Why Cameron’s speech on terrorism puts us more in danger
David Cameron’s speech last week was primarily focused on counter-terrorism, even if excerpts released to the media highlighted the ‘death of state multiculturalism’.
This is a problem in itself because, by conflating counter-terrorism and integration, Cameron weakens internal security and makes all of us more vulnerable to terrorism. This isn’t limited to the Conservatives either; many others who define themselves as ‘muscular liberals’ make the same mistake.
The cowardly fudge behind the rhetoric of Control Orders
I was at the Nick Clegg speech earlier today. He took aim at Labour’s pretty poor record on civil liberties, suggesting that the previous governments were more systematic and less casual than prominent ex-Ministers would have us believe.
Although there were some fine words on Libel Reform and some interesting proposals on Freedom of Information, most of the discussion in the speech itself, and in questions afterwards, was on control orders and curfews.
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Guantanamo payouts: right decision, wrong reasons
If anything, a million pounds is not compensation enough for seven years’ detention without trial in Morocco and Cuba, including subjection to starvation, sleep deprivation, regular beatings and having your penis mutilated with a scalpel. For that reason, Binyam Mohamed deserves the money.
Sure, the pay-off means that legitimate questions over whether he received paramilitary training in Afghanistan in 2001, and what he was doing when he tried to fly to the UK on a false passport before he was lifted in Karachi the following year, will now never be answered. It may be that Mr Mohamed is not a morally meritorious person.
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It still doesn’t make any sense
So, Wikileaks dumps a load of documents revealing what we all knew – that we’re losing an unwinnable war, using extremely unsavoury and hyperviolent methods in the process. We learn that we little understand the enemy and can, without too much effort, surmise that we have no clear plan for victory.
Further, we get final confirmation that we’re rubbing out hundreds of civilians per year, possibly thousands – our governments can’t guess how many men, women and children our armed forces are killing and frankly, they show little sign of caring.
When questioned, their stock response is that our deranged enemies kill far more than we do. This none-too-sly evasion is generally received as if it were a fair point, rather than a travesty.
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Conclusions of the upcoming torture inquiry may have already been agreed
Today the government is expected to make an announcement about a judge-led commission or inquiry into whether the UK was complicit in the use of torture.
Patrick Wintour on the Guardian blog says the test for the Coalition will come in the details. He asks:
Nick Clegg, Edward Davey and Hague have demanded an inquiry so much in Opposition, they would look ridiculous if they rejected one today. But much will depend on the details. Is the inquiry to be held in public, what evidence will be published, what witnesses will be called, will the civil court cases being taken against the government be stopped, how will compensation, if any, be distributed to victims of torture? And, finally, how will the American security services be involved and how will torture be defined?
But the answers to several of these questions were already set out last week in a well informed Telegraph column by political editor Ben Brogan.
It bore all the hallmarks of several authoritative insider briefings.
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The Sun and a Tory MP do the Taliban’s job for them
1. Patrick Mercer, former chief pusher of Glen Jenvey, gets wind of a new horror being deployed by the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan: fake IEDs buried with used hypodermic needles, intended to cut and scratch those attempting to defuse such devices.
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10 years for preparing for a race war
Ian Davison, the neo-Nazi who succeeded where others failed in producing ricin, must be somewhat relieved at receiving only a 10 year sentence for concocting a chemical weapon along with other terrorist offences, including making pipe bombs, one of which he recorded exploding.
After all, Martyn Gilleard, the skinhead who shared a passion for potential race war with a predilection for children, was given an 11-year-stretch for similar offences while only putting together some very rudimentary nail bombs, involving film canisters.
Davison’s son Nicky, on the other hand, has been given what seems a far harsher sentence of two years detention for only having the almost required Anarchist Cookbook and Poor Man’s James Bond manuals, both of which the judge himself noted are available to purchase from Amazon (and still are) despite their possession itself being an illegal offence.
