war on terror | ukwatch.net

Criminalising free speech

JamieSW — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:44:13 +0000

In November 2007 the European Commission submitted a proposal to add three new criminal offences to the 2002 EU Framework Decision on terrorism.1 If agreed by governments, EU countries will be obliged to criminalise “provocation”, “recruitment” and “training” for terrorism. Charges of “recruitment” and “training” will need to show a direct link with terrorist groups or activity (as defined in 2002), but the “provocation” offence is extremely broad, as it does not require a direct encouragement to commit terrorist acts but applies to any statements which create a “danger” of such acts being committed. According to the proposal:

“public provocation to commit a terrorist offence” means the distribution, or otherwise making available, of a message to the public, with the intent to incite the commission of [a terrorist offence as defined in the Framework Decision], where such conduct, whether or not directly advocating terrorist offences, causes a danger that one or more such offences may be committed.

As Statewatch pointed out in its analysis of the proposal, the wording of this definition is clearly likely to result in the criminalisation of the expression of political views (for example on the situation in Middle East or on certain conflicts within Member States), even if that expression does not in any way include the advocacy of terrorism to support those opinions.2 It will be enough that the authorities deem that there is a “danger” that this will happen, an actual terrorist offence as a consequence is expressly not necessary for the Framework Decision to apply.

The origins of the proposal

All three offences in the proposed Framework Decision are taken from the text of the 2005 Council of Europe convention on the prevention of terrorism.3 This Convention started life in 2003 in a working group established by Council of Europe Justice ministers to consider the harmonization of laws on incitement to terrorism and the act of “justifying terrorism”, which was already illegal in Spain (where prosecutions for the crime of “apología” have been extensive) and France (where prosecutions for “apologie” are extremely rare). After the Madrid bombings in March 2004 the Council of Europe mandated a far-reaching Convention addressing “public expressions of support for terrorist offences and/or groups”; “the instigation of ethnic and religious tensions which can provide a basis for terrorism”; “the dissemination of “hate speech” and the promotion of ideologies favourable to terrorism”.

The Council of Europe already had some experience in this area, having adopted in 2003 a Protocol to the “Cybercrime Convention” (of 2001) concerning the “criminalisation of acts of a racist and xenophobic nature committed through computer systems”, which addresses the dissemination of “racist propaganda” over the internet.4 However, while this Protocol contains an opt-out based expressly on established national principles concerning freedom of expression, there is no opt-out in the terrorism Convention agreed in 2005. There is at least a “safeguards” clause (in article 12) which obliges states to respect “freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of religion”, the principle of “proportionality” and the prohibition of “arbitrariness or discriminatory or racist treatment”. But in the EU proposals, even these limited safeguards have been dropped.

The EU negotiations

The EU proposals are a recipe for an overbroad offence encompassing political opinion and giving prosecutors enormous discretion in deciding when and if to bring cases for “public provocation” to terrorism. So bereft of human rights safeguards is the Commission’s proposal that the member states are considering introducing some of their own – a first for EU decision-making. The EU Council presidency describes the Commission’s proposal as “very delicate… situated on the borderline of fundamental rights and freedoms such as freedom of expression, assembly or of association and the right to respect for family life”.5 It is therefore “essential”, suggests the presidency, “that the right balance is struck”, as in the Council of Europe Convention. Of course, if the CoE Convention strikes such a delicate balance, why bother tinkering with it at all?

The solution proposed by the presidency is the insertion of a recital in the preamble to the draft Framework Decision based on article 12 of the Council of Europe Convention. However, as a recital, it will be of limited effect because member states are only obliged to align their national legal systems with the substantive obligations in the actual articles of the text. In opposition to the Commission proposal, Sweden – supported by other unnamed EU member states – has proposed a new article based on the draft EU Framework Decision on racism and xenophobia, which (like the CoE Cybercrime Protocol) contains an express opt-out allowing member states to abstain from enacting “measures in contradiction to fundamental principles relating to freedom of association and freedom of expression and assembly, in particular freedom of the press and the freedom of expression in other media”.

The limits to free speech

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that commissioned the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as, among other things, a terrorist, argued – provocatively and erroneously the eyes of many – that its actions addressed an important issue of self-censorship in the media:

“The modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where you must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule.6

While newspapers in many countries reprinted the cartoons, it is notable that the overwhelming majority of media organisations in the UK, USA, Canada and elsewhere chose not to. In doing so, they tacitly acknowledged the limits to free speech. As A. Sivanandan has put it:

“Europe holds that freedom of speech is the very basis of western democracy and cannot therefore be compromised or watered down. It is an absolute.

But that is a fallacy. No freedom is an absolute. Every freedom carries with it its own responsibility. The right to freedom of speech does not, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great American judge said, give you the right to falsely cry ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre.7“

Indeed, laws criminalising holocaust denial and incitement to racial hatred show very well the limits to free speech in western democracies. The status quo is an uneasy compromise based on the principles of respect for minority communities and social cohesion. Here the media occupies a crucial position, particularly when it comes to moderating the so-called “clash of civilisations”. Aidan White, Secretary-General of the International Federation of Journalists, has warned that “journalists need to be more conscious than ever about the dangers of media manipulation by unscrupulous politicians and racists”.8

Index on censorship

What began in Denmark as an exercise in counter-self censorship – albeit one of extremely dubious judgment, to say the least – quickly exploded into a politically charged issue seized upon by both sides of the ‘debate’. Exactly the same thing happened last year when Oxford University’s Student Union chose to hold a debate on free speech involving David Irving and Nick Griffin. Last month the Archbishop of Canterbury provoked a similar storm when his views about Sharia Law in Britain were seized upon by other supposed champions of free speech in the media. Yet for all the limits on free speech, all three examples show that freedom of expression is alive and well for cartoonists, racists, Archbishops and, for the time being at least, those that they offend.

The new EU proposals threaten to radically alter the status quo by criminalising speech that may provoke terrorism, even if where it does not directly advocate acts of terrorism. Because the EU’s definition of terrorism is so broad, the scope for criminalisation is enormous. “Terrorism” was defined in EU law in 2002 as:

“seriously intimidating a population, or unduly compelling a Government or international organisation to perform or abstain from performing any act, or seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organisation.”

To suggest that the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis or Afghans have the right to resist occupation and aggression through armed struggle could easily be construed as public provocation to terrorism. Advocates of direct action against corporations, government policies and intergovernmental organisations like the EU may also fall foul of the new laws.

Those who say that the new laws are needed argue that they are required to deal with “preachers of hate” and “Jihadi” websites. On the other hand, since incitement to murder and incitement to terrorism (included in the 2002 EU Framework Decision) are criminal offences, why not let the courts decide if that is what people are guilty of? It does seem reasonable for states to attempt action against websites that directly encourage atrocities such as ‘9/11’ and the Madrid and London bombings – however futile the uncontrollable nature of the web may render this exercise – but it is patently absurd to use them as a justification for the introduction of new offences criminalising people for their political beliefs or opinions.

The limits to permissible thought

In November 2007, Samina Malik, the 23-year-old self-professed “lyrical terrorist”, was convicted under section 28 of the UK Terrorism Act 2000 for the possession of material that is “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. The articles in question included the “terrorist manuals” she had downloaded from the internet and poems she had written about “Jihad”. After five months in prison on remand, Ms Malik was acquitted of the more serious charge of “possessing an article for terrorist purposes” under section 58 of the Act. So despite the jury finding no evidence to suggest that she ever actually intended to carry out an act of terrorism, she was given a suspended sentence for having even entertained the idea.

