Gareth Peirce | ukwatch.net

Was it Like This for the Irish?

Ellie Keen — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:43:54 +0000

The history of thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, as it is being written today, might give the impression of a steady progression towards an inevitable and just conclusion. The new suspect community in this country, Muslims, want to know whether their experience today can be compared with that of the Irish in the last third of the 20th century. It is dangerously misleading to assert that it was the conflict in Northern Ireland which produced the many terrible wrongs in the country’s recent history: it was injustice that created and fuelled the conflict. Before Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators who were marching to demand not a united Ireland but equal rights in employment, education and housing (as well as an end to internment), the IRA was a diminished organisation, unable to recruit. After Bloody Sunday volunteers from every part of Ireland and every background came forward. Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture (hooding, extreme stress positions, mock executions), brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant: that the state was seen to be combating terrorism sufficed. Central to the anger and despair that fuelled the conflict was the realisation that the British courts offered neither protection nor justice. The Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday, which was carried out by the lord chief justice, absolved the British army and backed its false account of 13 murders, ensuring that Irish nationalists would see the legal system as being aligned against them.

We should keep all this in mind as we look at the experiences of our new suspect community. Just as Irish men and women, wherever they lived, knew every detail of each injustice as if it had been done to them, long before British men and women were even aware that entire Irish families had been wrongly imprisoned in their country for decades, so Muslim men and women here and across the world are registering the ill-treatment of their community here, and recognising, too, the analogies with the experiences of the Irish.

As good a place to start as any is 19 December 2001. On this date a dozen men, all foreign nationals, were interned in this country. Recognising the connotations of the term ‘internment’, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland, the government insisted this was not equivalent to arbitrary detention without trial, a practice forbidden by the European Convention on Human Rights except in extreme emergencies, because each man was free to leave. The premise on which they were detained was that the United Kingdom could not in fact send them back to their countries of origin, since it was accepted that they would be at the very least a target for torture, if they were not killed on arrival.

December 2001 did not in fact mark the beginning of Britain’s official interest in men described as ‘Islamists’, since some from Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria who were in this country as refugees had long been the subjects of complaints to the UK by the regimes they had fled. After 9/11, however, Tony Blair professed a desire to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with President Bush. It would have been difficult to match Bush’s executive onslaught on constitutional rights in the US, by means of the Patriot Act; the designation of ‘enemy combatants’ and their detention by presidential order; the abolition of habeas corpus; the subjection of detainees to torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo or their unofficial outsourcing via rendition flights to countries specialising in even more grotesque interrogative practices, many of them those same regimes which had pressured the UK to take action against their own dissidents. Claiming that a parallel emergency faced Britain, Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security. Each of the dozen men snatched from his home on 17 December 2001, and delivered to HMP Belmarsh, expressed astonishment: first at finding himself the object of the much trumpeted legislation and, second, at discovering who his fellow detainees were. Each asked why, if he was suspected of activity linked to terrorism, he had never been questioned by police or the Security Services before it was decided that he was a ‘risk to national security’. The sole activity which some speculated might be the reason for their detention was their attempt to support Chechens when in 1999 their country was the subject of a second brutal invasion by Russia. But thousands of others had acted similarly, and such support was not unlawful.

Each man was told that, for a reason that could not be disclosed, he was in some unspecified way thought to be linked to unspecified persons or organisations, in turn linked to al-Qaida, which was then depicted by now discredited ‘al-Qaida experts’ as taking the form of the hierarchical pyramid of classic Western military systems. At the base of the pyramid were those who had been interned, almost all of whom said that they had never heard of al-Qaida before 11 September 2001. All of this echoed other wrongful detentions, like that of John Walker in 1974, when the West Midlands police coerced an innocent Irishman into confessing that he was an IRA ‘brigadier’, ignorant of the fact that such a title existed only in the British army. This confession was nevertheless swallowed whole. Walker was one of the Birmingham Six, all of whom spent 16 years in jail before the assertions of their prosecutors were finally discredited.

There should have been no need for the Muslim community to anticipate a similar wait, since just before Christmas 2005, three and a half years after internment had been rushed through Parliament, the House of Lords gave its judgment on that legislation in what should have stood as the most important legacy of British law in recent history. The law lords swept aside what had been said by the attorney general to constitute a just system necessary for national security. Focusing on the government’s disproportionate response to a claimed emergency, and its indefinite detention only of foreign nationals, the language of the law lords was heroic in its strength. There was a sense that the ruling’s importance went far beyond its importance to the 12 detainees, eight of whom had now been driven into mental illness, four of those into florid psychosis, and had been transferred by the home secretary from Belmarsh to Broadmoor.

Since the judgment, however, signalling as it did that the government had impermissibly crossed the legal barriers guaranteed by domestic and international treaties, it has become clear that the government intends to ignore the spirit if not the letter of the decision. It has also become clear that the government had, and continues to have, a wider strategy of which internment legislation was only one part. Little by little, ripples of information have found their way to the surface, sometimes confirmed by the government, sometimes denied. While the world knows and can assess for itself what chains of reaction were created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by the enormity of injustice suffered by the Palestinians, the cumulative effect of many other policies deserves analysis. It emerged for instance that in late 2001 the UK had begun to tip off other governments, for the ultimate benefit of the US, of the whereabouts of British nationals and British residents. Moazzem Begg, who was living with his wife and children in Pakistan, was kidnapped in January 2002; within hours he was in the hands of Americans (with a British Intelligence agent to hand), and transported without any semblance of legality to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, by this time an interrogation camp where torture was practised. After a year during which he witnessed the murders of two fellow detainees, he was moved to Guantánamo Bay. Until he finally returned to this country in 2005, nothing was known of the presence at his abduction of a British agent. Instead, for the whole of that year in Bagram, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office repeatedly told his father that they had no information about Begg and that the Americans would tell them nothing.