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The bombing of Moscow and the bombing of Grozny
One perennial riposte to condemnation of terrorism is to point to salient counter-examples of state brutality. Those who may wish to defend what happened in Moscow yesterday will have little difficulty in crafting suitable soundbites.
Russia has exercised imperial dominance over the Caucasus for over two centuries, under tzarism, Stalinism and authoritarian neoliberalism alike. Often the repression in Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Adygea and Kabardino-Balkaria has taken the most direct forms.
The paradigm case here is the sustained bombing of Grozny in December 1994 and January 1995, which probably constitutes the worst saturation bombing of a single city since Dresden.
Can Patriotism Combat Islamophobia?
Last night the Muslim Council of Britain held a special closed-meeting of parliamentarians, journalists, police, public servants, community representatives, academics and, erm, me. The topic of discussion was Tackling Islamophobia: Reducing Street Violence Against British Muslims.
The event was timely. “Since 9/11 anti-Muslim hate crimes appear to have become more prevalent than racist hate crimes where black and Asian Londoners are the victims.” (PDF) Testimony from a range of academic experts and politicians substantiated the claim that street violence against Muslims is rising.
Speakers stressed that there are “tangible links between Islamophobia or anti-Muslim bigotry in both mainstream political and media discourse…extremist nationalist discourse, and anti-Muslim hate crimes”. Peter Oborne – a journalist on the Conservative right by his own admission – described how after 7/7 he became aware that journalists in mainstream newspapers got away with telling lies and distorting facts about Islam and Muslims on a regular basis. Indeed he collected his findings and took them to Channel 4, who turned them into a special episode of Dispatches. This sort of dishonesty – he said – would not be tolerated if it were directed at any other minority group. Yet the smearing of British Muslims, usually playing on fears of terrorism, is standard fare in the British media.
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Binyam Mohamed: own goal
Spy boss Jonathan Evans cannot even be bothered to spell Binyam Mohamed’s name correctly, rendering it with three Ms in both the online and print versions of his article in defence of MI5 carried by the Daily Telegraph this morning.
That alone points to a worrying lack of attention on the part of Britain’s security services. You kind of want to hope that the funny people manage to identify the right guys to keep tabs on and bust when necessary, at least most of the time.
But Mr Evans – looking all calm and relaxed in his open neck Tattershall check shirt, sleeves rolled up to indicate readiness to get down to work – does make one very important and entirely correct assertion.
The international Islamist far right will indeed extract maximum advantage from the Mohamed case, enabling them to undertake ‘propaganda and campaigns to undermine our will and ability to confront them’. So the pertinent question becomes: who provided them with this wonderful opportunity?
The state is wrong to ban thought-crime
Say someone of Basque extraction, working in London, hangs behind his desk a flag obviously based on the Union Jack, save that the crosses are white and green and the background red.
Just for clarification, we’ll add here that all his colleagues know that to refer to him even casually as ‘Spanish’ is making a one heck of a mistake. And when the story breaks that Euskadi ta Askatasuna tried three times to assassinate Jose Maria Aznar, failing on each occasion, our hypothetical friend maintains in conversation that they were right to do so, and that he hopes that they have better luck next time.
Alternatively, anyone old enough to remember the days of lock ins at Irish pubs may have found themselves standing to attention at some point in the small hours, as the show band played a passable version of Amhrán na bhFiann and the buckets started passing round and filling up with cash.
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What happens now to Guantánamo?
Back in March, I published a four-part list identifying all 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, as “the culmination of a three-year project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.” Now updated (as my ongoing project nears its four-year mark), the four parts of the list are available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.
The first fruit of my research was my book The Guantánamo Files, in which, based on an exhaustive analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon (plus other sources), I related the story of Guantánamo, established a chronology explaining where and when the prisoners were seized, told the stories of around 450 of these men (and boys), and provided a context for the circumstances in which the remainder of the prisoners were captured.
I’ve also been tracking the Obama administration’s stumbling progress towards closing the prison, reporting the stories of the 41 prisoners released since March, and covering other aspects of the Guantánamo story.
