Paul Mitchell | ukwatch.net

De Menezes Murder: Lies Begin to Unravel

eddie — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:31:25 +0000

Explosive testimony has been presented to the inquest into
the police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, suggesting that
he was shot even though he was known to be unarmed.

Evidence was given that the innocent Brazilian was killed despite
his not being clearly identified as a suspected terrorist. In
addition, officers involved have said that they were prepared
to kill de Menezes even without authorisation from commanding
officer Cressida Dick.

Jean Charles was fatally shot two weeks after the July 7 bombings
in London, which killed 56 people and one day after an apparent
failed second attempt to detonate devices. He was reportedly mistaken
for Hussain Osman, one of the failed July 21, 2005, bombers. Anti-terror
officers pinned him to the floor of a London underground train
and pumped seven bullets into his head at point-blank range.

Last week, a Special Branch officer revealed that he altered
his notes because they indicated that police shot dead Jean Charles
as he boarded a train at Stockwell tube station on July 22, 2005,
even though he was known to be unarmed. The officer, referred
to as “Owen,” was giving evidence on October 8.

Owen was deputy surveillance coordinator in the Scotland Yard
control room during the surveillance operation that resulted in
the young electrician’s death and had made notes about the
day’s events on his computer. After he had given his evidence
at the inquest, Owen was asked for all his notes relating to the
shooting.

He claims he logged onto his computer to change the names of
officers into the codenames given by the court to protect their
identities, but then deleted a paragraph in which Dick, who is
now deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,
had told officers to allow Jean Charles to continue his journey
because he was “not carrying anything.”

The full paragraph reads, “Management discussion. CD [Cressida
Dick]: Can run on to tube as not carrying anything. Persuaded
by unidentified male amongst management.”

It flatly contradicts Dick’s own evidence at the inquest
on October 7, the previous day, in which she claimed that she
ordered her officers to “stop” Jean Charles because
he was a “terrorist threat.”

Owen says he deleted the paragraph because it was “misleading.”
He claimed he couldn’t remember if it was Dick talking although
he said it was probably her when questioned further.

“I believe it was the commander but when I reflected I
couldn’t be sure, or whether she was saying this is what
we are going to do or this is one of the options. It was a woman’s
voice.”

When asked if he realised he had committed a serious offence,
Owen said, “I have removed a line I believed was wrong and
gave a totally false impression.” He told the inquest he
had deleted more than he had intended because he was rushing to
an appointment. When asked if “management” had asked
him to make the changes, Owen replied, “No. I am sure of
that, sir.”

Owen also made the startling revelation that he did not submit
the crucial paragraph to the Independent Police Complaints Commission
(IPCC) inquiry in 2006 or the health and safety trial last year
into the shooting, at which he gave evidence, “because he
wasn’t asked to.”

Commander Dick also claimed she was informed “they think
it’s him” when Jean Charles left a building linked to
Hussain Osman and made his way to Stockwell station. Chief Inspector
Vince Esposito, a counter-terrorism expert advising Dick on the
day of the shooting, said he believed, “without a shadow
of doubt,” that Jean Charles was failed bomber Hussain Osman
and that a “critical shot” to the head was only administered
if a suspect was identified and was carrying a device.

However, speaking at the inquest on October 10, “Pat,”
who acted as contact between Scotland Yard and the surveillance
team, reported he had said only that Mr. de Menezes was “possibly
identifiable with” the suspect. “I was always under
the impression that the subject had been unidentified,” he
stated.

Another senior officer, Detective Inspector Merrick Rose, revealed
that he could not “recall” whether images of the real
suspect, Osman, were discussed at a dawn briefing before Jean
Charles’s death—begging the question, was a comparison
between the two men ever made?

Dick denies that her instruction to “stop” Jean Charles
was an order to shoot to kill and that she did not say “at
all costs.”

Mark Lewindon, now retired, was a detective chief inspector
in Special Branch at the time. He had told the inquest he had
overheard the order from Dick when she was speaking in the operations
room at New Scotland Yard. “It was said he shouldn’t
be allowed to get on the train and I think the words she used
were ‘at all costs,’ ” he said.

Dick responded in her defence that “I would need to be
absolutely satisfied that this person posed a dreadful imminent
threat to members of the public before I would order a critical
shot.”

“I was asking for what you might call a conventional—albeit
aware of all the risks—challenge from the firearms officers.”

Subsequent evidence demonstrated that, whether or not Dick
was calling to make operational a shoot-to-kill policy, the police
involved had already been instructed to do just that.

A tactical adviser and senior firearms advisor known as Trojan
84 made the extraordinary admission to the inquest that police
were prepared to take a “critical” shot without

orders from their superiors.

The inspector had been in charge of briefing the marksmen who
shot dead Jean Charles. Giving evidence in open court for the
first time, Trojan 84 said: “We felt that for any DSO [designated
senior officer] to make a decision about a critical shot was a
hugely difficult decision to make and maybe career-threatening.

“In relation to the critical shot, the instruction would
come direct from the DSO but what I also mentioned was that if
we were able to challenge, but the subject was not compliant,
then a shot may be taken.”

When Trojan 84 was asked if officers were prepared to take
the critical shot without authorisation, he replied, “Yes.”

“It was my job to tell the team they would be supported
whatever decision they took because of the structures that were
in place.”

Trojan 84 could only have conceivably issued such instructions
if they had been already laid down at the highest possible level—much
higher than the DSO Cressida Dick.

The shoot-to-kill policy implemented against Jean Charles is
known as “Operation Kratos,” adopted in secret two years
earlier in high-level discussions between top police officers
and the government. Under its remit, a senior police officer is
on standby 24 hours a day at Scotland Yard, the headquarters of
the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), with the authority to deploy
special armed squads to follow and, if deemed necessary, shoot
dead suspected suicide bombers.

It is now clear that, without any clear identification or indication
of an imminent threat, the police were determined that someone
would die that day in furtherance of the so-called “war on
terror.”

Moreover, even the limited safeguard of accountability to a
designated superior officer would not be allowed to interfere
with what was a political and not a security-driven decision.

As the World Socialist Web Site insisted in the immediate
aftermath of police murder, “there was a deliberate decision
to kill, rather than arrest, de Menezes, taken at the highest
level of the police force rather than by the officers immediately
involved.”

Jean Charles was shot in cold blood primarily in order “to
instill fear in the population and implement a shoot-to-kill policy
that had been secretly decided on by Prime Minister Tony Blair
and top officials two years previously.” The treatment meted
out to de Menezes sent out the clear message—first articulated
by Blair—that the “rules of the game” had changed.

Labour proposes huge increase in state surveillance

tim — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:16:10 +0000

In a further escalation of the attack on democratic rights, the Labour government is proposing a huge increase in state surveillance. It is implementing new measures under the pretext of the “war on terror” to intrude ever deeper into the private lives of people who are viewed as potential criminals rather than citizens.

As things stand, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) introduced in 2004 allows hundreds of public bodies to monitor communications without a court warrant. The Commissioner for the Interception of Communications, Paul Kennedy, oversees 795 agencies and organisations permitted by RIPA to acquire communications data. These include 9 intelligence agencies, 52 police forces, 12 other law enforcement agencies, 139 prisons, 475 local authorities, and 108 other organisations such as the Post Office and the Food Standards Agency.

There were 519,000 requests for information in 2006/07, mainly from the police and security services—up from 440,000 the previous year. Official reports say law enforcement agencies were also authorised to “interfere with someone’s property” about 3,000 times in 2007/08, mount 355 “intrusive surveillance” operations (breaking in to someone’s property or planting a bug) and carry out 18,767 cases of “directed surveillance” (following someone and recording their activities).

Currently, telecommunications companies must store records of all phone calls for a year so that they can be examined. In 2005, Statewatch News Online revealed how T-mobile had “an automated e-mail system that allows law enforcement agencies to retrieve subscriber and billing details by consulting the system directly—all they need is a mobile phone number. This process requires no human intervention from T-mobile staff: the system automatically generates spreadsheets showing the subscriber and billing information and sends them to the law enforcement e-mail address.”

From next year, internet service providers will also be compelled to collect information about the web sites people visit and details of their emails. The Home Office said the new measures would force companies to store “a billion incidents of data exchange a day” and dismisses any concerns about these developments with the usual mantra, “we consider that these measures are a proportionate interference with individuals’ right to privacy to ensure protection of the public.”

There are plans to force all companies to hand over their data to one central “super” database so that government agencies will no longer need to submit requests to individual companies.

The government is also putting pressure on organisations besides the police and security services to make more use of spying powers. Kennedy complained, “I am concerned that so many authorities who applied for powers to be given to them, apparently do not use them and I do not know why this is … if this state of affairs continues unexplained, then consideration must be given to removing the powers from them.

“During the period covered by this report only 154 local authorities made use of their powers to acquire communications data. A total of 1,707 requests were made for communications data and the vast majority were for basic subscriber information. Very few local authorities have used their powers to acquire itemized call records in relation to the investigations, which they have conducted. Indeed our inspections have shown that generally the local authorities could make much more use of communications data as a powerful tool to investigate crime.”

UK Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, agreed saying, “The commissioners’ reports offer valuable oversight and provide reassurance that these powers are being used appropriately.” She added: “We need to ensure Ripa powers are used appropriately and are not undermined.”

Smith’s last remark is a reference to the recent furore over local authorities using phone and email records and carrying out video surveillance of people applying for schools for their children, housing benefit and other social services. The papers were also full of headlines about spying operations to detect dogs fouling the footpaths and people using refuse bins improperly.

Sir Christopher Rose, the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, warned local authorities that they risked losing “the protection that RIPA affords.” He used the “lack of understanding of the legislation” shown by councils and their “serious misunderstanding of the concept of proportionality” to call on them to “invest in properly trained intelligence officers who could operate covertly.”