On 13 February 2008, the Court of Appeal quashed the earlier section 58 convictions of five young Muslim students for downloading extremist literature. The Court decided that while there was no doubt the men had possessed extremist literature, there was no proof that they ever intended to do anything with it. This demand for legal certainty exposes the inherent flaws in the EU proposals – they seek to criminalise the possession of a “dangerous” opinion. Christopher Hitchens recently defended the author Martin Amis of racist attacks on Muslims, saying “the harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation, but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought”. As John Pilger and others asked in a letter to the Guardian newspaper following the conviction of the “lyrical terrorist”, is the right to “experiment with the limits of permissible thought” now only accorded to people who have the correct skin colour, religion and academic background?9

Ben Hayes is a researcher with Statewatch and the Transnational Institute.

1. COM (2007) 650, 6.11.07. See SEMDOC website: http://www.statewatch.org/semdoc/503.html
2. See Statewatch News online, November 2007: http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/nov/03eu-com-terror-plans.htm
3. Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism of 2005 (CETS No.: 196)
4. Additional Protocol to the Convention on cybercrime, concerning the criminalisation of acts of a racist and xenophobic nature committed through computer systems (CETS No.: 189)
5. Council doc. 6761/08, 20.2.02.
6. “Muhammeds ansigt”, Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten, 30.9.05
7. “Freedom of speech is not an absolute”, interview with A. Sivanandan, Race & Class, July 2006.
8. “Journalism and Combating Intolerance: Those Cartoons and a Challenge to Free Expression and Quality Media”, Aidan White, http://www.ifj-asia.org/page/white_danish_cartoons.html
9. “Race, class and freedom of speech”, Iain Banks, Caryl Churchill, Lindsey German, Michael Kustow, Adrian Mitchell, Andrew Murray, John Pilger, Michael Rosen, Guardian, 7.12.07.

Chorus of failure grows ever louder over Afghanistan

Ellie Keen — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 22:04:26 +0000

GIVEN centuries of cross-Channel antipathy, can we believe what a Frenchman has to say on the thoughts of a Briton on progress in the war in Afghanistan? If a coded French diplomatic dispatch obtained by the respected Paris weekly Le Canard enchaine is to be believed, London’s man in Kabul thinks this war is lost.

In the ways of diplomacy, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles might be forgiven for believing his exchange early last month with Francois Fitou, the No.2 at the French Embassy, was strictly entre nous. But Fitou was so alarmed by what he heard, that he reported all its explosive detail to Paris – where it was promptly leaked to the investigative and satirical Le Canard enchaine.

Cutting across the official belief in Washington and London that the war is hard but winnable, Fitou says that Cowper-Coles told him current American strategy “is destined to fail”.

Fitou summarises the Englishman’s assessment: “The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the [Afghan] Government had lost all trust. [The insurgency], while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital.

“The presence – especially the military presence – of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime that would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis.”

Cowper-Coles apparently sees no benefit in boosting allied troops in Afghanistan – it would only increase the sense of an occupation and give the Taliban more targets, Fitou reports. Instead, the British ambassador argues that the only realistic solution is the emergence of “an acceptable dictator”, which would allow Britain to withdraw its troops within five to 10 years.

The report provoked howls in London. But stopping short of a denial, the Foreign Office declined to go into what was the thinking of the British ambassador. Resorting instead to its own sleight of hand, it denied something that Le Canard enchaine had not reported – that the thoughts attributed to Cowper-Coles were the views of the British Government.

The French report coincides with a crisis of confidence among Washington and its allies in Afghanistan, including on-the-record expressions of frustration by British officers after seven years of fighting in the country’s south.

“The perception of the threat from the Taliban continues to outstrip reality,” Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith told The Times last week. “This struggle is more down to the credibility of the Afghan Government rather than the threat from the Taliban.”

Washington has begun a raft of reviews of the conduct of the war amid conflicting assessments of what is required. The most senior levels of the American military are demanding more troops but at the same time they insist that an Iraq-style surge is not the answer.

“The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge’,” the new US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, said in Washington this week. Instead, he spoke of a “sustained commitment” over “many more years” and what ultimately would be a political, not a military solution.

But McKiernan argued that co-opting the Afghan tribes, as the US had done in Iraq after spurning their help for three years, was more a recipe for civil war than it was for peace or stability. “We’re in a very tough fight,” he told reporters. “The idea that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility.”

However, as Washington persists with fighting the war in Afghanistan on the cheap, investing just a fifth of what it spends in Iraq, unflattering comparisons are being made with past conflicts.

Zamir Kabulov, the Russian ambassador to Kabul, has lectured Washington that it is repeating the mistakes made by Moscow during its 1980s occupation of Afghanistan, when it believed that control of Kabul and the provincial centres equated with control of an essentially rural population.

Increasingly, another benchmark is Vietnam. Writing in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the US military analysts Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason started by highlighting that more Americans have died in seven years in Afghanistan than in the first nine years of the Vietnam War.

“More and more the American effort in Afghanistan resembles the Vietnam War – with its emphasis on body counts and air strikes, its cross-border sanctuaries, and its daily tactical victories that never affect the slow and eventual decisive erosion of rural support for the counterinsurgency,” they write.

They, too, see a parallel with Moscow’s Afghanistan adventure. “That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centres. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now.”

They argue America is failing because of its “endemic failure” to engage and protect rural villages and to immunise them against the insurgency.

The cornerstone of the policy – to extend the reach of the Karzai Government – was precisely the wrong strategy in a country and society in which the most important level of governance was local. But allied military contact with remote villagers was rare, typically brief and nearly always limited to daylight hours.

“Re-empowering the village councils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to recreate the traditional check against a powerful political network of rural mullahs, who have been radicalised by the Taliban,” they write. “But the elders will not commit to opposing the Taliban if they and their families are vulnerable to Taliban torture and murder.”

The analysts suggest the deployment of 200 development and security teams in the south and east of the country. Each would have 60 to 70 NATO troops, 30 to 40 Afghan National Army troops and an equal number of logistics and development staff.

The current system of international reconstruction teams was spread far too thinly. Confined to the regional centres, their ratio to the local population was one team per 1 million people and they visited districts only once a month.

The teams proposed by Johnson and Mason would be a permanent international presence at the district level. “State Department and USAID personnel, along with medics, veterinarians, engineers, agricultural experts, hydrologists and so on could live on the local compounds and work in their districts daily, building trust and confidence,” they say.

“As long as the compounds are discretely sited, house Afghan soldiers to provide the most visible security presence and fly the Afghan flag, they need not exacerbate fears of foreign occupation. Instead, they would reinforce the country’s most important, most neglected political units; strengthen the tribal elders; win local support; and reverse the slow slide into strategic failure.”

The Afghanistan debate has always been about balancing the need to fight the Taliban and the other insurgency groups, and to defend the population so they might get on with their lives.

The latter means a radical change in a military-heavy strategy in a part of the world where killing one enemy creates 10 more.

It also requires greater recognition of the warning from General David Richards, who headed NATO forces in Afghanistan until February last year: “If NATO doesn’t succeed in bringing substantial economic development to Afghanistan soon, some 70 per cent of Afghans will shift their loyalty to the Taliban.”

Richards’s warning had less drama than the words attributed to Cowper-Coles – but both men seem to be singing from the same song sheet.

It’s a song about failure.

Doubts over women suicide bombers

JamieSW — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:00:31 +0000

Most British newspapers carried a story on August 26 about a young Iraqi woman who allegedly was a suicide bomber, but who surrendered to police in Baqouba rather than blow herself up.

There were serious doubts about the story’s authenticity, however. For example, the Metro and the Telegraph reported that the circumstances of her arrest remain unclear, with US officials saying she turned herself in but Iraqi police claiming she was caught after behaving suspiciously.

The Guardian, however, published the claims of the Iraqi police without a shred of probing or scepticism. For example, the paper said that the girl’s father “had carried out a suicide bombing”, while Arabic TV stations showed both the girls’ parents sitting indoors.

Moreover, publishing Abu Ghraib-like photos and video of the young woman in such a humiliating situation verged on the pornographic. The Iraqi police certainly appeared to be enjoying the interrogation.

