clients are being held based on thin intelligence, but Kurnaz’s case is the first where the record clearly shows that evidence of innocence was ignored to justify his continued detention. His story, pieced together from intelligence reports, newly declassified Pentagon documents, and secret testimony before the German Parliament—much of it never before reported in the United States—offers a rare window into the workings of the secretive system used to hold and try terrorism suspects.

It seems there are more rare windows into those workings, in the shape of fifty videotapes of CIA interrogations that Busco inadvertently failed to get wiped, (with their usual combination of evil and incompetence). There’s ten months to go of this. How much more?

Lawyers for Gitmo detainees endorse Obama as the best choice to reverse Bushco War on Terror detention policies to “restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community.”

Hillary Clinton has yet to give a definitive answer on what she’ll do about Gitmo – and more importantly what she’ll do about an intelligence and security apparatus that knows no restraint under Bushco.

Hillary boasts of her wealth of foreign policy experience, gained on the right-hand (so to speak) of the president. That would include experience of enabling Gitmo and the kidnap and detention of inocent men like Murat Kurmar, then?

It was the Clinton administration that established the precedent for Camp X-ray when it jailed Haitians for having AIDS, says Pauline Park at Visible Vote ’08:

In the wake of the September 1991 military coup that ousted Haiti’s first democratically elected president, the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted thousands of Haitian refugees who’d fled their country by boat and brought them to Guantánamo Bay. In 1992, the last year of his first and only term, George H.W. Bush ordered 300 of these Haitian refugees who had tested positive for HIV detained indefinitely without access to lawyers and held in leaky barracks behind razor wire. When Bill Clinton came into office, he continued the detention of these Haitian refugees.

Bill Clinton had won election in November 1992 as The Man from Hope, but to the Haitians in the AIDS death camp at Guantánamo, the situation looked hopeless until Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale University law professor, began working on their case with a group of his students. Brandt Goldstein documents the extraordinary story in his book, Storming the Court: How a Band of Yale Law Students Sued the President — and Won (Scribner 2005). In partnership with New York lawyer Michael Ratner, Koh and his students filed suit on behalf of the Haitian refugees. The Clinton Justice Department responded by moving to get the case dismissed and to have Yale and Koh punished with financial sanctions.

“Plaintiffs have been trying to use the courts to decide matters of national security, in place of the Defense Department, the Department of State, and the president himself,” Justice Department attorney Scott Dunn declared in arguing for the Clinton administration in federal court. “The courts have already decided that’s improper,” Dunn asserted, anticipating arguments that the Bush administration has made in defending the indefinite detention regime at Guantánamo since 2001.

Don’t look to another President Clinton to close Gitmo or stop rendition.