An Unsuitable Job for A Former Detainee

There has been plenty of comment but very little clarity following yesterday's Sunday Times report of accusations by Amnesty International's Gita Saghal that her organisation's "high profile associations" with former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg in its 'Counter Terror With Justice' campaign "was risking its reputation". After speaking to the newspaper, Ms Saghal has been suspended from her post pending the outcome of an internal investigation and a website has been set up by South Asia Citizens Web to defend her.

In a statement, Gita Saghal said:

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organisation must ask: if it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others? For in defending the torture standard, one of the strongest and most embedded in international human rights law, Amnesty International has sanitised the history and politics of the ex-Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg and completely failed to recognize the nature of his organisation Cageprisoners.

The tragedy here is that the necessary defence of the torture standard has been inexcusably allied to the political legitimisation of individuals and organisations belonging to the Islamic Right.

Amnesty International has responded with a statement of its own and Cageprisoners has published a detailed rebuttal letter from Moazzam Begg to Sunday Times journalist Richard Kerbaj, accusing him of ignoring the answers to questions raised in a telephone interview. Mainstays of the muscular 'Decent Left' Nick Cohen and Martin Bright have set up a Facebook page in Saghal's defence, David Aaronovitch has joined the fray, the jihadi-obessed Harry's Place has cranked into gear with its usual tirade of insults and arch rivals Islamophobia Watch has replied with some thoroughly nasty comments of its own about Saghal and Women Against Fundamentalism.

The rest of us, it seems, are in the dark and somewhat bewildered, unable to make an informed judgement in the absence of specific detail in the allegations against Moazzem Begg (right) or Cageprisoners's work with Amnesty.

I don't know either Begg or Gita Saghal, but her general comments so far seem only to imply that by raising concerns about the treatment in Britain of what I would otherwise consider extremely obnoxious individuals - by opposing the chaotic system of control orders or the use of expulsions to countries with dubious human rights, for example - Cageprinsoners is guilty of association with 'the Islamic Right'. Presumably the same applies to providing support to their families and therefore means there are plenty of others (including myself) as well as Amnesty International who are equally guilty. Saghal's allies in the 'Decent Left' and the rightwing press undoubtedly think so.

If, however, there is specific evidence that Moazzem Begg or Cageprisoners are "committed to systematic discrimination" that "fundamentally undermines the universality of human rights", then I don't think it is unreasonable to expect some hard facts to back up this serious allegation.

Equally, not one of the activists I know and respect is completely infallible and supporters of Gita Sahgal are asking far too much in demanding unconditional backing because she has a track record as an anti-racist activist, rather than because of the detail of her allegations. Moreover, the argument that a mainstream organisation like Amnesty International is somehow acting improperly and 'denying free speech' in suspending a member of staff for publicly criticising her employer in the press also seems very thin - that's what mainstream employers tend to do to protect themselves and it's what defines the bravery of 'whistle-blowers': speaking out regardless of the inevitable consequences.

Then there is the issue of Moazzem Begg himself. Regardless of his past, his decision to use his experiences in Guantanamo to campaign for its closure, to speak alongside some of his former US army guards and to call for dialogue seems completely in keeping with Amnesty's work. Most importantly of all, the nature of the ordeal he faced in the name of ‘freedom’ and 'democracy' during his incarceration suggests he deserves rather greater courtesy from an activist and campaigner than accusations made through the pages of a Sunday newspaper.

Until there is more substantive information from Gita Saghal, I'm not sure that I want to automatically jump aboard a bandwagon of condemnation started by those who broadly think most Muslims are suspect and that sacrificing human rights is a necessary consequence of the 'war on terror'.

However, one of my friends, who has been involved in Women Against Fundamentalism and Southall Black Sisters for many years, has promised more detail soon. I await the next developments with growing curiosity.

Socialists Defy Free Speech Ban In Scandal-Ridden Waltham Forest

Great news for free speech in Walthamstow - campaigners from the Socialist Party and the Greens have defied an attempt by Waltham Forest council to ban political stalls in the town square without first seeking 'prior permission'.

For years, religious and political groups have set up stall in the square without any problem. Then last week, socialists calling for a public inquiry into council mismanagement were told to move on: a council jobsworth turned up, said they were in breach of a 105-year old bye-law and threatened them with the prospect of a potential £500 fine.

The council claims that it has only now managed to recruit enough 'enforcement officers' to work weekend shifts and catch people breaking this local ordinance. However, this seems like an excuse: its claim that "any person or group wishing to operate in these areas needs to have the correct permission, in the form of a signed agreement, and have paid the appropriate fee" is undermined by the inability of both the local newspaper and the Socialist Party to obtain any information about the size of this alleged fee or the terms of any agreement.

