The Art of Balance2 Sep 2008The long-established Middle East conflict polarises opinion. It is difficult to have a dispassionate viewpoint. Most people would like to see a reduction in tension leading to a peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. However, depending on their experiences individuals understand, and therefore prefer, one version of events which they believe to be more truthful and accurate. Journalists are not free from these forms of influence, and unsurprisingly, this polarisation is often reflected in the British media’s coverage of Israel and its relationship with the Palestinians. The Israeli Ambassador, Ron Prosor, pointed out that Israeli affairs are more widely covered than most other countries with a similar population. There are complex reasons why this is so. Firstly, my PhD research indicated that the British media often reflects the interests of the US; in this context, Israel could be viewed as more newsworthy than countries that do not enjoy such a close relationship with America. Secondly, the media cannot be divorced from its commercial interests – it operates in a competitive space, and media outlets publish what sells newspapers and broadcast items that attract audiences. This conflict is one such story. Another issue is location; the Middle East has more than its fair share of drama. Most news organisations have a considerable number of journalists posted to the region at any time, making it easier to follow interesting stories arising there. Associated with this is Israel’s success in attracting media organisations to base their Middle East operations in Jerusalem. This was explained by a BBC executive, who stated: “Israel is an easy place to work in journalistic terms; it is accessible.” He compared this with the complex bureaucracy found in some Arab countries. Interestingly, Israel’s pole position is being challenged by Dubai, which has recently put a great deal of effort into creating an attractive working environment for the international media as part of its own commercial development. My own opinion is that since developing its media hub, Dubai gets far wider coverage in the British media than neighbouring Emirates such as Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, and indeed, often more than other Arab states. If this trend continues, international coverage of Israeli matters could decline, but this may not suit Palestinian or Israeli interests. The Israeli ambassador cited a recent study claiming that more newspaper commentaries give a negative view of Israel than a positive one. These statistics are only relevant if compared to other national and international coverage showing that Israel is the only country depicted in this manner, but that is unlikely. Bad news often takes precedence as it is seen as more interesting. Recent topics such as corruption scandals and the siege of Gaza have been widely and sometimes negatively reported in the Israeli media; it is not surprising to find these high-profile stories in Britain. News stories may be negative or reflect different versions of ‘truth,’ but that does not in itself imply inaccuracy, nor breach of the Editors’ Code or Ofcom regulations. Many Israeli supporters claim that the British media ignores ‘terror’ attacks on Israel citizens. All military attacks cause ‘terror’ amongst local populations, but with no international definition of this word, it is meaningless terminology. From an alternative perspective, organisations that reflect Arab opinion believe there is more media emphasis on rocket attacks on Israel than on Israeli attacks on Palestinians. This has some credibility. For example, I read in the Israeli press that last year there were 92 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces, but no Israeli child was killed by Palestinians during the same period. These tragic statistics were ignored by the British media. Downplaying Palestinian deaths is not a new trend. Research in 2006 found that more words were used to describe the kidnapping of one Israeli soldier than were used when reporting 20+ Palestinians killed by Israel, most of them civilians. For example, the Daily Mail devoted 661 words for the kidnapping, and 167 to the deaths, and the Guardian used 826 for the kidnapping, and 393 for the deaths. My own research shows that when 15 Palestinian children were killed by Israelis during one month in 2002, 107 words were printed per child death. During this same period, seven Israeli children were killed by Palestinians, with an average of 1,070 words each. Israelis were described as innocent victims of hatred, whereas Palestinian children were frequently made to appear culpable for their own deaths; for example, a reporter might associate a death with stone-throwing. Reports often cited Israeli views of events but ignored Palestinian versions. Palestinian children were rarely named or personalised, whereas Israeli children often were. Similar findings were made in an extensive study of ITV and BBC output by Glasgow University. As many people use TV as their main source of news, the study demonstrated that the lack of context, the style of language and the spokespersons used often confused audiences rather than informing them. Respondents in their audience studies did not understand fundamental issues such as refugees, military occupation and settlement building, but instead saw the conflict as a tit-for-tat border dispute. The BBC is particularly vulnerable to lobbying, as the public views it as more reliable than commercial broadcasters; the corporation claims “accurate, robust and impartial journalism.” The BBC commissioned an independent report from Loughborough University in 2005 to evaluate its coverage of the conflict; the findings correlated with the Glasgow study, describing coverage as incomplete and misleading. An important finding was that BBC reports did not show that one side is in control whilst the other side lives under occupation. They also described a disparity in favour of Israel that existed in talk time and media appearances. This was also confirmed by an extensive Arab Media Watch study of BBC news output, which showed similar disparities in terminology, talk time, historical context, and the tendency to play down Palestinian suffering. For example, after Israeli attacks resulting in many civilian deaths, there was one Palestinian attack on Jewish settlers and one suicide attack, but the BBC repeatedly described these as “ending a period of relative calm.” The terminology and context issues particularly concern refugee issues. The Glasgow study found that only 8% of people knew that Palestinian refugees were displaced from their homes when Israel was formed. The media had an opportunity to debate this after the 2007 Arab Summit. Their peace initiative was re-launched, promising Israel full peace in return for withdrawing from occupied lands and finding a just settlement for refugees. This was not mentioned in tabloid newspapers, and although a dozen broadsheet editorials at the time referred to the Arab offer, none focused on the refugee issue. The British broadcasting media are required to provide balanced coverage, but the press has no such restrictions and can provide a partisan view, hence there are likely to be articles that reflect opposing versions of ‘truth.’ However, newspapers still have a duty to provide accurate information, but that does not stop them from omitting items that do not suit their editorial line. It is notable that there has been little comment on the siege of Gaza, which conforms to the legal definition of collective punishment of 1.5 million civilians. When the siege intensified at the beginning of February 2008, the only commentary in the Times was entitled “A barrage against Israel,” and the siege was blamed on the Palestinians. It went on; “?the frenzied, rhetorical onslaught of the Jewish state is at best intellectually lazy?” However, there was little sign of this onslaught; out of 10 daily newspapers, only the Telegraph, Independent, Financial Times and Guardian each published one leader, and in addition there were only nine commentaries, five of them in the Independent. Only the Independent reacted directly to Israel’s intensification of the siege, whilst the others reacted to the breach in the Gaza-Egypt border. An AMW terminology study in March 2008 compared the newsprint coverage of 120 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, and eight Israelis killed by a Palestinian in Jerusalem days later, noting the selection of words used to describe the incidents. Five journalists balanced their choice of descriptive words in each tragedy, whereas nine others used terms such as “massacre”, “bloodbath” and “slaughter” when describing the Palestinian attack, but used sanitised terms such as “offensive”, “incursion” and “strikes” to describe the Israeli attacks. When asked to explain his use of terminology, one journalist stated that he avoided the use of inflammatory words, but his copy had been changed by his editorial team without his knowledge or permission. The British media has a responsibility in its reporting of the conflict, as inciting hatred of either Israelis or Palestinians, or hiding the historical obstacles that need to be understood and overcome, can only prolong suffering. In order to guide the media, there should be more empirical research that covers issues such as historical context, story selection, terminology, types of discourses followed, spokespersons used, accessibility and prominence. Independent academic studies so far have shown that the British media tends to follow discourses that do not create understanding of the Palestinian case. There are many complex reasons why this occurs, but in itself this can foster anti-Israeli sentiment, as a largely one-sided perspective can mislead some audiences into thinking that Israel controls everything, and hence creates an environment in which radicalism can grow. That worries many people – including most Palestinians.
High Court Rules on Binyam Mohamed2 Sep 2008In the lawless world of Guantnamo ?- and the United States? even murkier network of secret prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA ?- it has taken six years and four months for British resident Binyam Mohamed to secure anything resembling justice. Seized in Pakistan in April 2002, Binyam was rendered to Morocco three months later, where he was tortured on behalf of the US for 18 months, in sessions that regularly included having his genitals cut with a razor, and was then held for nine months in Afghanistan, first at the ?Dark Prison,? a secret prison run by the CIA, where he was also tortured, and then at Bagram airbase. He has been held at Guantnamo since September 2004. When justice finally came for Binyam, it was not at Guantnamo, but in London?s High Court, where, last Thursday, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones delivered a stinging rebuke to both the British and the American governments: to the British for the complicity of the UK intelligence services in the US administration?s post-9/11 policies of ?extraordinary rendition? and torture, and to the Americans for the lawless conduct of the trials by Military Commission that were established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to deal with ?terror suspects? like Binyam (even though the judges professed in their ruling that they ?did not consider it necessary to form any view about the overall fairness of the Military Commissions procedure?). The road to the High Court opened up in May this year, when Binyam?s lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve, who represent over 30 Guantnamo prisoners, teamed up with solicitors at Leigh Day & Co. to sue the British government, seeking the release of information relating to British knowledge of Binyam?s rendition and torture, in preparation for his impending trial at Guantnamo. In the event, this was prescient, as charges were leveled against Binyam on May 28, in connection with the spectral ?dirty bomb? plot that was dropped years ago against US citizen Jose Padilla. It was, therefore, imperative that potentially exculpatory evidence ?- which the British possessed, and which they had also handed over to the Americans ?- was made available to his lawyers so that they could begin preparing a defence, and, preferably, discover evidence of torture, which would back up Binyam?s claims that the charges against him were based solely on confessions obtained through torture, and would, therefore, make the US administration call off his forthcoming trial. It was an indication of how far removed the Military Commissions are from legal norms that, although Binyam?s lawyers contended that he had been tortured, and had discovered the records of ?extraordinary rendition? flights that matched his accounts, the US administration had not only provided no information to enable them to defend him, but had also categorically refused to account for his whereabouts before his arrival at Bagram. Whatever information they and the British possessed would, it was stated, be made available to Binyam?s military defense lawyer, Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley, at the discovery stage, should his trial go ahead, but as the trial of Salim Hamdan demonstrated in late July, some evidence was withheld from the defence until the last possible moment, and other evidence ?- relating, for example, to coercive interrogations of Hamdan conducted by the CIA in Afghanistan ?