Overall, as it stood at December 31, 2009, 574 prisoners had been released from Guantánamo (42 under Obama), one — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — had been transferred to the US mainland to face a federal court trial, six had died, and 198 remained.
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How Anjem Choudhary uses the media
Anjem Choudary is brilliant at professional media trolling. He knows exactly what to say, what to do and who to talk to, and also when to do it.
As strokes of genius go, nothing is more likely to wind up the nutters outside of his own clique than a half-baked supposed plan to march through Wootton Bassett, which may as well be our current Jerusalem, a holy place which cannot in any way be defiled, such is how it’s been sanctified both by the press and politicians.
As for his rather less amusing supposed plan for “sending letters” to the families of those bereaved through the current deployment to Afghanistan, urging them, according to that notoriously accurate source, the Sun, that they should embrace Islam “to save [themselves] from the hellfire”, it seems more likely that this would only be through the “open letter” which appeared on the Islam4UK website, which is currently 403ing.
Calling for a sense of perspective is of course a complete waste of time. It doesn’t matter that Islam4UK, the umpteenth successor organisation to Al-Muhjarioun.
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We’re giving terrorists what they want
Something doesn’t quite add up over the security panic that followed last week’s failed terror attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner.
Britain has joined the US and other countries in toughening up checks at airports. Full body scanners, hand luggage checks and no toilet access an hour before landing are amongst some of the measures introduced to tame the new wave of psychosis that is hitting the western world.
Now. Let’s say that your house was broken into once and, hypothetically, you decided to take extra security measures to protect it. Iron bars on the bedroom window, armoured glass fitted with welded steel hinges, a special 24/7 CCTV guarding the room and a 10st stainless steel padlock to round it all off, are all concrete measures that would set your mind at rest.
However, with the initial excitement out of the way comes the realisation that all of the above may just be an expensively futile exercise. The bedroom may be safer than a fortress, but front door, living room, kitchen and all other entry points are as vulnerable as they were before.
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Thoughts on the Christmas terror attempt
The attempted terrorist attack on an airliner on Christmas Day has attracted so much international press that it’s difficult to ignore. However, my thoughts are mainly in a jumble about the whole thing so rather than take time might a cogent think piece I thought I’d make a list of ‘things what occur to me’.
1. Fail to blow up a plane, you get wall to wall coverage for your cause in every nation on Earth. Actually blow up dozens or even hundreds in Pakistan, Iraq or Afghanistan and you’re lucky if you get into the inside pages once let alone over and over again. It’s obviously news but the response feels disproportionate.
2. What would the world be like if we rewarded non-violent protest with this kind of media coverage? Does the international media actually, inadvertently, make violence more attractive than democratic avenues? The media’s approach is certainly what leads Al Quaida to see airplanes as their targets of choice over other possibilities.
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After Abdulmutallab: the media outcry
Odds are that the 278 passengers on board the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day represented a reasonably random demographic.
I’m guessing entirely, of course, but it also seems reasonable to assume that there will also have been quite a few Muslims on the plane. Statistically speaking, the numbers involved even make it quite likely that those travelling on the Airbus A330 included one or two of the kind of people who habitually resort to such formulas as ‘refusal to condemn’ when discussing terrorism that they would classify as anti-imperialist.
There is an old joke that runs ‘just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you’. Unfortunately, the same consideration now applies to sane, rational, left of centre civil libertarians.
However morally outraged us lot get when the US blitzes an Afghan wedding party to Kingdom Come, it’s a fair bet that Osama bin Laden and his mates do not reciprocate our sincere Guardianista indignation when their team clocks up a home run.
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How will this terrorist attempt affect liberties?
The attempted terrorist attack by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Eve presents some major policy headaches for President Obama just when he was beginning to grapple with them.
It’s a given that airport security will tighten further to near-ridiculous levels, even though some number-crunching by blogger Nate Silver shows that a person could board 20 flights a year and still have less chance of being caught in a terrorist attack than being hit lightning.