So why now? Perhaps because, in an election year, Waltham Forest council doesn't want local people reminded that it has finally been caught out publicly after years of mismanaging funds. As Private Eye Rotten Borough's column pointed out in late January, there have already been numerous previous investigations by the council's own auditors, which unsurprisngly found no evidence of criminality. In February 2009, Labour's Lord Harris accused the leadership of the Labour Group in Waltham Forest of "hoping that the problem would simply go away" and claimed that he had been approached by a 'senior councillor' to keep questions 'in the Party'. Finally in March last year, a panel including the chief executive of the London Development Agency Peter Rogers was brought in to head a new independent investigation. It found that million of pounds in central government Better Neighbourhood Initiative funding for deprived wards was unaccounted for or had been diverted towards the borough's spending on the Olympics, that rules to prevent fraud were routinely ignored and that files had been doctored or were 'incomplete'. Four senior council officers resigned before the investigation was published in December 2009.

None of which has proved a problem for the career of Cllr Clyde Loakes, who was the chair of the Local Strategic Partnership and responsible for monitoring regeneration spending when the mismanagement took place. The Labour Party has selected him as it parliamentary candidate for Northampton South.

LAZY FRIDAY - Oui 3 from '93

It seems like such a long time ago now, but think back to 1993.

John Major was in Downing Street, terrorism meant the Bishopsgate bombing but we weren't yet at war with a noun, whilst the fact that the BNP had won their very first council seat in the Isle of Dogs was unusual enough to make front page news in the Evening Standard (I still have a copy) and we were still getting used to something called Microsoft Windows 3.1.

The final invasion of Iraq was still a decade away and several activists I know were still at junior school.

Meanwhile in the UK charts, there was a now obscure band called Oui 3 that had a couple of hits that I loved - Break From The Old Routine and the Buffalo Springfield sampled For What It's Worth.

In another Friday lunchtime distraction - and celebrate that this is the 500th post on my blog - I've tracked down both tracks for your listening pleasure:

Archer Daniels Midland CEO Patricia Woertz Talks Agribusiness

For those who aren't familiar with them, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is a major purchaser and trader of the agricultural commodities that are motivating the destruction of rainforests and has a controlling interest in Wilmar, the company most responsible for new industrial palm oil plantation expansion in Indonesia and one of the largest investors in biofuels.

This is just hilarious - more on the Yes Men's highly suspicious World Economic Forum website.

Can Free Speech Survive Police On Campus?

Like some kind of geopolitical Newtonian law of motion, the actions of a minuscule number of jihadi lunatics leads inevitably to a reaction from those who claim to defend us from the threat of terrorism.

Today’s announcement by Universities minister David Lammy that anti-terrorism police are being stationed in universities considered “at risk of being targeted by extremists” is undoubtedly the latest response to the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the ‘panty bomber’ who tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day. The first was the list of 14 countries whose nationals automatically face more intensive body searches and luggage checks, an assumption of blanket suspicion. But because Abdulmutallab was a former student at University College London and had been president of its Islamic Society, the university itself has been forced onto the defensive. The evidence may suggest that Abdulmutallab actually embraced his extreme views in a madrassa in Yemen, but as Jerome Taylor in the Independent said at the end of December 2009:

Some believe that Britain’s universities remain alarmingly open to Islamist radicals. Others fear that a "reds under beds" style hysteria that treats all Muslims students as potential threats to national security will force Islamic debate in our universities underground and behind closed doors.

Much of the generalised paranoia about Islamic societies has been stoked by the likes of Douglas Murray of the right-wing (and misnamed) Centre for Social Cohesion or by commentators such as Melanie Phillips, who tried to imply some kind of link between Abdulmutallab and another former UCL student, the decidedly secular Samar Alami, who was convicted of detonating a car bomb outside the Israel embassy in London in 1994 (in what has always seemed like an appalling miscarriage of justice). David Lammy’s proposals take us a step further, however, from what is undoubtedly a covert surveillance presence already in a number of universities. Putting police officers on campus - and publicly announcing an intention to do so - can only increase fear and mistrust, risk closing down any potentially critical debate about the ‘war on terror’ and make Muslim students feel even more under siege. It’s hardly a great way to win hearts and minds.

Then there is the small matter, which I really must mention, of how poor police intelligence about terrorist threats from ‘student cells’ has been. You may recall, for example, the ‘anti-terror’ raids that followed Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick’s failure to conceal secret documents from photographers in Downing Street. On 8 April 2009, the result was the hurried arrest by armed police of twelve students in the north west of England as alleged terrorist suspects. One, a Liverpool University student, was thrown to the ground and held there at gunpoint for an hour (above). At the time, Gordon Brown spoke his lines from the security services and the police, saying:

"We are dealing with a very big terrorist plot … there were a number of people who are suspected of it who have been arrested. That police operation was successful.