Rose added, “The government is reviewing those public authorities that have access to these powers to ensure that they have a continuing and justifiable requirement for them. On completion the government will list the authorities that can use each of the powers and the purposes for which they can use them, and set out revised codes of practice.”

Simon Milton, outgoing chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA), attempted to defend local authorities against these accusations saying, “Councils have been criticised for using the powers in relation to issues that can be portrayed as trivial or not considered a crime by the public. Yet councils are caught between the rock of public opinion and the hard place of being told they should actually be using some of these powers more widely.” He agreed, however, that, “... it is important that they use these powers carefully and appropriately and we will be working with [the Surveillance Commissioner] to help enable this.”

Last April, Milton was the driving force behind a proposal to use supermarkets to collect data on migrant workers. Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, told MPs, “The LGA has recently suggested that we look at footfall in supermarkets. They reckon Tesco has pretty good accurate information about the people who use their stores. I welcome that kind of imaginative thinking if it can help us to get a better and more accurate view at the local level of what the impact [of migration] is.”

Earlier this year popular opposition to Labour’s anti-terror legislation and its erosion of civil liberties allowed former Conservative Shadow Home Secretary David Davis to adopt the mantle of “defender of liberty” when he won the Haltemprice and Howden by-election. A similar thing has happened with these new proposals. Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers has warned about “the ceding of intrusive powers to local government and other bodies and giving them access to once sacrosanct personal data” and Dominic Grieve, the current Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, said, “Yet again the Government has proved itself unable to resist the temptation to take a power, quite properly designed to combat terrorism, to snoop on the lives of ordinary people in everyday circumstances.”

The new powers are linked to the enactment in British law of a European Union directive on data retention, which the Labour government was largely responsible for steamrolling through the European Union in 2005.

It claimed they were vital to defeat terrorism after the September 11, 2001 bombings in New York but, in fact, the EU was considering police-state measures well before then. In 1998, attempts were made in the Enfopol proposals to allow law enforcement agencies access to all communications, which were only withdrawn after widespread condemnation by civil liberties groups. This, after all, was not long after the enactment of limited reforms expressed in Human Rights Acts and Data Protection procedures.

However, following George Bush’s October 2001 letter to the EU, which demanded that countries “revise draft privacy directives that call for mandatory destruction to permit the retention of critical data for a reasonable period” the Belgian government back by the UK introduced proposals for mandatory data retention.

In October 2005, after months of secret meetings, the European Council with its UK Presidency published a draft directive. The UK Home Secretary, Charles Clark, warned the European Parliament that if it did not vote for the proposals “he would make sure [it] would no longer have a say on any justice and home affairs matters.”

Civil rights organisations put their faith in the European Parliament to block the proposals. One NGO asked, “... the European Parliament faces a crucial decision. Is this the type of society we would like to live in? A society where all our actions are recorded, all of our interactions may be mapped, treating the use of communications infrastructures as criminal activity.”

In the event, the draft was fast-tracked through the parliament with little debate and few amendments and became law after the vast majority of socialist and conservative MEPs voted for it.

As many lawyers and experts pointed out, any EU member state was, in effect, now free to retain “any type of data for any type of security purpose for any period at all.” They expressed concern that there would inevitably be demands for more draconian measures such as ID cards required to use internet cafes, the banning of all international email services such as Hotmail, and blocking the use of all non-European Internet Service Providers.

The unprecedented infringements of civil liberties that the Labour government and its European counterparts have implemented and are proposing are not motivated by the “war on terror”. As the political representatives of big business and the super-rich, they are conscious that they cannot secure a popular mandate for policies based on militarism, colonial conquest and the systematic destruction of the living standards of millions of people and are preparing other means for their enforcement.

Shell tanker drivers’ strike

Tim Holmes — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:51:56 +0000

Last weekend’s strike by 641 Shell oil tanker drivers foreshadows a summer of discontent over low pay rises and soaring food and fuel bills.

Unconfirmed reports suggest they have been offered a 14 percent pay rise, undermining the government’s 2 percent target but little more than the original offer of 7.3 percent this year and 6 percent next, which the drivers rejected before last weekend’s strike.

Unite trade union leaders have called off another four-day strike due to start this Friday and an overtime ban and are recommending drivers accept the deal. They have refused to make the deal public, confining themselves to a joint statement with the two contractors employing the drivers, Hoyer UK and Suckling Transport, saying they were “pleased to confirm that they have successfully concluded pay talks.”

The government became extremely nervous at the speed with which many areas of the country ran out of fuel last weekend, the solidarity for the strikers shown by drivers from other companies and the support given by the public. The same nervousness goes for union leaders who, witnessing the chaotic effects of the strike and its spread to other workers in a way reminiscent of the secondary action banned by the Conservatives in the 1980s and upheld by Labour, moved quickly to close it down.

Despite the strike only involving drivers delivering to Shell petrol stations—about 10 percent of the UK’s total—it quickly began to bite as they picketed oil refineries and distribution depots. By Monday, nearly 700 petrol stations out of the 8,700 in the UK had run out of diesel and unleaded petrol.

From the first hours of the strike, tanker drivers from BP and other companies refused to cross picket lines.

Striking workers picketed three oil depots in Scotland—at Grangemouth oil refinery, Aberdeen and Inverness—waving banners saying, “Shell, gallons of greed” and “Shell drivers over a barrel.” Only 3 tankers left the Grangemouth depot in the first seven hours of the four-day dispute, instead of the usual 40 vehicles an hour, and 6 turned away.

On Monday, drivers from other companies walked out to join the strikers at Grangemouth after 11 workers from Scottish Fuels—a spin-off from BP—were reportedly suspended for refusing to cross the picket line and “refusing to accept management instructions.”

Faced with the possibility of the dispute escalating, Scottish Fuels backed down and reinstated the workers. Trade union leaders sought to bury the incident, claiming it had all been a “misunderstanding” and was now over.

Grangemouth, which is one of the most vital oil distribution centres, delivering one third of the UK’s supply, was the scene of a strike by workers at another BP spin-off company, Ineos, in April, protesting cuts to the company’s pension scheme.

Around 15 BP drivers, who had arrived with a police escort for the nightshift at the Stanlow refinery in Cheshire, then refused to work, joined striking drivers. Some independent drivers also drove away after talking to pickets.

In Plymouth, drivers from every fuel company at the local distribution depot joined the strike, leading to nearly all the petrol stations in the counties of Devon and Cornwall running out of fuel. The local Business Council chairman, Tim Jones, told the BBC, “The impact of this right across the board is absolutely horrifying.

“The frustration and anger among the business community is growing by the hour.

“Fuel prices are already high, there is a credit crunch and this is the last straw. Businesses are on their knees.”

The government relaxed competition law to allow fuel companies to compare stocks and target areas where fuel was short and also prepared emergency powers to ration petrol. It instructed the police to break up any picket lines that tried to prevent tankers from leaving or entering refineries or fuel depots and put the Army on standby to drive fuel tankers.

Chancellor Alistair Darling claimed on Wednesday that large pay rises for public- and private-sector workers would fuel rising prices and said, “That would be a disaster, not just for the country but for each and every one of us.”

“If you get yourself into a position where every penny extra you get through pay rises is eaten up through price rises, through inflation, then we will get into precisely the problems Britain had in the Seventies, the Eighties, and even the early Nineties, when inflation was at very high levels,” he said. “We have got to be vigilant in relation to all pay—public and private sector pay alike—because if we get ourselves into that spiral it will take years to get out of it.”

Darling spoke out after inflation hit a 10-year high of 3.3 per cent, and forecasts suggest it could hit 4 percent or higher within the next few months. For only the second time since the Bank of England was made independent, the level of inflation has risen more than 1 percentage point above the target—forcing its chairman Mervyn King to write to the Chancellor explaining how he plans to control the problem. King says that inflation will stay “markedly” above the 2 percent target for the foreseeable future suggesting interest rate cuts are off the agenda. At the last meeting of the Bank, interest rates were kept at the same level, but some board members wanted them to rise.

Workers made to pay for slump

Darling’s insistence on below-inflation pay awards is part of a continued effort to place the burden of the coming economic slump on the backs of working people. For a worker on the average salary of £23,750 and receiving the current average 3.2 percent pay rise, it means take-home pay rising by £500 a year—about half the £1,000 extra that the average family has to find just to pay for their annual food and drink alone and before they pay for soaring fuel, housing and transport costs.

According to figures published by the Office of National Statistics this week, the cost of food and drink has risen nearly 8 percent this year, the highest increase since 1990. Essential foods, such as bread and butter, have leapt by nearly 20 percent. The price of gas and electricity has soared and could go up another 50 percent over the coming year, and other utility suppliers such as water companies are planning to announce double-digit price rises soon. Average household heating and fuel bills will rise by more than £400.

At the same time, the number of people without jobs is currently 1.64 million and rising sharply. It is widely predicted to keep going up for the next 18 months.

These sorts of price rises have fuelled anger amongst the population as a whole and growing militancy amongst workers, especially as the government declared that pay rises had to be kept to 2 percent a year for years to come. There have already been strikes by postal workers, teachers and civil servants in protest of pay levels. Next week, the public sector union, Unison, will announce the result of a ballot on industrial action by 600,000 council workers who have already rejected an offer of just below 2.5 per cent. The union’s general secretary, Dave Prentis, warned that a dispute with public sector workers could bring the government down at the next election—raising the nightmare scenario haunting Labour politicians of a repeat of the 1978-1979 Winter of Discontent that led to the collapse of the last Labour government.

Darling tried to downplay the drivers’ pay rise, insisting that it was a one-off award due to the “peculiar” nature of the oil industry—a line repeated by Business Secretary John Hutton.