Seemingly unrelated areas of injustice, we now learn, have all along been connected. Two British residents, acknowledged to have been seized in 2002 in the Gambia and subjected to rendition by the US as a direct result of information provided by British Intelligence, were for the next five years subjected to interrogation (including torture) primarily to obtain information about a man interned in this country. One of those interned in December 2001, a Palestinian, trying to guess the reason for his detention the next year, told his lawyers that he had raised money for many years to build wells and schools and to provide food in Afghanistan. One of those wells, he said, bore the name of the son of its donor, Moazzem Begg. The Palestinian’s lawyers, knowing by now that Begg was in Guantánamo, started to think the unthinkable. During hearings at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, at which these cases are heard, there is a brief opportunity for the detainee’s lawyer to question an anonymous Security Service witness concealed behind a curtain, before the lawyer is asked to leave the court so it can continue its consideration of secret evidence. The witness was asked: ‘Would you use evidence that was obtained by torture?’ The unhesitating answer was: ‘Yes.’ The only issue that might arise, the agent added, would be the weight such evidence should be given. Three years after this, in December 2005, the House of Lords affirmed the principle that no English court can ever admit evidence derived from torture, no matter how strong the claimed justification or emergency. The message for the government was again unequivocal: the principles of legal obligation must be adhered to in all circumstances.

Despite the strength and intended permanence of these two rulings by the House of Lords, however, many Muslims have come to see any protection from the courts as constituting only a temporary impediment before the government starts to implement a new method of avoidance. After three months of prevarication, the internees were released on bail under stringent conditions, but the Home Office was simultaneously pushing yet more emergency legislation through Parliament, this time to introduce Control Orders which placed a substantial number of restrictions on the now released detainees. Any breach would constitute a criminal offence carrying a penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment. Three of the detainees, including the Palestinian, were pitch-forked out of Broadmoor during the night and driven by police to empty flats. One of them, a man without arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact anyone without committing a criminal offence, subject to a curfew and allowed no visitors unless approved in advance by the Home Office. Two of these three detainees were immediately readmitted to psychiatric hospitals; neither of them had been hospitalised before being interned. These men had already been found to have patterns of psychological damage explicable only as a result of their indefinite detention.

Other former detainees, particularly those with wives and children, soon began to recognise the disturbing effects of the Control Orders. The electronic tag they had to wear, which registered every entry and exit from the house, was only one element of a family’s altered existence; a voice recognition system was supposed to confirm the detainee’s presence at home during curfew, but the machines, of US manufacture, often failed to recognise the accents of Arabic speakers, with the result that uniformed police officers would enter the house in significant numbers at all times of the day and night. No visitor would come near their homes because to enter required first to be vetted by the Home Office. Children could do no schoolwork that involved the internet, the use of which was forbidden. Families had endlessly to involve lawyers in the most trivial matters: to obtain permission to go into the garden; to attend a parent-teacher meeting; to arrange for a plumber to enter the house.

What happened to these men? Are they still, three years later, trying to live normal lives despite the restrictions? The answer came only five months after their release. On 7 July 2005 bombs exploded in London. Within days it was known that the bombings had been carried out by young men born and bred in Yorkshire. On 5 August Blair announced that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ and that diplomatic agreements were being made to deport the same small group of detainees to their countries of origin, although the government knew that the use of torture was still routine in these countries. It was said that an assurance would be obtained that the men themselves would not be tortured after they were returned, and that an independent monitoring organisation in each country would guarantee that this was being adhered to. Despite such assurances, these deportations flew in the face of two important legal commitments to which this country is obliged to adhere: one, to send no person to a country where there is a risk to him of torture, the central premise of the Refugee Convention, and, two, to achieve the eradication of torture (and not by negotiating a single exception, while offering no protest to a regime’s use of torture on others).

On 11 August the Algerian and Jordanian former internees were again arrested. There were soon more arrests, this time of two Algerians who had been acquitted unanimously in a trial at the Old Bailey in April 2005 of involvement in a conspiracy to use ricin, an allegation that had been seized on at the time of their original arrest by Colin Powell in his attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq to the UN. (One juror described how for him a moment of truth came early in the trial, when a witness from Porton Down nervously drank three containers of water while in the witness box seeking to explain why an early lab report said to have been conveyed to the police and confirming that there was no trace of ricin, had, curiously, never reached the Cabinet Office.)

Those detainees who remain in the United Kingdom are still in prison or under extreme bail restrictions. One has been returned twice to Broadmoor from prison before being bailed to a psychiatric hospital. There are now two more Jordanian detainees and several Algerians, while Libya rapidly became the third state to promise safe re-entry to its dissident citizens. As for the promised monitoring organisations, one was purpose-built in Jordan in 2005, a husband and wife team bankrolled by the UK, which by the summer of 2007 (when two thousand inmates in one Jordanian prison were beaten the day after the first ever visit of an NGO, Human Rights Watch, to whose representatives they had complained of torture), had still never visited a prison. In Libya, the independent monitor agreed to by Britain is the Ghadafi Foundation, headed by Colonel Ghadafi’s son.

Algeria never signed a memorandum of understanding with Britain, nor did it appoint an independent monitor, although both safeguards were said by Blair to be non-negotiable precursors to deportation. Constant prevarication was ascribed initially to the Algerian president’s ill-health, and then to meetings being postponed, until finally the detainees’ appeals against deportation could be delayed no longer. SIAC, hearing evidence in large part in secret, found that Algeria’s ‘body politic’ appeared to have moved to ‘a state of lesser danger’ for perceived dissidents, that a limited amnesty was on offer, so that the refugees would not be put on trial, and thus that it was safe to deport them. Several Algerians in prison here or under severe restrictions decided to return. As they said in a letter to a British newspaper: ‘We are choosing the alternative of a quick death in Algeria to a slow death here.’