But just like the immediate aftermath of the Forest Gate raids in June 2006, this turned out to be more nonsense: after three weeks of interrogations and searches, there was no evidence against any of the students. Manchester police admitted they were innocent but unlike the two brothers who live around the corner from me, the ordeal was far from over.

Ten students, all Pakistani citizens, were immediately rearrested and imprisoned as a ‘threat to national security’ (or to cover the government’s embarrassment, depending on your point of view). The remaining two were electronically tagged and forced to live under curfew conditions. Denied bail, the ten were held as Category A prisoners and were moved around the country from prison to prison. Neither they nor their lawyers were told of any “evidence” against them at a special immigration court and eventually the twelve agreed to voluntary repatriation to Pakistan rather than face prolonged imprisonment.

So is there religious extremism on Britain’s campuses? To a degree (if you pardon the pun), the answer is yes, of course there is. There has been a rapid expansion of high education over the last decade, more and more young people attend university and it is certainly true that many of those who have subsequently been involved in terrorist incidents have been university-educated. Is that enough, however, to rubbish studies (as bloggers on Harry’s Place tried to do in 2008) showing what those of us who lives in areas with sizeable Muslim populations already know, that the majority of young British Muslims are opposed to political Islam and more likely to join Amnesty International than al-Qaeda? Only if your immediate knee-jerk reaction to the minuscule number of jihadi lunatics is to assume that the majority of Muslims are almost certainly extremists too.

Moreover, if you are a student facing the prospect of police officers on campus, a fear of being labelled ‘extremist’, even the prospect that innocence will not be enough to avoid detention as a ‘national security threat’ or even expulsion from the country, another question may well seem far more important than whether extremism exists or not on campus.

How on earth can universities hope to remain as centres of free speech in an atmosphere as poisoned as this?

David Lammy’s interview for BBC Radio 4’s The Report is broadcast tonight at 8pm.

Time For Lord Carlile To Tend His Roses

I never imagined it would be Andrew Dismore, the Hendon MP and chair of parliament's joint committee on human rights, but it's about time someone called time on Lord Carlile.

After five long years in the rarified, suspicious world of special access to briefings by spooks, in his role as the government's "independent" reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, the Liberal Democrats' most illiberal peer has a track record of saying exactly what the security services and ministers want to hear. He was an advocate of the extention of detention without charge to 42 days and went out of his way to criticise David Davis, the former Conservative Home Secretary who stood down to fight a bye-election in 2008 on the issue, in the pages of The Sun. A supporter of house arrest (otherwise known as control orders), for which the lawyer Gareth Peirce accuses him of providing a 'veneer of credibility' to a system in disarray, Carlile is also an opponent of the use of intercept evidence in terrorism trials and has defended racial profiling in the use of stop and search - in the words of one Lib Dem, he helps to foster mistrust towards Muslims by "perpetuating the idea that it's OK to stop a Muslim (and, for that matter easy to identify a Muslim by the fact that they're non-white), but not OK to stop a blond woman":

He writes of cases where 'where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realist­ically, there is not the slightest poss­ibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop' - well, most Asians and black people are as far from any known terrorism as most blond women, so if anything, that's a killer blow to the idea of using 'profiling' based on the colour of a person's skin. I feel almost embarrassed having to explain this to an obviously intelligent Liberal peer.

Quite so, but that's what happens when even the 'obviously intelligent' go native in spook-land. "I think there is a risk of the perceptions of [Carlile's] independence being undermined, and that then undermines [his] credibility," Andrew Dismore is quoted as saying. "I think there ought to be a fixed term for his job."

I couldn't agree more. And five years is way, way more than long enough.

The Spirit Level - In Three Minutes

On Friday 12 February, Newham Bookshop presents Richard Wilkinson discussing The Spirit Level - Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better at Wanstead Library. It argues that almost every social problem common in developed societies - reduced life expectancy, child mortality, drugs, crime, homicide rates, mental illness and obesity - has a single root cause: inequality. Here's a brilliant teaser:

Message to Sir Robin: If Oxford Can Do It, Why Can't Newham?

It often seems that if there is one thing Newham has more of than fried chicken shops, it's letting agents. And thanks the the End Child Poverty campaign, we know there are 6,600 Newham children who are growing up in temporary accommodation, mostly in properties that are privately owned and managed and many that are sub-standard.