In fact, there is nothing peculiar about the conditions facing workers in the oil industry. What has happened to the oil tanker drivers—including contracting out to slash existing wage rates—is something every worker or professional person will recognise and most will have experienced. It was a major reason why attempts to whip up hostility against the drivers remained largely unsuccessful. As Gary from Lincolnshire wrote to the right-wing Daily Mail “...it’s not a disgraceful pay rise. Open your eyes to reality. What these tanker drivers have received is what all of us should get. It’s only fair and reasonable. If you believe the CPI inflation rate of 3.1 percent then you have been totally duped by the government. Wake up Britain we ALL deserve 14 percent and don’t let them fool you.”

Twenty years ago, tanker drivers were amongst the best-paid sections of the working class and enjoyed relatively good conditions and pension benefits. Under the impact of globalisation, all this has changed. Figures released by Unite showed that the drivers have suffered a drastic decline in their wages and conditions since the 1990s, when Shell outsourced their tankering operations. At the time, trade unions at the company and at countless other companies and public services across the UK sold the concept of outsourcing to their members, saying that under employment protection (TUPE) rules, they would keep the same pay and conditions. The fact that new starters could be employed at different rates was downplayed or ignored.

According to Unite, in 1992, a driver typically earned approximately £32,000 (US$62,400) per year for a 37-hour week. Today, 16 years later, that same driver, employed by contractors Hoyer UK and Suckling would be earning the same £32,000-per-year basic wage for working a 48-hour working week—considerably closer to the industry average of £25,000.

As the strike started, Unite General Secretary Tony Woodley blustered, “This should have been solved six months ago. Shell outsourced my members’ jobs years ago to cut costs and have been very successful at the workers’ expense.

“Despite what management is saying, our members are on a basic wage of £31,800 and if they had remained working for Shell that would now be £46,000. What we are asking for is a basic wage of £36,000.”

Woodley argued for a pay rise by citing yet another attack on drivers’ conditions his union failed to fight—pensions. “It would cost just £1 million to solve this dispute—money they have already saved from the workers’ pension scheme alone,” he said.

Unite Assistant General Secretary Len McCluskey chimed in, stating that Shell “is one of the most profitable companies on earth and it now needs to provide the financial flexibility to avert this dispute. It is no use Shell bosses, who have themselves enjoyed 15 percent plus pay increases in the last year, sitting on their hands…. Shell tanker drivers are earning exactly the same today as they were fifteen years ago while working for a company that makes £1.3 billion every month, profits our members’ hard work helps deliver. So Unite is saying to Shell bosses, stop hiding behind your sub-contractor and help us sort out a solution.”

Shell is quite unmoved by the pathetic appeals from Woodley and McCluskey. On July 1, the company is outsourcing its IT infrastructure and the transfer of 3,200 jobs, mostly based at its Aberdeen HQ, to AT&T, EDS and T-Systems. The trade union Amicus is threatening legal action over staff redundancy terms, which Shell amended in June last year, slashing payments from £200,000 to £50,000 (US$98,700). Regional Amicus officer Graham Tran complained that “loyal” employees were being “dumped” and pleaded, “We just want Shell to look after its loyal employees.”

Shell says it will press ahead with plans to make pre-tax cost savings of about US$500 million per year through reorganising its structure, cutting costs and outsourcing jobs in the hope it will surpass the record £14 billion in profits it made last year.

As many industry analysts point out, as oil prices soar, companies are “increasingly examining their supply chain networks in order to make them more efficient and sustainable.” According to Unilever customer logistics director (Europe) Martin Whitcombe, manufacturing or logistics networks take a minimum of three to five years to restructure, “so it is important that firms make changes now.”

“Oil prices are now $127-$130 a barrel. At $150 a barrel, we start thinking about our (supply chain) network; at $200 a barrel, we really start thinking about our network,” he said.

According to economists Jeff Rubin and Benjamin Tal, this year’s explosion in transportation costs has offset all the trade liberalisation efforts of the past three decades. They say that the cost of transportation in 2000 when oil was US$20 a barrel was the equivalent of a 3 percent tax, but with oil at US$150 a barrel, it is equivalent to an 11 percent tariff.

More troops for Afghanistan, no Iraq withdrawal

Ellie Keen — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

At a joint press conference with US President George Bush yesterday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that more troops would be sent to Afghanistan, taking the UK’s contingent in the country to its “highest level.”

After speculation in the media of a rift between London and Washington over troop deployments in Iraq, he added that there was no “timetable” for a withdrawal from the country. Britain has 4,200 troops remaining in Iraq on the outskirts of Basra and took part in the US-Iraqi offensive in late March against Shiite militiamen in the city. He also supported Bush in pledging that tougher sanctions will be imposed on Iran for failing to stop its nuclear energy programme.

Defence Secretary Des Browne later told parliament that a further 230 soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan, taking the total to around 8,030 by early 2009.

Sunday’s Observer newspaper had claimed that Bush had delivered a “stern message” to Brown last week, warning about further reductions of British forces in Iraq. The White House moved to defuse the issue by saying, “What the president said is what the president has been saying and Prime Minister Brown has been saying from the very beginning.” Downing Street declared that it was not British policy to set “arbitrary timetables” on troop withdrawal.

At their press conference Bush said, “I have no problem with how Gordon Brown is dealing with Iraq. He’s been a good partner.”

He continued, “I just want to remind you that [Brown] has left more troops in Iraq than he initially anticipated. Like me, he will be making his decisions based on the conditions on the ground without an artificial timetable based on politics.”

He warmly welcomed Brown’s pledge to send more troops to Afghanistan and to step up sanctions against Iran, praising him for being “tough on terror.”

In relation to Iraq and Afghanistan, Brown said, “There is still work to be done and Britain plays, and will continue to play, its part.” He praised Bush as a “true friend of Britain” and for the “steadfast resolution that he has shown in rooting out terrorism in all parts of the world.”

On Iran, Brown stated, “I will repeat that we will take any necessary action so that Iran is aware of the choice it has to make—to start to play its part as a full and respected member of the international community, or face further isolation.”

Britain would urge Europe to impose “further sanctions” on Iran, he said, by freezing the assets of the country’s biggest bank and imposing new sanctions on oil and gas.

Bush thanked Brown for his “strong statement,” and added, “The Iranians must understand that when we come together and speak with one voice we are serious.” Pressure was necessary to “solve this problem diplomatically,” but “Iranians must understand, however, that all options are on the table,” he threatened.

Brown’s pronouncements gave Bush everything he wanted. They were a kick in the teeth to those in the ruling elite and sections of the press who hoped that Brown’s elevation to prime minister would signal an end to Tony Blair’s “mistake” of aligning Britain too closely with the US.

Brown’s craven support for Bush reveals that far more was involved than a policy error on Blair’s part. Both men represent the dominant financial elite, whose central aim is utilise relations with Washington to project a global military and economic presence for British imperialism, while strengthening its hand against its major European rivals, Germany and France. And even though things have gone badly, there is little sign that anyone has an alternative perspective to offer within ruling circles, least of all Brown himself.

Brown’s pronouncements only highlighted the impotence of the perspective promulgated by the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), which helped organise an anti-Bush demonstration on Sunday in tandem with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the British Muslim Initiative. Originally banned from assembling in Parliament at midday, the police finally allowed it to take place in the early evening but continued to refuse it permission to march the few hundred yards to Downing Street where Brown was entertaining Bush.

The StWC was the main beneficiary of the mass movement against the Iraq war and the widespread sentiment it provoked amongst working people for a political alternative to Labour. A key role was played by the Socialist Workers Party, which insisted that there was no possibility of the struggle against war being conducted on the basis of socialism. It had to formulate demands that could be supported by everyone, including a handful of Labour rebels and trade union functionaries, Liberal Democrats, nationalist parties, dissident Conservatives and the coalition’s other major affiliates, CND and the Muslim Association of Britain—a small group of Arab Islamists that portrayed the Iraq war in religious terms.

As Blair’s hold on power became increasingly untenable the StWC sold the idea that Brown, then his chancellor, would break from policies that he had fully supported. A letter was drafted by Communist Party of Britain leader Andrew Murray and StWC convenor and SWP leader Lindsey German that whilst acknowledging that “Brown has been at the Prime Minister’s right hand throughout the decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan” claimed, “Nevertheless, it is our conviction that mass pressure, combined with electoral self-interest, can force the British government to break from George Bush’s wars.”

The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were described as “Bush’s wars” in order to provide a retroactive amnesty for all those Labourites who had voted in favour of war alongside Blair and Brown.

The Sunday demonstration also saw the antiwar MP George Galloway using his opportunity to sow dangerous illusions in Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama. He repeated statements he made earlier in the month on Arab TV when he said, “I pray for the safety of Barack Obama, and I pray that he can shift the United States’ attitude. So as we come towards the November elections, and the real prospect of a significant victory for Obama, everyone will have to re-find their footing, and these puppet presidents and corrupt kings [in the Middle East] may discover that the ground has moved under their feet, Allah willing.”

Earlier this year Galloway declared, “My guess is America is looking for real change, and only Barack Obama represents that.”

Obama seeks to portray himself as an opponent of the Iraq war, but has repeatedly rejected what he describes as a “precipitous withdrawal” of troops—Bush’s “artificial timetable”—stating that he “has always believed that our troops need to be withdrawn responsibly” and that troops involved in “counterterrorism” operations would stay. In practice this means maintaining the occupation indefinitely.

In his June 4 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, while repeating his support for diplomatic engagement with Iran, he said, “I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.”

Obama represents a section of the American ruling elite that has concluded that a significant change in stance and personnel is required to salvage the interests of US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally. These layers do not oppose military action as such, but regard the Bush administration’s single-minded focus on winning a military victory in Iraq as unwise and ultimately disastrous. An Obama presidency would not represent a fundamental break with the politics of American imperialism, but rather its continuation in a new form.