- was ruled off-limits by the military judge presiding over the trial, and was, essentially, regarded as though it didn?t exist at all. In Binyam?s case, his lawyers sued the British government after an earlier attempt to secure potentially exculpatory evidence from the British government was turned down, when the Treasury Solicitors, acting on behalf of the government, attempted to brush aside British complicity in Binyam?s rendition, torture and false confessions by claiming that ?the UK is under no obligation under international law to assist foreign courts and tribunals in assuring that torture evidence is not admitted,? and adding that ?it is HM Government?s position that ? evidence held by the UK Government that US and Moroccan authorities engaged in torture or rendition cannot be obtained? by his British lawyers. Last Thursday, following a judicial review in the High Court that was triggered when Binyam?s lawyers sued the government, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones demolished the government?s defence of its actions in a 75-page judgment (also available as a five-page summary). The judges made clear that, after Binyam was captured and US agents came to regard him as ?a serious potential threat to the security of the United Kingdom,? the British intelligence services had ?every reason to seek to obtain as much intelligence from him as was possible in accordance with the rule of law and to cooperate as fully as possible with the United States authorities to that end.? They concluded, however, that the actions of the intelligence services from May 2002, when a British agent visited Binyam in US-supervised Pakistani custody, until February 2003, when the British last received information from the US regarding his interrogations, had placed the British government in a position where it ?was involved, however innocently, in the alleged wrongdoing,? which it had helped facilitate. Regarding Binyam?s time in Pakistan, where the British agent who visited him on May 17, 2002 made it clear that the British government ?would not help [him] unless he cooperated fully with the US authorities,? the judges ruled that Binyam?s detention was ?unlawful? under Pakistani law, because he ?was being detained by the United States incommunicado and without access to a lawyer.? Furthermore, the judges noted that the British intelligence services ?provided further information to the United States and further questions to be asked of BM [Binyam]? for nine months after this visit, even though he ?was still incommunicado and they must also have appreciated that he was not in a United States facility and that the facility in which he was being detained was that of a foreign government (other than Afghanistan).? The judges noted that all of the above was particularly significant because the information obtained from Binyam was ?sought to be used as a confession in a trial where the charges ? are very serious and may carry the death penalty,? and that it is ?a long-standing principle of the common law that confessions obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment cannot be used as evidence in any trial.? They therefore ruled that ?by seeking to interview BM in the circumstances found and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship between the United Kingdom Government and the United States authorities went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.? The gravity of this was brought home during the judicial review, when the agent who had interviewed Binyam in Pakistan was cross-examined for several days in closed sessions that were clearly so perilous for the agent, in terms of potential criminal liability for war crimes under the International Criminal Court Act of 2001, that he brought his own legal adviser with him, and, it was revealed in the judgment, initially refused to answer the judges? questions, fearing self-incrimination. This, of course, is in marked contrast to the position held by the US administration, which has refused to sign up to the International Criminal Court, and which, in addition, maintains that it ?does not torture? and continues to do all in its power to deny that it has been responsible for gross human rights abuses. In the second part of their ruling, the judges took as their starting point an admission by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, which took place ?after the commencement of this application but before the hearing,? that he had ?identified documents which he considers could be considered exculpatory or might otherwise be relevant in the context of the proceedings before the Military Commission.? After stating that David Miliband had informed Binyam?s lawyers and had ?provided these documents to the United States Government,? the judges added, ?It is a matter of regret that the documents have not been made available in the proceedings under the Military Commissions Act in confidence to BM?s lawyers, who have security clearance from the United States authorities to at least secret level.? This was not the judges? only thinly-veiled criticism of the behaviour of the US authorities, but it was for three specific reasons that they proceeded to rule that the Foreign Secretary was ?under a duty? to disclose ?in confidence? to Binyam?s legal advisers the requested information, which was ?not only necessary but essential for his defence?: firstly, because the Foreign Secretary had not made the documents available to Binyam?s lawyers; secondly, because the US authorities had also refused to do so; and thirdly, because the Foreign Secretary had accepted that Binyam had ?established an arguable case? that, until his transfer to Guantnamo, ?he was subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by or on behalf of the United States,? and was also ?subject to torture during such detention by or on behalf of the United States.? Having demolished the cases put forward by both the British and American governments, the judges nevertheless held out a lifeline for the Foreign Secretary, pointing out that they would ?make no order for the provision of the information? until he ?had an opportunity to consider the interests of national security in the light of these judgments,? and set a date for a second hearing on Wednesday August 27. On the day, what was initially regarded as a straightforward hearing for the Foreign Secretary to announce his response to the judges? ruling turned into another long session as the government responded to the security concerns mentioned by the judges by filing a Public Interest Immunity (PII) Certificate seeking to suppress disclosure of the documents on the grounds of national security, and the US State Department attempted to strike a deal through correspondence with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). John Bellinger, the US State Department?s Legal Adviser, claimed that public disclosure of the documents was ?likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence information-sharing arrangements between our two governments.? His only concession to the judges? ruling was to note that the Office of the Chief Prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions had agreed to provide the British intelligence documents (44 in total) to the Commissions? Convening Authority, Susan Crawford, if she requested them, ?subject only to the condition that the names of American and British government officials and the locations of intelligence facilities will be redacted from the documents prior to their being provided.? He added that, if Binyam?s trial were to go ahead, the redacted documents would be made available to his military lawyer at the ?normal discovery phase? of the process. In a separate email to the FCO, Stephen Mathias, one of John Bellinger?s deputies, offered a further concession ?by way of update,? in which he stated that the Legal Adviser had now decided to present the documents to Susan Crawford, without waiting for her to ask for them. Describing this as ?a significant development,? Stephen Mathias proceeded to claim, with a degree of force that appeared rather intimidating, ?Ordering the disclosure of US intelligence information now would have only the marginal effects of serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence sharing relationship, and thus the national security of the United Kingdom, and of aggressive and unprecedented intervention in the apparently functioning adjudicatory processes of a longtime ally of the United Kingdom, in contravention of well established principles of international comity.? As Ben Jaffey (for Binyam) argued in court, neither the State Department?s ?carefully calibrated concessions? nor the British government?s claim of Public Interest Immunity were tenable. He pointed out, as the judges did in their ruling, that the case did not involve public disclosure of the documents, but only the confidential disclosure to Binyam?s lawyers, Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley and Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve?s Director, who both have US security clearance. He added that the supposed concessions demonstrated merely that the US government was determined to find any method possible to prevent disclosure, and added that nothing offered by the State Department addressed the ?central question? relating to Binyam?s rendition and torture. ?Where,? he asked, ?was Mr. Mohamed between 2002 and 2004?? Ben Jaffey was equally dismissive of the British government?s PII claims, noting, in particular, that David Miliband had effectively conceded that the British government was going to hand over the intelligence documents to Binyam?s lawyers until the State Department intervened, and calmly dismissing the government?s national security claims. His composure was in marked contrast to that of the government?s representative, Tim Eicke, who struggled to maintain a coherent argument, despite the best efforts of the many representatives of the government and the intelligence services at the back of the court, who kept slipping him notes suggesting new twists on the spurious national security case. On Friday, the judges delivered their second judgment on Binyam?s case. Noting that the correspondence from the US State Department effected a ?significant change? in the US position, they nevertheless refused to accept the British government?s position regarding its Public Interest Immunity Certificate. They were, it seemed, convinced in particular by submissions from the Special Advocates, Thomas de la Mare and Martin Goudie, who represented Binyam in the various sessions of the court that were closed to the public when confidential material was being discussed. In the opinion of the Special Advocates, the PII Certificate, and other proposals presented in a closed session on Wednesday, ?failed to address, in the light of allegations made by BM, the abhorrence and condemnation accorded to torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.? Adding that this issue was something whose significance had been ?accepted on behalf of the Foreign Secretary,? the judges proceeded to note that the Foreign Secretary ?nevertheless contended that the issues arising out of BM?s allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment were implicitly dealt with in his Certificate,? and in the documentation used in the closed session. ?Having carefully considered this matter,? the judges wrote, ?we do not consider that the issue arising out of the allegations made by BM is implicitly dealt with in these documents.? Refusing to push the matter further, the judges commended the Foreign Secretary and the FCO?s Legal Adviser, Daniel Bethlehem QC, for having ?gone to very considerable lengths to provide BM with assistance,? noting that it was ?evident? that they had ?been engaged in lengthy discussions which have led to the important changes? summarized in the second judgment. ?This,? they added, ?has been time-consuming and burdensome, and has rendered very real assistance to the interests of justice in this case.? As a result, the judges concluded their second judgment by giving the Foreign Secretary another week to come up with a response to their initial ruling and the developments since. They suggested that this could be in the form of another security certificate, although I hope, of course, that, having been thrown another lifeline, the government might find it preferable ? bearing in mind the Special Advocates? description of ?the abhorrence and condemnation accorded to torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment? ? either to give Binyam?s lawyers what they require, or, preferably, to convince the US administration that, in order to keep the door to the torture chambers firmly shut, the only available course of action is to drop the charges against Binyam and return him to the UK.
Blindingly obvious2 Sep 2008Home Office Minister Tony McNulty is correct to point out that suggesting that economic recession could lead to an increase in petty crime, violence, racial abuse and far-right extremism was a “statement of the blindingly obvious.” Unfortunately, the minister seems to assume that the recession is an act of God and the government powerless to influence matters. While the international downturn in trade is a reality and the knock-on effects of the credit crisis detonated by the US subprime mortgage scandal undeniable, every country will undergo its own economic experience that is dependent on specific national characteristics. And the level of the crisis that is already hitting Britain is conditioned by the pro-business policies pursued by new Labour. Recession will not cause the problems itemised in the Home Office draft letter. There is already huge resentment in working-class areas across Britain that will be exacerbated by rising unemployment, mortgage defaults and a general depression of living standards. Governments tend to appeal to the mythical Dunkirk spirit to ride the wave of hardships, but that is less likely when people can see clearly that there is no equality of sacrifice. Indeed, new Labour has made a virtue of inequality, with Chancellor Alistair Darling simply the latest leading advocate to say that he is not perturbed by the prospect of hugely differing levels of income. And this is not simply rhetoric. New Labour has presided over a widening gap in income and wealth more akin to Victorian norms than to a supposed modern democracy. The revelation by the TUC PensionWatch survey that top bosses can retire on average annual pensions of 200,000, 25 times what the average worker will get and 50 times more than the basic state pension, illustrates a grotesquely divided society. Employers and managers have, in recent years, launched a concerted drive against workers’ pension entitlements, while ensuring that their own are safeguarded. The government has acquiesced in this process, lecturing workers about their own supposed fecklessness while running down the value of the state pension. And its obsession with leaving economic priorities to be decided by the vagaries of the market has seen Britain’s manufacturing sector inexorably eroded, with over a million relatively well-paid jobs, complete with decent conditions and a pension, scrapped and replaced by a combination of McJobs and dead-end “training” schemes. It has claimed that there isn’t the finance available to improve the state pension, take the railways back into public ownership or invest to defend manufacturing jobs. But it has been able to find billions of pounds for overseas wars and 50 billion to bail out Northern Rock shareholders. The government’s wars have not only been costly but have created a new enemy – international terrorism – which is used as an excuse to cut back human rights and to increase xenophobia. This combination of crimes against working people makes new Labour unfitted to lecture anyone on the effects of recession. It is implicated up to its neck. The only way to avoid the negative consequences in the Home Office letter is to fight back against the economic and social policies that cause them in the first place.