The Iraqi police have been shown on many occasions in the past to have made up stories. The widely-reported claim that women with Down’s syndrome blew themselves up in a market in Baghdad in February was full of holes.

Everyone in Iraq knows that all the police do after the bombing is washout the evidence. On numerous occasions eyewitnesses have said an explosion was a car bomb – with government number plates – while the police and the puppet government claim it was a suicide bomber. The truth is always the first casualty in these incidents.

All these recent claims about Iraqi women suicide bombers are either made by the US or by the Iraqi puppet government of the Green Zone in an attempt to show that the resistance in Iraq is defeated and therefore resorting to desperate measures. But very few people in Iraq believe that these security forces are there to protect them. According to Mohamed Al Dayni, member of the Iraqi parliament, there are at many documented cases of rape committed by members of the Iraqi security forces, yet to be properly investigated or prosecuted.

I telephoned the reader’s editor of the Guardian to lodge a complaint, in a polite but upset voice. The woman who answered the phone breathed a sigh down the phone as I was explaining to her my complaint as if she was bored.

Can I suggest that people write a short email or make a telephone call to the reader’s editor to complain about the Guardian’s article: reader@guardian.co.uk,
0207 7134736

Afghanistan: on the cliff-edge

JamieSW — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:01:57 +0000

Many sober analysts of the war in Afghanistan expected a military offensive by the Taliban in the early months of 2008. They also suspected that Taliban paramilitaries would avoid major confrontations with foreign forces, out of awareness of the overwhelming firepower that these could launch even on quite small groups. They expected instead an extension of the use of small raids, improvised roadside-bombs and suicide-attacks.

In the event these tactics have indeed been widely used. But the increased level of Taliban activity has been expressed in many other ways as well. They have included a closely coordinated assault on a prison in Kandahar that released hundreds of Taliban detainees; an attack on the Serena international hotel in the heart of Kabul on 14 January; the bombing of the Indian embassy there on 7 July; and a major increase in attacks on transport links (see “The global economic war“, 14 August 2008).

This widening of targets is serious enough for American, British and other military commanders. What has really surprised them, however, has been the ability of Taliban and other militias to engage in significant conventional military attacks. One of these, on 13 July, killed nine United States troops in a newly established but isolated base in Kunar province; another, on 19 August, killed ten French soldiers in Sar0bi (Surobi) district, only fifty kilometres east of Kabul. The deteriorating situation in Afghanistan had even before these assaults been reflected in the redeployment of a full aircraft-carrier battle-group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to the Indian Ocean to bring its planes within range of southern Afghanistan.

The result is to provide the US with far more airpower. In addition, the group’s flagship has offered itself as a venue for high-level diplomacy: top US and Pakistani military commanders (including Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs-of-staff ,and General Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistan army’s chief-of-staff) met on the USS Abraham Lincoln on 26 August to analyse the security crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan itself – without, it seems, a positive result (see Pauline Jelinek, “Pentagon brass meet with Pakistanis on carrier“, Associated Press, 28 August 2008).

By the last week of August 2008, the total US military death-toll in Afghanistan has reached 580; as many as 105 have been killed in 2008 alone, including sixty-five in May-July, the worst period since the war started in October 2001 (see Jason Straziuso, “US deaths reach 101 for the year in Afghanistan“, Associated Press, 25 August 2008).

Across the border in Pakistan, there were credible reports of an expanding Taliban/al-Qaida training system, with new camps established in the border districts (see “Afghanistan: state of siege“, 10 July 2008). Some limited Pakistani army actions had very little effect (see Jane Perlez & Pir Zubair Shah, “Pakistani Taliban Repel Government Offensive“, New York Times, 10 August 2008), while sixty-four people were killed in a double bombing of one of Pakistan’s largest munitions factories (see Jane Perlez, “64 in Pakistan Die in Bombing at Arms Plant“, New York Times, 22 August 2008).

An argument of force

There is now a developing consensus that Taliban militias, along with warlord groups and al-Qaida paramilitaries, have considerably expanded their influence across much of southern and southeastern Afghanistan, with Taliban/al-Qaida elements also gaining control of large areas of western Pakistan close to the Afghan border (see Jason Straziuso, “U.S. Losing Edge in Afghanistan, Experts Fear“, AP/Arizona Republic, 25 August 2008). A deep concern over the vulnerability of the major military supply-routes from the Pakistani port of Karachi through to Kabul has been compounded by a Russian threat to suspend its agreement with Nato for transit of military materials through its own territory (see Jeremy Page, “Russian Threat to Nato Supply Route In Afghanistan“, Times, 26 August 2008).

The coalition’s reliance on air-power has resulted in further civilian casualties. Around 700 Afghan civilians have been killed in January-August 2008; the worst such incident being on 21 August when, according to United Nations sources, at least sixty children and thirty adults were killed in a US air- raid (see Jon Boone, “UN confirms 90 civilians killed in Afghanistan air strikes“, Financial Times, 27 August 2008. Meanwhile, Taliban units are now operating close to Kabul, and have advanced to secure control of parts of Kandahar (see Carlotta Gall, “Taliban Gain New Foothold in Afghan City“, New York Times, 27 August 2008).

From the Pentagon’s perspective, what is to be done? Most of the foreign forces in Afghanistan are under Nato control in the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf); but this is largely under the leadership of the United States, and the overall war in Afghanistan is dominated by US planning and support. Britain, together with Canada and the Netherlands, may be heavily involved in counter-insurgency operations, but they are relatively small actors in a scene where the Pentagon is the driving-force.

Thus, the views of Washington are decisive: and the overwhelming judgment there – across the political spectrum – is that Afghanistan is now the central focus of the “war on terror”. The John McCain and Barack Obama camps each take the view that there must be a substantial increase in the use of military force in Afghanistan, especially if some limited withdrawals from Iraq become possible (see Godfrey Hodgson, “America’s foreign-policy election“, 28 August 2008).

A game of consequence

Thus, the bottom-line is that there is only one answer to the Taliban revival, the revitalisation of al-Qaida, and even the jihadist presence in western Pakistan: the application of intense military force. There is simply no other way.

This has three key consequences. The first is that the more force that is applied in Afghanistan the greater the risk not just of civilian casualties but of creating an environment in which the foreign military presence is seen more and more as an occupation. There are already well over 60,000 foreign troops in the country, with the majority engaged in combat. Moreover, civilian deaths are causing such controversy that Kabul’s political class is trying to distance itself from the United States. As a military build-up intensifies in late 2008, there is a strong risk that the perception of occupation will extend well beyond the Taliban and other militias together with their immediate supporters.

The second consequence is that the more a perception of western occupation grows, the more likely it is that the opposing forces take on a perspective of global jihad. Most previous resistance to foreign forces, as against the Soviets in the 1980s, was grounded in nationalist or ethnic sentiment rather than being part of a global movement. Over the past year there have been clear signs that Taliban militias in conjunction with the al-Qaida movement and paramilitaries that have travelled from north Africa, the middle east and central Asia have increasingly seen their insurgency as elements in just such a movement.

Moreover, the impulses of sympathy with these radical forces are fuelled by the detailed reporting by al-Jazeera and other media outlets of the many civilian victims of western air-strikes and other calamities in Afghanistan. This ensures that Muslims across the rest of the world are , just as Iraq has done so over the past five years. Muslims across the rest of the world are becoming as aware of what is happening in Afghanistan as they have been regarding Iraq since 2003 (see “Afghanistan in an amorphous war“, 19 June 2008).