The attempt to prevent and curtail a peaceful antiwar protest is made necessary by the absence of any democratic mandate for the policies pursued by Brown and Blair before him. It led to open conflict between a massive number of police and some protesters, resulting in 25 arrests and some serious injuries. Two rows of barriers were erected to prevent access to Whitehall, together with rows of police officers and riot vans.

ISSE addresses students during week of debates at the University of Sussex

tim — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:18:38 +0000

The International Students for Social Equality recently took part in a “One World Week” of debates on international topics, organised by students at the University of Sussex. The ISSE has been campaigning to set up a student society on the campus and has held three meetings this year—on the Russian Revolution, the Iraq War and the May-June 1968 uprising in France.

After receiving an invitation from event organiser Oniicosi Luqman, the ISSE provided speakers for a number of sessions that were attended by up to 20 students.

Several students signed up to the ISSE. Student union communications officer Koos Couvée said that “it was great you guys talked about things from a broader, international viewpoint. We have never heard such ideas before here and they really had an impact.”

The first session of “One World Week” posed the question “Kenya: Can the new government guarantee fair elections, stop tribal tensions and end corruption?”

World Socialist Web Site correspondent Ann Talbot explained that the crisis that afflicted Kenya after the elections earlier this year “was not a conjunctural episode that can be addressed by reform of the constitution, by better oversight of public institutions, or by widening the political elite to include previously excluded groups.” Kenya was undergoing a systemic breakdown of its political system, which was one expression of a far more generalised crisis in Africa, she said.

Talbot agreed with first speaker, Kenyan freelance journalist Julius MbaLuto, that “the outbreak of what has been described as inter-tribal violence in Kenya has nothing to do with any peculiar propensity of African people for such conflict.” At independence in 1963, the British handed power over to the Kikuyu elite, which then enriched itself at the expense of the majority of the population, including the Kikuyu poor.

For almost half a century, this elite has failed to carry out an effective programme of land reform, one of the most basic elements in the programme of bourgeois democracy, or bring about economic improvement for the vast majority of poor. Although Kenya was held up as an African “success story,” its high economic growth has not benefited the majority of the population, more than half of whom live on an income of less than US$2 a day and at least half on less than US$1 a day.

This situation resulted from the subordination of the ruling elite—of whichever faction—to the interests of the major capitalist powers, the international financial institutions and the giant corporations that dominate the world economy. For a short time after independence, as long as the Cold War lasted, Kenya’s new rulers had a certain room for manoeuvre. But no more, Talbot explained. Subjected to IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes that demanded previously protected markets be opened up to global finance capital, the result has been rapid deregulation, privatisations and public spending cuts accompanied by increased looting of the economy.

Talbot explained how Mwai Kibaki and his Rainbow Coalition had won victory in 2002 by promising reforms and an end to the corruption associated with the previous Moi regime. The Orange Democratic Movement of Raila Odinga, a former member of Kibaki’s government, became the focus of those who were excluded from this “feeding frenzy,” she said. Their inclusion in the new power-sharing government is part of a vast wealth grab. Almost half of MPs have become cabinet ministers or assistant ministers and are entitled to huge salaries and other benefits. Odinga, who is now prime minister, has a fleet of cars and a 45-strong personal bodyguard.

Talbot said that the post-election violence was prepared in advance. It was state repression aimed at the poorest strata of the population, which had a class, rather than tribal character. Politicians on both sides were prepared to sacrifice the lives of almost 2,000 of their fellow countrymen in pursuit of wealth and power. These politicians now sit in the same cabinet and talk about returning the displaced people to their farms and homes. “A cabinet composed of people of this stamp are not about to resolve any of the political and economic problems that confront Kenya. They are part of the problem,” she added.

She concluded by calling for a new political perspective to address the problems that confront the mass of the Kenyan population. Genuine economic development can only take place in Kenya on the basis of the socialist reorganisation of the world economy to meet the needs of the majority of its people.

The Obama campaign

ISSE organiser Marcus Morgan spoke at the session, “The US people want change. Can Obama bring it?”

Morgan explained how the growing economic crisis and resulting social tensions have thrown the Democratic Party into crisis and seen it fracturing along racial, ethnic, gender and other demographic lines.

The bitter conflict between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, despite there being no public expression of major policy differences between them, signifies a deep divide in the US ruling elite. Although Obama had tapped into broad and deep discontent, particularly among young people, over the war, economic insecurity, and the corruption and criminality of the Bush years, he has been carefully groomed as the candidate of “change” by a faction of the Democratic Party that sees a shift in foreign policy as the only way to defend US interests around the world.

Morgan reviewed the historical evolution of the Democratic Party and the collapse of American liberalism. The “New Deal” reforms advocated by the Democratic Party under Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression had proved to be the high point of US liberal reforms, he said.

Following World War II, however, the Democratic Party no longer presented itself as the party of the “working man,” but as the defender of the “middle class.” Workers, it was said, would improve their lot by benefiting as consumers from the economic growth and general prosperity of the country.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the post-war boom beginning to unravel against the background of civil rights struggles, the Vietnam War, urban riots and a wave of strikes. “As the promise of rising living standards through the expansion of the consumer society faltered, the Democratic Party sought to refashion itself under the banner of identity politics,” he explained, becoming an unstable alliance of competing interest groups, which included the civil rights establishment and more privileged layers of blacks and other minorities, feminist organisations, gay rights groups, trade unions and environmentalists.

Working class support for the Democrats was further eroded as the party supported demands for the restructuring of the US economy in the face of its global competition. It was Democratic President Jimmy Carter, Morgan recalled, who initiated the first major attack on the reforms of the New Deal and began an offensive against the wages and living standards of the working class.

If there was one telling indication of Obama’s real political agenda, Morgan added, it was when, in an unguarded moment, he spoke of the “bitterness” of working class voters in Pennsylvania over wage-cutting, layoffs and deepening economic insecurity, and the indifference of both Republican and Democratic administrations to their problems. Following a media campaign, Obama apologised for his “blunder” and remained on the defensive for the remainder of the Pennsylvania campaign. This episode demonstrates how completely American liberalism and the Democratic Party are dedicated to suppressing discussion on the fundamental class tensions and interests that dominate American society and opposing the development of an independent socialist perspective in the working class.

Morgan’s appraisal drew a sharp response from the Stop The War Coalition speaker on the platform who was opposed to a socialist critique of Obama and the Democrats. She insisted that Obama was the best of a bad bunch, and that it was a question of uniting the discontent that will emerge, largely of a local and ethnic character, into a “national forum” pledged to “mass radical action.”

Israel and Palestine

Jean Shaoul, who writes on Israel and Palestine for the World Socialist Web Site, spoke at a session considering the questions, “Palestine—How can the Palestinians be liberated? What does the division between Hamas and Fatah mean? Can a majority of Israelis be won to supporting Palestinian rights? Who is precluding the two-state solution?”

Shaoul made it clear that it is only possible to understand the failure of the struggle to liberate Palestine from the standpoint of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.

She explained how shortly after Israel defeated the Arab nations in the 1967 Six-Day War, Yasser Arafat and his Fatah faction came to dominate the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Although it was a popular and radical mass movement, its perspective was one of a democratic, secular, capitalist state where the Palestinian bourgeoisie would be free to exploit its own working class.

Arafat and the PLO sought to work through the various Arab regimes, which were entirely dependent on a world market dominated by the imperialist powers and who were ultimately fearful of the threat to their rule posed by the working class. As such, they had demonstrated their inability to either achieve genuine independence from imperialism or secure the democratic rights and social needs of the workers and peasant masses they exploited.

“One after another, all of these regimes betrayed the Palestinians with tragic consequences,” Shaoul added.

Along with oil revenues, backing from the Soviet Union had allowed the Arab regimes a certain room for manoeuvre in their dealings with the major powers. But the first Gulf War in 1991, which unfolded during the final days of the USSR and amidst the drive to restore capitalism, saw the majority of the Arab regimes line up unambiguously with Washington. This left Arafat completely isolated. In 1993, he was forced to sign the Oslo Agreement, officially renouncing his original perspective of freeing the whole of 1948 Palestine and accepting a two-state solution.

The Palestinian Authority set up under the Oslo agreement, Shaoul continued, was to be the vehicle for the Palestinian bourgeoisie to exploit the working class and become fabulously wealthy. Fatah became associated with corruption, waste and inefficiency that even Arafat’s prestige could not disguise. While Arafat himself ultimately baulked at Washington’s demands to accept Israel’s dictates, his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, pledged himself to peace on whatever terms Washington and Tel Aviv demanded.

Shaoul described how Hamas offered no alternative, but was a retrogressive development of the Palestinian national movement. Its explicit call for an Islamic state, she said, would involve the subjugation of non-Muslims and the mass expulsion of Israeli Jewry. In its ideology and methods, Hamas mirrors the Zionist extremists, who claim all of Palestine as a Jewish state with no room for other peoples.

Hamas, too, has all but accepted a two-state solution, Shaoul continued, making an offer recently to the Israeli government to accept a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 borders along with its promise of a ceasefire.

Such a state, even if realised, would be economically unviable other than as a heavily fortified investment platform for the transnational corporations from which to brutally exploit the working class and peasantry.

The liberation of Palestine is only possible as part of a perspective of ending the artificial patchwork of capitalist states in the Middle East and through the unity of Arab and Israeli workers, youth and intellectuals in a combined struggle to establish the United Socialist States of the Middle East.

Shaoul rejected the conception that the Israeli people are collectively responsible for the oppression of the Palestinians. Israel is beset by class and social conflicts and has a strong and militant working class that opposes its government’s social and economic policies.

The fate of the Middle East, Shaoul said, “will, in the final analysis, be decided in the US and Europe, either by the political representatives of big business implementing their plans for the region’s military and economic subjugation, or by the major battalions of the international working class doing what is politically necessary to prevent this.”