In making this decision, two of the Algerians, Benaissa Taleb and Rida Dendani, dramatically miscalculated. Astonishingly, SIAC allows secret evidence to be given even on the issue of an individual’s future safety. Had the men properly understood the reality (or more important the fragility) of diplomatic arrangements, perhaps neither would have decided to return. Each was told that an amnesty applied in Algeria which he should sign even though he had committed no offence; indeed special arrangements were made by the Home Office for each man to have bail to attend the Algerian Embassy in London for this purpose. Each believed that he would not be detained more than a few hours on arrival and that, as the British diplomat organising these deportations had promised SIAC, there was no risk that he would be held by the infamous DRS secret police. In fact they were both interrogated for 12 days during which they were threatened and subjected to serious physical ill-treatment. They were then charged, tried and some months later convicted, on the basis of the ‘confessions’ forced from them during this time. Dendani was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, Taleb to three.

At the heart of Britain’s reassurances as to their safety had been the confidence that the Algerians would place too high a value on their relationship with Britain to risk its disapproval. No British official has ever attempted to visit either man in prison, despite reports that both continue to be held in conditions that violate every international norm; no official attended their trials and the fact that visa applications by the men’s UK lawyers have been ignored for a year by the Algerian authorities, despite repeated requests for help from our government, has been commented on with amusement during proceedings before SIAC as evidence of Algeria’s independent spirit. A desperate letter describing how he had been tortured was sent by Dendani from Algeria to the president of SIAC. It brought no response. Despite all this, it is still maintained that it is safe to deport people to Algeria. An application on behalf of appellants for a secret hearing at which information given to lawyers by those afraid of providing it in the open could be properly and safely examined has been rejected, not because SIAC considered the proposal without merit, but because the court’s rules, it appears, do not allow for such a procedure.

Is the treatment of these two men simply a blip in an otherwise safe and lawful process? Is it reasonable for the Muslim community to see wider significance in the treatment of such individuals? Over the past year it has emerged that Britain has secretly been willing to disregard the most basic principles of refugee protection. First, we learned that Taleb’s interrogation by the DRS was indisputably based on information received by the Algerians from the UK. Not only did Algeria possess the 2003 findings against him by SIAC (under the internment legislation that the House of Lords subsequently held to be unlawful), but it has now been discovered that the asylum claims of possibly all of this small group of detainees have been passed to the regimes from which they had fled. Asylum rests on the central premise of confidentiality, and a clear promise to that effect is given by the Home Office to all those who claim asylum here. After all, the contents of the application, or the very fact of its having been made, might create danger for the applicant if he returned to his country of origin. In the case of one man whose appeal against the Home Office’s request to deport him has not yet been considered by SIAC, we have discovered that a specially commissioned medical report describing his vulnerable condition has already been prepared by Belmarsh and sent to Jordan.

Taleb, known throughout his internment only by a letter of the alphabet so that his family in Algeria would not be at risk, arrived there to find that all the information about him based on secret evidence under now abandoned legislation was held by the Algerians, un-anonymised. Taleb had decided to return to Algeria in the hope he would be safe, and so no court in Britain had ordered his deportation. Yet the Algerians possessed all the British government’s ‘evidence’ about him. His subsequent trial confirmed his worst fears. His Algerian lawyers argued, and he gave evidence of this himself, that he had signed an unread ‘confession’ after spending 12 days in DRS custody and after having been beaten by his interrogators. The presiding judge countered by referring to the ‘West’ and its ‘illusory democracy’: ‘Weren’t you imprisoned, confined to your home for several years without trial, without charge and without respect for any procedure of either inquiry or investigation in a democratic country par excellence, Great Britain? No one in this court can teach us a lesson or put to us the least complaint on this matter, since in this country no person has been subject to such treatment.’ Taleb’s claim for asylum in the UK he saw as amounting to a ‘betrayal’ of his country of origin. Asylum was accorded ‘only to those who hated their own country’, and the judge commented at length on Algerians who had gone abroad and painted a black picture of the country’s human rights situation ‘to the benefit of NGOs whose time was spent vitiating the truth about Algeria’.

Taleb’s eventual conviction was, curiously, for going to Afghanistan in 1991 to fight the Russians. In fact, he went to Pakistan in 1991 as an idealistic 18-year-old, where he taught refugees from Afghanistan; the Russians had left two years earlier. As for the amnesty he had signed? Not only its relevance but its existence was denied. The United Kingdom displayed no interest in any of this. The reality is that British Petroleum has sunk £6 billion into obtaining oil from Algerian southern Sahara; the US and the EU are scrambling with the UK for a slice of Libya’s economic potential; and Jordan, one fifth of whose annual national income is provided by the US, is content to act as its most reliable provider of safe destinations for rendition and torture.

In February, a judgment published by the European Court of Human Rights in the case of a Tunisian whom Italy sought to deport, although Tunisia continues to practise torture, revealed that the UK had tried to intervene in the case in the hope of undoing one of the European Court’s most important decisions, Chahal v. UK, in which the court insisted that the claim of a risk to national security could never trump a European country’s international obligation not to return a refugee who might be tortured. The European Court rejected this attempt in strong terms.

Through a myriad other routes Britain attempts to evade internationally recognised legal restraints. Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back.’ Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’ without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence. A few weeks ago in the House of Lords, Lord Hoffman expressed horror at ‘the meanness and squalor’ of a regime ‘that monitored who had what for breakfast’. The number of such cases now multiplies daily. They have nothing at all to do with national security, they only succeed, as they are intended to, in sapping morale; they have everything to do with reinforcing the growing belief of the suspect community that it is expected to eradicate its opinions, its identity and many of the core precepts of its religion.