Climate Camp and Class2 Sep 2008Picture the scene. The setting sun is glinting off the visors of the police lined up in front of me. It’s the second or third day of the weeklong Camp for Climate Action – already I’ve lost count – and for the second or third time since I last slept it looks as if the cops are about to invade. I’ve just bolted from the opposite end of the site, where I’ve helped dig a defensive trench at another gate. To my left, atop a red van, a woman who sounds scouser than scouse exhaustedly screeches words of encouragement into a megaphone and somehow dances to Radiohead. To my right, a posher than posh couple casually talk up Cornish nationalism and agree that political correctness means white people suffer more oppression than anyone else on the planet. All the campers care about the environment, but that seems to be the only thing we have in common. That and – by now – a dislike of police. The first Climate Camp was set up in 2006, by activists who had been heavily involved in organising protests against the G8 summit in Gleneagles the year before. Their immediate target was the Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire, but they sought to demonstrate two things. Firstly, that direct action was an effective way of making changes within society – like shutting down power stations – and secondly, that people could live non-hierarchically, in an environmentally sustainable way. Many of the initial organisers self-identified as anarchists, and they wanted climate camps to be anarchy in action. At least that was the theory. Now in Climate Camp’s third year, the results are highly questionable. In terms of building a movement for environmental sustainability, the camp experience and how it is perceived by the wider population both need to be considered. Certainly, to be a climate camper is to participate in anarchy in its original and best sense ? running things without bosses. The camp is clustered into regional neighbourhoods, which hold meetings every morning. These assemblies discuss organisation within the neighbourhoods and camp policy as a whole, such as whether to accept the police?s latest ultimatum. Decisions are eventually reached via consensus, and ‘spokes’ are delegated to express the collective?s views to the ‘spokes council’, before reporting back. This can be seem like a long-winded process if you’re used to taking orders, but it works to ensure that everyone feels ownership over decisions, and are therefore usually happy to implement them. Anarchy can work fast too, and not just when riot police arrive on site at 5.30 in the morning. Perhaps my favourite illustration of this took place on the final Sunday evening, when a trail of wooden boards that snaked through the camp needed to stacked. Someone took the initiative to do this, then someone else joined in next to them. Within a couple of minutes, the idea of stacking had gone along the trail, and about quarter of an hour later it was all done. Quite a strenuous task had quickly been completed, without a single order being given. However, halfway through the week ‘An open letter to the neighbourhoods’ was circulated, authored by ‘?a large group of anti-authoritarian participants in the climate camp’, and expressing ‘deep concern about the direction that the debates have taken over the past days’. It went on to claim that ‘In more than one workshop we have heard calls from the podium for command-and-control and market-orientated measures to address climate change’, and ‘The responses to these proposals have been far too polite?. Calling for ?A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism’, as well as ‘all forms and systems of domination and discrimination’, it emphasises ‘A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations’. The letter hit on one of the central problems facing the camp: how to make it ?a welcoming and non-sectarian space? for people new to anarchist ideas, whilst ensuring that career environmentalists like George Monbiot and Mark Lynas (who outraged many by backing the government?s nuclear power plans, the former on BBC?s Newsnight) don?t get an easy ride. This issue is compounded by the inevitable tendency of more militant campaigners being drawn to the barricades and defending camp against police. Saturday was the climax of the week, and had been declared the day when we would “?go beyond talk and culminate in a spectacular mass action to shut down Kingsnorth. Permanently!”. The camp separated into blue, green, silver and orange blocs, with the plan being that we would take different routes over land, sea and air to get to Kingsnorth, arriving en masse, and E.ON bosses would order a shutdown. The end result was that one person climbed over the second security fence onto company property, and was immediately arrested. One boat made it onto a jetty, and a police charge sheet reveals that one of the four water inlet systems was shut down, but E.ON claimed it was “business as usual”. Fifty arrests were made, about half the total for the week. So much for what actually happened. How much of the intended message survived the mainstream media?s filters and made it into public consciousness? At the start of the week, coverage focused on the police attacks. Monday, 4th August saw BBC exposure of the police?s brutal dawn raid, giving details of casualties, showing police in riot gear attacking campers, and quoting camp media team members at length. On Tuesday, they ran with local Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews? claim that the police had been “provocative and heavy-handed”. On the other hand, none of the other almost daily attacks got any press. This may be partly due to the pressure of the police?s announcement that they?d discovered a stash of knives and other weapons in woodland near the site. Campers immediately denied any connection with the stash, and none has since been found. But it seems likely that for many, this discovery provided retrospective cover for the police?s use of force, potentially dissuading waverers from paying a visit. For the mainstream media, the camp wasn?t so much an experiment in sustainable living as a collection of oddities. When they discussed on-site conditions at all, they seemed more intrigued that there were people in the 21st century who voluntarily used compost toilets and grey water systems, than by the green implications. That this was part of an ‘eco village’ seems largely to have passed them by, a fact illustrated by a Google News search. Bizarrely, the Custer County Chief in Nebraska, USA picked up on it, as did a New Statesman article (not very encouragingly titled ‘Woolly minded hippies?’). This contrasts with 109 results for “climate camp” “compost toilet”. For their part, The Guardian even produced a tourist-style survival guide, entitled ‘How to go to Climate Camp – and enjoy it’. As in previous years, the camp got the mainstream media talking about the role that carbon emissions play in manmade climate change. However, outlets overwhelmingly portrayed this as a protest against emissions at Kingsnorth in isolation, rather than the structural need of capital to expand, degrading the environment in the process. One deviation from this was when the Kent News quoted camper Anya Patterson as saying “If we are serious about fighting climate change, we have to tackle the root causes, and those are greed and a commitment to relentless economic growth.” Similarly, the non-hierarchical decision-making process was largely ignored, with the BBC merely describing it as ‘exhaustive’ and ‘somewhat baffling’. One facet of the week that all mainstream media went big on was the idea of direct action. Unfortunately, it was only covered in the most superficial way, focusing on the supposed dangers that campers would be letting themselves in for. Of course, police attack was not listed amongst these hazards, but electrocution and drowning were. The implicit message in all of this was that once people stepped outside the law, their safety was at risk, and that therefore the state and – by extension – police really are there to serve and protect everyone ? batons, riding crops, pepper spray and all. Though the Climate Camp website is declaring the week a resounding success, it can surely be judged a valiant failure in terms of its stated objectives. E.ON were inconvenienced for a few hours, but Kingsnorth was not shut down. Some campers learned about non-hierarchical organising and strategies for sustainable living, but this made little impact on the wider public. ?Direct action? became a media buzzword, but only as something irresponsible and to be feared. Carbon emissions became a hot topic, but in the context of the above, only as ‘footprints’ to feel guilty about. Indeed, some campers were hoping for this. On the Thursday morning, I had a discussion with an activist about his ambitions for what is being dubbed the ‘climate movement’. “To make a lot of people very guilty”, he replied. This emphasis on guilt as a precursor for individualistic lifestyle change is perhaps the very opposite of what many original organisers hoped for. However, I believe it is fundamental to what is sometimes called ‘green and black’ anarchism. The idea of a class-based transformation of society is rejected ? in some cases because of righteous disillusionment with traditional forms of class struggle, in many cases because the individual is from a relatively wealthy background. When such people see impending environmental catastrophe as the number one threat to their lives, their philosophy often becomes more anti-technological than anti-capitalist. Taking this perspective to its logical conclusion, capitalism and the state wouldn?t be much of a problem if they could somehow leave people alone in ecological peace, but since they can?t, both must be overcome. But with international class-based solidarity apparently ruled out, the result is that ?setting an example? (as one woman put it) becomes the main method of ideological recruitment. This sets green and black anarchism up for its own failure. Due to the built-in ideological structures of mainstream media and the state, the example set is of using those compost toilets, getting attacked by police, and putting yourself in mortal danger on your week off. Understandably, this is not an example that many are willing to follow. The boast that Climate Camp would ?shut down Kingsnorth? was always about bravado and bluster, a tendency which people from all strands of activism are vulnerable to in times of unrelenting defeat. But how could Kingsnorth really be shut down? Medway Council have approved E.ON?s plans, and the final decision rests with the government, who have already indicated they will grant permission. Demolition of the current site and the construction of the new one is scheduled for February next year. On camp, there was a lot of talk about trying to build on current ?momentum? and systematically blockading work from then onwards. Clearly, because of the long term commitment to direct action necessary, this would attract a smaller and ever dwindling number of people, unless substantial local support is forthcoming. Even if it is, there are plans for seven more coal-fired stations in the pipeline, plus all the other myriad ways capital is destroying the environment. There simply aren’t enough of us to wage such a struggle. Any campaign against environmental destruction has to be rooted in a movement against the profit motive and the capitalist system, or it is doomed to symbolic gestures and failure. Industry doesn?t create carbon emissions, working people do, because they are paid to do so and see no viable alternative. While capitalist ideas prevail amongst the working class, invasions of power stations are less direct action and more dramatic lobbying; ultimately impotent appeals to the government to see further than the short term bottom line, something it is organically incapable of doing. Ironically, this plays into the hands of people like George Monbiot. ‘Climate change is not anarchy?s football’, he patronisingly declared in a post-camp online reply to an article by radical journalist Ewa Jasiewicz, before going on to declare that ?I don’t know how to solve the problem of capitalism without resorting to totalitarianism?. And every dictatorship needs paid advisors. No George, climate change is not ‘anarchy’s football’; it?s a matter of life and death. That?s why we need working class revolution, so we can sort it out.