EU Sends Mission to Kosovo

Tim Holmes — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 04:46:09 +0000

Last week, the European Union (EU), under pressure from the United States, sent a 1,800-strong “rule of law” mission—the largest in the bloc’s history—to replace the United Nations mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). The EU mission’s job is to reform the police, prisons and judiciary and pave the way for Kosovan independence, which the US wants the provincial government to declare early next year.

UNMIK has administered Kosovo as a protectorate since the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. UNMIK has functioned under the terms of Security Council Resolution 1244, which recognised Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo while placing the province under the occupation of foreign troops governed by a UN viceroy. Under international law, a new UN resolution is needed to change the province’s status.

The EU mission pre-empted a Security Council meeting held December 19 to receive a report on the failure of UN-appointed mediators to bring about a negotiated agreement between local ethnic Albanian and Serbian leaders, as well as Serbia. The report states, “Neither party was willing to cede its position on the fundamental question of sovereignty over Kosovo.”

Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu and Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica also addressed the meeting.

“We are ready to take steps toward a future declaration of independence of Kosovo together with our friends,” Sejdiu told the Security Council. Rame Manaj, the spokesperson of Kosovo’s Constitutional Commission, said a new constitution had been drafted (reports suggest by Balkan experts at the US State Department) and would soon be presented to Kosovo’s parliament. “Kosovo will be a parliamentary republic with a more powerful role for its president,” Manaj explained, with a security force that will be transformed into a national army in due course. For the time being, 16,500 NATO troops are to remain in the province.

Serbian Prime Minister Kostunica told the Security Council that Serbia’s fate was in its hands. He said his country defended its sovereignty “strongly and firmly” and would consider a declaration of independence illegal. Moves to “dismember” Serbia would create a precedent for separatists elsewhere in the world, he warned.

Kostunica condemned the “supervised independence” plan published by UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari in February 2007, of which the EU “rule of law” mission is the first step. Kostunica said, “It is unacceptable that the illegitimate arrival of an EU mission to the province is discussed so that Ahtisaari’s plan for creating a puppet state may be implemented.”

“It is particularly insulting and unacceptable that the mutilated Serbia is being offered the reward of quicker admission into the EU if it reconciles with violent alteration of its borders,” Kostunica added.

Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema, who presided over the Security Council meeting, emerged to say its members were unable to reach any “concrete conclusions,” but urged the opposing sides to avoid actions that may lead to violence in the region. D’Alema blamed the “strong positions” taken by Washington and Moscow for aggravating the problems between the ethnic Albanian and Serbian sides. He said that President Boris Tadic of Serbia had told him, “I can’t let the Russians be more Serbian than me,” and the ethnic Albanians had said they “can’t let themselves appear less Kosovar than President Bush.”

D’Alema added that Italy and most EU countries supported independence, but “the Americans have underestimated the difficulties of the situation.”

The US has aggressively pursued the Ahtisaari plan. Last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared, “Serbia and Kosovo are never going to be one again”—repeating the promise US President George W. Bush made back in June that the province would soon be independent.

Following the UN Security Council meeting, US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the “irreconcilable differences” between the ethnic Albanians and Serbs meant Kosovo’s independence could no longer be delayed. “The continuation of the status quo poses not only a threat to peace and stability in Kosovo, but also to the region and in Europe,” he added. Khalilzad claimed Resolution 1244 allows for the implementation of the Ahtisaari plan.

Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin disputed Khalilzad’s claim, warning that “any move toward a unilateral declaration of independence would clearly be outside of the limits of international law and Resolution 1244” and would set a dangerous precedent. Russia has warned that “the situation is threatening to slip towards an uncontrollable crisis if international law is not upheld.”

Russia’s mediator at the Kosovo Albanian-Serbian talks, Aleksandr Botsan-Kharchenko, declared that the negotiating process was still in an early stage and that the two sides “cooperated and contacted constantly…for the first time since 1999.”

“Russia’s principled position is that work within Security Council Resolution 1244 should continue, without seeking loopholes in that document that would, allegedly, enable Pristina [the Kosovan capital] to declare independence or the international community to replace UNMIK with an EU mission,” he stated.

“To say that Kosovo has the right to independence and [breakaway regions in Georgia] Abkhazia or South Ossetia do not would be a typical example of double standards,” Botsan-Khachenko said. He added that Russia is “doing everything in its power to prevent such a scenario and to prevent the creation of a negative precedent.”

“We want to find a long-term solution for this conflict and any dialogue and any step, even a tiny one, is a step forward…. To let this go now would be a monstrous mistake,” he concluded.

Moscow is particularly concerned about the involvement of Washington, backed by Britain and the other European powers, in the future of Kosovo, which it sees as part of their attempt to limit its aspirations as a regional and world power. Moscow is eager to boost its position in the Balkans, where it competes for influence with the EU and where its companies have invested heavily, particularly in oil and gas pipelines.

The tensions in Kosovo are linked to the wider dispute over the installation of US missile defence shield bases in the Czech Republic and Poland and threats of further sanctions and war on Iran. In the last few weeks, Russia has withdrawn from the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty and is threatening to redeploy troops to its European borders. Moscow has indicated that it intends to move part of its fleet to Syrian ports and to maintain a permanent presence in the Mediterranean, and has tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile.

The EU has been split by the recklessness of the US and the growing antagonisms with Russia. At the same time, the bloc is trying to project a united front to the world, saying it can handle problems in its own back yard. “Kosovo’s independence is inevitable,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared. “It’s an issue for Europe to sort out.”

“The most important thing is for the EU to take the next steps with as much unity as possible,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel added.

Only one EU country, Cyprus, remains openly opposed to Kosovan independence and backs Russia’s call for further negotiations. It fears that diplomatic recognition of an independent Kosovo would legitimise the Turkish regime that occupied the northern part of Cyprus in 1974.

However, other EU countries remain concerned over the implications of Kosovo’s independence for separatist movements in their own countries and for their close relations with Serbia and Russia. Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said that “a unilateral proclamation of independence is not positive for Spain, but it will wait to see what happens.” He explained that Madrid “respects international law and the unity of the EU” and “violating laws has never done any good in history.” Romanian Defence Minister Teodor Melescanu added, “A unilateral decision could have a very negative effect on the entire region and is not in keeping with international law.”

The EU is also split on the issue of Serbia’s membership of the bloc. Many member states are keen to start accession talks with Belgrade on January 28, in the run-up to presidential elections in the country.

They hope to boost the chances of pro-Western president Boris Tadic, who is running neck and neck in polls with Tomislav Nikolic, deputy leader of the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party. Nikolic unconditionally rejects Serbian recognition of an independent Kosovo, and has suggested Russia set up a military base in Serbia to rival the US presence at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. Some member states, led by the UK, are strongly against membership talks until the Serbian government pursues more vigorously fugitives wanted for war crimes, including former general Ratko Mladic and Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadic.

The rush to make Kosovo independent and uncertainty over Serbian EU membership have created a crisis for the Serb politicians who played a vital role for the West in ousting former President Slobodan Milosevic and were installed in power in Serbia. For example, Serbia’s foreign minister, Vuk Jeremic, educated in the UK and US and a high-flyer in London financial circles, has been forced to criticise his erstwhile backers, saying the EU offer to accelerate Serb membership of the organisation will never be accepted. “The trade-off is out of the question. We cannot exchange our territory for our European future,” he complained bitterly.

In Kosovo, Bertran Bono, the spokesperson for KFOR, NATO’s “peacekeeping” mission in the province, proclaimed his confidence that everything was under control, saying, “We do not want any kind of violence here, but we have already planned everything to stop it from happening again in all situations. That means that we have different scenarios prepared for the best and worst case scenarios and we are ready to answer all challenges.”

The 200,000-strong Serb minority concentrated in northern Kosovo well remembers KFOR’s inability to stop the violence of March 17, 2004, when 19 people died, more than 950 were injured and there was large-scale destruction of property. Knut Vollebaek, the high commissioner for national minorities of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, has already pointed to a possible new wave of Roma refugees who “could flee to neighbouring Macedonia and Montenegro if their safety is threatened, especially in the southern part of the province.”

On December 18, several thousand Serbs in the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica demonstrated against the deployment of the EU mission and moves towards Kosovan independence. Marko Jaksic, a leading local official of Kostunica’s conservative Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), told the crowd that the Serbian parliament should stop all discussions about EU membership and be prepared to annul a unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo.

Such a declaration by Pristina could prompt other unilateral actions, starting with the partition of northern Kosovo, precipitating violent separatist re-alignments in the region and becoming the catalyst for a wider conflagration.

See Also:
War danger grows after Kosovo status talks collapse
[12 December 2007]
After the Slaughter: Political Lessons of the Balkan War
[14 June 1999]

Guantanamo Detainee's Years of Torture

eddie — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:10:24 +0000

A British resident, Omar Deghayes, detained at Guantánamo Bay as an alleged terrorist, reports that he has suffered years of torture, sexual abuse and death threats. Last week, Omar’s family released a dossier documenting his terrible ordeal, which he dictated to a lawyer visiting the United States-run military prison.

Deghayes, a lawyer, aged 37 and married with a five-year-old son, has been incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay for years with four other British residents—Saudi Arabian-born Shaker Aamer, Jordanian Jamil el Banna, Ethiopian Binyam Mohamed and Algerian Abdennour Sameur. In addition to their physical and mental ordeals, all have found themselves in a Catch 22 nightmare. Although granted refugee status, indefinite leave or exceptional leave to remain in the UK because of threats of mistreatment in their own countries, the Labour government ignored pleas to press for their release from detention on the grounds that they were not UK citizens. At the same time, the US administration refused to negotiate their release with the countries of their birth.