In December 2001 it was a small group of foreign nationals who paid the price for Blair’s wish to show solidarity with the US; and their predicament has never been widely known or understood beyond the Muslim community. But joining them in prison today are more and more young British men, and occasionally women. Many have little or no idea why they are there, although even more disturbingly, the majority were tried by the courts in conventional trials before conventional juries. Why is it, therefore, that the accused do not seem to comprehend why they are there when the prosecution has in any trial to serve all of its evidence in the form of statements, in order to inform the defendant of the case against him? The answer is that the vice underlying the internment/deportation cases is now being perpetrated in conventional trials. The accusations are similarly inchoate: defendants are said to be ‘linked to terrorism’ or ‘linked to extremism and/or radical ideology’. In these cases, the evidence before the court has time and again been found after a search on a defendant’s computer or in a notebook; the defendant is charged with possession of a certain item or this item is held to demonstrate the defendant’s desire to incite, encourage or glorify terrorism.

The right to a fair trial is in many ways difficult to articulate. If a defendant believes his or her prosecution is unjust, does he or she have any concepts to hang onto that are not entirely nebulous, unless they can prove, as those wrongly convicted in Birmingham or Guildford did, that their confessions had been brutally coerced? Or in the case of Judith Ward, when it was proved that the prosecution had withheld for 18 years evidence that disproved her claimed fantasies, or that of Danny McNamee, in which the information that circuit boards identical to those he was held to have used were in the possession of an actual bomb-maker was kept from his defence and a fingerprint was claimed to be his when it was not. In each of these cases, bad, misleading and on occasion false ‘expert’ evidence also played its part. Less well-known guarantees of a fair trial do, however, exist, just as clear protections for refugees exist, which were equally intended to hold good for all time and in the face of all emergencies. The relevant provisos, which underpin the right to a fair trial, are that the law should be clear and certain so that individuals can be confident that their behaviour does not transgress the limits society has set; that the application of the law should never be retrospective; and that there are protections intended to preserve freedom of speech, religion, thought and privacy. Young Muslims search the internet in their tens of thousands, as do non-Muslims. Any internet search, however, leaves an ineradicable trace which can and does provide material that puts its searcher now at risk of prosecution for possession of information that might be ‘of use to terrorists’. They even risk arrest for writing anything that could be said to ‘incite’ or ‘encourage’ ‘terrorism’.

This is the context of many current prosecutions. The fruits of a police search are uncovered, prosecutions mounted for the ‘possession’ of literature, films and pamphlets bought or viewed on websites, even if that viewing was swift and the item discarded or even deleted. The defendants are stigmatised as potential terrorists and their cases considered by juries more often than not without even one Muslim among their ranks to provide what the concept of 12 jurors randomly selected is intended to contribute to the trial process – a reflection of the collective good sense of the community.

Two young Muslim women were separately tried at the Old Bailey last year for having written works deemed by the prosecution to be for a terrorist objective. One was the ‘Lyrical Terrorist’, whose appeal against conviction is due to be heard shortly. The other, Bouchra El-Hor, was acquitted by her jury; she had the good fortune to have as a defence witness Carmen Callil, who witheringly described the letter that El-Hor had written as a classic example of the way devout women, whether Catholic or Quaker, Puritan or Muslim, experiment with creative writing as a means of expression while living isolated existences. The jury laughed at Callil’s savage critique, but one could see recognition and understanding follow.

This is very dangerous territory, however, where a lucky accident of interpretation is critical to a jury’s understanding of a case and where police and prosecutors, neither of them armed with any understanding of Islam, press on with prosecutions although the court struggles properly to understand what is at issue. Where the human story is straightforward, the task is far easier, but even so, now that secret accusations and secret courts have intruded into the sacrosanct forum of an open jury trial in which secrecy is not allowed, what is a jury to make of an allegation that a defendant has breached a Control Order imposed on the basis of secret evidence which holds that he is a risk to national security? On trial just before Christmas was a young Essex Muslim, Ceri Bullivant, who had been placed under a Control Order and then charged with a criminal offence when he absconded, unable to cope with the restrictions of that order. In his case the jury magnificently acquitted him on the basis that he had a reasonable excuse to breach his order. It was only later, however, in the High Court, that what lay behind the secrecy became suddenly clearer. Mr Justice Collins quashed the order itself; before he did so, an Intelligence agent giving evidence from behind a screen admitted that the tip-off which had led to the decision that Bullivant was a risk to national security and ‘associated with links to terrorists’ had come from a friend of Ceri’s mother who, after drinking heavily, had phoned Scotland Yard, which failed ever to contact the caller to ask for further explanation. Equally disturbingly, a childhood friend of Bullivant’s told the court that he had been approached by MI5 officers and asked to spy on local Muslim youths. When he pointed out this was unlikely to be productive since he was not himself a Muslim, he was encouraged to become one and told that ‘converts are given a special welcome.’

From a distance such blundering negligence might seem merely laughable, but those affected by it feel resentment, anger and despair. Why should young people as much a part of Britain as any other citizen require what are in effect interpreters to establish their innocence? The more religiously based the evidence, the greater the opportunity for obstinate incomprehension. Conspicuous by its absence in case after case is any evidence, expert or otherwise, proffered by the prosecution that attempts to explain the most basic concepts of Islam to a non-Muslim jury. Take the instance of a saying of the Prophet Muhammad familiar to all Muslims: ‘Fight the unbelievers with your wealth, yourselves and your tongues.’ Should a man who made a supplication in those terms in Regent’s Park Mosque on the holiest night of Ramadan four years ago, in support of the citizens of Fallujah who were that night defending their city in the face of the announced eradication by US troops of all who remained there, have anticipated that he might be breaking the law, or that he could be charged and prosecuted in 2008 after a friend’s home video of his prayer was found by police in a raid? He had, after all, repeated those same challenging words many times over the years, and explained again and again to the public, to the police and politicians, one of the most fundamental concepts of Islam, the Ummah, which makes every Muslim anywhere in the world the brother of every other Muslim, so that if one is attacked others are obliged to help. Should he be surprised to be prosecuted for having reiterated these same words of support in a mosque? The answer lies in Blair’s warning: ‘The rules of the game have changed.’ Previously accepted boundaries of freedom of expression and thought have been redefined and are now in effect being prosecuted retrospectively, with the result that our criminal justice system is becoming further distorted as many truly innocent defendants plead guilty, against their lawyers’ advice, terrified by the prospect, as they see it, of inevitable conviction and ever lengthening prison sentences. Thousands of others, all of whom have searched the internet, watch with horror the process of criminalisation and punishment.