Anarchist Scholarship31 Aug 2008Thanks for taking some time to answer these questions today, David. For starters, could you tell us about the Anarchist Studies Network: what work does it do and what do you hope for it to achieve? The ASN was basically established, I suppose, to do two things: create and foster links between the growing number of people doing research on anarchism (whether they were students/academics or not); and, building on that, to promote further research in the area and help disseminate the results. A group of us (lecturers and postgraduate research students) in the Politics Department at Loughborough University who were working on various aspects of anarchist history, politics, and theory were keen to raise the profile of research on anarchism?because, without wanting to be paranoid, it’s still difficult to get scholarly (i.e. properly researched) work on anarchism taken seriously within the education system in Britain. Some of us belonged to the Political Studies Association, which allows its members to create “Specialist Groups” on all kinds of subjects, so we set up a Specialist Group for the Study of Anarchism, which means that we get a certain amount of funding from the PSA. The name was later changed to ASN. With the help of our more techie members, we’ve since set up a wiki web site and an e-mail discussion list. There have also been a couple of annual meetings where all the members got together to discuss plans. The PSA funding (which has no strings attached so long as it’s used to do what we want to do in any case, i.e. promote the study of anarchism) has allowed us to fund various seminars, workshops, and conferences, and to give financial support to members who needed help to be able to attend these events?not to mention the forthcoming ASN conference in Loughborough this September. In its succinct definition of anarchist studies, the ASN states “For a number of us, what we are calling ?anarchist studies’ no longer necessarily takes anarchism as its object of study but as a standpoint from which to study the world. Anarchist contributions to thought are making a reappearance in a number of fields, challenging established orthodoxies. Perhaps, against all odds, we are witnessing the emergence of a new anarchist paradigm in academia.” Can you describe some current examples of how anarchist ideas are informing new approaches to the imposing challenges leveled by capitalism in recent years? And what is the relationship of anarchist studies to the ongoing revolutionary project to achieve anarchy? Plenty has been said and written over the last few years about the resurgence of interest in anarchist ideas, and the influence of anarchist modes of organizing within social movements, trade unions, worker co-ops, and popular protests of all kinds, as well as in the broader alter-globalization “movement of movements.” There are still debates to be had there about the nature of the relationship between some contemporary anarchisms and earlier anarchist movements, and this relationship clearly varies from country to country (the situation in the States, say, is different from that in France). But the remarks you quote in your question could probably be read in two ways. One reading could be that “anarchist studies” is not just about the study of anarchism, but that it is about bringing an anarchist perspective to bear in doing research on any subject. Sharif Gemie, for example, once described himself to me as an anarchist historian rather a historian of anarchism. In international relations, someone informed by an anarchist methodology might reject the state-centric approach of most analyses in that field (see Alex Prichard’s recent PhD on Proudhon and international politics). And I’ve just seen a call for papers for a panel at the Association of American Geographers’ 2009 annual conference that proposes to explore the possible contribution of anarchist theory and practice to a radical geographic theory (Kropotkin and Elise Reclus were, of course, geographers). Barry Pateman (in his introduction to the forthcoming AK Press edition of my book) also talks about “that critical grey area between independent anarchist scholarship and the academy.” His concerns have to do with “what we are doing when we research the history of anarchism and anarchists. Some recent scholarship appears to suggest that the lives of anarchists?their hopes, fears, contradictions and, yes, moments of inspiration?are no more than objects for intellectual experimentation.” On the other hand?although I understand the healthy skepticism towards many academics whose research (and teaching, for that matter) is entirely divorced from any political commitment?I do get a bit weary of those “activists” who draw a clear distinction between themselves on the one hand and “academics” on the other, refusing to see any value or use whatsoever in scholarly research. As if the fact that some of us happen to earn our living working as teachers in universities and colleges means that we can’t also be politically active in other ways. Tell us about the ASN Conference happening September 4-6, 2008. This isn’t the first conference that ASN members have been involved in organizing or that the ASN has subsidized, but it’s the first ASN conference as such. The point of it was really to bring together as many people as possible who are doing some kind of research on any aspect of anarchist history, politics, or theory: partly just to find out what’s going on out there, because so many people working in these areas are more or less isolated. And we’ve been quite pleased with the response: there are going to be around 100 talks and I think over 140 people are now registered. Whereas we were originally thinking mostly in terms of developing networks within the British Isles, there are going to be participants from Canada and the US, and from right across Europe as well as/including Turkey. We’ve also managed to attract a good mix of well-established researchers (such as Martin Miller, who published his study of Kropotkin in 1979 and David Goodway, who’s been writing radical history for many years and whose recent Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow is the culmination of fifteen years of work), post-grads, and people outside the education system (although it can’t be denied that money has been a problem in some cases, despite a system of bursaries). You are also the reviews editor for the Anarchist Studies journal. Tell us a little about the journal (for those unfamiliar) and what you look for as reviews editor? What books have recently caught your eye that you endeavored to feature? The ASN is kind of semi-officially linked to AS?not just because that would seem logical anyway, but because AS actually grew out of the Anarchist Research Group (ARG), a precursor of the ASN. There were a couple of successive History Workshop Conferences in the early 1980s (HW, dominated by New Left Marxists, was interested in “history from below”) at which the anarchist strand was the second-best attended strand after feminism/women’s history That success encouraged us to set up the ARG, with more or less regular seminars in London, and subsequently a journal: Anarchist Studies. The journal is multidisciplinary and, as Ruth Kinna confirmed in a recent editorial, we don’t have an editorial line: we judge everything we’re sent on its merits (properly researched, well written, convincingly argued, etc) and publish or not accordingly. As for the role of reviews editor, I probably ought to be pleased, but I’m currently extremely frustrated because there are so many books appearing that I would like us to review, but we can’t fit them all in! I’d like to ask you a few questions about your book, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917-1945. What started you on your path to researching anarchism in France during this period? Having been totally alienated from Leninism by my experiences as a school student in the Trotskyist Workers’ Revolutionary Party, I first became interested in anarchism when I was an undergraduate studying French and German. When I decided to continue into post-grad study, I also decided to move away from literature and towards politics or history. It was at Sussex that I first became involved with a group of anarchists (which included, coincidentally, the philosopher Alan Carter), and I approached Professor Rod Kedward (who published The Anarchists in 1969) as a possible PhD supervisor. I originally wanted to do something on anarchism and May ?68, but he persuaded me that the subject had been done to death. (The basic criteria for a successful PhD are that the thesis has to produce new material or to present an original interpretation of material already known, so you have to make certain pragmatic decisions about what you can research.) An enormous amount has been published on the French anarchist movement up to 1914, because it was extremely influential, whereas the inter-war period was dominated by studies of the nascent communist movement (partly for understandable reasons?the importance of the French Communist Party in the history of the country? but also because labor history tended to be dominated by Marxists of one kind or another). So, studying the anarchist movement after what is generally seen as its heyday seemed the logical thing to do, and it turned out to be an extremely interesting, key period in the movement’s development in the twentieth century. You mention in the Introduction that “although this is a study primarily at the level of ideology and organization, I have endeavored to avoid producing a history dealing solely with leaders or faceless organizations. I have tried?as far as the sources permit?to emphasize the feelings, the beliefs and the commitments of ordinary ?grassroots militants’ to show them struggling with new and difficult situations, to rescue the memory of these otherwise unknown militants…” Did you set out with this goal in mind or was it the result of your extensive research? My first exposure to history and historians was in the History Department at Sussex University, which contained a number of people who were quite prominent in the History Workshop movement. I was naturally attracted to the idea of “history from below” ?a concern with ordinary working-class activists and the movements in which they participated, and the rejection of the idea that “history is the story of great men.” But the degree to which I was able to say much about the everyday lives of the relatively unknown activists I learned about was determined to a large extent by the available sources: such people tend, by definition, not to write books or articles, or leave much correspondence behind. Police files were sometimes useful, but very uneven and often of dubious accuracy. Oral history was of limited use because of the period being studied. Using movement newspapers as a major primary source also tended to encourage a focus on organizations and political-ideological debates, rather than on individuals, since the most important of them were the official organs of particular organizations. Having said that, even when analyzing the debate over, say, how anarchists should react to bolshevism in 1920, it was interesting to see how individual activists writing in these papers developed different ideas and different responses, and how the arguments and positions adopted evolved in response to national and international events?something made possible by the openness of debate in these groups and their willingness to publish all shades of opinion. So, yes, I started out with a very bottom-up approach to history, but what is possible is to some extent dictated to you by the available material. Could you summarize for readers the rise of anarchist communism during this period and the “increased distance both in terms of ideology and practice between anarchist communism and individualist anarchism”? What were the most apparent distinctions between these two orientations towards anarchism? Anarchism as a tendency developed in France in the 1840s, but it was only really in the 1880s that it became an identifiable, autonomous movement whose program and tactics differed clearly from those of other socialist currents. By that stage, the vision of the future society to which most French anarchists subscribed had already become an anarchist-communist one: i.e. advocating the socialization of all property except for that which was for genuinely personal use, operating on the basis of need. Tactically speaking, French anarchist-communists accepted the need for organized, collective direct action, notably (though not exclusively) through labor unions. However, before the Great War there was still a significant individualist current within the broader movement, which was characterized by a rejection of the communist economic model and of the collectivist ethos, by an interest in anarchism (or “anarchy” as they often preferred to put it) as a philosophy and a way of life for the individual, and also by an impatience with the less “advanced” majority of the population?an impatience which often tended to lead to feelings of superiority and a disdain for the unliberated “mass” or “herd” (as some individualists put it). However, most anarchists were turned against individualism: first by the futility and entirely negative consequences of the brief wave of anarchist terrorism in 1892-94; and later by its association with the indiscriminately violent (and equally futile) actions of the Bonnot Gang. When a national federation of French anarchist groups was finally created in 1913, it declared in favor of anarchist-communism and individualists were barred from the founding conference. What I concluded from my research was that anarchist-communists and anarcho-syndicalists on the one hand, and anarchist individualists on the other hand could no longer be said to belong to the same movement after the First World War. The gap between individualists and what we now call social anarchists was increased by the combined effects of the war and the 1917 Russian revolution. The first of these two events demonstrated that the anarchists’ decades long antimilitarist campaigns had failed to prevent the draft and war; the second brought home the fact that in France?universally seen, up until 1917, as the homeland of the revolutionary tradition?had not seen a social revolution (to complete the work of 1789). This perception of failure triggered in most French anarchists a profound self-questioning. It made some receptive to the siren-song of the nascent international bolshevik movement with its base in the only European country which had succeeded in making a revolution; it made many others argue that what was needed, in the interests of efficacy, was a more ideologically and organizationally cohesive anarchist movement. This latter debate had of course begun many years before, but it was 1914-1917 which really gave it impetus. And, whereas Alexandre Skirda and others tend to emphasize the role of the Makhnovites (in exile in Paris), in fact when they published their Organizational Platform in 1926 they were pushing at an open door as far as many French militants were concerned: the argument for greater organization, the move away from what came to be seen as an absolutist emphasis on the autonomy of the individual was a result of lessons drawn from practical experience. This “revisionist” tendency was linked to a new determination to see the anarchists once more playing a central role in the broader labor movement, and the historical evidence suggests that, in practice, anarchist-communists in the 1920s and 30s had far more to do on a day-to-day campaigning basis with syndicalists, left-wing