Omar’s family was granted political asylum in the UK following the arrest and execution in 1980 of his father, a Libyan trade union leader and political opponent of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He grew up in Brighton and studied law in the UK in the hope of becoming a human rights lawyer. Although the rest of his family are British citizens, Omar missed an interview because he was abroad and still has a Libyan passport, which means the Gaddafi regime is legally responsible for making diplomatic representations on his behalf.

In 2001, Omar decided to look for work abroad, ending up in Afghanistan where he started a business exporting dried fruit, married his wife and had a son. When the US invaded Afghanistan, the family attempted to return to the UK via Pakistan, but were arrested in Lahore in April 2002, reportedly for a bounty of US$5,000.

In Pakistan, Omar says he was told the US had ordered his detention. Guards subjected him to “systematic beatings,” threatened to leave him in a room full of snakes and submerged him under water until he thought he was going to drown. Faced with electric shock treatment, Omar explains, “The more I scream they will laugh and do it again…my screams all in vain.”

Omar was returned to Afghanistan and the US-run prison at Bagram air base, which he likened to “Nazi camps that I saw in films.” When asked by his lawyer about his treatment, Omar replied, “Of course, beating and torture is considered normal [there].”

His captors subjected him to forced nudity, deprived him of food for 45 days and locked him in a box with very little air for long periods. British intelligence agents are reported to have interrogated Omar up to seven times while he was in Bagram.

Omar claims the “guards forced petrol and benzene up the anuses of prisoners. This would burn horribly.” He said guards issued death threats and that he witnessed them shoot one prisoner who tried to help a detainee being abused and then beat another one to death.

“One by the name of Abdaulmalik, Moroccan and Italian, was beaten until I heard no sound of him after the screaming.

“There was afterwards panic in prison and the guards running about in fear saying to each other the Arab has died. I have not seen this young man again.”

Omar claims another detainee was beaten to a bloody pulp, leaving him “paralysed and mentally damaged.”

US authorities transferred Omar to Guantánamo Bay in September 2002, where he alleges he was beaten on his first day. He says guards sexually assaulted him and other detainees during a strip search. And when he challenged them he was repeatedly pepper-sprayed. One guard forced his finger into one of Omar’s eyes, blinding him.

After an eight-month period of solitary confinement, Libyan intelligence agents interrogated Omar in September 2004 and threatened him with violence and death. One allegedly said, “You will be brought to judgement in Libya. In here I cannot do anything but if I meet you [later] I will kill you.”

Omar claims his captors said he would not receive a proper trial and faced execution. He says, “Many times one FBI interrogator by the name of Craig said, ‘Omar, it is nothing like the law you studied in the UK. There will never be a proper court and lawyers, etcetera, it would be only a military tribunal to determine your future and your life. Your best choice is to cooperate with me.”

Omar’s family protest his innocence and are campaigning for his release. His brother Abubaker says, “I cannot believe how the Americans can do this to him, and astonished how he could survive this.” His mother, Zohra Zewawi, added, “I worry that something has happened to his mind. He is being tortured. I read his diary. When he gets out I fear he will not be normal Omar. I’m sure he will have changed.”

They say that although Omar’s name is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, the accompanying picture taken from a training video of a Chechen separatist group looks nothing like him, a view supported by facial recognition experts.

Three Britons—Asef Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul—held for two years in Guantánamo Bay, and who published a 115-page dossier accusing the US of carrying out mental and physical torture, were flown back to the UK in March 2004 and freed without charge.

In a similar development last week, Sandy Hodgkinson, US deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs, said that although the inmates were “still considered to be of a significant threat,” the US government would not insist on their arrest and imprisonment in Britain as a condition for transfer.

Hodgkinson’s statement was prompted by a formal request sent by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asking for the release of the British residents. He claimed the UK government had changed its mind because of recent steps taken by the US government to reduce the numbers of those detained at the camp, initiate a “move towards” its closure and “include an increasing emphasis on engagement with third countries over the transfer and resettlement of those detained.”

Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who represents the five men, greeted the UK government’s decision to ask for the detainee’s release, stating, “This is good news for everyone, even George Bush. For all his statements about wanting to close Guantanamo, he can’t if it’s chock-a-block. The Europeans have been pretty pious in their criticism, but done nothing to help close it until now. This is a remarkable turn for the British government.’’

The “remarkable turn” is not based on a change of conscience by Tony Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, a sudden discovery of democratic principles as the media proclaims.

For one thing, the High Court had instructed the Home Office to decide by last week whether one of the five detainees, Jamil el Banna, would be allowed to return to live in the UK after his release.

More importantly, after the lies used to launch the Iraq war, and the systematic undermining of civil liberties in the name of the war on terror under Blair, Brown has come to office lacking any popular support.

In addition, there is mounting international condemnation of Guantánamo Bay and its violation of the US constitution and international law. A report released in April by Amnesty International describes “deteriorating” conditions at the prison camp and called for its immediate closure of the camp and the right of victims to pursue reparations in US courts.

In an affidavit submitted to the US Supreme Court in June, Army reserve officer Stephen Abraham became the first officer to openly criticise the Guantánamo Bay military tribunals where he served as a panel member. Abraham’s affidavit provides first-hand evidence that the tribunals are a travesty of justice in which personnel are poorly trained, information is withheld or misused and panel members are pressured to declare detainees guilty of being “enemy combatants.”

Guantánamo Bay detainee railroaded into guilty plea: The issues of principle in the case of David Hicks
[14 April 2007]

21/7: What Was Known?

Tim Holmes — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 20:37:28 +0000

Earlier this month a jury in Woolwich Crown Court found Muktar Said Ibrahim, Hussain Osman, Ramzi Mohammed, and Yassin Omar guilty of conspiracy to murder in a failed attempt to set off four bombs in London on July 21, 2005. The judge said each of them must serve at least 40 years in jail before they can be considered for parole. The jury failed to reach a verdict relating to two other defendants, Manfo Kwaku Asiedu and Adel Yahya, who now face a retrial.

The court heard how the homemade hydrogen peroxide bombs, similar to those used in London on July 7, 2005 that left 52 people dead and 700 injured, were carried by the defendants in backpacks onto three tube trains and a bus. The bombs failed to explode, emitting a “popping noise”.

Ibrahim claimed that they only intended to frighten people in a protest against the Iraq war. Omar told the court, “I hoped that this would be televised, would be shown on TV and taken seriously and that would put pressure on the government after they realised that people have gone to these lengths just to do a demonstration on Iraq.” Prosecutors argued that only the wrong formula for the explosive and “good fortune” prevented another atrocity from occurring.

During the trial it emerged that Ibrahim, the leader of the plot, had arrived from Eritrea in 1990 and was jailed in 1996 for five years for a violent mugging. In 2003 he visited Sudan for “jihad training” and boasted to friends on his return that he had used rocket-propelled grenades. In May 2004, Ibrahim encouraged Osman, Mohammed, and Omar to join him on a jihadi training camp in Britain’s Lake District.

It is at this point that the trial began to expose once again just how extensively the police and security services were monitoring the activities of Islamic extremists.

In August 2004, Ibrahim was also captured on surveillance photographs taken outside Finsbury Park mosque in London. The venue is associated with many of those who have been subsequently charged with terrorist offences. The mosque was run by the radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, who is serving seven years in jail, and swarmed with intelligence agents and informants. Hamza has long relations with Britain’s security services. Former Labour Party Environment Minister Michael Meacher has asked if the security services encouraged British Islamists to fight in the former Yugoslavia—a claim aired by the former US federal prosecutor John Loftus in 2005, who has stated that British intelligence used the al-Muhajiroun group in London for this purpose.

There are questions as to how much the intelligence services continued to protect or work directly with Abu Hamza. But there is no doubt that anyone who visited Finsbury Park mosque would be known to the police. Abu Hamza is wanted by the US for the alleged establishment of a terrorist training camp in Oregon with associate Haroon Rashid Aswat. Referring to Aswat, Loftus said, “What’s really embarrassing is that the entire British police are out chasing him, and one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him. And this has been a real source of contention between the CIA, the Justice Department, and Britain…. [H]e is a double agent.”

Despite this surveillance, in September 2004 Ibrahim was granted a British passport. Within a month, he was charged with a public order offence in London after an argument with a policeman who questioned him about the literature he was handing out. Ibrahim jumped bail and headed for Heathrow airport in December 2004, followed by ten MI5 undercover agents. The taxi in which he was travelling was driven by Rauf Mohammed, an Iraqi who was suspected of working with Syrian-born Mohammed al-Ghabra to help British Muslims travel to Iraq to fight against the US-led occupation. Al-Ghabra, who protests his innocence and remains at liberty in London, had had his bank accounts frozen by US Treasury officials who claim he was someone “who provides material and logistical support to Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations”.

Ibrahim and his two companions were stopped by Special Branch officers who found thousands of pounds in cash, a military first-aid kit and manual, with passages on the treatment of gunshot wounds heavily annotated, and a ballistics manual. Police said they did not have enough evidence then to prevent him from completing his journey. Razwan Majid and Shakeel Ismail, who travelled with Ibrahim, have not been seen since and their families have reported them missing.

It was not until documents were leaked in early 2006 by disaffected MI5 officers demanding an inquiry into “missed evidence” (to put pressure on ministers to provide more resources for the intelligence agencies) that it became known that Ibrahim was then followed to Pakistan. It has been suggested that whilst in Pakistan Ibrahim may have met at least two of those involved in the July 7 bombings: Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shahzad Tanweer, who are known to have been there at the same time.

Khan and Tanweer had been watched by MI5 for almost 18 months before the attacks. MI5 officers had followed Khan and photographed him on at least four occasions and made inquiries about a telephone registered in his name. Tanweer had been identified on three occasions. They had come to the attention of the security services as a result of the investigation, Operation Crevice, into those subsequently arrested for planning to blow up nightclubs or shopping centres with fertiliser bombs in 2004.