In this country we did not grow up with a written constitution and human rights legislation entered our law only recently. In times of tension we struggle to find answers to basic questions. Are there rules and can they be changed? Are there legal concepts that protect a community under blanket suspicion, or should that community’s adverse reaction to suspicion be seen as oversensitivity in the face of perceived political necessity? Should we accept the concept of the greatest good for the greatest number? The answer is again the same: we are bound by international treaty and, belatedly, by domestic human rights legislation, to hold that there are inalienable rights that attach to the individual rather than society. Article 8 of the European Convention protects not only respect for family and private life, but also the individual against humiliating treatment; Article 10 protects freedom of expression, Article 9 freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and Article 14 guarantees that in the enjoyment of these rights any discrimination is itself prohibited. Occasionally, fierce campaigning successfully sounds an alarm: the proposed extension from 28 to 42 days of the time allowed for questioning those suspected of involvement in terrorism is being energetically fought. But there are less obvious erosions of parallel rights.

If this is indeed how it was for the Irish, we should urgently try to understand how significant change came about for them. Much current reminiscence ignores vital factors, such as the inescapable responsibility of the Irish Republic and, above all, the political weight of the Irish diaspora and the far-sightedness of those who began and maintained contact, long before Blair was elected and claimed the ultimate prize. Throughout the thirty years of conflict, forty million Americans of Irish descent formed an electoral statistic that no US administration could afford to ignore. It is said that on the night before he decided to grant a visa to Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton watched a film about the catastrophic injustice inflicted on one Irish family by the British state. Here, Lord Scarman and Lord Devlin, retired law lords, joined Cardinal Hume, the head of the Catholic Church in England, in educating themselves in the finest detail of three sets of wrongful convictions involving 14 defendants. At one critical moment Cardinal Hume confronted the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, challenging the adequacy of his briefing.

No similar allies for the Muslim community are evident today, capable of pushing and pulling the British government publicly or privately into seeing sense. Spiritually, the Muslim Ummah is seen as being infinite, but the powerful regimes of the Muslim world almost without exception not only themselves perpetrate oppression, but choose to work hand in hand with the US and the UK in their ‘war on terror’. It is for us, as a nation, to take stock of ourselves. We are very far along a destructive path, and if our government continues on that path, we will ultimately have destroyed much of the moral and legal fabric of the society that we claim to be protecting. The choice and the responsibility are entirely ours.

Gareth Peirce is a lawyer who has since the 1970s represented individuals accused of involvement in terrorism from both the Irish and the Muslim communities.

Another Dodgy Dossier

Alex Doherty — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:55:16 +0000

Any MPs who hold misgivings about supporting an invasion on the basis of a dossier later discovered to have been utterly misleading ought now to be demanding a proper, transparent investigation into what the police did and did not do that might have prevented the bombings in London of July 7; and they ought to treat with extreme caution the “dossiers” prepared to support 90-day detentions.

The leader of the opposition, in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, asked for just such an inquiry. Were that to have been conducted, the present stampede, with justifications for numbers of days of detention plucked out of the air, could not possibly be happening. While some reports have hinted at police incompetence and failure to arrest those involved in advance of the bombings, these are likely to be only the tip of the iceberg. A far-reaching inquiry might well show that not one second of additional time for interrogations would have been needed to redress a complete failure to use any of the powers already in police hands. All that is needed is for MPs to say: “Pause for a moment, let us have a proper, truthful explanation.”

As a starting point for its justification, the police dossier revisits the ricin case, in which a number of innocent men were acquitted – an outcome intensely disliked by the police. Now they claim that had they had 90 days, or perhaps 29, or maybe 19, the outcome would have been very different, and that “the suspect who fled the country while on bail and who eventually proved to have been a prime conspirator would have stood trial in this country”. The police held that suspect for two days. It was their decision to release him. Where does the need for 90 days come from?

In contradiction of the police claim that they needed more time to liaise with foreign jurisdictions, the head of MI5 is on record as saying that this country could not make inquiries of a regime such as Algeria (to discover if the originator of information had been tortured) lest it stop the free flow of information.

So far as 90 days might have been advantageous “to understand the complexities of the conspiracy before the decision was required to charge or release”, the police appear to forget that from day one they (and the prime minister) were trumpeting a plot involving chemical weapons. Two years later it was left to a hapless witness from Porton Down to suggest that it was his fault that the instantaneous discovery that there had been no ricin had not been communicated to Scotland Yard or the government. Memories are short. The rush to judgment came not from any 14-day restriction (most of those charged were held for considerably less than seven days); it came from an urgent political desire to seize upon a pot of Nivea cream that in the end was discovered to contain no poisonous material.

Further justifications are just as shoddy. Time is needed to “establish the identity of subjects”. What is not explained is that at Paddington Green police station, suspects often wait for 48 hours or considerably longer for a first interview confined to name, address and elementary background details. Look at any custody record of any detainee under terrorism legislation, and you will see that for 90% of the time or more no interviews take place. Solicitors often beg for some movement; demands after as much as a week for a reason to be given for the arrest fall on deaf ears. Solicitors waiting to be present at interviews that never take place can be seen patrolling Edgware Road, since the rebuilding of the security section, at a cost of millions, failed to leave room for them – and did not provide more than two interview rooms. So when the turn comes for detainees to be interrogated, they are told there is “no interview room at the moment”.

