fair trial | ukwatch.net

Self Defence

Ellie Keen — Sat, 24 May 2008 12:05:26 +0000

As students are denied legal aid for imprisonable offences

Reckon students are all bone-idle skiving filth who haven’t even got the wit to tie their shoelaces properly? Well then you’d be in disagreement with Judge Parsons (of Brighton magistrates). He’s just refused legal aid to seven students up in front of his bench for ‘aggravated tresspass’ (punishable by up to three months inside) on the grounds that “they are intelligent enough to represent themselves”.

The seven are accused of D-locking and supergluing to EDO MBM’s infamous factory of death in Brighton on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War. Despite the fact that the student protesters are all in their first year and none are studying law, the judge is perhaps paying the defendants a compliment in considering them equal in legal know-how to a barrister (who study for around six years before they are considered ready to defend their clients). They are under stringent bail conditions to stay away from EDO MBMs factories.

Of course legal aid is gradually being whittled away for all of us (See SchNEWS 618). But the decision to cut off the supply this time is interesting in the light of how many cases against EDO protestors have ended in failure for the authorities (See SchNEWS 535). Campaign spokesman Andy Beckett told SchNEWS

By robbing these defendants of their rights to adequate legal representation, the authorities are launching an attack on our campaign as a whole. They’ve been forced to drop cases when it looked as if evidence of police collusion with the factory owners was about to emerge. But that evidence only emerged after careful examination by trained solicitors. The whole thing smacks of a desperate attempt to secure convictions against supporters of our successful campaign.

The National Union of Students is up in arms at this abuse of the student’s status to trick them out of their right to legal representation. In the words of the USSU education officer;

That students are being denied legal assistance simply because they are students is disgraceful. A fair and public trial is a human right. When students take on international arms dealers without legal representation it is laughable to claim that the proceedings could be fair or equal. At a time when civil liberties are under attack nationally, this court is specifically targeting students as an isolated and disempowered group.

To support the defendants, fight for civil liberties and take action against the arms trade join Smash EDO at the Carnival Against The Arms Trade...

Oppose Unjust Proposals of the Counter Terrorism Bill

Ellie Keen — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:47:35 +0000

Yet another Counter-Terrorism Bill is now before Parliament. These proposals would extend the injustice of current ‘anti-terror powers’, which make exceptions to the normal criminal law, especially its protection of suspects through the right to a fair trial.

The proposed powers are based on the Terrorism Act 2000, which defined terrorism so broadly as to include simply the threat of violence to property in an attempt to influence a government, anywhere in the world. Such a broad definition could include many normal political activities in this country and any resistance to oppressive regimes abroad. That Act also created ‘terrorist’ offences of associating with particular organizations, sharing a platform with their members, and helping them financially, e.g. simply by selling publications.

Since the Terrorism Act of 2000, ‘anti-terrorism’ measures have imposed much injustice, particularly on Muslim and migrant communities. Of over 1200 people arrested under anti-terrorism laws, less than 5% have been convicted of ‘terrorism’ offences, few of these involving any plans for violent activities. A key effect has been to create a climate of fear – fear that political activity, or simply talking to the wrong people, will bring arrest or house raids.

The proposed new powers would extend current injustices, especially punishment without trial, in several ways:

Detention without charge would be extended from 28 days to 42 days
‘Terrorism suspects’ could be detained without charge for six weeks. Before 2000 it was 4 days. Neither government nor police have given any convincing reason why so long is needed.
Post-charge questioning of ‘terror suspects’ – presumed guilty?
‘Terror suspects’ could be subjected to further questioning after a criminal charge, even up to the trial date. Saying nothing could count against them at trial.
At present, people once charged can refuse to answer until their trial, without their silence being interpreted as a sign of guilt or deception.
‘Terrorist connection’ would justify a heavier sentence
Judges could give people longer sentences for ‘ordinary’ offences if they had a ‘terrorism connection’ – for example, allegedly supporting a banned ‘terrorist’ organization.
Confiscation of property without trial
Convicted ‘terrorists’ could have their property confiscated – such as bank accounts, vehicles, computers or even a house. The special procedure would not be a normal trial; it could involve secret evidence.
Extra punishment without trial beyond the original sentence
Convicted ‘terrorists’ could face a ban on foreign travel once released from jail. This would be done by a special order, not a trial. Those convicted could also face a requirement to tell the police where they go whenever they sleep away from home, in some cases for life.
New offence for volunteers of not giving information to police
Volunteer workers, for example in a youth project or charity, could be prosecuted for not telling police about suspected ‘terrorist’ activities. People might be over-suspicious and report imagined activities because they are afraid of being criminalised for concealment.
New offence of providing information about the armed forces
The Bill would make it an offence to seek or communicate information about the armed forces which could be useful to terrorism. This could apply simply to peace protestors telling each other, for example, what happens at a military base.
Hiding evidence about police killings
Some inquests could be held in secret, without juries. Sensitive material about how and why a person was killed by the police or army would be hidden away; they would never be held properly to account.