In February that year, Khan and Tanweer were followed for 15 hours while they were in turn following a car driven by Omar Khyam, the leader of the fertiliser bombers. On March 23, Khan and Tanweer were again filmed alongside Khyam, only a week before he was arrested. In a recorded conversation, Khyam and Khan discussed purchasing one-way tickets to Pakistan. Kyam urged Khan, “because you’re going to leave now, you may as well rip the country apart economically as well. All the brothers are running scams. All the brothers that are leaving are doing it.” He added that within two weeks of landing in Pakistan, Khan would be “at the front”. Khyam also told Khan that “next month, they’re going to start raiding big time all over the UK”.

MI5 also failed to send unnamed photographs of Khan and Tanweer to the United States to be viewed by one of the fertiliser bomb plotters, Mohammed Junaid Babar, who had turned informer after being arrested by the FBI. Babar subsequently identified Khan as someone he had trained with at an Al Qaeda camp in Pakistan in 2003, together with other fertiliser bomb plotters.

When Ibrahim returned to the UK, six months later in March 2005, police did not stop him, even though they were alerted about his return and he was the subject of an arrest warrant for jumping bail. This failure is made all the more extraordinary, given that Madrid had witnessed the terrible atrocity at Atocha railway station in March 2004 that left 191 people dead. A May 2006 Intelligence and Security Committee report into the July 7 attack warned the intelligence services of the possibility of terrorists engaging “in unseen operational activity despite even intensive investigative efforts”.

The same report suggests “the existence of the ‘home-grown’ threat had been well understood in advance of July 2005”. British nationals accused of terrorist activity included shoe-bombers Richard Reid and Saajid Badat, both in jail for plotting to blow up aircraft in 2001; Andrew Rowe serving 15 years for terrorist offences in 2003; Dhiren Barot, arrested in 2004 for planning a “dirty bomb” attack in Britain and sentenced to 30 years in jail; and most members of the “Operation Crevice” plot who were convicted earlier this year to life imprisonment.

If official accounts are to be believed, then every trial that has so far taken place relating to terror plots, successful or failed, has painted an ever more damning picture of incompetence on the part of the security services. But given the record of MI5 and MI6, and the role provocations have historically played in Britain’s policy in Ireland and elsewhere, it is entirely possible that the London bombings of both July 7 and July 21 were allowed to take place so as to provide the government with a pretext for further attacks on civil liberties and new military adventures overseas.

The usual defence offered by the security services for their repeated failure to follow leads and arrest those under surveillance who later turned out to be major figures in various terror plots is to claim that resources were over-stretched and those deemed to be “peripheral” figures (such as Khan and Tanweer) were not prioritised. At the time of the fertiliser bomb plot and the July 7 and July 21 plots a year later, estimates were cited of up to 1,200 people involved in or sympathetic to terrorist cells. More recent claims cite figures of 2,000 active terrorists in 219 suspected terror networks under watch in Britain, along with a similar number of sympathisers.

It is impossible to verify or disprove such reports. But there is no doubt that the government’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have made Britain a prime target for terrorist acts and helped recruit significant numbers of disoriented young men to Islamic fundamentalist groups.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the actual situation revealed in the three major terror trials or investigations carried out so far is of a far smaller number of people involved in plotting terrorist acts. Many knew each other personally or at least travelled in the same circles and to the same places, particularly Finsbury Park Mosque. And a significant number of these individuals had been under sustained surveillance by the security services, without action being taken that would have prevented a terrible loss of life.

The Government and The Floods

Tim Holmes — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 03:17:01 +0000

Last week, some of the worst floods on record hit Britain, leaving seven people dead and thousands with homes ruined by sewage and chemicals.

In Sheffield, pensioner Peter Harding died whilst trying to cross a road hit by rising floodwater and schoolboy Ryan Parry was drowned in a swollen river. Mike Barnett, 28, died after becoming trapped in a storm drain in Hull, and Eric Dickinson, 68, was trapped in his submerged car in Pershore, Worcestershire. The body of Hugh Birch, 41, was found floating in the river Leen in Nottingham, and a sixth victim, a man in his 60s, drowned in a waterways lock near Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. The body of an elderly woman was recovered last weekend from the river Severn at Ironbridge, Shropshire.

The cost of damage is estimated at more than £1 billion, with 27,000 homes and 5,000 businesses affected. The Association of British Insurers (ABI) warned that about one in four people did not have contents insurance, so would not be covered for flood damage.

The M1, the UK’s most important motorway, was shut amid fears that the Ulley dam, near Rotherham, would collapse. About 600 people living in villages downstream from the dam had to leave their homes and spend several nights in emergency shelters. In Barnsley, more than 130 streets were affected by flooding.

The Meteorological Office says that June was the wettest in England since 1914, with parts of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the Midlands having the worst rainfall for the month since records began. Weather forecasters are warning people to expect more storms. With the ground still saturated, this could cause major problems even if rainfall is not heavy.

The Environment Agency (EA) still has four severe flood warnings in place along the Don Valley, with a further 21 standard warnings in the north and east of England. Emergency services are still working non-stop in the worst affected areas, including Toll Bar and Bentley, near Doncaster, where a sluice gate above the villages failed to open—causing the Ea Beck to burst its banks.

Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, said, “The Government has not understood the scale, gravity and severity of what has happened. We have witnessed the biggest rescue effort in peacetime Britain by our emergency services and it’s not over yet. Fire crews and officers have been working to the point of collapse. Emergency fire control operators have been under major pressure, with thousands of extra calls for assistance from the public.”

Tony Blair, in his last day as prime minister, said, “The immediate thing is to make sure we get the right coordination with the emergency services…and that we try to make sure we prevent any further loss of life.”

Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown’s new foreign secretary and MP for Doncaster North, commented, “This is a very serious situation. I am talking to government colleagues about what more can be done to help people out of their situation.”

However, last August, it was on the orders of Brown’s Treasury Department that Miliband’s brother David, Brown’s Foreign Secretary who was then Tony Blair’s minister for the environment, food and rural affairs, forced through a £200 million budget cut.. The Environment Agency (EA) bore the brunt of the cuts, with £15 million slashed from flood defences and £9 million from environmental protection. Officials complained, “The lack of notice of the cuts restricted the options for handling them to what was feasible,” which “in some cases…led to tactical and opportunistic decisions.”

These decisions affected the maintenance programme, flood mapping, flood forecasting and warning and strategy development, including flood management plans and water level management plans. According to a memo issued by EA executives last month, the flood defence programme is facing further funding cuts that could last until 2011. In Yorkshire alone, this has meant the shelving of six major flood defence schemes, including new barriers to protect Leeds and Ripon and repairs to flood defences in York.

It should be remembered that after the floods in 2000, which resulted in three deaths and the flooding of several cities, towns and villages twice in two weeks, Blair promised, “We have to put in the right protection for people against the possibility of floods and work to deal with the issue of climate change.” His deputy, John Prescott, asked, “Should our power lines come down every time we have such storms? Should 1,000 trees fall across railway lines in the South East? Should we do more to prevent flooding? Is our drainage system adequate?”

Much of the blame for the floods has been deflected onto the EA, which is responsible for building new and replacement flood defences, flood channel clearance and flood forecasting and warning. Its chief executive, Baroness Young, rejected charges that she had “manifestly failed” and should consider resigning. She blamed inadequate funding for the organisation’s failure to build and maintain flood defences.

According to the National Audit Office (NAO), which issued a report on the EA’s flood defence programme just one week before June’s disaster, the EA spent £483 million on new defences and the maintenance of existing assets last year—an increase on the £303 million spent in 2001, the year of the last big floods. But Stephen Haddrill, the ABI’s director general, says at least £750 million a year is needed.

Although the government points to the EA’s increased budget between 2001 and 2006, the organisation has had to take on responsibility for a lot more flood defence work from other bodies. In 2001, it had responsibility for 11,000 miles of flood channels and embankments and 23,000 structures such as sluices, weirs and pumping stations. In 2006, this had doubled to 24,000 miles and 46,000 structures.

At the same time, the in-house workforce has been cut from 1,570 in 2001 to 1,400 earlier this year, and there are plans to reduce this number to 1,357 by April 2008.

The NAO report praises this reduction and other “positive” factors related to cost control and improved efficiency. But the report is littered with the practical results.

It says the EA has failed to hit its target “to maintain 63 percent of England’s flood defence systems in their target condition.” Even this figure is uncertain because the agency’s IT system is costly and difficult to use, and is unable to hold maintenance records or produce “an accurate and satisfactory report of system condition.”

The NAO concludes that “the limited improvement in asset condition since 2000 suggests that, at the current rate of progress, the Agency will struggle to meet its future condition targets.”

Although the EA has responsibility for thousands of miles of channels and embankments and thousands of structures, most are still owned or maintained by other bodies or private individuals over whom the agency has limited powers. In the “best” EA region, North East Thames, only 30 percent of the 400 third parties contacted had taken any action to repair or maintain their defences.

Over the last 50 years, despite the known threat, property developers have been allowed to construct nearly 2 million households in areas at risk, mainly on floodplains. Of these, 469,000 are at significant risk, Over 40 percent of people living in these homes are unaware of the dangers.

Although the EA has objected to hundreds of developments in recent years, nearly a fifth have been approved—including the Thames Gateway project for 160,000 houses promoted by John Prescott. These developments only have to conform to a risk of flooding once every 100 years compared to the Dutch standard of a risk of a flood every 10,000 years.

Jane Milne, the ABI’s head of property, believes that insurance companies might soon refuse cover for many householders. In the Netherlands, most of which lies below sea level, it has been virtually impossible to get insurance since the 1953 floods.

See Also:
Britain’s flood disaster exacerbated by spending cuts
[6 November 2000]

"A Systematic Policy of Torture"

Tim Holmes — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:44:42 +0000

Lawyers are claiming that the British government approved a systematic policy of torture of detainees in Iraq.