Where is the detainee meanwhile? I find it impossible to believe that the grim unpleasantness of the cells can be anything other than intended, especially given the costly revamp. It has left 365 hideous white tiles on the walls of each cell (as an Irishman counted some years ago). There is a hard plastic mattress on a wooden plank, with an open toilet at one end. A bare light in the high ceiling is difficult enough to read by, but the life-saving distraction of reading matter is more often than not forbidden. There is no natural light; the 14 days of detention are spent in an underworld without fresh air or proper ventilation – an inescapable part of the anticipated experience. In warm weather, heat comes from pipes under the bunk. In cold weather, unpleasant-smelling oil heaters are pushed uselessly into the corridors.

At the end of a 14-day period of interviews, lawyers themselves are often ill and exhausted. Effects on detainees are far more drastic: in a number of cases, police have had to pay compensation to innocent detainees who suffered permanent trauma after their release; one woman’s menstrual cycle was drastically altered after a seven-day detention, and her partner suffered alopecia; many students have never resumed their studies; one man succeeded in committing suicide, and many others have tried.

MPs would do well to remember the legislative stampede in December 2001 to detain foreign nationals indefinitely without trial. Parliamentarians were reassured that detention would be a last resort; that reassurance was entirely false. Men who it was claimed were the most serious terrorism suspects in this country at the time were not questioned for 14 minutes, let alone 14 days.

Parliamentarians have been duped twice into supporting steps necessary for a “war on terror”. To allow this to happen a third time would be a wholesale dereliction of their duty.

Gareth Peirce is a partner at Birnberg Peirce solicitors who has represented numerous detainees under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001

gp@birnbergpeirce.co.uk

Torture

Alex Doherty — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 14:04:10 +0000

You can listen to the following interview here:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/01/1515244

AMY GOODMAN: This past weekend I was in Britain and Ireland as part of our international Exception to the Rulers book and media tour, and we had the chance of a rare interview with Gareth Peirce, sitting down in her home for an extended period of time. I began by asking her about the release of Moazzam Begg.

GARETH PEIRCE: The experience of the four detainees coming back was a very contrived affair, done for public consumption, not just in this country, but for America as well, and was totally bogus. And at no point, Im completely sure, was there ever an intention properly to interrogate the detainees; and there was no conclusion ever likely to happen, other than that they would be released very quickly. So, it was an extravaganza for the purposes of press and publicity, with no proper investigative purpose whatsoever.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was it like when Moazzam came home, one of the four detainees, and saw his family?

GARETH PEIRCE: I knew Moazzam Begg from years before. He was a passionate campaigner on behalf of other people wrongly imprisoned. I had in my mind’s eye how he was, and I was shocked when I saw him again in the police station. He was in the shape of someone who has, against all of the odds, retained his mental agility and his depth of serious thought. But at what cost? One could see some of that. He had lost enormous amounts of weight, a man who didn’t have enormous amounts of weight to lose. And one sees the strain. One sees the effect.

AMY GOODMAN: And what has been the effect on his family? He has a wife, and –

GARETH PEIRCE: He has a wife and four children. He hadn’t met his youngest child. His youngest son was born after he was unlawfully seized in Pakistan. I think when people emerge from wrongful conviction, or from having been taken hostage, then the reacquaintanceship between family members is far more difficult than is anticipated. All of the hostages who have returned from the Lebanon, all of the men and women in this country wrongly imprisoned, say the same thing: that for years all of your thought is that, if you got out, or if your husband got out, or your son, everything would be fine. And, of course, in many ways, it is. But your own psychic space within society has been filled, and you’re coming back, and you’re not just re-entering a life that’s had to go on without you. Youre reacquainting yourself with people, however well you know them, who have been forced to change because of what has happened to you. And so, if you’re Moazzam Begg, you left a father who was an invalid, who you were worried about. Only in captivity, you learned that he had, in fact, had a successful operation. But when you come back, you find a father who has been campaigning for three years, solidly, and who has become a well known national figure, and you left yourself in anonymity; and you have come back, and you’re known, and your name is known, and you’re not just someone the press wants to speak to. You’re someone other aspects that the press wants to vilify. There is one scandalous tabloid newspaper here that has effectively put a bounty on the heads of those who have returned, who said that if you know the whereabouts of these men, ring the Sun newspaper this number. They are unable to re-enter the life they left in the same way. They’re not the same people, and they can’t pick up where they left off. Sorry, thats much too long for your purposes.

AMY GOODMAN: No, that’s fine. We’re not sound bite radio. So we really appreciate a full explanation like this. What was Moazzam Begg charged with?

GARETH PEIRCE: Oh, he is not charged with anything. He was tortured, and brutalized in wholly unlawful conditions for three years. He was living with his family, not clandestinely, in Pakistan. He was unlawfully captured by Americans with British complicity, and with Pakistani complicity, and taken to Bagram in Afghanistan, where he was held for a year, as he said in the one letter that came out from there without having seen the sun or the moon or the stars for an entire year, and brutalized and degraded and humiliated, and then taken to Guantanamo, where he was the only person we know of- there may be others that we don’t know of but the only person we know of who was in complete isolation for two years. That may be because he witnessed the murder of two detainees in Bagram Air Base. And, perhaps, to keep that deep, dark secret for as long as possible, he was not kept with the others. He was kept in Guantanamo, without any natural light, in a tiny cell area where even exercise was without access to any other detainees. It’s astounding to me that he has retained his intellect and his ability to articulate as extraordinarily as he has. He, one has to say, is a person with enormous reserves of strength and spiritual resources.

AMY GOODMAN: What exactly did he see at Bagram? How were these two men killed?