The third consequence is the state of Pakistan, where political instability and the resignation of Pervez Musharraf entails a decrease in United States influence over actions in the border districts. Many of these districts are independent of Islamabad’s control, paramilitary training-camps are operating, supplies readily pass through to Afghanistan, and supportive populations provide a stream of recruits to the cause across the border (see Eric Schmitt, “Top military officials discuss violence along Pakistani border“, International Herald Tribune, 28 August 2008). Almost all military analysts agree that the subjugation of the Taliban and associated warlords in Afghanistan is impossible as long as this situation continues. The al-Qaida leadership has also sufficiently reconstituted itself in western Pakistan to be able once more to exert influence even beyond the middle east and southwest Asia (see “Al-Qaida’s afterlife“, 29 May 2008).

A bitter harvest

The impact of these developments on the United States is to increase the conviction that to win the war in Afghanistan requires the application of greater force there and an acceptance that at some stage the US will have to intervene forcefully in western Pakistan (see Peter Spiegel & Josh Meyer, “U.S. Debates Going After Militants in Pakistan“, Los Angeles Times, 23 August 2008). There are alternatives, including an acceptance of the need to engage systematically with some of the less radical militia elements, but these are simply not on Washington’s agenda. Thus a more intense and more extensive war seems likely between now and early 2010, with the likelihood that this is just what the al-Qaida movement wants.

In 2003, a few analysts warned that occupying Iraq would lead to an intense and dangerous conflict that would serve as a jihadist combat training-zone of great value to the al-Qaida movement (see, for example, “A thirty-year war“, 4 April 2003). That was indeed the outcome; and an American insistence on remaining in Iraq – whatever the Nouri al-Maliki government may want – means that Iraq may yet come to the fore in this role again. For now, though, the focus moves on – or more correctly, back – to Afghanistan.

When the nineteen hijackers perpetrated the 9/11 atrocities, the al-Qaida movement no doubt expected that the United States would occupy Afghanistan and could be vanquished there in a war of grinding attrition, just as the Soviets had been. In the event, to terminate the Taliban regime the Pentagon cleverly used air-power, special forces and a rearming of the Northern Alliance rather than a direct occupation.

Even then, this seemed to be too easy. One of the earliest columns in this series suggested that: “...an apparent US victory achieved before the end of the year may, in reality, be just a further stage in a longer-term civil war in Afghanistan. This is supported by the likelihood that many Taliban and al-Qaida units have already crossed the border into north-west Pakistan, where there is substantial local support for their position…” (see “The ninth week of the war“, 4 December 2001).

Now that a direct occupation of Afghanistan has evolved and is set to expand, there is the added complication of deep insecurity across the border in Pakistan. Only two months away from the eighth year of the start of the Afghan war – and following their recent setbacks in Iraq – Osama bin Laden and the other elements of the al-Qaida leadership may well be looking forward to a new era in their conflict with their “far enemy”. Iraq has to an extent served its purpose, but Afghanistan may now come to overshadow even that bitter and costly conflict.

Security Services on trial

tim — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:05:30 +0000

A London court has ruled that the British government must disclose information that could support the claim that torture was used to extract confessions from Binyam Mohamed, a former British resident who has been held in Guantánamo Bay since September 2004.

The ruling by the Judicial Review—a special court that considers the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body—is a rebuff to Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who had initially argued that he was under no obligation to provide Mohamed’s lawyers with the information.

Binyam Mohamed has now been incarcerated for nearly six and half years. He was first detained in Pakistan, and then subjected to “extraordinary rendition”—Washington’s euphemism for its programme of organised kidnapping and torture—to Morocco. Here he was held for 18 months while his captors used torture—including slicing his genitals with a razor—to wring a “confession” out of him.

He currently faces trial by a US Military Tribunal, charged with conspiring to commit terrorism and providing material support for terrorism in an alleged “dirty-bomb” plot. He could face the death penalty if found guilty. The judges ruled that the information is “not only necessary but essential for his defence”.

Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, Director of Reprieve, who has represented Mohamed since 2005, told the press, “This is a momentous decision. Compelling the British government to release information that can prove Mr. Mohamed’s innocence is one obvious step towards making up for the years of torture that he has suffered. The next step is for the British government to demand an end to the charade against him in Guantánamo Bay, and return him home to Britain.”

In their ruling, the judges state, “It is a long standing principle of the common law that confessions obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment cannot be used as evidence in any trial.”

The Judicial Review was held at the end of July over five days in both open and closed sessions, also hearing testimony in camera from British Security Service and Secret Service officers who had been involved in the questioning of Mohamed while he was detained in Pakistan and elsewhere. The court’s 75-page open judgement was finally published last week, while a secret “closed” judgement has also been made.

Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones found there were compelling grounds that the “exculpatory” information should be released in confidence to Mohamed’s legal representatives. No order for the provision of such information has been made until a further hearing considers the issues of “national security” raised by the Foreign Secretary as grounds for its non-disclosure.

At the Judicial Review, Dinah Rose QC, representing Mohamed, told the court that by cooperating with the US in its unlawful treatment of her client, the security and intelligence agencies were “mixed up in wrongdoing”. It was also alleged that the US “provided the UK with the fruits of his interrogation”.

Rose said that a British agent—identified only as “Witness B”—had made a “veiled threat” to Mohamed while he was being held in Pakistan, to encourage his “cooperation”, with the implication that “we won’t help you unless you confess”. She also asserted that MI5 had “repeatedly” provided the US authorities with detailed information about Mohamed’s life in the UK, information that was then used by his captors during interrogation.

In his summing up, Ben Jaffey, another of Mohamed’s legal team, highlighted the contradictions in MI5’s accounts; one MI5 officer had said that British security and intelligence agencies “did not know” Binyam Mohamed’s whereabouts after he was flown out of Pakistan in 2002, whereas an MI5 representative had explicitly told the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee that it believed he was in US custody.

Seeking to justify its refusal to hand over information that could uphold Mohamed’s claim that he was tortured, the government told the court that the UK was “hugely dependent in a number of areas on US intelligence”.

Moreover, it was a “fundamental principle” that information passed between the countries not be disclosed to a third party without the consent of the country which had provided it. “Any disclosure, however limited, would seriously undermine this principle to the point that future cooperation between the UK and its most valuable intelligence partner, the US, would be severely jeopardised”, posing a “very serious risk to UK national security”.

Judicial Review findings

Binyam Mohamed’s case makes a mockery of the Labour government’s pretensions to oppose the use of torture and uphold human rights.

While claiming to uphold the Geneva Conventions and international treaties outlawing the use of torture, British military personnel, as well as officers from the various intelligence agencies have been implicated in the mistreatment of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Binyam Mohamed, they have been caught red-handed.

The judgement records that “it was accepted on behalf of the Foreign Secretary… that BM [Binyam Mohamed] had established an arguable case (i) that over the period April 2002 to May 2004 he was first held by the United States incommunicado and without access to a lawyer or a court or tribunal in Pakistan, and then detained there or elsewhere by the United States until his arrival in Guantánamo Bay in September 2004 (ii) that he was subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by or on behalf of the United States during such detention and (iii) that he was subject to torture during such detention by or on behalf of the United States.”

Moreover, the legal hearing and court ruling establish conclusively that not only did the British government know about the mistreatment of Mohamed, British agents also facilitated this “wrongdoing”. The judges found that “The relationship between the United Kingdom Government and the United States authorities was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing”.

Even more damning, the court found “that on the basis that what was done was arguably wrongdoing, the SyS [Security Service] facilitated it in the manner and to the extent described.”

The court concluded that the “conduct of the Security Service facilitated interviews by or on behalf of the United States when BM was being detained by the United States incommunicado and without access to a lawyer in Pakistan in the period April 2002 until at least May 2002… The Court also concluded that the Security Service continued to facilitate the interviewing of BM by providing information and questions after 17 May 2002, in the knowledge of what was reported to them as to the circumstances of his detention and treatment in Pakistan.”

The Security Services then continued to provide further information and questions to their American counterparts, even when they knew that Mohamed had been moved from Afghanistan to a third country, where he faced serious mistreatment.