socialists, unorthodox Marxists, and Trotskyists than with the comparatively much smaller number of individualist anarchists. The latter showed little interest in “the social question,” being more interested in interpersonal relations and what we would today call lifestyle issues. Relations between the two currents seem at times to have been extremely hostile. Despite bitter disagreements amongst the various camps of organized anarchists, the inter-war years saw a massive growth of the movement, whether it was in labor union activity, anti-fascist action, or?in many ways a culmination of both?support for the Spanish revolution. Could you give readers an idea what you mean by “anarchist” when describing this growth and roughly how expansive it was? Thanks to their strong opposition to the war effort in 1914-18, and to the reformist and “class-collaborationist” leadership of the CGT, the anarchists enjoyed a brief resurgence of popularity during the revolutionary situation that arguably existed in several European countries at the end of the Great War. But that didn’t last long for a number of reasons: notably, the creation of the Communist Party in 1920 and the Communists’ growing control over the revolutionary syndicalist movement; but also (according to the anarchist-communists’ self-diagnosis) their own inability to hold on to new supporters because of their disorganization and theoretical paucity. The real growth in support for the anarchist movement was in 1936-37. This was caused by the anarchists’ consistent antimilitarism (which attracted some increasingly disillusioned former Communists); their radical stance with regard to the Popular Front government (their insistence on direct action and their attempt to push the general strike towards “generalized expropriation”); but, above all, by their association with the CNT-FAI and their high profile campaign in support of the Spanish revolution and the Republican forces. The tendency within the broader movement that benefited most from this was the mainstream, anarchist-communist Anarchist Union (AU), which had, in the interests of solidarity (in public at least), muted its criticisms of the CNT’s ministerialism. We have to see the growth in support in perspective, of course: the anarchist movement was still very small in comparison with the Socialist Party or even the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the AU had around 2,500-3,000 paid-up members in 1938, and in the same period was printing around 20,000 copies of its weekly newspaper, Le Libertaire. They printed 100,000 copies of a special issue for May Day 1937. At the same time, the anarcho-syndicalist CGTSR had around 5,000-6,000 members, and the “revolutionary individualist” French Anarchist Federation claimed to be printing 6,500 copies of its fortnightly Terre Libre. What this enables us to conclude about the number of “anarchists” or “supporters” or “sympathizers” there were in France at that time is unclear. Jean Maitron (the first serious historian of French anarchism) suggested that it might be possible to calculate the approximate number of anarchist sympathizers or supporters (depending on how you define those terms) by analogy with the known 1:20 ratio between Socialist Party members and voters: thus adding up UA and CGTSR membership would give us around 8,000 paid-up, active members, and suggest that we might assume about 160,000 sympathizers or supporters. There are several objections that could be raised about this idea, though, and it’s basically impossible to give anything like precise figures. You place great emphasis on the incredible impact of both the Russian and Spanish Revolutions on the French movement?an impact they had on movements the world over. Can you tell us what particular challenges these brought to anarchists in France and how they attempted to meet them? The Russian and Spanish revolutions represented moments of doctrinal crisis for the anarchist movement. It was confronted for the first time with actual revolutions in which anarchists played a significant role. On both occasions, the anarchists were provoked into questioning their own theories and their own visions of the Revolution. Significant sections of the movement found anarchism as a revolutionary doctrine and practice severely lacking. Important aspects of anarchist doctrine and practice were questioned and rejected, or so modified that it was difficult to perceive any clear and significant distinction between anarchism and other sectors of the revolutionary socialist movement. The much-vaunted “specificity” of anarchism became somewhat problematic: what exactly was it that distinguished the socialist varieties of anarchism from non-anarchist socialisms? In the 1920s, this aggravated existing debates about anarchist organization and tactics, and led to the debate about Platformism; in the 1930s, French anarchists were in a dilemma about how or whether to criticize Spanish comrades (over “ministerialism”) who were in a very tricky situation?and, of course, that debate about the tactical/strategic choices made in Spain in 1936-37 is still alive amongst Spanish anarchists and syndicalists. On a practical (rather than doctrinal) level, anarchists in France were faced with the growing influence of Leninism, then Stalinism, in the labor movement, and were ultimately completely marginalized, despite their best efforts. Your book relies almost exclusively upon French-language sources. Can you recommend English-language studies of anarchism from the same time period that complement your work? There is very little available in English on the French anarchist movement, at least not in this period. There’s Richard Sonn’s book on the anarchists around the fin de siecle. And there are some excellent studies of French syndicalism (e.g., Jeremy Jennings and Wayne Thorpe). But if someone wanted to read something complementary to my History of the French Anarchist Movement, the best thing to do would probably be to read the historical overview provided in one of the general survey books like Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible.
Flipping the Script31 Aug 2008It’s been seven years since George Bush dubiously declared ?War on Terror’. Since then, there have been an estimated 95 thousand civilian deaths (655 thousand by some accounts), 4,730 US military deaths, 288 British deaths and the toll still rises. In July, a Pentagon-commissioned study by Rand Corp admitted that the Bush administration strategy to defeat Al-Qaeda had been ?unsuccessful’ and condemned the most unpopular foreign war since Vietnam as badly ?off target’. Psychologically, the conflict has taken a heavy toll on the American people and contributed to a super sized dose of soul-searching, as evidenced by Hollywood’s recent output. When even the caped crusader, Batman, is forced to admit defeat against conductor of chaos, the Joker, it has been a dark night indeed. So how has the art world responded to this legacy of disasters? Apart from the ICA’s Memorial to The War in Iraq commission last year, why haven’t we seen any major exhibitions tackle the subject? 9 Scripts from a Nation at War at Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery (a modest space reserved for media art) attempts to do just that, by exploring the psychology of a nation in conflict. Transcripts, testimonies, interviews, notations and web logs form the ?scripts’ for this quietly controversial ten-part video installation which interrogates contemporary warfare and citizenship through semantics and academic participatory games. According to the script accompanying the Scripts, the curators Amy Dickson and Rachel Taylor and artists David Thorne, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes, Andrea Geyer and Katya Sander set out to ?examine the ways in which war determines scripts and certain roles such as “citizen”, “veteran”, “detainee”, “correspondent”’ and to investigate how written and spoken language affects identity and is fundamental to defining and perpetuating the structures of power. The exhibition is the last in a series of four which set out to ?explore citizenship through themes of economy, belief, the state and the individual’. All very worthy and public-spirited, it would appear, but this time, at least, the art transcends the blurb. Not everyone who wanders into this show will recognise the trendy, postmodern techniques employed, such as re-enactment, but most will be familiar with the ubiquitous ?workshop’ approach. In fact, at times it’s a bit like watching role play exercises at a group therapy or adult education session, but that’s not necessarily a criticism. These experiential techniques generate a healthy climate of debate and ensure the subject matter never gets didactic. The show opener, Script: Citizen: 248 predictions about what I will do when democracy comes, is the most accessible, but also the weakest. Statements like ?I will be a hotbed of insurgency’ and ?I will ignore the dim whispers of the missing’ are chalked up on a blackboard by a group of performers and then immediately erased. The phrases are frustratingly flippant and oblique, but that’s most likely the point. As viewers, aka ?Citizens’, this is an upfront challenge to reappraise our feelings about the conflicts and reactions to them. In the main room, we are presented with a choice of listening booths. Dominating the show, in both size and content, is the triptych: Script: Detainee: Please tell me when it’s my turn to speak because I don’t know what’s going on here. This is a documentation of a five hour public reading of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which were conducted at Guantanamo Bay in 2004/5. There are 558 tribunal transcripts like this, each around 100 pages long, invisible to the public on account of the sheer volume of paperwork. In the tradition of reenactment art (a form popularised by Rod Dickinson with The Milgram Experiment and Jeremy Deller’s Turner Prize-winning The Battle of Orgreave, where events of historical significance are restaged) the subject matter is suitably cryptic. The reconstruction of tribunals enables the participants (both the actors and the audience) to experience the conditions under which the terror suspects were condemned and to witness the injustice (i.e, the inbuilt inflexibility) of the Guantanamo tribunal procedure, where detainees were expected to represent themselves without foreknowledge of the evidence against them or being able to speak directly to witnesses. In the words of detainee, Ashraf Salim, a former schoolteacher: I know my fate is predetermined by this tribunal. This tribunal is not real. My presence, one defending myself, or not defending myself is of no importance whatsoever…where is the justice here? Does the fact that they are spoken by a middle-class, white woman make them more or less chilling to an art loving audience? Tate goers were invited to find out for themselves at a live reading which accompanied the exhibition. Re-enactment is an appropriately ironic technique to use here, as the term ?enactment’ is used in law to mean decree, edict or dictat and these were extra-legal proceedings. Re-enactment is also a traditional, popular form of learning which dates back to the pageant and the medieval Passion play. What the artists seem to be saying is that in order to understand recent history, we need to experience it emotionally and unfiltered, not as a minor item in an overcrowded news agenda. The same technique creates a distancing effect in Script: Veteran: I am thinking I should put on my uniform. Here, two retired soldiers prepare a public speech (from a prerecorded interview where they talked about their experiences in Iraq and their subsequent return to civilian life) and then perform it to an empty auditorium. The re-representation of this highly personal material asks the serviceman to re-evaluate their function in this conflict, while at the same time allowing them to reclaim their experiences. Private Mickiela Montoya gives a harrowing account of how she became pregnant while serving in the National Guard, only to be told she was going to Iraq and then treated as ‘some sort of criminal’ for trying to shirk duty. The stressful experience caused her to miscarry, after which she suffered chronic depression before her deployment in Iraq: one trauma supplanted by another. These are every day stories, not media sensations brought to an audience of millions, but they demonstrate how effectively the military machine erases human identity, dignity and individual experience. In the words of Veteran Corporal Jose Omar Portilla: the hard fact is you’re just a number … you’re not in charge of yourself anymore … from the moment you wake up to when you eat, sleep or go to the rest room. In another part of the room, actors perform fragments of texts by the same soldiers and others involved in the war. This dry, staged presentation where the actors attempt to define terms like ?torture’ and ?enemy combatant’, reflect how impossible it is to capture the experience of war in words, and how easily the horror can be concealed in paperwork using prescribed terminology. The Lacanian distinction between Speech and Language underpins much of this work. Language is a formal system of signifiers encoding meaning, whereas the act of speaking gives back identity and autonomy to the speakers. The critic is given a face and a voice. In Script: Correspondent: But you have to tell it in a way that doesn’t lose you your credibility we are reminded that it’s not just the foot soldiers, but journalists who were strong-armed by the war machine. Here correspondents offer their views on the difficulty of maintaining neutrality when reporting from the front line. One Al Jazeera correspondent, Abderrahim Foukara, reflects on his discomfort when there was pressure from the US Defense department to call the invasion a ?liberation’ or risk being labeled a radical or friend of terrorism. At no time do the journalists interviewed drop their professional, dispassionate demeanour. Not all the Scripts are equally successful. The re-presentation of web blogs about Iraq by a quasi-teacher figure or the role play exercises of anthropology students talking about the impact of war in the classroom quickly became boring, perhaps because we’ve become immune to the endless flow of user-generated sludge which is peddled as ?self-expression’. However, there is a wealth of source material to get lost in here. As the different perspectives piled up ? each offering a personal and no less valid version of the war ? a horrifyingly holistic picture emerges: that of a nation (the US or the UK) so obsessed with analysis, as events unfold in real time or replay, with self-reflection and navel-gazing that we no longer know how to act. A democratic war is a sit-back spectacle. The power of 9 Scripts… is that it is confrontational and thought provoking without presenting images of death, destruction, torture and viscera and it manages to avoid political tub-thumping. Similarly, with the ICA’s Memorial to the War in Iraq, the most successful memorial commissions in the earlier show were the ones which took a step back from the politics and looked at how the media dealt with the conflict. Work like Snapshots from Baghdad by the Slovakian artist Roman Ondk, for example: a disposable black camera on a white plinth, which was supposedly meant to contain pictures from a war zone which will never be developed, and, perhaps, should remain undeveloped. By focusing on the Scripts ? words and semantics which can justify, condemn or seal an individual or a nation’s fate ? we are forced to interrogate our roles in this conflict and to reassess the position of the Citizen in relation to the State.