The attempted airborne attack will instead impact other issues too. For a start it will raise complications again about trialling terrorists in civil courts rather than military courts. President Obama attracted a storm of criticism from the right when his Attorney General announced that one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – will face a civil jury in New York.
That issue is likely to come to the forefront as the trial begins. But Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s capture will also raise questions on whether he should be charged in a civil court or by a military commission as KSM initially was.
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Is this the only solution to Afghanistan?
There’s a distinct air of unreality which must around hang around newspaper offices and also the realms of Whitehall. The reaction to the killing of 5 British soldiers by an Afghan police officer was one of a still aloof nation that regards it as unbelievable that it can be so apparently easy to kill Our Boys, while also perplexed at how “Terry Taliban” isn’t prepared to play by good old fashioned Queensbury rules.
It wasn’t so long ago that IEDs were being described as “new” and “asymmetrical” tactics, as if guerilla warfare was some new concept, and that it was perfectly beastly that the other side weren’t allowing themselves to be shot out in the open like the clearly inferior fighters that they are. How dare they make the greatest, best trained army the world has ever seen look bad?
The problem the attack poses though is obvious: when our policy is to train the Afghan army and police and then get out, or at least that’s what it’s meant to be, that this officer was apparently not a new recruit and had been in the police for three years raises the nightmare that there may be many more “cells” where we have in fact trained those will then turn on us when the chance arises.
This isn’t exactly new either though: the Iraqi police and army were and probably still are riddled with those with their own distinct agendas, and that was in a country where there are only two major sects in conflict with each other.
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The continuing madness of Melanie Phillips
At the weekend Ed Husain wrote an eminently reasonable, measured and very restrained attack on the more out-there views of Melanie Phillips. Husain clearly feels that Phillips is a potential ally in the battle against radical Islam, although quite why judging by her record it’s difficult to tell.
His main concern now seems to be that rather than being an ally, she’s becoming a prominent obstacle to any kind of progress. Especially in the way she seems determined to see conspiracies where there are none, in this instance with Inayat Bunglawala and his determined opposition to the remnants of al-Muhajiroun.
Again, this isn’t anything new with Phillips: a few years back she was convinced that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been buried beneath the Euphrates and that Saddam’s crack team of WMD experts had upped sticks and moved to Syria.
Nonetheless, it was also going to be interesting to see how Phillips responded.
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We’re marching against Islamists
contribution by Shaaz Mahboob
I was a little shocked – and delighted – to find Inayat Bunglawala announcing that he is going to organise a counter-demonstration to Anjem Choudary‘s group Islam4UK, which is planning to call for the implementation of their version of sharia law at a rally on Saturday 31 October.
My organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), had been working closely with likeminded British Muslim and non-Muslim democrats in planning a demonstration to coincide with Anjem’s anti-democracy march and protest against freedom.
Last week a Facebook group was also set up to float the idea and ignite people’s interest. We had planned to make a formal announcement on Monday, but it makes sense, in the circumstances, to bring that announcement forward.
Our counter-demonstration is based on our belief in, and commitment to, those liberal values that define the British state, including legal and constitutional equality for all, equal rights for women and minorities, and religious freedom, including the right to be free of faith. We are turning out to defend all of these virtues of a secular democracy that Islam4UK so despises and daydream of taking away from the British public.
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» New Labour and ignoring racism of the past
» A good week for employment… if women are ignored
» Why it was probably best that just AV is offered in the referendum
» Clubs can’t stop offensive football chants
» There’s no point blaming migrants or welfare for unemployment
» Goldstone’s ‘retraction’ over Operation Cast Lead changes nothing
» Cameron, Clegg: both wrong on immigration
» Don’t be fooled by Cameron and Cable’s immigration stunt
» Why the *type* of debt Britain owes also matters
» Why isn’t Labour offering a credible alternative in Northern Ireland?
» Fear and loathing in Britain’s rightwing press
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