GARETH PEIRCE: I have no idea of the details yet. He has written to me in two letters, which eventually came out. He has referred to it in passing. I haven’t been interrogating him. At some time in the future, when and if he has the wish to talk more, then that, Im sure, will be of great importance to learn. But he has come back to a family which needs him, and which he needs to reacquaint with, and I respect him for getting his priorities straight, and saying, At some point, I will do my duty to explain what has gone on. That point may come quickly, but I need to be with my family now.

AMY GOODMAN: Have he and the other three men, who have just been released from Guantanamo to here in Britain, sued the U.S. Government?

GARETH PEIRCE: The American lawyers he had launched a simultaneous claim for habeas corpus, and an action brought under the Tort Act in America. As I understand it, the U.S. government is attempting, or has attempted to strike out that action on the basis that he is now no longer under American control, and I know nothing of the possible future of that action. What I do know is that if there is justice, these men ought to receive reparation. What has happened to them has been in breach of every basic international minimum norm and guarantee, and they have been tortured. There is no getting around it. They have been subjected to criminal behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Peirce, leading British human rights advocate, attorney for two of the four British men who returned from Guantanamo, were released to Britain last week. We’ll continue with our discussion in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We continue our rare interview with the leading British human rights attorney, Gareth Peirce. Shes the lawyer for Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar, two of the four British citizens released from Guantanamo Bay last week, after nearly three years in detention without charge.

GARETH PEIRCE: The other detainee I represent is Richard Belmar, whos recently returned.

AMY GOODMAN: What about his case? What was he — Where was he picked up? How was he captured and who is his family?

GARETH PEIRCE: His family are living in London. He did not have lawyers until very recently, and in consequence we know far less about him. Theres been an enormous, sustained campaign in this country about Moazzam Begg and others, and the name Richard Belmar was not known in the same way, although his sister has been bravely trying to to make his — the fact of his disappearance known. Hes a much younger man. He’s someone who upon re-entry, we see as perhaps being quite damaged, needing real help of a kind that is not made available here at all. One minute they’re in Paddington Green police station, the next minute they’re out on the street with a pack of press for better or for worse, wanting to talk to them. Nowhere to live, other than their families’ houses which are known about by the press and the immediate priority with each family was to get the detained person away from the police station into an anonymous location where they could at least talk to their families. That — The whole of the past few days have been devoted to that, and nothing else.

AMY GOODMAN: How was Moazzam Begg captured? How was he taken or arrested?

GARETH PEIRCE: Because he was living with his wife and children and was seized from the house they were living in, weve known about his capture from the first moment. He was taken by men who he describes as thugsPakistani and Americantaken in a car. We had always thought that he had managed to ring his father from a mobile phone somewhere in the back of the car; but he he explained to me two days ago, in fact, he was seized. He was placed in a cell, and he found in his pocket then his mobile phone, and his father received a telephone call from him within hours of his capture saying, I don’t know whos taken me. There are American voices. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And no more was heard until the Red Cross telephoned his father from Bagram in Afghanistan saying, We have a Moazzam Begg here. But we brought on his behalf legal action in Pakistan, habeas corpus to say, Where is he? Deliver him to the court, and every relevant ministry put in an affidavit to say, We have not taken him. We do not have him. And yet, there he is in American hands within ten days. It’s kidnapping. Utterly unlawful.

AMY GOODMAN: While the government hasn’t charged him, they said that he was training at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan? Is that what they have said?

GARETH PEIRCE: It’s what the Pentagon is pumping out as information, no doubt, to attempt to discredit Moazzam Begg. That is not true. He says unequivocally, it’s not true. I believe totally what he says. He is the most scrupulously honest, careful person. And at some stage, if anyone has the wit to want to understand what he will say, then there will be a chilling history of American brutality and mendacity, and there will be a complete exoneration of Moazzam Begg.

AMY GOODMAN: Is he explaining now why he visited Afghanistan?

GARETH PEIRCE: Weve known. Weve always known. He emigrated to Afghanistan with his wife and children, tragically for him, in the summer of 2001 in order to live in the only probable experiment that at that time was existing in the world, an experiment in an Islamic society. And he went in order to set up a school with his wife. And the plan was that they would both teach. And there they were in Kabul. They had bought a house. They were living there. They were establishing themselves, and then the invasion happened, and they had to get out. And they got out to Pakistan, re-established themselves, again started up life in a house in which they were living, and it was at that point he was seized.

AMY GOODMAN: And so —

GARETH PEIRCE: Everything that was ever said by President Bush or Prime Minister Blair about, These are bad men captured on the battlefield was utterly untrue. Completely, utterly untrue.

AMY GOODMAN: Is the Pentagon saying he earlier had spent time in Afghanistan at another trip by himself?

GARETH PEIRCE: You will have to ask the Pentagon what they’re saying. I don’t know. I have no idea.

AMY GOODMAN: What is Moazzam saying happened to him in Guantanamo? How was he tortured?

GARETH PEIRCE: Well, so far hes spoken to an American lawyer who saw him there, who has signed a gagging order, and what Moazzam says at some point he will say properly. What we know from every other detainee whos emerged from Guantanamo is that the methodology that was used was consistent and involved interrogation in extreme conditions with coercive methods that included sleep deprivation, bullying, threatening; but I have also heard from Moazzam Begg an extended statement in which hes described how under threat of death he was forced to make a false confession, and that he witnessed the murder of two detainees in Bagram, and that he has consistently complained about the treatment hes been accorded. That much we know. I am sure there is much more to come.

AMY GOODMAN: You say he was immediately released, pretty much, from British detention after being flown in from Guantanamo. But then what happened? Is he free?

GARETH PEIRCE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Was there any move by the British government to do anything, to go after him and the other men who have been released?

GARETH PEIRCE: No.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you say that they said that they’re introducing a new law?