Labour proposes huge increase in state surveillance30 Aug 2008In 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.
Afghanistan faces humanitarian crisis- Oxfam30 Aug 2008Afghanistan needs urgent help to avert a humanitarian crisis this winter, with millions facing some of the worst conditions for more than 20 years, a leading British charity said on Saturday. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world with more than half of the population living below the poverty line and millions of Afghans facing constant food shortages. About 1,000 people died in the last, exceptionally severe winter marked by bitter cold and heavy snowfall. “This is a race against time, the international community needs to respond quickly before winter when conditions deteriorate,” Matt Waldman, the head of policy in Afghanistan for British charity Oxfam, said in a statement. “If the response is slow or insufficient, people could be forced to sell assets or leave their homes and villages, and there could be a further deterioration of stability,” he said. Oxfam said Dai Kundi province in central Afghanistan may be facing the worst conditions in more than 20 years, and similar conditions could be found in other provinces. Many areas in Afghanistan are virtually inaccessible in winter because of snow, poor roads and worsening security, hindering the delivery of aid and food. In a letter to international development ministers around the world, Oxfam has called for a “major humanitarian response” after a poor take-up of its appeal in July for $404 million. While Britain, the United States, Canada and the European Commission have already committed funds, many more have yet to contribute to the appeal which has reached only one fifth of target, said Oxfam. Staff shortages mean there are also not enough people to organise and coordinate the required aid effort, Oxfam said. Afghanistan relies heavily on international aid with around 90 percent of its spending coming from foreign donors. Drought, rising food prices as well as spreading insecurity have all contributed to a worsening humanitarian situation in the war-torn country.
A UK Window on CIA Abuses29 Aug 2008Britain?s High Court will hold a hearing to assess whether the UK government should be ordered to hand over secret documents to lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee. The detainee in question, Binyam Mohamed, faces possible charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism before a military commission at Guantanamo. Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and former UK resident, was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002. Transferred to US custody, he was reportedly rendered by the CIA to Morocco, detained there secretly for over a year, and then moved for several months to a secret CIA detention site in Afghanistan. He then spent a few months in military detention at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and was ultimately brought to Guantanamo Bay in September 2004. Mohamed claims that he was brutally tortured during his time in secret detention, and that the evidence that will likely be used to prosecute him is a result of that torture. He also claims that the UK government has information that supports his claims of abuse. Last week, in an important judgment, the UK High Court ruled in Mohamed?s favor. It found that the British government was under a legal obligation to disclose to Mohamed?s counsel the information it possesses relating to Mohamed?s whereabouts, treatment, and interrogation between April 2002 and May 2004. The court emphasized that this information is ?not merely necessary but essential? to Mohamed?s defense against military commission charges. While the court stopped short of ordering the foreign secretary to hand over the information?allowing additional time for the national security implications of disclosure to be considered?it will reach the mandatory disclosure question at its hearing this week. From Britain to Pakistan to the Prison of Darkness Binyam Mohamed came to Britain in 1994, when he was a student, after having spend a short period in the United States. He converted to Islam while in the UK, and in mid-2001 he left the UK for Pakistan and Afghanistan. He claims that he traveled to the region because he wanted to kick a drug habit. The military commission charges that have been sworn against Mohamed allege that he attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and later received training in building remote-controlled explosive detention devices in Pakistan. While living at an Al Qaeda safe house in Lahore, Pakistan, the charges say, Mohamed allegedly agreed to be sent to the United States to conduct terror operations. Mohamed was arrested at the Karachi airport on April 10, 2002, as he attempted to leave Pakistan to fly to London. Although he was initially detained in Karachi, he claims that he was interrogated there by US agents. The UK High Court has also confirmed that a British agent visited Mohamed in Pakistani custody on May 17, 2002. Mohamed claims that he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco in July 2002. There, he claims, he was beaten, repeatedly cut on his genitals, and threatened with rape, electrocution and death. Interrogators reportedly asked him detailed questions about his seven years in London, based on information that his lawyers believe came from British sources. In late January 2004, Mohamed says, he was sent to Afghanistan, where he was held in a secret CIA prison?called the ?Prison of Darkness??until May 2004. At that point, he was transferred to military detention, first at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo, where he remains. According to the UK High Court, the military commissions case against Mohamed is based on confessions Mohamed made while in military custody?after May 2004?not on anything he said while being interrogated by the CIA. Mohamed claims, however, that it was the abuse in CIA custody that induced him to confess while in military custody, and so proof of those CIA abuses are crucial to his defense. Refusal to Disclose As part of a continuing effort to cover up the CIA?s misdeeds, US officials have refused to provide Mohamed or his lawyers any information whatsoever about his treatment or whereabouts from the time of arrest in April 2002 until he was transferred to Bagram in May 2004. To date, the UK government has similarly refused to provide Mohamed?s lawyers any such information, although it has acknowledged that some documents in its possession might be exculpatory. In last week?s ruling, the High Court noted that the UK foreign secretary had acknowledged that Mr. Mohamed had established an arguable case that he had been subject to illegal rendition and torture. The court also found that the British security forces had facilitated Mohamed?s interrogations by supplying information and questions to US officials, even while they knew that Mohamed was being held incommunicado in a non-military detention facility overseas. The court found, in short, that the relationship of the UK government to the US authorities with regard to Mohamed ?was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.? Because the UK was in some way a participant, not simply an observer, the court held that the UK is legally obligated to provide Mohamed with information relating to his abuse. Not only did the court deem this information to be ?essential? to Mohamed?s ability to adequately defend himself, it emphasized the need for the government to provide the necessary information as soon as is practically possible. The reason for the hurried timing lies in the military commissions? timetable. At present, military commission charges against Mohamed have been prepared, but the commission?s convening authority has not yet signed off on them. In order to potentially affect the charging decision, Mohamed has a important interest in getting exculpatory information to the convening authority before that decision is made. The Prospect of Mandatory Disclosure The UK court decried the fact that the US authorities have failed to provide this potentially exculpatory information to Mohamed?s counsel, particularly since both his counsel are security-cleared. But it recognized, as well, that the United States? failure is no excuse for Britain?s inaction. Unless the UK foreign secretary voluntarily provides the relevant documents to Mohamed?s counsel, the High Court will consider ordering disclosure. Such an order, which the court seems presently inclined to grant, would open an important crack in the wall of secrecy that surrounds the CIA?s rendition, detention, and interrogation abuses. Joanne Mariner is a human rights attorney
Doubts over women suicide bombers29 Aug 2008Most British newspapers carried a story on August 26 about a young Iraqi woman who allegedly was a suicide bomber, but who surrendered to police in Baqouba rather than blow herself up. There were serious doubts about the story?s authenticity, however. For example, the Metro and the Telegraph reported that the circumstances of her arrest remain unclear, with US officials saying she turned herself in but Iraqi police claiming she was caught after behaving suspiciously. The Guardian, however, published the claims of the Iraqi police without a shred of probing or scepticism. For example, the paper said that the girl?s father ?had carried out a suicide bombing?, while Arabic TV stations showed both the girls? parents sitting indoors. Moreover, publishing Abu Ghraib-like photos and video of the young woman in such a humiliating situation verged on the pornographic. The Iraqi police certainly appeared to be enjoying the interrogation. The Iraqi police have been shown on many occasions in the past to have made up stories. The widely-reported claim that women with Down?s syndrome blew themselves up in a market in Baghdad in February was full of holes. Everyone in Iraq knows that all the police do after the bombing is washout the evidence. On numerous occasions eyewitnesses have said an explosion was a car bomb – with government number plates – while the police and the puppet government claim it was a suicide bomber. The truth is always the first casualty in these incidents. All these recent claims about Iraqi women suicide bombers are either made by the US or by the Iraqi puppet government of the Green Zone in an attempt to show that the resistance in Iraq is defeated and therefore resorting to desperate measures. But very few people in Iraq believe that these security forces are there to protect them. According to Mohamed Al Dayni, member of the Iraqi parliament, there are at many documented cases of rape committed by members of the Iraqi security forces, yet to be properly investigated or prosecuted. I telephoned the reader?s editor of the Guardian to lodge a complaint, in a polite but upset voice. The woman who answered the phone breathed a sigh down the phone as I was explaining to her my complaint as if she was bored. Can I suggest that people write a short email or make a telephone call to the reader?s editor to complain about the Guardian?s article: reader@guardian.co.uk,
0207 7134736
Notting Hill Carnival crackdown targets young black men29 Aug 2008London’s Notting Hill Carnival is rightly hailed as a celebration of multi-ethnic Britain. But it turned into a nightmare for hundreds of young black men as heavily armed police swooped on buses carrying them to the street party. In a pre-planned operation, police boarded buses in the Oval area of south London to take off those who fitted their profile. The first of dozens of partygoers were corralled into a side street next to the famous cricket ground from around 2pm onwards. Hundreds of police, some carrying machine guns, sealed off the surrounding area and fingerprinted and searched the mainly teenagers inside the cordon. Over the course of the afternoon the police raided bus after bus. By 7pm around 200 men, overwhelmingly black and some appearing to be as young as 13, were being held. Teenagers walking on nearby streets weren’t safe either. One young man, who had been with a group of friends returning from a birthday party, told Socialist Worker that police had put him and his friends into the cordon. He explained how they had been on the way to the park to play football when a police van screeched to a halt and officers piled out. Outside the cordon Socialist Worker spoke to many people who had just been released and were now waiting, hoping their friends would emerge soon. Handcuffed While some were resigned, saying that this kind of policing had become the norm, others were incensed. “This is some Rodney King shit going on here,” said one, referring to the beating of a black man by police that led to the Los Angeles riot in 1992. “The Feds [the police] had us up against the wall and some of us on the floor being handcuffed until they searched us. Then they just let us go because they know we hadn’t done anything wrong.” By early evening parents were joining the crowds outside the cordon, arguing with police about why their children were being held, and angry that a trip to carnival should be the pretext for such a clampdown. The police commandeered buses to take more than 100 young people to police stations ? though only seven were charged with any offence. For some who made it to carnival, things were only a little better. Outside Notting Hill tube station, among the diverse mix of tens of thousands of revellers, gangs of police swooped almost exclusively on young black males. It was the first of many hurdles that they would face. In the 200 metres between the station and the road where carnival floats were parading there were five separate police lines. Socialist Worker stood behind one line of police that formed a “control point”. There was no sign of the much publicised “knife arches” that were supposed to keep carnival safe ? instead there was old fashioned stop and search. We witnessed dozens of black males being searched. The only white men we saw being held were part of racially mixed groups. One young black teenager told Socialist Worker that this was the fifth time the police had searched him this year. “I have even been stopped twice in one day,” he said. Those who have responded to the tragedy of knife crime by calling for police crackdowns ought to take note. The criminalisation of a generation of black youth will undoubtedly lead to explosions of anger in the future, just as it did a generation ago with the riots that swept Britain’s inner cities.
