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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 99 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 March 14 Sunday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Safety versus civil liberties - this is the debate which is starting to intensify after the recent terrorbomb attacks in Spain, and I think it's a false dichotomy. First, it's worth noting that even authoritarian governments do not necessarily have total success in combating terrorism. In Russia, for example, the Chechens have demonstrated an ability to wage war in the heart of Russia. That said, it must be agreed that tyrannies tend to be orderly. Examples include Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Kim Jong Il's North Korea. The obvious problem here is that tyrannies tend to be injurious to their own citizens. Imagine a government that, in the name of security, suspends the rule of law and imprisons its enemies, real and imagined, in dungeons where they are held incommunicado for years, denied access to lawyers and courts, the government not being particularly fussed about the fact that the innocent are incarcerated along with the innocent. Imagine that, and what you have is Guantanamo Bay, from which place some British citizens have, in the last week, finally been released after many months of punishment for, it seems, purely imaginary crimes. Of course, in this case, the Bush regime has been exerting its power over the citizens of other nations rather than over its own citizens. Even so, this seems symptomatic of where the world may be headed. The more bombings there are - and it is certain that there will be more bombings, more death, more slaughter - the more we're going to be tempted to redesign society as a prison. My thesis, however, is that prisons are not safe places. Section 99 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 March 14 Sunday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Right now, the website associated with the British newspaper The Guardian has an article about how people are being treated at Guantanamo Bay. The article reveals the existence of "a secret super-maximum security facility" called Camp Echo where some prisoners are held "in tiny cells in solitary confinement 24-hours a day". The Americans recently released five British prisoners, and the Guardian article deals with three of these, Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal. Apparently the Americans thought these three British citizens featured in a video tape which starred Osama bin Laden and which related to 9/11. However, the British security services were finally able to document the fact that the accused three had been in Britain when the video was made. Right now, a link to the article (which includes allegations of harsh treatment, and which is credited to "The Observer's David Rose") is online as follows:- on the website of the British GUARDIAN newspaper In today's [2004 March 14] (print) edition of the The Japan Times, on page four, there is an article headlined "Two Britons freed from Guantanamo allege beatings and mistreatment". Apparently there are allegations of mistreatment from recently-released British detainees Tarek Dergoul and Jamal al-Harith. However:- |
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U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told a British television network it was "unlikely" abuses were taking place at Guantanamo. "Because we are Americans, we don't abuse people who are in our care," he said, according to a transcript released by ITV.
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In the light of that claim, it's interesting to do an Internet search for data on how Americans treat Americans, for example:-
www.google.com/search?q=us+prison+torture which throws up, for example:- Evidence of U.S. Human Rights Violations Another interesting search is:- www.google.com/search?q=prison+officer+torture+convictions+US I started browsing through the first document that search threw up, the Amnesty International Report for 2001, which details a number of cases of Americans treating other Americans in ways which fail to justify Colin Powell's Panglossian optimism. The following link leads to that first document:- Amnesty International 2001 report - USA I was casually browsing this stuff when one section suddenly made me sit up and pay attention. It's fairly deep in the report, below "Torture/ill-treatment in prisons and jails" and below "Abuse of incarcerated children" and down below "Execution of the mentally impaired". It's in the miscellaneous section headlined "Other concerns":- |
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Mazen Al-Najjar, a Palestinian immigrant jailed for more than three years on the basis of secret government evidence, was released in December after a court ruled that a summary of that evidence, which purported to show his links with a terrorist group, was insufficient to justify his detention. New proceedings had been ordered into the case by a court in May which found that his due process rights had been violated. AI called for a ban on the use of secret evidence to detain people during deportation proceedings.
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Now, since the report is from 2001, "jailed for more than three years" takes us way back before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
I was interested enough to do another search:- www.google.com/search?q=Mazen+Al-Najjar And found an article dating from the day when Al-Najjar got rearrested:- The following is from an ABCnews.com report dated November 24, 2001:- |
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In 1996, immigration officials charged Al-Najjar, who once taught language classes at a Tampa, Fla., university, with overstaying his visa and sought to deport him. While Al-Najjar contested his deportation, the INS sought to keep him in jail on the basis of so-called secret evidence linking him to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government. The government said some of the evidence of Al-Najjar's ties to the group was classified and refused to provide it to Al-Najjar or his lawyers.
The attempt to use "secret evidence" led to a lengthy court fight. Al-Najjar spent more than three years in prison before being released last December, after a federal judge said that the use of such evidence against Al-Najjar was unconstitutional. |
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The chronology seems to be that Mazen Al-Najjar was charged in 1996, imprisoned for more than three years on the basis of secret evidence, released in December 2000 after an American court declared the use of this evidence was unconstitutional, and was then rearrested on 2001 November 24 after a different court "upheld Al-Najjar's deportation".
From another article online, it seems that Al-Najjar was eventually deported in or shortly after August 2002 (there was, apparently, difficulty in finding a country that would accept him.) So what was the secret evidence against him? I haven't been able to dig deep enough to find out - or maybe it's still a secret. But, in the case of three of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, we now know the evidence: they were captured on videotape in the company of Osama bin Laden. The only problem, however, is that, as the British security services finally established, the accused were at home in Britain when the videotape was made. Going back to the Guardian Guantanamo Bay Prisoner Article, which is based on interviews with three of the five British citizens recently released by the USA, the following point is noteworthy: |
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The three men said that as far as they could see, there were few if any genuine terrorists at Guantanamo Bay: perhaps at worst, a few mullahs who had been loyal to the Taliban.
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Actually, when I go back and reread the article, checking my interpretation of what it says, I find I'm being too kind to the Guantanamo system. It seems the (mistaken) accusations that the men were captured on videotape with Osama bin Laden only surfaced "last summer", which rather suggests that, up until then, the evidence was even flimsier than looking like someone on a suspect videotape.
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