GARETH PEIRCE: For a year, Tony Blair has said, because the government here has been consistently criticized for its failure to do anything to achieve the return of the remaining four British detainees, Tony Blair has repeatedly said, It will be reasonable for the Americans to expect us to have structures in place that would insure the safety and security of our countries. That’s what he said. Is it a coincidence that on the day they return, the Home Secretary announces new measures? The answer may be yes and no. No, because we had in a separate situation achieved an enormous victory when they had introduced internment in this country, attempted to, in a cheap imitation of the PATRIOT Act (both disgraceful legislative measures). We had achieved a victory after three years of struggle for the men detained here. The House of Lords said, This is utterly unlawful. You cant lock people up indefinitely without trial here. However, it is extremely suspicious that on the day that the government reacts to that House of Lords ruling happens to be the day when the Guantanamo detainees come back. Is this yet another pathetic attempt by the government of this country to please the Americans to ape the Americans in their unlawful legislative program? Maybe. Maybe it’s just bluff and bluster. Maybe it’s just saber rattling. Probably is. There is no legislation in place. The legislation that has been flagged up in relation to monitoring or detaining British citizens who it’s unable to chargeI don’t think thatll pass muster in Parliament. It also is unlawful. The proposals are unlawful. The fact is the police delivered him to the address his family was waiting at. They left him and said, basically, You’re on your own now. He’s no threat to anyone. He’s a law-abiding, peaceful, thoughtful person who has a future doing a great deal of good in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Peirce is one of the leading human rights lawyers in Britain. I was speaking to her in her home in London this weekend. The lawyer for both Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar, two of the four British detainees who were released to Britain from Guantanamo last week. They are now with their families. As we continue with our interview, I went on to ask her to compare the detentions at Guantanamo with anything else she has worked on in her life. This is Gareth Peirce.

GARETH PEIRCE: Of course, we have not seen anything like this before. It’s absolutely breathtaking, audacious, unlawful kidnapping of vast numbers of people, simply not caring that it is tantamount to shredding up every international treaty obligation which all of our countries have subscribed to. What I see it as, is an experiment, an experiment by America to see what interrogative methodology it could use and obtain results in disregard completely of the fact that this — Well, consciously, in fact, knowing that it was using prohibited methods. An experiment to see what you could get (disregarding the fact that experience tells us it must be nonsense what you get from coercive interrogation), but also an experiment in testing reaction internationally and nationally. Will there be protest? Have we gone too far? And tragically, the answer probably is the experiments successful. There has not been world revulsion expressed that has compelled the United States to back down, to apologize, to release everyone, to pay reparation, to achieve a mea culpa, an acknowledgement, this should never be done again. No. Rumsfeld has said the recent results of the American election endorse our methods. There is a shameless intention to continue. Maybe falter for a moment. Maybe theres been criticism, but not enough to stop it. And the result of the experiment is that worldwide there is now been a message: You can abandon every treaty obligation, abandon Geneva conventions, abandon human rights law, abandon guarantees of prohibition on torture. You can do the lot, and if youre strong enough and powerful enough, and saber rattle war on terror terminology, nobodys going to stop you. That’s the tragic outcome.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you say that — that the British citizens were released because of pressure from Tony Blair as a partner of George Bush, and do you see this as a model for what will happen to the other prisoners? There are still hundreds being held. What distinguishes these men who have been released?

GARETH PEIRCE: It wasn’t Tony Blair who did a single thing to help. I think it was the reverse, that it wasn’t accidental that two British citizens were amongst the first six nominees for military commissions. In my view, that was a miscalculation by both our governments, and it was intended as a present to our government by the American administration. Okay, you want to say youve got a threat in your country. Heres proof positive. However, unexpectedly, for the government, the British public across the board, every — every aspect of political thinking, the thought — British nationals were detained in horrific cages, and humiliated and tortured and facing as was said at that time, the death sentence, caused a revulsion. It was not to be, and our government was forced to start doing something. It did too little too late. It did it in effectively. It traded bodies and who knows what else as being given or taken as gifts politically because of this. But these four came back because of public pressure, not because of any political morality whatsoever on the part of our government; and there are still many long-term British residents in Guantanamo for whom our government has surrogate responsibility, including refugees about whom they’re doing nothing. They do nothing, and they have to be compelled to do something.

AMY GOODMAN: And in terms of the latest British torture scandal, similar to the soldiers who are now being charged and on trial who tortured people at Abu Ghraib, can you comment on that? I don’t think a lot of people in the United States have even heard about pictures showing British soldiers torturing prisoners in Iraq, and where that happened?

GARETH PEIRCE: Right. Well, there’s nothing like the power of the photograph, and one imagines if there’s one military reaction for the future to this, it is: Prohibit cameras rather than prohibit tactics. That’s a tragic reality, but our hypocrisy is considerable. Our Home Office has acknowledged in the appalling internment procedures we introduced here which have now been declared illegal, our Home Office acknowledged that we use for the purposes of intelligence here information obtained from torture, and we are prepared to use it. Our only caveat is what weight we give it. And our courts have endorsed that up to date. There’s still an appeal to the House of Lords on this point. At the moment, the shameful state of law in this country is that it’s okay to use torture. It’s simply not okay if it was British agents carrying it out. Now, that again is Guantanamo writ large. Okay if someone else does it. We neednt be too choosey, but we will use it. Again, that is the recipe for the destruction of all guaranteed international minimum norms.

AMY GOODMAN: Leading British human rights advocate, Gareth Peirce. The attorney for two of the four British men released from Guantanamo, having been held there for almost three years, released without charge. They are now in Britain with their families. We broadcast this program today on the day the full Senate begins the debate on the confirmation of White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, as Attorney General of the United States. Many say it was Alberto Gonzales who laid the legal groundwork for the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, by saying that the Geneva conventions do not apply.