The claim follows a ruling on June 13 by the Law Lords in the House of Lords—the highest court in Britain—in the Al-Skeini and others v Secretary of State for Defence case. The case was brought by the families of six Iraqi civilians who died in British-occupied Basra in 2003. One of the dead, Baha Mousa, died in British custody while UK soldiers on patrol shot the other five.

Mousa, a 26-year-old receptionist, was detained and allegedly tortured along with others by soldiers in the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment at the UK’s Temporary Detention Facility. This is said to have involved hooding with sandbags, keeping stress positions for long periods, sleep deprivation and being subjected to kickboxing “games,” where soldiers competed to see how far they could be kicked.

Photographs and records show Mousa suffered 93 injuries, including four broken ribs, a fractured nose, smashed wrists and a ligature around his neck. According to one witness, “I heard Baha Mousa screaming. I was still hooded but it sounded like he was in another room. I heard him scream: ‘Please help me, blood is coming out, please help me, I am going to die.’ The last thing I heard him say was: ‘My nose broke.’ After this there was silence.”

In February 2004, the International Red Cross “expressed concern” to the British government over the treatment meted out to Mousa and other detainees who were “made to kneel, face and hands against the ground, as if in a prayer position…. The soldiers stamped on the backs of the necks of those raising their head.”

Medical examinations showed “large haematomas with dried scabs on the abdomen, buttocks and sides, thighs, wrists, nose and forehead consistent with their accounts of beatings.”

The Law Lords’ judgement confirms a High Court ruling in 2004, which was opposed by the government. Mousa’s family and the relatives of the five other Iraqis had argued that the government was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the UK Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) by not conducting an independent inquiry into the deaths. They added that such an inquiry was made even more necessary because coalition personnel enjoyed complete immunity from prosecution under Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17.

The government argued that the ECHR only applied to Europe and was not applicable to British troops in Iraq, and that the HRA only applied in UK territory.

In their judgement, the Law Lords ruled that that there must be a full independent inquiry whenever detainees such as Mousa suffer inhuman treatment, torture or death whilst detained in UK military establishments anywhere in the world. However, they also agreed with the High Court that because the other five Iraqis were not in custody and their shootings had occurred on Iraq territory, which was outside UK jurisdiction, their case was therefore “outside the scope of the convention and the Act.” Their case is now to be taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Des Browne, the defence secretary, welcomed the Law Lords ruling, saying it provided “helpful clarification of the precise legal framework under which UK forces operated overseas.”

He claimed, “We have never argued that the treatment of Baha Mousa was acceptable or that his death should not have been investigated,” but he continued to refer to the Mousa’s treatment as “an unlawful conditioning process” rather than torture.

Following the Law Lords’ ruling, lawyer Phil Shiner representing the Mousa family repeated his calls for an independent inquiry. He told the Times that the government had tried to cover up the “shocking new revelations” during a court martial of those involved in Mousa’s death that revealed that the government and the top army brass were “complicit in a systematic policy of torturing detainees in British military custody.”

At the court martial at Camp Bulford in southern England earlier this year, Corporal Donald Payne of the Queen’s Lancashire regiment pleaded guilty to inhumane treatment and was jailed for a year and dismissed from the army, making him Britain’s first convicted war criminal. Six other soldiers, including the former commander of the regiment, Col. Jorge Mendonca, had their cases thrown out amid claims that there were gaps in the evidence and that some key suspects did not appear at the trial.

Shiner explained, “To date the UK Government has managed to suppress much of this material, including all the bundles of documents and evidence from the court martial, and a shocking video showing hooded and cuffed detainees being verbally and physically abused as they were man-handled into the UK’s preferred stress position.”

Shiner added, “We’re not just talking about nuanced degrading treatment, this is torture by any definition of that word…. And we’re not just talking about torture, we’re talking about the techniques the Heath government banned, such as hooding, sleep deprivation, stressing, food deprivation and white noise.”

According to Shiner the ban brought in by Edward Heath’s Conservative government in 1972 during the crisis in North Ireland was overturned after the government’s chief law officer, Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith, declared that the HRA did not apply abroad and thus lower legal standards were permitted. The Defence, Intelligence and Security Centre at Chicksands in central England became the centre for training in these techniques.

As a result, it became standard practice to hood detainees in Iraq using sandbags and plastic cement bags. And there was “huge resistance at the highest levels” to stopping the practice because of pressure from the US.

Shiner also criticised army doctors who certified that detainees were fit to withstand ill-treatment and actually initiated it.

He concluded by saying, “The implications of this case are enormous.”

Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, one of the human rights groups that initiated the court cases, commented, “The significance of this decision is that individual soldiers cannot be left as scapegoats and left to carry the can for the failures of our government and our military high command…. [T]he Human Rights Act protects anyone detained by British authorities anywhere in the world.”

Further hearings are likely following the Al-Skeini ruling. A number of cases involve abuses committed at Camp Breadbasket in May 2003 by soldiers in the 1st Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. They detained Iraqis who had been looting and then beat them, forced them to simulate oral and anal sex and suspended them from a forklift truck. Martyn Day, a lawyer acting for the claimants, said, “There are 10 cases being prepared in relation to Camp Breadbasket and a further 20 claims relating to a variety of allegations of abuse committed by soldiers in other parts of southern Iraq.”

Sewage Pollution in Scotland

Alex Doherty — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:36:47 +0000

A pump failure at the Seafield sewage treatment plant near Edinburgh on Friday has sent millions of gallons of untreated human excrement into the Forth river estuary. It was 40 hours before the public was notified.

The failure is linked to a ruthless cost-cutting exercise and asset-stripping operation mounted by Thames Water’s new owners, Australia’s Macquaries Bank. In January, the company announced its intention to sell most of its subsidiaries, including its Scottish operations—the Almond Valley, Seafield and Esk private finance initiative (PFI), Glen Water, Scottish Water Solutions, Loch Katrine and Thames Water Nevis.

Thames Water was unable to shut down the Seafield plant because there is no alternative means of treating the sewage from more than 800,000 people in the region.

Peter Farrer, general manager for Scottish Water, which is supposed to supervise Thames Water, said, “There has been a catastrophic failure of one of the large pumps at Seafield which pumps waste water into the treatment works. We have had teams of engineers working around the clock to try and rectify this problem.”

Farrer said it was not possible to stop the pollution because the plant was actually designed to pump into the river when emergencies occur.

A Thames Water spokesperson said, “We were unable to repair the pump on site. The breakdown meant the sewage could not be directed to the treatment facility. We had to allow an emergency outflow into the Forth—if we had not done that it would have been directed on to land.”

The spokesperson claimed that “we have screening so no solids would have been able to get into the Forth,” but later added, “I can’t rule out the possibility of excrement in a semi-solid state being washed up, but we’ve had no reports from Sepa [Scottish Environment Protection Agency] about environmental pollution of that nature.”

A Sepa spokesperson said the agency had introduced special measures to “minimise the risk of pollution” and put up notices on beaches in the area telling residents and visitors to avoid contact with the water.

Gordon Greenhill, head of community safety at Edinburgh City Council, warned, “Any raw sewage has human pathogens in it which has the capacity to make people ill.”

Rob Kirkwood, the chairman of Leith Links Residents’ Association, which has campaigned for years about the smell from the plant, said, “It has an infrastructure that is basically Third World technology.”

Simon Arbuthnot told the BBC, “I live beside the Firth of Forth and work beside Seafield sewage plant. The plant is a disgrace and has been the subject of many complaints for years. The surrounding area stinks, blamed as usual on old equipment. The council has repeatedly ignored calls for the plant to be updated and this major spillage comes as no surprise to many locals who have known for some time that it is substandard and should have been closed years ago.”

Scotland’s First Minister Jack McConnell has called for an investigation into the spill, saying, “It is essential that Scottish Water and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, where they have a role, get on top of this situation and take the action that is required to secure the coastal area that is affected.”

He called for an “immediate investigation into the mechanical failure that has apparently caused this spillage and what action needs to be taken as soon as possible to ensure that such a mechanical failure does not occur again.”

It was the Scottish Executive that authorised the formation of Scottish Water in April 2002 following a merger of the three former water authorities—East, West and North of Scotland—on the basis of “a new public sector model in the UK water industry and Scottish Water [that] aims to be as efficient and effective as water companies in the private sector.” Scottish Water boasts that it has cut its operating costs by £366 million in 2002-2006.

Following its formation, Scottish Water then outsourced the operation of five sewage treatment plants around Edinburgh to Thames Water under the Seafield private finance initiative. At the time, Thames Water said the deal represented “A completely new partnership model in the outsourcing market place.”

Late last year, Thames Water was sold to Macquarie for £8 billion. In the run-up to the sale. the company announced that a quarter of its 4,000 workforce would be made redundant.

Press reports suggest morale in Thames Water and its subsidiaries is at rock bottom. One manager told the Independent that many managers are “working to rule” following an edict by Thames Water’s new chief executive David Owens that they would not receive a pay rise or a bonus this year, their company car scheme is to be stopped, and there is an absolute ban on recruitment. The manager said, “The way Thames is behaving will not exactly motivate managers to meet the targets. The car park empties at four o’clock every day now. People are effectively working to rule. They see the pay freeze as just an excuse to take money out of people’s pockets to pay to the new shareholders instead.”

Thames Water has the worst leakage rate of any water company, and the regulator Ofwat has threatened to fine the company if its performance does not improve this year. In 2005, the company increased water charges to its customers by 21 percent at the same time as its former chief executive received a total of £2.66 million for the year and the total remuneration of the four executive directors soared by 62 percent to £1.26 million.

Thames Water received the biggest fines for pollution in England and Wales last year after prosecution by the Environment Agency. During 2005, the company was fined £128,000, including £110,000 for incidents in 2003 when 20,000 fish were killed by sewage pollution.