Bad housing affects every aspect of a child’s life, from their health and safety to educational attainment and likelihood of poverty in adulthood, which is why one of End Child Poverty's priorities in Newham has been ask local people to help name and shame offending temporary rental companies (see PDF flyer here). Using this information, campaigners aim to get landlords to sign up to a decent homes charter, helping to improve the homes of hundreds of families across the borough.

But it wouldn't be necessary to leave this important issue to local campaigners if Newham council decided to act boldly. Last week the Oxford Mail reported that Oxford City Council intends to adopt new powers the government is introducing in April, which are designed to clamp down on bad landlords and improve the quality of private rented accommodation. The council plans to set up a compulsory licensing scheme for all new and existing private landlords and if they don’t comply with the standards set out in the license, they could be prosecuted and face a fine of up to £20,000.

Newham has a Landlord Accreditation Scheme but it is entirely voluntary, which means there is little incentive for cowboy landlords to cough up £75 to join it. So the message to Newham's Mayor Sir Robin Wales is simple: if Oxford can act decisively and if substandard homes affect the futures of hundreds of local children, why can't Newham act too and making licensing compulsory?

No Shock Doctrine for Haiti

Thursday
11 February
from 7.30pm-9.30pm

Brockway Room,
Conway Hall,
25 Red Lion Square,
London WC1R 4RL

Nearest tube: Holborn | Map

Speakers:

• Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment
  
  
• Selma James, writer and solidarity activist, Global Women's Strike
  
  
• Nick Dearden, director of Jubilee Debt Campaign

Haiti was the first independent nation in Latin America, freed as a result of an inspiring slave revolt. Yet it has been subject to domination ever since, from US occupations, to the crippling 135-year debt imposed by former colonial master France, to Western-backed dictatorships and IMF-imposed free market economic 'reforms'.

Now, as US troops patrol the country, free market economists are seeing new opportunities to privatise and 'restructure' Haiti's economy, while its external debts have still not been cancelled by rich donors. The 'shock doctrine' looks to be striking again. Join the discussion about what solidarity we can offer to those in Haiti seeking an alternative future.

London Activist Forum | organised by the Radical Activist Network

Confirm attendance for No Shock Doctrine for Haiti on Facebook

Monitoring Network Keeps the Spotlight on Police Brutality

An edited version of this also appears as a guest post on Liberal Conspiracy.

With the police adopting an increasingly confrontational and often violent approach to maintaining ‘order’ at public protests, the presence of trained legal observers, to collect information that may be helpful in later court proceedings and assist activists who are arrested or need medical attention, has become essential. Their focus is on the safety of demonstrators, without which the ‘right to protest’ is severely undermined if people are intimidated by the fear of police brutality from taking part in one of the vital elements of a democratic society.

Photo: Harpymarx

At the G20 protests in April 2009, senior police officers sanctioned excessive force with an apparent expectation, based on previous experience, that the press and the public wouldn’t that much care about protesters. Taken aback by the spotlight placed upon them by the storm of complaints that followed, particularly the video evidence from members of the public that provided graphic evidence of violent conduct, the police have been forced onto the defensive. So far this has led directly to the review of public order policing, Adapting to Protest, by Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Dennis O’Connor, which expressed particular concerns about “the influence of… members of the public who play an active role in collecting, analysing and distributing media themselves.” It also resulted in the extremely low-key policing of last summer’s Climate Camp in Blackheath. Whether the review will really change anything and how long the new approach to policing protests will last, however, is far from certain. Much will depend on maintaining a constant level of scrutiny on police tactics and conduct

With little confidence in public bodies like the Independent Police Complaints Commission and to try and ensure that attention remains focused on the policing of protest, four experienced organisations have set up the Police Monitoring Network to train and collate information from ‘police monitors’ at demonstrations around the country.

Members of the network include the legal team from Climate Camp, FITwatch (who monitoring oppressive surveillance by police ‘forward intelligence’ teams), the Legal Defence and Monitoring Group (who provide legal observers at demonstrations and grew out of the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign and Poll Tax Prisoners Support Group) and Newham Monitoring Project (an east London community organisation that has supported black communities to challenge police misconduct since 1980). They are supported by the civil liberties organisation, the Campaign against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC), and by solicitors with expertise in civil actions against the police.

Police monitors will complement the role provided by legal observers in ensuring the safety of demonstrators but will focus specifically on scrutinising the actions of the police – whether, for example, police officers are covering identification numbers or psyching themselves up for violence and when police commanders are using tactics like ‘kettling’ that greatly increase the likelihood of confrontation.

Training for police monitors, aimed initially at those who already have experience as legal observers, is planned for March 2010 and a website will be up and running shortly. For further information, contact FITwatch at defycops@yahoo.co.uk