Mohamed’s lawyers have been pressing the government to release information and documents they held that might sustain his claim that the “evidence” against him had been extracted under torture. After an initial request for information was lodged by his legal representatives in April, government lawyers responded by saying the “UK is under no obligation under international law to assist foreign courts and tribunals in assuring that torture evidence is not admitted”.

Binyam Mohamed’s case was finally accepted for Judicial Review at the beginning of June. Recognising the urgency of his plight, Mr Justice Saunders agreed to an “expedited” hearing, saying, “If it is correct that in the course of an interrogation, in which material supplied by the Defendant [the British government] was employed, the Claimant [Binyam Mohamed] was tortured, then it is arguable that there is an obligation to disclose material which may assist Claimant in establishing before the American Military Court that he was tortured. Whether the Court should exercise its discretion not to order disclosure can only be determined at a full hearing.”

It was not until this application for a Judicial Review was accepted that the Foreign Secretary then grudgingly acknowledged government documents “could be considered exculpatory or might otherwise be relevant in the context of proceedings before the Military Commissions”.

Geneva Conventions

In its deliberations, the court considered whether the British government or its agents had contravened the Genva Conventions.

“The United Kingdom Armed Forces are trained in the laws of armed conflict set out in the Geneva Conventions. The Joint Services Intelligence Organisations’ training documentation states that the following techniques are expressly and explicitly forbidden: (a) physical punishment of any sort; (b) the use of stress positions; (c) intentional sleep deprivations; (d) withdrawal of food, water or medical treatment and three other specified techniques.”

Citing a 2007 report by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), established by the Intelligence Services Act 1994 to examine the policy, administration and expenditure of the Security Service (SyS), Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the court found that the SyS and SIS “must have appreciated that it [rendition] was contrary to the rule of law.”

The ruling also documents the fact that the government knew of the ongoing and persistent mistreatment of detainees being held by the American authorities, or those acting on their behalf.

From December 2001, British intelligence operatives were able to interview detainees in Afghanistan, if permission was given by the US authorities holding them. The first SyS officers arrived at Bagram airbase on January 9, 2002 to begin this interrogation.

A report from one such officer dated January 10, 2002 contained certain “observations” about the conditions under which the detainees were being held. As a consequence, on January 11, 2002, instructions were sent to all SIS and SyS officers in Afghanistan that all prisoners, “however they are described, are entitled to the same levels of protection.”

Despite claims that this merely represented an “isolated case”, the judgement records that there were reports of a “further isolated case” in March 2002, and in April 2002 an SIS officer was present at an interrogation of a detainee by the US military, who complained of being kept “in isolation”.

In June 2002, according to an ISC report cited by the court, the SyS had discussed with Foreign and Commonwealth officials a US report that referred to the “hooding, withholding of blankets and sleep deprivation of a detainee in Afghanistan”.

Again, in July 2002, a SyS officer reported to his senior management that whilst in Afghanistan, “a United States official had referred to ‘getting a detainee ready’, which appeared to involve sleep deprivation, hooding and the use of stress positions.”

The court ruling cited an official document that was sent to all Security Service and Secret Service officers in Afghanistan in January 2002: “With regard to the status of the prisoners, under the various Geneva Conventions and protocols, all prisoners, however they are described, are entitled to the same levels of protection. You have commented on their treatment. It appears from your description that they may not be being treated in accordance with the appropriate standards. Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this. That said, HMG’s [Her Majesty’s Government] stated commitment to human rights makes it important that the Americans understand that we cannot be party to such ill treatment nor can we be seen to condone it.”

Such is the Labour government’s venal double-talk: not only has the British government tacitly accepted the use of torture by the US authorities from the beginning of the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and benefited from the “intelligence” it produces), British agents have actively facilitated it. All that counts is that HMG must not be “seen” to condone it!

This kind of terror prevention constrains us all

Ellie Keen — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:10:16 +0000

Aabid Khan, Sultan Muhammed and Hammad Munshi were all found guilty under the Terrorism Act this week. Between them they had what’s been described as a ‘terrorist library’: manuals on weapons, explosives and poisons, as well as video clips of mujahideen fighting and information about transport systems in the US and UK.

Their online conversations included discussing how to smuggle a sword through airport security. The dominant figure in the group — Aabid Khan — wrote chillingly of wanting to ‘cause trouble for the kuffar…cause fear and panic in their countries’ and aimed to recruit ‘a group of at least 12’. Khan received a 12-year sentence; Muhammad was sentenced to 10 years and Munshi — the youngest person to be convicted under the Terrorism Act — is still to receive his sentence.

Yet the main evidence against them was the documents in their possession. There does not appear to have been a plot. As far as the Crown Prosecution Service is concerned, there doesn’t have to be a plot. The men were prosecuted under Section 57 of the Terrorism Act 2000 — possessing an article for a purpose connected with terrorism. ‘The purpose of this legislation is to enable the police and the prosecuting authorities to act early against people who possess articles for a terrorist purpose, before a plan or conspiracy to commit a particular act has necessarily been formed.’

It’s worth comparing these convictions with a case that was quashed earlier this year in the Court of Appeal. A group of young men were convicted under the Section 57 of the Terrorism Act in similar circumstances (although less well connected than Aabid Khan to other extremists). They too had downloaded huge quantities of material and they too were excitedly discussing potentially violent ideas (the group also included a schoolboy). Yet the Court of Appeal found that possession of an article in itself was not an offence — what mattered was if was there an intention to use the material for terrorism.

It’s possible on this basis that there might be grounds for appeal.

The problem with this kind of terrorism prevention is that it constrains us all. There is no room for intellectual curiosity, for flirting with unfashionable ideology or even for engaging in serious research on the topic: Rizwaan Sabir and Hicham Yezza were reported to the police by their own university and detained for six days last May. Sabir had been studying extremism and had asked Yezza to print out a document for him.

Such is the culture of fear and confusion that he was not even safe to do his research in a centre of academic freedom. There can be no better example of how counter terrorism has pervaded our culture — and of the damage caused by such a broadly defined offence.

Trained in Terror

Ellie Keen — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Phyllis Kipteo still does not know why Kenyan paratroopers dragged her husband from their home in the middle of the night four months ago. The following morning she went to the military camp at Chepkube in Kenya’s Mount Elgon district close to the border with Uganda, but the soldiers there could tell her nothing. She last saw him through the barbed wire fence of the camp; he was naked, bruised and couldn’t walk.

Her story might sound an ordinary tale of military brutality except that the soldiers who tortured her husband and may have killed him are the first graduates of a new British counter-terrorism training programme for foreign forces.

“Operation Monogram” provides counter-terrorism training and equipment to foreign security forces in parts of the world the British government believes are hotbeds of violent extremism that could threaten the UK. Kenya is one of the first beneficiaries of the programme because it shares a border with war-torn Somalia and because of its own experience of terrorist attacks, in particular the US embassy bombing in 1998.

Among its graduates are 20 Para, a parachute regiment in the Kenyan army. But rather than being deployed along the Somali border, units from 20 Para were sent into the district of Mount Elgon, Kenya’s second highest peak on the border with Uganda. Mount Elgon is a national park and protected forest where a little-known insurgent group, the Sabaot land defence force (SLDF), has terrorised the population and claimed the lives of at least 600 people since 2006.

The Kenyan approach to counter-insurgency in Mount Elgon district was strikingly reminiscent of the British in their brutal suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. Soldiers went from village to village rounding up nearly all of the male population of the district and taking them to military camps for “screening”. On the way and upon arrival in the camps the men were beaten severely; some died. Then the survivors were forced to line up and bite the back of the man in front of them. Informers in a Land Rover with blacked-out windows decided who was a member of the militia and those deemed innocent were then set free.

Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of victims of the military screening who complained of problems breathing, urinating, walking, and sleeping after severe beatings. Prison officials say they treated dozens for severe injuries who were delivered to the jail after being detained in the military camp. Some 800 suspects were remanded in jail and between March and May 4,000 were screened in total.