Ask your MP to oppose those proposals of the Counter-Terrorism Bill. Support the due process rights of all ‘suspects’.

Model letter to send your MP can be downloaded at http://www.campacc.org.uk/Library/MP_letterCTB08_260208.doc
DEMONSTRATE against the Counter-Terrorism Bill on Monday 12 May 2008, 5-7pm 10 Downing Street. Details available at www.cacc.org.uk

Short Cuts

Ellie Keen — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:16:23 +0000

The trial of eight men charged with conspiracy to murder and ‘conspiracy to commit an act of violence likely to endanger the safety of an aircraft’ is underway at Woolwich Crown Court, an enclave of Belmarsh prison in South-East London. You remember the scenario: the components of liquid bombs to be carried in shampoo containers or contact lens solution or drinks cans or bottles of baby milk, to be assembled onboard in the loos and detonated with laptops, mobiles, camera flashes, iPods; there would be three exploding airliners, or six, or nine, or 12; they would be blown up mid-Atlantic, or over Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, New York. On successive days in the summer of 2006 newspaper billboards blared out how close we were to disaster: the attacks were set for 16 August; no, 22 August; no, the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Back then, you could take your pick.

But there was no question about the consequences. Flights were cancelled, carry-on allowances restricted and liquids banned; British Airways claimed they had lost £100 million in revenue; Ryanair threatened to sue the government over the security measures it was forced to put in place. The police operation that culminated in the arrest of 24 people, mostly Pakistani Muslims, on the night of 9 August – in Walthamstow in East London, Birmingham and High Wycombe – cost the Met alone more than £23 million. It was called Operation Overt. Although they made rather less noise about it in public than the feisty Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, the Met too tried to get the government to compensate them for some of the money they had spent. Their complaints are available online.

Apart from the first few days – in which the prosecution laid out its most incendiary evidence – the trial hasn’t been much reported in the press. This is normal, of course, for a long and detailed trial; and R. v. Abdulla Ahmed Ali et al is expected to last eight months. The pace of revelations can be nail-gnawingly slow, as members of the jury are asked to reinsert pages 140a and 140b behind Tab 4 of Volume 3 of their box files, but only – mark you – ‘once the staples have been removed’. A Portakabin has been laid on as a media annexe: no mobile phones, no cameras. It is fitted out with 70 seats; on the day I visited, only one of them was occupied, by the laptop of a journalist who spent part of the morning session out looking for a sandwich, a thing not easy to find in the wastelands near Belmarsh. But the press gallery will never be entirely empty. At least one person has to be there, a reporter from the Press Association, since the stories that appear in the papers under various bylines are mildly reorganised versions of PA releases. Sometimes this is acknowledged; often it isn’t.

On the day in question, the key witness was a shop assistant from a pharmacy near Harley Street where one of the accused, Arafat Waheed Khan, had been caught shopping on CCTV. He appeared to have bought four 500 ml glass jars at £38 a piece. That this wasn’t big news, or particularly illegal, explains why on this occasion the daily PA report made only a handful of papers, among them the Worthing Herald. The national press is above printing trivia, which is why no mention was made, in the Worthing Herald or anywhere else, of the uncertainty during cross-examination as to whether Khan, hesitating over his purchases and apparently wanting plastic jars rather than glass, had said ‘I’m not sure he wants that’ or – more mysteriously, and as the witness maintained – ‘I’m not sure she wants that.’ Who was he or she? Maybe the journalists will return to the court when the defendants start taking the stand; but since that isn’t expected to happen until the summer they may well – who knows? – be on holiday by then.

But the particular reason this trial hasn’t been worth reporting is that all the main elements of the prosecution’s case were widely known long before it began, were known, in fact, before the suspects were even charged. Despite the contradictory and lurid claims that ran in British papers under the banner ‘terror in the skies’, US media and officials seem in retrospect to have had an uncanny insight into what the case against these men would be. On 10 August 2006, the day after the arrests, while the Home Office continued to play its cards close to its chest, Michael Chertoff, the US secretary of homeland security, told PBS News that the explosives would be hidden ‘in ordinary-looking things like beverage containers’ – the prosecution now alleges that the accused were experimenting with injecting explosives into bottles of Lucozade and Oasis – and that the plan ‘could have, in fact, been executed within a matter of a week or two’: there was no mention of precisely when, and the prosecution at Woolwich Crown Court doesn’t contend that the plotters had selected a date, however imminent it could in theory have been. By the standards of the British papers and the BBC, Chertoff was positively sober.