Blair has no right to lecture on the rule of law29 Aug 2008Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, has been lecturing Russia on the need to respect Ukrainian and Georgian sovereignty. He doesn’t seem to realise how incongruous this sounds to much of the world, given Britain’s own disregard of international law. In a similar vein, our former prime minister, Tony Blair, also caused wry smiles earlier this month when he visited Malaysia to give the Universiti Malaya’s 22nd Sultan Azlan Shah lecture on Upholding the Rule of Law: A Reflection. Blair argued that this means “rules and procedures that are transparent, and rules of evidence that make sense and are fair. These basic principles apply universally and without them, the rule of law means little or nothing.” As you can imagine, the topic Blair sought to address was a source of both amusement and disbelief among the Malaysians. This is what the vice-chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, had to say: “It is quite obvious from casual observation that someone who has been known to have misled others, including the country’s parliament, has lost the moral authority to preach about the rule of law and good governance ? One wonders then what ‘basic principles’ Blair had in mind when he gave an almost unconditional support for the unilateral decision to invade Iraq against the wishes of the international community and without the approval of the UN ? Indeed, as late as April 2006, when an eminent British former law lord attacked Guantanamo Bay as ‘a stain on American justice’, Blair reportedly refused to follow suit. According to Lord Steyn, who just retired from Britain’s highest court: ‘While our government condones Guantanamo Bay, the world is perplexed about our approach to the rule of law. You may ask: how will it help in regard to the continuing outrage at Guantanamo Bay for our government now to condemn it. The answer is that it would at last be a powerful signal to the world that Britain supports the international rule of law.’” The former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, was characteristically blunt: “It is disgusting to see this criminal of the highest order being welcomed in Malaysia and worse still to talk on the rule of law when he broke all international laws and the laws of his own country by deliberately lying and sending young British soldiers to die in a war of aggression.” Mahathir added that: “Saddam has been hanged, Karadzic was recently arrested, but this man goes around the world, lecturing on the rule of law.” Roger Tan, a member of the Malaysian Bar Council, asked if, “by supporting and participating in the 2003 United States-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, I wonder whether Britain, being the world’s oldest democracy, still possesses moral authority in a comity of nations to lecture on the principle of rule of law.” I visited the official Tony Blair website to read his own account of what had transpired in Malaysia. Unfortunately, I could find no mention made of the trip.
Afghanistan: on the cliff-edge29 Aug 2008Many sober analysts of the war in Afghanistan expected a military offensive by the Taliban in the early months of 2008. They also suspected that Taliban paramilitaries would avoid major confrontations with foreign forces, out of awareness of the overwhelming firepower that these could launch even on quite small groups. They expected instead an extension of the use of small raids, improvised roadside-bombs and suicide-attacks. In the event these tactics have indeed been widely used. But the increased level of Taliban activity has been expressed in many other ways as well. They have included a closely coordinated assault on a prison in Kandahar that released hundreds of Taliban detainees; an attack on the Serena international hotel in the heart of Kabul on 14 January; the bombing of the Indian embassy there on 7 July; and a major increase in attacks on transport links (see “The global economic war“, 14 August 2008). This widening of targets is serious enough for American, British and other military commanders. What has really surprised them, however, has been the ability of Taliban and other militias to engage in significant conventional military attacks. One of these, on 13 July, killed nine United States troops in a newly established but isolated base in Kunar province; another, on 19 August, killed ten French soldiers in Sar0bi (Surobi) district, only fifty kilometres east of Kabul. The deteriorating situation in Afghanistan had even before these assaults been reflected in the redeployment of a full aircraft-carrier battle-group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to the Indian Ocean to bring its planes within range of southern Afghanistan. The result is to provide the US with far more airpower. In addition, the group’s flagship has offered itself as a venue for high-level diplomacy: top US and Pakistani military commanders (including Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs-of-staff ,and General Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistan army’s chief-of-staff) met on the USS Abraham Lincoln on 26 August to analyse the security crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan itself – without, it seems, a positive result (see Pauline Jelinek, “Pentagon brass meet with Pakistanis on carrier“, Associated Press, 28 August 2008). By the last week of August 2008, the total US military death-toll in Afghanistan has reached 580; as many as 105 have been killed in 2008 alone, including sixty-five in May-July, the worst period since the war started in October 2001 (see Jason Straziuso, “US deaths reach 101 for the year in Afghanistan“, Associated Press, 25 August 2008). Across the border in Pakistan, there were credible reports of an expanding Taliban/al-Qaida training system, with new camps established in the border districts (see “Afghanistan: state of siege“, 10 July 2008). Some limited Pakistani army actions had very little effect (see Jane Perlez & Pir Zubair Shah, “Pakistani Taliban Repel Government Offensive“, New York Times, 10 August 2008), while sixty-four people were killed in a double bombing of one of Pakistan’s largest munitions factories (see Jane Perlez, “64 in Pakistan Die in Bombing at Arms Plant“, New York Times, 22 August 2008). An argument of force There is now a developing consensus that Taliban militias, along with warlord groups and al-Qaida paramilitaries, have considerably expanded their influence across much of southern and southeastern Afghanistan, with Taliban/al-Qaida elements also gaining control of large areas of western Pakistan close to the Afghan border (see Jason Straziuso, “U.S. Losing Edge in Afghanistan, Experts Fear“, AP/Arizona Republic, 25 August 2008). A deep concern over the vulnerability of the major military supply-routes from the Pakistani port of Karachi through to Kabul has been compounded by a Russian threat to suspend its agreement with Nato for transit of military materials through its own territory (see Jeremy Page, “Russian Threat to Nato Supply Route In Afghanistan“, Times, 26 August 2008). The coalition’s reliance on air-power has resulted in further civilian casualties. Around 700 Afghan civilians have been killed in January-August 2008; the worst such incident being on 21 August when, according to United Nations sources, at least sixty children and thirty adults were killed in a US air- raid (see Jon Boone, “UN confirms 90 civilians killed in Afghanistan air strikes“, Financial Times, 27 August 2008. Meanwhile, Taliban units are now operating close to Kabul, and have advanced to secure control of parts of Kandahar (see Carlotta Gall, “Taliban Gain New Foothold in Afghan City“, New York Times, 27 August 2008). From the Pentagon’s perspective, what is to be done? Most of the foreign forces in Afghanistan are under Nato control in the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf); but this is largely under the leadership of the United States, and the overall war in Afghanistan is dominated by US planning and support. Britain, together with Canada and the Netherlands, may be heavily involved in counter-insurgency operations, but they are relatively small actors in a scene where the Pentagon is the driving-force. Thus, the views of Washington are decisive: and the overwhelming judgment there – across the political spectrum – is that Afghanistan is now the central focus of the “war on terror”. The John McCain and Barack Obama camps each take the view that there must be a substantial increase in the use of military force in Afghanistan, especially if some limited withdrawals from Iraq become possible (see Godfrey Hodgson, “America’s foreign-policy election“, 28 August 2008). A game of consequence Thus, the bottom-line is that there is only one answer to the Taliban revival, the revitalisation of al-Qaida, and even the jihadist presence in western Pakistan: the application of intense military force. There is simply no other way. This has three key consequences. The first is that the more force that is applied in Afghanistan the greater the risk not just of civilian casualties but of creating an environment in which the foreign military presence is seen more and more as an occupation. There are already well over 60,000 foreign troops in the country, with the majority engaged in combat. Moreover, civilian deaths are causing such controversy that Kabul’s political class is trying to distance itself from the United States. As a military build-up intensifies in late 2008, there is a strong risk that the perception of occupation will extend well beyond the Taliban and other militias together with their immediate supporters. The second consequence is that the more a perception of western occupation grows, the more likely it is that the opposing forces take on a perspective of global jihad. Most previous resistance to foreign forces, as against the Soviets in the 1980s, was grounded in nationalist or ethnic sentiment rather than being part of a global movement. Over the past year there have been clear signs that Taliban militias in conjunction with the al-Qaida movement and paramilitaries that have travelled from north Africa, the middle east and central Asia have increasingly seen their insurgency as elements in just such a movement. Moreover, the impulses of sympathy with these radical forces are fuelled by the detailed reporting by al-Jazeera and other media outlets of the many civilian victims of western air-strikes and other calamities in Afghanistan. This ensures that Muslims across the rest of the world are , just as Iraq has done so over the past five years. Muslims across the rest of the world are becoming as aware of what is happening in Afghanistan as they have been regarding Iraq since 2003 (see “Afghanistan in an amorphous war“, 19 June 2008). The third consequence is the state of Pakistan, where political instability and the resignation of Pervez Musharraf entails a decrease in United States influence over actions in the border districts. Many of these districts are independent of Islamabad’s control, paramilitary training-camps are operating, supplies readily pass through to Afghanistan, and supportive populations provide a stream of recruits to the cause across the border (see Eric Schmitt, “Top military officials discuss violence along Pakistani border“, International Herald Tribune, 28 August 2008). Almost all military analysts agree that the subjugation of the Taliban and associated warlords in Afghanistan is impossible as long as this situation continues. The al-Qaida leadership has also sufficiently reconstituted itself in western Pakistan to be able once more to exert influence even beyond the middle east and southwest Asia (see “Al-Qaida’s afterlife“, 29 May 2008). A bitter harvest The impact of these developments on the United States is to increase the conviction that to win the war in Afghanistan requires the application of greater force there and an acceptance that at some stage the US will have to intervene forcefully in western Pakistan (see Peter Spiegel & Josh Meyer, “U.S. Debates Going After Militants in Pakistan“, Los Angeles Times, 23 August 2008). There are alternatives, including an acceptance of the need to engage systematically with some of the less radical militia elements, but these are simply not on Washington’s agenda. Thus a more intense and more extensive war seems likely between now and early 2010, with the likelihood that this is just what the al-Qaida movement wants. In 2003, a few analysts warned that occupying Iraq would lead to an intense and dangerous conflict that would serve as a jihadist combat training-zone of great value to the al-Qaida movement (see, for example, “A thirty-year war“, 4 April 2003). That was indeed the outcome; and an American insistence on remaining in Iraq – whatever the Nouri al-Maliki government may want – means that Iraq may yet come to the fore in this role again. For now, though, the focus moves on – or more correctly, back – to Afghanistan. When the nineteen hijackers perpetrated the 9/11 atrocities, the al-Qaida movement no doubt expected that the United States would occupy Afghanistan and could be vanquished there in a war of grinding attrition, just as the Soviets had been. In the event, to terminate the Taliban regime the Pentagon cleverly used air-power, special forces and a rearming of the Northern Alliance rather than a direct occupation. Even then, this seemed to be too easy. One of the earliest columns in this series suggested that: “...an apparent US victory achieved before the end of the year may, in reality, be just a further stage in a longer-term civil war in Afghanistan. This is supported by the likelihood that many Taliban and al-Qaida units have already crossed the border into north-west Pakistan, where there is substantial local support for their position…” (see “The ninth week of the war“, 4 December 2001). Now that a direct occupation of Afghanistan has evolved and is set to expand, there is the added complication of deep insecurity across the border in Pakistan. Only two months away from the eighth year of the start of the Afghan war – and following their recent setbacks in Iraq – Osama bin Laden and the other elements of the al-Qaida leadership may well be looking forward to a new era in their conflict with their “far enemy”. Iraq has to an extent served its purpose, but Afghanistan may now come to overshadow even that bitter and costly conflict.