After an outcry, mass detentions are no longer the strategy of the Kenyan military and the authorities say an internal investigation is under way into the allegations of abuse. However, spokesmen simultaneously deny that their forces are capable of torture.

Initially the British military appeared to accept the assurances from the Kenyans. Britain has important strategic interests in Kenya. Besides being an important ally in counter-terrorism Kenya is the hub for a UK programme to train African forces for peacekeeping operations. Furthermore, the UK uses Kenyan territory for training British infantry in jungle and desert warfare.

This week, however, Human Rights Watch provided hard evidence suggesting that the Kenyan assurances given to the British are worthless. An off-duty prison guard who was on leave in Mount Elgon said he was arrested by a group from 20 Para and beaten to within an inch of his life, apparently because it suspected his brother of involvement with the SLDF. He identified the unit and the officers who beat him. They later apologised.

Presented with the facts, prominently reported on Channel 4 News on Monday, the UK government has now threatened to suspended military training of Kenyan forces and has encouraged the Kenyan authorities get to the bottom of the abuses in Mount Elgon.

This is the right thing to do. But rather than waiting for human rights organisations like Human Rights Watch to point out the shortcomings of its counter-terrorism collaboration with African and Middle Eastern security forces, the British government should be working proactively to ensure that these security forces act according to the law. The US, which is involved in the same places for the same reasons, should follow suit.

Another recipient of UK and US assistance and diplomatic support is Ethiopia, whose security forces have committed war crimes and serious human rights abuses in the course of their counter-insurgency operations in Somalia and in the Ogaden in eastern Ethiopia. Both London and Washington have failed to speak out against those abuses let alone reviewed their assistance to Addis Ababa.

Back in Mount Elgon district, Phyllis has filed a habeas corpus case against the Kenyan government. She wants to know what happened to her husband – and so do the families of other “disappeared” – but many cannot afford lawyers. More than 40 people are still missing, last seen by their relatives being bundled into military trucks in the early hours. “This is how counter-insurgency is done,” senior police and military officials told me. If this is how it is done in Kenya, or any other front in the fight against terrorism, then Britain should have no part in it.

Ben Rawlence is Kenya researcher for Human Rights Watch

Binyam Mohamed’s judicial review

JamieSW — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:00:55 +0000

On Monday July 28, just four days after his 30th birthday, British resident and Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed was finally granted the opportunity to have his case heard, albeit in front of a British judge, rather then his American captors, and even though he was unable to attend the hearing, because he remains imprisoned in Guantánamo. There he waits in isolation to discover whether the US administration, which put him forward for trial by Military Commission at the start of June, will formally arraign him on charges of “conspiracy” and “providing material support for terrorism” over the coming weeks.

Binyam has been imprisoned without trial for six years and four months — first in Pakistan, then in Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months on behalf of the US authorities, then for nine months, in the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, a secret prison run by the CIA and at a US military prison in Bagram airbase, and finally, since September 2004, at Guantánamo.

The judicial review that took place last week came about after Binyam’s lawyers — at Leigh Day & Co. and Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents 30 Guantánamo prisoners — requested, in April, that the British government hand over any evidence in its possession regarding its knowledge of Binyam’s long ordeal, which might provide invaluable exculpatory evidence to assist Binyam in his anticipated trial.

The lawyers were specifically seeking information relating to Binyam’s rendition from Pakistan to Morocco, which was known about in advance by British agents, who visited him in Pakistani custody and offered him a heavily-sugared cup of tea, telling him, “Where you’re going, you need a lot of sugar.” They were also concerned to establish the extent of British involvement in his subsequent torture in Morocco, where, as he told Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s Director, during a visit at Guantánamo, his lowest point came not as the result of his frequent physical torture (which included having his genitals regularly cut with a razor blade), but when his captors asked him questions about his life in London, which could only have come from the British intelligence services, and he realized that he had been betrayed by the country in which he had sought asylum as a teenager.

The trigger for the judicial review was the cold-hearted response of the British government’s lawyers to the request filed by Binyam’s lawyers. The government’s legal advisers claimed that “the UK is under no obligation under international law to assist foreign courts and tribunals in assuring that torture evidence is not admitted” and that “it is HM Government’s position that … evidence held by the UK Government that US and Moroccan authorities engaged in torture or rendition cannot be obtained” by his British lawyers.

Approving an “expedited” judicial review at the start of June (meaning, it would appear, that he understood the urgency of the case), Mr. Justice Saunders explained, “If it is correct that in the course of an interrogation, in which material supplied by the Defendant [HM Government] was employed, the Claimant [Binyam Mohamed] was tortured, then it is arguable that there is an obligation to disclose material which may assist Claimant in establishing before the American Military Court that he was tortured. Whether the Court should exercise its discretion not to order disclosure can only be determined at a full hearing.”

With that final caveat, it was by no means certain that the judicial review would go Binyam’s way, but on Monday the sparks began to fly almost immediately. Dinah Rose QC, Binyam’s counsel, wasted no time in telling Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones, as the Guardian described it, that “the security and intelligence agencies were ‘mixed up in wrongdoing’ in cooperating with the US in the unlawful treatment” of Mr. Mohamed, and added that, in return for information provided by the British intelligence services to their US counterparts, the US “provided the UK with the fruits of his interrogation.”

Rose explained to the judges that a British agent, identified only as “witness B,” made a “veiled threat” to Binyam, while he was in Pakistani custody, to encourage him to “cooperate with his interrogators when the officer saw him after he was first captured in Pakistan.” The implication, she noted, was “we won’t help you unless you confess.” She added that MI5 then “repeatedly” supplied the US authorities with detailed information about Mr. Mohamed’s life in London for US officials to use in his interrogation, even though, as she pointed out, the British officials “did not press the US to tell them where Mohamed was being held after he was transferred from Pakistan, and in what conditions.”

Rose also declared that the government “must have known the treatment Mohamed was likely to face [in Pakistan], ‘given the history of the Pakistan authorities.’” This provoked a response from the government’s representatives, who, rather feebly, perhaps, in light of recent revelations that the British government has colluded with the Pakistani authorities in anti-terror operations to a shocking extent, “did not dispute that Mohamed was held incommunicado for three months in Pakistan but did not accept the conditions in which he was held there were unlawful.”

After this promising start, Tuesday’s session was even more explosive. Although the hearing was only scheduled for two days, it was extended after the first half of the day was taken up in a closed court cross-examination of “witness B,” which observers interpreted as meaning that the judges were drilling mercilessly for the truth.

The second half of the day involved a similarly extraordinary scenario. This time the judges, having asked the government to vouch for the independence of Susan Crawford, the Military Commissions’ Convening Authority, who is responsible for overseeing the Commission process, brandished a letterhead which revealed that Ms. Crawford actually works for the US Department of Defense, and declared that, in light of this seemingly clear evidence of political interference in what is supposed to be an impartial trial system, they would be devoting time in their deliberations to examining whether or not the Military Commissions can be regarded as a fair process.

To everyone’s surprise, almost the whole of the rest of the week’s sessions were taken up with the continued closed court cross-examination of “witness B.” Considering that observers had indicated at the start of the judicial review that the cross-examination would probably only last for half an hour, the only rational conclusion that could be drawn was that the allegations of “wrongdoing” mentioned by Dinah Rose QC were being fully explored by the judges — possibly in a criminal context — and this undoubtedly explains why, on arriving at the court earlier in the week, “witness B” had brought his own lawyer with him.