Much more detail was given in a piece published a couple of weeks later in the New York Times, a piece that was immediately subject to a special order that prohibited its publication in Britain. It was deemed prejudicial to any subsequent trial and the NYT responded by blocking internet access to it from UK computers. The authors cited ‘five senior British officials’ and a ‘person briefed about the case’ and claimed that ‘several suspects were doing chemical experiments with a sports drink named Lucozade and syringes’; they also gave details of MI5 surveillance of the top-floor flat on Forest Road in Walthamstow that the security services called the ‘bomb factory’. They mentioned the handwritten diary, apparently containing wiring diagrams, that is alleged to have been found in Abdulla Ahmed Ali’s jacket pocket when he was arrested outside Waltham Forest Town Hall at 21.43 on 9 August; they mentioned the USB memory stick onto which he is said to have downloaded UK-US flight schedules three days before his arrest. These last findings now have the status of ‘agreed facts’ in the trial, meaning that they are protested by neither prosecution nor defence, but it’s a mystery how American journalists came to be equally agreed 18 months before the event.

Most remarkably, the NYT’s reporters quoted from the ‘seven martyrdom videos’ that were found in police searches of cars, garages and flats in Walthamstow. Their article was published on 28 August 2006. The transcripts that are now being presented in evidence in South-East London were written up by a police interpreter early in October 2006. Could the Met have saved themselves some money by flying over a few hacks from New York, who managed to glean the contents of the videos before they were transcribed? One thing the hacks also said, which the prosecution hasn’t, was that

while officials and experts familiar with the case say the investigation points to a serious and determined group of plotters, they add that questions about the immediacy and difficulty of the suspected bombing plot cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the public statements made at the time.

‘In retrospect,’ said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department, ‘there may have been too much hyperventilating going on.’

A fair amount of hyperventilating is still being encouraged outside the courtroom. An excerpt from one of the ‘martyrdom videos’, made by Umar Islam, was released last week to Sky News, which has also made it available on its website. In February, Andrew Gilligan – veteran of the sexy dossier and scourge of Red Ken – was dispatched by Channel 4 to an airfield near Basingstoke where he detonated an undisclosed liquid explosive inside the fuselage of a decommissioned passenger jet. It ‘caused a large fireball, a massive hole in the side of the aircraft and blew seats out of the cabin’. Best of all (though this wasn’t mentioned in Gilligan’s dispatch: the trial had after all yet to start), the explosive had been carried in the same sort of container – a 500 ml plastic bottle – that the prosecution, as of April, alleges the men in the dock used for their experiments. What the prosecution doesn’t so far allege is that the plotters tested their bombs; but then they didn’t have a TV-size budget.

The government’s determination to extend again the period for which ‘terror suspects’ may be held without charge has as much to do with the desire to placate what it sees as Middle England – a desire that has been at the core of its philosophy since 1997 – as any imperative of national security. The eight men now in court were charged on 20 August 2006, ten days after their arrest. The police have cited the vast amount of material that has to be sifted through in cases like this – four hundred computers, two hundred mobile phones and eight thousand memory sticks, CDs and DVDs were seized – as a reason for the time needed before a charge can be made. But high-tech forensics are only a small part of the evidence being presented in R. v. Abdulla Ahmed Ali et al. Much of the evidence was gathered well before the arrests through old-school surveillance: subject was seen entering T&I Communications in Wood Street, Walthamstow, and speaking on a mobile phone ‘in hushed tones in a foreign language’. Perhaps when wiretap evidence is made fully admissible in court – it isn’t yet – surveillance reports will sound less like the work of PC Plod, who loiters on street corners with his pencil stub. But whatever the result of this particular case, even the current provision for 28 days’ detention is unnecessary, given the breadth of new legislation. A suspect can in theory be charged under the 2006 Terrorism Act if evidence suggests that he was associating with the wrong kind of people and having the wrong conversations. It’s nearly thought-crime. Talking in ‘hushed tones in a foreign language’ is a very bad thing to do.

Daniel Soar is an editor at the London Review.

Leak Pair Convicted

Tim Holmes — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:06:25 +0000

*JUAN GONZALEZ:* A pair of British men were sentenced to jail on Thursday for leaking a classified memo that revealed President Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair in April 2004 that he wanted to bomb the Doha headquarters of the Arabic television network Al Jazeera. On Thursday, a former civil servant named David Keogh was sentenced to six months in jail for violating Britain’s Official Secrets Act. A former parliamentary researcher named Leo O’Connor was given a three-month sentence. They were convicted after a highly secretive trial. The British government maintained that the memo was so sensitive that most of the trial could not take place in public in the interest of national security.

*AMY GOODMAN:* The Daily Mirror newspaper first reported on the existence of the memo, but the British government has placed a gag order on other news organizations. To talk more about the memo, Davide Simonetti of the website, BlairWatch, joins us in London. Welcome to Democracy Now!