Summing up on Friday, Ben Jaffey, another of Binyam’s lawyers, revisited the complaints made by Dinah Rose in light of the week’s developments. As the Guardian explained, Jaffey highlighted disturbing contradictions in MI5’s statements, telling the court that in his witness statement an MI5 officer had said that Britain’s security and intelligence agencies “did not know” where Mr. Mohamed was after he was flown out of Pakistan in 2002, even though MI5 had explicitly told the Intelligence and Security Committee that it believed that he was in US custody. It was as a result of this statement, Jaffey said, that the committee concluded, in its report on Mr. Mohamed’s case last year, that it was “understandable” that MI5 did not seek assurances about his treatment. Jaffey added that the committee was “not given the full picture,” and delivered a final criticism of MI5, pointing out that, although the intelligence service had indicated at the time that he was in US custody, “it now conceded that he was in a ‘location unknown.’”

Although the US authorities are still maintaining a wall of silence over Binyam’s treatment — with the Associated Press reporting that, on Friday, the Pentagon “refused to say … whether Mohamed was ever taken to Morocco” — the British judges are clearly unimpressed with a situation in which, even after six years, denials and evasion remain the norm. As the judicial review came to an end, Lord Justice Thomas said that Binyam’s case raised “many and very troublesome issues.”

The judges are expected to deliver their ruling in two weeks’ time.

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

The war in Afghanistan is not a noble cause

JamieSW — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:42:55 +0000

The most noble cause of the 21st century was how Des Browne, the defence minister, described the war in Afghanistan.

This isn’t just a grotesque and insulting way to describe a war in defence of corrupt government, warlords and opium poppy production. It is part of a concerted attempt to rebrand Afghanistan as the good war, the war worth fighting and dying for, the war worth spending billions of pounds to maintain.

No less than Princes William and Harry have been enlisted for this cause, with church parades, memorial services, and pictures of the coffins of dead soldiers returning home. Special reports from the troops in Afghanistan pop up on the news, all stressing the valuable and important role of the troops in helping the Afghans to fight terrorism.

Ministry of Defence spin doctors are working overtime to present this war in all its patriotic glory just as the figure for British soldiers dead has shot over the 100 mark and looks set to continue going up.

George Bush’s visit in June provided the opportunity for Gordon Brown to announce more troop deployment in Afghanistan, as well as increasing sanctions on Iran.

This war has now been going on for nearly seven years. It was the first war George Bush launched in his “war on terror” following the 9/11 attacks. Its aim was to root out Osama Bin Laden from his mountain hideaway, overthrow the Taliban government and destroy Al Qaida. Even Bush has publicly distanced himself from his cry of “Wanted dead or alive” about Bin Laden. The reason is simple: the aim of the Afghan war was not achieved.

The Taliban was defeated easily by the world’s greatest military power and its allies, but Al Qaida was not rooted out, Bin Laden was not captured and none of the promises made to the Afghan people were kept.

Tony Blair announced that “we will not walk away” in the aftermath of the war. He was right. The troops remained, but little was done to help to improve the lives of the Afghan people. Ten times as much is spent on the military as on reconstruction in the country, which remains one of the poorest in the world. Much of that reconstruction is in any case military related.

The Economist magazine published recently a scathing report about the US-backed Afghan government, highlighting its corruption, dependence on warlords and inability to control large parts of the country. There is a quota for the number of women in the Afghan parliament but the society remains as difficult for women as ever. Despite claims by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair in 2001 that women would be liberated by the war and the overthrow of the Taliban, most women still wear the burqa.

Most of the British casualties have occurred in the past two years in Helmand province, despite claims by then defence secretary John Reid that he hoped British troops could go to Helmand and operate “without a shot being fired”.

Britain and the US are intending to pour more troops into Afghanistan. In Iraq, British troops play a political, not military, role as they sit it out at Basra airport. Even the US is engaged in “secret” talks with the Iraqi government about the conditions of withdrawal, although this would involve maintaining US bases, giving US troops immunity from prosecution, controlling much of the airspace and much else.

There is no such talk in Afghanistan, where a serious war is continuing and threatens to escalate, drawing in Pakistan. The Taliban is stronger than it has been since 2001 and there is widespread Afghan opposition to the foreign troops, as many civilians are caught in airstrikes or are forced to become refugees to avoid the war.

We should not allow Bush and Brown to escalate the war. Its human and financial costs will only grow. We are also seeing the effects here. The vote in parliament to extend detention for terrorist suspects without charge to 42 days was one of the most shameful of recent times. The most right wing party in parliament, the DUP, were promised up to £1 billion (plus no extension of abortion rights to Northern Ireland) in order to give their nine votes to the government. Many Labour MPs who voted for the change clearly did not believe in it but thought it a good way to wrongfoot the Tories.

The demonstration opposing Bush was met by restrictions, police violence and arrests. So when we said if they wage war there they will also wage it on us here, we were right.

A bankrupt and unpopular government is attacking the civil liberties which have been fought for over hundreds of years. They are doing so because protest and dissent give the lie to their propaganda about the war and make it harder for them to keep enlisting teenagers to die in the killing fields of Afghanistan. That’s why we have to keep protesting.

US tells lies about torture, say MPs

Ellie Keen — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:42:11 +0000

Britain can no longer believe what Americans tell us about torture, an MPs’ report to be published today claims. They also call for an immediate investigation into allegations that the UK government has itself ‘outsourced’ the torture of its own nationals to Pakistan.

In a damning criticism of US integrity, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said ministers should no longer take at face value statements from senior politicians, including George Bush, that America does not resort to torture in the light of the CIA admitting it used ‘waterboarding’. The interrogation technique was unreservedly condemned by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who said it amounted to torture.

A change in approach would have implications for extradition of prisoners to the US, especially in terror or security cases, as the UK has signed the UN convention which bars sending individuals to nations where they are at risk of being tortured. During waterboarding, a person is tied to a board with their feet raised and cellophane wrapped around the head. Water is then poured on to the face, causing the victim to start to drown.

Today’s committee report said there were ‘serious implications’ of the striking inconsistencies between British ministers continuing to believe the Bush administration when it denies using torture. ‘The UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future,’ said the committee. ‘We also recommend that the government should immediately carry out an exhaustive analysis of current US interrogation techniques on the basis of such information as is publicly available or which can be supplied by the US.’

It also urges the government to press the US authorities for information on whether any American military flights landing in the UK were part of the ‘rendition circuit’, even if they did not have detainees on board at the time.

The government has repeatedly accepted US assurances that UK territory has not been used for ‘rendition’, the extra-judicial transfer of suspects between countries. But in February, Miliband told the Commons he had been informed by the US that two rendition planes refuelled on the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

The MPs also urged the Foreign Office to investigate a Guardian report that six British nationals claimed to have been detained and tortured by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, where they were also interrogated by British intelligence officers. Foreign Minister Lord Malloch-Brown told the committee: ‘We absolutely deny the charge that we have in any way outsourced torture to Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] as a way of extracting information, either for court use or for use in counter-terrorism.’

The report also called on the Foreign Office to seek consular access to all British citizens, including those of dual nationality, detained in Pakistan and asked for an explanation from ministers why one of those detained was apparently denied consular access but was visited by a British official, who may have been an intelligence officer.

Time for a serious debate on Islamophobia

Ellie Keen — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Every journalist owes the Daily Mail’s Peter Oborne a debt of gratitude for last week’s Dispatches documentary exposing Islamophobia in our media. From the journalists on the Express and Star who refused to publish a page of inflammatory nonsense about Muslims, to the staff on the Barking and Dagenham Recorder facing foul-mouthed abuse from the BNP, every media worker who is concerned about anti-Muslim racism in the media will be uplifted by Oborne’s work.

This was a very serious piece of journalism, broadcast at an extremely sensitive time – on the anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London. Channel 4 made sure the documentary was copper-bottomed by commissioning accompanying research by the excellent Cardiff School of Journalism team under Prof Justin Lewis. Moreover, Oborne produced his own pamphlet to go with the film, “Muslims Under Siege“. Both should be required reading for journalists.