*DAVIDE SIMONETTI:* Thank you very much.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Explain exactly what you understand this memo to say.

*DAVIDE SIMONETTI:* Well, we have not seen the memo, so we can't know exactly what's on it at all, but what we understand from what we've read is an alleged plan by the President George Bush to bomb the Al Jazeera offices in Doha, after not being very pleased with some unflattering coverage. This is roundabout the time of the attack on Fallujah, of course. There's also allegedly other stuff in the memo about the attack on Fallujah, and that also might have been deemed as sensitive in the court case.

*JUAN GONZALEZ:* And was this a proposal by President Bush to have the British bomb the headquarters or that the United States was going to do it and they wanted to get the viewpoint or perspective of Prime Minister Blair?

*DAVIDE SIMONETTI:* I think, and, of course, I can't be sure, because none of us have seen this memo, that it would have been an American action, and it would have been just a request of -- to see what Tony Blair would have thought of the idea. That's my take on it, from the little I’ve seen. But, of course, we don't know, because nothing's been disclosed.

*AMY GOODMAN:* In February of 2006, Democracy Now! traveled to Doha to attend the second Al Jazeera Forum. During our Democracy Now! broadcast from Qatar, we spoke with Al Jazeera’s managing director, Wadah Khanfar. I asked him for his response to the 2004 memo.

bq. *WADAH KHANFAR:* You know, I would say that I was at that moment in time, the bureau chief in Baghdad. So I was aware of the daily problems that we faced in our work in Iraq. More than twenty of our colleagues were detained at certain checkpoints. Some of them spent, you know, days in jail, actually, in very serious circumstances. Some of them were tortured in Baghdad.

bq. The situation in Fallujah, we -- it happened that we were the only team, the only crew, that we had -- Al Jazeera had the only crew inside Fallujah reporting live, actually. I remember when Kimmitt made this kind of statement, he was in the box on our screen, the other half of the screen, the other box, was showing live images from the hospital of Fallujah, about civilians who had been killed. He was telling us that, “You are fabricating the story. You are lying. You are not telling the truth,” you know, and the Arab world was watching what has been happening.

bq. Now, of course, recently, a lot of media started to apologize about the misinformation regarding Fallujah and the fact that they were reporting incidents, or the attack on Fallujah from the embedded -- embedded with the American side. So the situation in Fallujah, that was the issue.

*AMY GOODMAN:* That is Wadah Khanfar. He’s the managing director of Al Jazeera, when we spoke to him in Doha in Al Jazeera's headquarters. Juan?

*JUAN GONZALEZ:* Davide Simonetti, I’d like to ask you about the difficulties that journalists have in Britain reporting on stories like this, when there is so much that the government does not permit you to discuss or write about in public.

*DAVIDE SIMONETTI:* Well, of course, it's almost impossible. The Official Secrets Act, which our attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, invoked to stop the disclosure of the memo, that was just the beginning. I mean, in the papers today, we're hearing that the judge is now -- in the case of David Keogh and Leo O'Connor -- is now imposing further gagging orders, that even stuff that was disclosed in open court can’t be discussed. There's a real effort to stop anything of this story getting out, even though much of it is in the public domain.

*AMY GOODMAN:* You have, as a blogger with the website, BlairWatch, have said if you can get a hold of this memo, you are going to print it, in spite of the Official Secrets Act?

*DAVIDE SIMONETTI:* Yes, we will. We'll do it with -- not just on our own, but there are hundreds of bloggers that have agreed to do it with us, and also some mainstream publications have agreed to, as well. And I think if it was released like that, there wouldn't be anything -- there wouldn't be anything much they could do about it to prosecute, if so many people -- if it suddenly exploded into the public domain.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Davide Simonetti, Al Jazeera submitted a Freedom of Information application early 2006, requesting the disclosure of the contents of the memo, but their request has been denied. Finally, we just have a few seconds, but these two men, the men who now have been jailed, David Keogh and the Member of Parliament researcher Leo O’Connor, who are they? They are in jail now.

*DAVIDE SIMONETTI:* Well, one is a researcher. One was an assistant. They seem to be used as -- I wouldn't say scapegoats, because David O'Connor [sic] did actually try to release this. But there’s other problems, as well. The MP Peter Kilfoyle disclosed the contents of the Al Jazeera memo to John Latham in the States. The MP, who is the boss of Leo O'Connor, also did this, allegedly, from what we're reading. It seems that the government has picked on these two, because it would be embarrassing to start bringing charges against British MPs, Members of Parliament.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Davide Simonetti, thank you for being with us. We'll continue to follow the story, blogger with the website, BlairWatch.

*DAVIDE SIMONETTI:* Thank you very much.