The mainstream media’s response to Oborne’s challenge, however, has so far been disappointing, and by no means matches the seriousness of the issues he raises.

The Independent gave Oborne space for two major articles, one of which in its media section, and columnist Mark Steele last week demolished the Sun’s response to Oborne. The Mail gave him a double page spread.

But apart from a few comment pieces by Muslims praising the documentary in the Guardian, the Observer and the Times, and a splendid piece by the Guardian’s Seamus Milne, the response has been either silence or hostility.

The Observer’s Andrew Anthony slagged it off, accusing Oborne of “blasting himself in the foot“. In the Sindy, Hermione Eyre accused Oborne, of all people, of “white liberal piety“. To add insult to injury, Oborne was disgracefully thrown out of parliament for distributing his pamphlet to MPs.

Readers of this blog might wish to questions aspects of Oborne’s approach, which, for example, doesn’t make explicit the link between the rise of Islamophobia and the “war on terror”. But we share his criticisms of the war in Iraq. In his Dispatches documentary in March, “Iraq’s Lost Generation”, he said: “The British Government has misled us in the run-up to war and is in denial now about what we are leaving behind. It has failed to bring liberal democracy to Iraq, brought danger to the streets of London, damaged our international reputation, alienated millions of our fellow citizens and betrayed the values we stand for in a moral and strategic disaster.”

It is time for the dangerous Islamophobia that is rampant in the British media to be recognised and debated.

We must not let the issues that Oborne has raised be brushed under the carpet.

Afghanistan under the knife and hammer

JamieSW — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:29:25 +0000

The procedure is quite simple. Choose a country in the world that seems to be suffering, in some way dysfunctional, ripe for ‘intervention’. Perform some ‘surgical’ air strikes and, after a quick and painless stitch-up, auction it off to the highest bidders. Having done that, so the theory goes, you can return home and contemplate your good deeds. But, sticking with the medical metaphor for a second, you are not a doctor and you wouldn’t know the hippocratic oath if it was printed in reverse lettering on your forehead. Whatever ‘illness’ you were supposedly dealing with has metastasized while the body is resisting your implants. In fact, the ‘patient’ keeps trying to kick your ass every time you come near him. Time to give up? Hell no. While Bush sends more troops to Afghanistan, Gordon Brown has insisted that there will be no ‘artificial timetable’ for British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Okay, but how about a real timetable?

Take a look at what’s happening. The current propaganda, being widely repeated in various fora, is that the occupation – despite all the difficulties and the terrible burdens we must bear – is ameliorating the situation of Afghanistan. Thus, practically every commentator is repeating the incorrect claim, floated by Laura Bush, that infant mortality has declined by 25% since the occupation began. In fact, one study led by the World Bank, which is heading reconstruction and development programmes in Afghanistan, said last year that infant mortality had fallen – not by 25% or 26%, but by 18%. And that study excluded the worst-hit regions of Afghanistan, such as Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar, Zabul and Nuristan, because of security concerns. That is, it excluded 15% of the population from its scope. On the other hand, mortality among under fives has certainly risen. So, in 2005, 20% of the under-five population perished. In 2006, 25% died. Okay, so infant mortality in the least war-torn regions fell by 18% in five years, while in just one year, the rate of child mortality across the whole country increased by 25%. So, what are we supposed to be celebrating? More children get to live beyond their first 12 months before biting the dust from starvation, treatable diseases and, er, the odd bomb or bullet? As for the 75% who get past the age of five, if they do ever get to be grown-ups, they will at least have some interesting prospects – the torture chamber, rape, starvation, the destruction of their farms at the hands of DynCorp, murder at the hands of a local patriarch flush with dollars and self-regarding pomp, thermobaric bombardment…

There is no Lancet survey for Afghanistan. We have had some estimates of deaths in the first year of the war, the highest of which was supplied by Jonathan Steele of The Guardian, who estimated 49,000 direct and indirect deaths resulting from the war. There are occasional estimates of civilians killed, but the detection rate is likely to be extremely low – to my knowledge, there is no consistent effort to actually trace the number of deaths there. The UN provides figures, estimating the rate of deaths among civilians in the hundreds over the last six months. Frankly, that is just unbelievable (and, actually, I would like to know how they distinguish between a combatant and a civilian – presumably they rely on the occupation authorities for this kind of information). Consider just one facet of the war. In Iraq, between 50 and 100 Iraqis die as a result of air strikes every day. When the secret air war on both Iraq and Afghanistan was confirmed, the figures showed that the biggest spike in bombings was in Afghanistan where the number of major raids reached more than 800 per month. And we’re supposed to believe that the death rate resulting from air strikes alone is lower than in Iraq, where the number of mass bombings – though very high – was less? In Iraq, in a period of three years, 78,000 violent deaths were caused by air strikes in Iraq (this was before the big spike in aerial bombardments). In Afghanistan, where the rate of aerial bombardment has always been higher, the figure must be higher. One informal estimate of deaths last year was carried out by Associated Press. It suggested that a total of 5,100 people had died violently in the first 9 months of 2007 (and most were killed by the occupation). Given that such passive surveys tend to massively underestimate the true scale of deaths, we are really talking about tens of thousands of deaths in that period, at least if we want to be realistic. Given the longevity of the war and its increasing brutality, if a Lancet-style survey can ever be carried out in Afghanistan, the total deaths may even be higher than in Iraq.

One index of the rate of destruction is the rate at which the insurgents are able to recruit and expand. Where the occupation is most bloody, the resistance is most concentrated. Until recently, south-west Afghanistan has been what the ‘Sunni triangle’ was in Iraq. It was where the US was most unpopular, and where attacks generally occurred most frequently. But now, the ‘Taliban’ – realistically, we know that most insurgents are not actually Talibs, and many of the actual Taliban leaders are on the receiving end of serenades from Hamid Karzai – are controlling more of the country than the US. The rate at which occupying troops are being killed has been rising year on year, peaking in June this year, and surpassing the rate of ‘coalition’ deaths in Iraq for the first time. The insurgency controls ever larger tracts of the country.

The verities of Afghanistan are poorly gauged, as I have indicated, but so far as we can tell what is happening, we know that the occupiers no longer command the support of most Afghans. The patience and forebearance of Afghans was and is enormous, despite the abuses, despite the torture chambers, despite the indiscriminate killings, the bombing raids resulting in massacres, and despite the obscene ‘Green Zone’ style luxury for occupiers and their auxiliaries in Kabul while much of the population is actually starving. Despite the obvious unpopularity of the Taliban, most people appear to want to negotiate a deal with them rather than prosecute a long and bloody war. Even the puppet administration of Hamid Karzai and the very meek and gentle General Rashid Dostum would like to cut some sort of a deal. Of course, there are those for whom the war is working out just swell. The warlords whom the US pays off to keep order are seeing their private armies expand greatly as they reap greater profits from the opium crop. Power is increasingly localised, and Hamid Karzai doesn’t have a finger of real influence beyond Kabul. Contractors such as DynCorp are making out as well, because their role is to destroy the opium farms (those belonging to the poor farmers, not the big local rulers who are effectively under Nato protection). Curiously, DynCorp never seem to succeed in reducing drugs production wherever they are despatched to do so, yet they continually get the contracts. And as for Washington? The last thing they want is to get out. Both Democrats and Republicans are intent on increasing the commitment to Afghanistan, if necessary by scaling back the war in Iraq. They know they are in danger of losing the whole situation. Not only is the war in Afghanistan turning the population against the occupiers. In Pakistan, where the government is assaulting ‘Taliban strongholds’ with great ferocity, local populations are actually becoming more and not less supportive of the Talibs. The US is increasingly projecting its force across the border, and sabre-rattling against the Pakistani government (even Karzai is getting in on that act). The danger of a regional war is escalating in that “global Balkans” – as Brezinski, Obama’s foreign policy advisor, dubs the region – and the United States government is raising the stakes.