War Resisters League Listening Project28 Aug 2008Survey results recently published in The Independent newspaper showed that 66% of the British population thought we should never have gotten involved in Iraq and 74% thought British troops should be withdrawn as soon as possible. Notwithstanding this overwhelming support for the anti war position, the associated movement is currently not sufficiently supported to achieve its objectives. In order to learn from a similar situation in their country, the oldest secular peace organisation in America the War Resisters League (WRL), conducted structured interviews with a hundred activists from a wide range of peace movement organisations and published their findings in a special edition of their journal WIN. Needless to say there is much for the British peace movement to learn from WRL?s enterprise. Interviewees were all asked a series of questions and their responses were collated and presented by major themes. Obviously responses were not homogonous but WRL manage to convey a consistency in their presentation that clearly points to a direction going forward. For me this was conveyed in WRL?s national field organiser Matthew Smucker?s closing words in the report. Addressing the question ?can we do it?, he replies ?the answer-the future-depends on who the ?we? is?. Most respondents to the question ?what is lacking in the peace movement? thought there was a shortage of active participants together with an absence of opportunities for newcomers to get involved in productive work. Many suggested that the movement was out of touch and Greg Layton from US Labor Against the War suggested using standard market research approaches to craft messages for target constituencies. Most people thought that the movement lacked strategy both in terms of overarching framework and short term winnable campaigns. Funding and resources were thought by most to be lacking and Patrick Reinsborough from the smartmeme Strategy & Training Project, identified the peace movement?s alienation from philanthropic foundations as a major cause of funds deficiency. Interviewees perceptively highlighted many constraints to the peace movement. Michael Mc Phearson of Veterans for Peace felt that the movement should shift its appeal from moral argument to explaining in practical terms why war is bad for the public at large. Co Chair of United for Peace & Justice Judith Leblanc believes a major constraint is politics, she says ?if people conceptualise this (anti war) as a left movement then you automatically cut yourself off from 65 of the 70 percent of people who oppose the war?. Many interviewees identified a dearth of skilled organisers and a lack of organisational development holding back the movement. Kelly Campbell of the September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows said ?we need organisations willing to take on a focus on skills building ?you talk about (the campaign planning tool) power mapping for a campaign and some people have no idea what that is?. Other respondents noted a lack of leadership development. Xiomara Castro of the Ella Baker Centre observed ?it?s the same people running the meetings, or the same people are part of a few overlapping organisations. There are no stepping stones, no mentorship, no room to grow into involvement?. WRL?s major conclusion is that to be effective, the anti war movement has to increase capacity. It notes that mass movements are typically not built by recruiting members individually. Rather they come about by getting buy-in from already organised and resourced sectors. But as Michael Mc Phearson says ?sometimes if you work with one group you risk alienating a wing of your organisational core?. WRL believe for the anti war movement to realize its full potential its objectives have to be accepted as their own by existing organisations. It points to the West Coast Longshoreman?s Union 2008 Mayday anti war strike as an example. Instead of individuals having to assimilate into a counterculture to participate, the antiwar movement should be developing relationships with the leaders of established labour, student, community and faith groups etc, whereby those organisations adopt, necessarily winnable, campaign objectives of the anti war movement. Space limits doing full justice to the WRL report and peace activists should get a copy of their own from the WRL website (It costs $4 www.warresisters.org). The September Convention of the Left in Manchester devotes a full day to the issue of peace. Participants at this important day should bear in mind Judith Leblanc?s remarks above, that the peace movement is not an exclusively left movement and also when she says ?The vitality of the left is only realized when it?s related to that broad cross-section of folks in the political centre ?. We must do whatever we can to engage and activate and leverage that (anti war) majority?.
Thatcher’s Shadow falls over Alex Salmond28 Aug 2008Alex Salmond’s remark to Iain Dale that Scots ‘didn’t mind the economic side’ of Thatcherism, created a storm of hypocrisy and exposed a fundamental truth about Scottish politics, argues Gerry Hassan, in a swiftly written essay. Mainstream politicians are as united in tacitly accepting Thatcher’s legacy as in publicly abominating her policies. British politics have for the last thirty years been shaped by Margaret Thatcher, Thatcherism and the legacy of Thatcher?s period in office. All of the mainstream politicians who have followed her ? John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron at a UK level, and Alex Salmond and his Labour predecessors as First Minister in Scotland ? have been influenced by her, and their politics shaped, defined and framed by her and her achievements. This has been thrown into sharp focus by recent remarks – and the reaction to them – made by Alex Salmond in an interview for Total Politics with Iain Dale, who thought them so obvious as to be quite uncontroversial. The fact that the political world we live in has been created by Mrs. Thatcher is well made by Simon Jenkins in his persuasive thesis, ?Thatcher and Sons? where he examines the Thatcher legacy and its acceptance by Major, Blair and Brown. This entailed the reconfiguration of politics, the state and polity around a new credo of free market capitalism, deregulation, privatisation, celebration of the super-rich, alongside increased centralisation and an authoritarian, powerful central state. Blair and Brown both famously courted Margaret Thatcher once they arrived in office; both invited her to No 10 Downing Street, while at the same time overtly accepting, embracing and extending the nature of the Thatcher revolution. While they were doing this, large parts of Labour continued to see Thatcher as a hate figure and Thatcherism as something they totally detested. This produced a strange kind of almost Alice in Wonderland politics whereby Blair and Brown attempted to send out overt signals to former Tory voters that they understood their concerns, while continuing with her policies and operating within her legacy, and at the same time, offering the pretence that they disagreed with large parts of her legacy by creating a caricature of it: going about three million unemployment or the ?Black Wednesday? moment of Major?s government. At its core New Labour was, in the words of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, ?Thatcherism consolidated?. ?Bathgate No More, Linwood No More? and Thatcherism North of the Border The way Thatcherism has been perceived in Scotland has been even more pronounced on the surface, but even more complex and complicated underneath. The combination of Thatcher?s English persona and style, English nationalism and the fact that the Tories were increasingly a small, declining minority of votes, always meant that Thatcherism was never going to win the popularity stakes north of the border. Part of this was no doubt due to Mrs. Thatcher?s personality rubbing Scots up the wrong way, as much as her policies. The Thatcherite agenda produced north of the border economic and social dislocation with massive de-industrialisation, hardship and poverty, which were interpreted in Scotland increasingly in the 1980s as ?anti-Scottish? ? something that the North of England, Yorkshire and Wales shared in policy-wise, but could not experience through the same paradigm. The poll tax was important in precipitating this disparity as it was imposed on Scotland first: the country was singled out as a test case a year before the rest of the UK. There was a genuinely proconsular aspect to this, as one of the most Tory of policies was rolled out in the least Tory province, which precipitated anti-English sentiment. However, as with all things life was a little more complex that the ?Bathgate no more, Linwood no more? lament of The Proclaimers ? who compared Scotland?s experience of Thatcherism to the Highland Clearances. Scottish people enjoyed many of the benefits of Thatcherism ? buying their council houses and privatised shares, while higher public spending continued north of the border ? but they just didn?t vote Tory as a result of it. Instead, the majority of Scottish opinion, aided by the grotesque imposition of the poll tax, moved into a position of feeling both the ?victim? of and ?morally superior? to, the rest of the UK. Scottish politics for the eighteen years of Tory rule was characterised by opposition politicians ? Labour, Lib Dem, SNP ? trying to outdo each other in their opposition and rhetoric towards Thatcher. This was an era of symbols and shibboleths which defined the nation?s resistance to Thatcherism: Linwood, Invergordon, Ravenscraig and Rosyth. All but the last were closed under the Conservatives and each cause, campaign and crisis was meant to signify that the Union might be under threat. Two politicians who excelled in this climate were Gordon Brown and Alex Salmond. Understanding Thatcherism in the post-Thatcher Age The election of New Labour and acceptance and consolidation of much of the Thatcher legacy, led to Scottish politics moving on as well, but with the continuation of an even more complex Alice in Wonderland set of attitudes. With the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, both Scottish Labour and the SNP had to emphasise their ?Scottish? credentials and their difference. They did this by stressing that they were more left-wing and social democratic than parties south of the border, and continuing with the language of detestation towards Thatcher and Thatcherism. While they presented themselves in this way, both parties moved in the same direction as New Labour and came under the same influence: accepting the logic and values of the post-Thatcherite environment, while pretending otherwise. Thus, we come to the importance of Alex Salmond?s recent remarks on Margaret Thatcher. Salmond stated: The SNP has a strong, beating social conscience, which is very Scottish in itself. One of the reasons Scotland didn?t take to Lady Thatcher was because of that. It didn?t mind the economic side so much. But we didn?t like the social side at all. He then had to qualify his remarks almost immediately, taking the unprecedented (and slightly embarrassing) step as First Minister of Scotland of phoning in to BBC Radio Scotland?s Saturday ?Morning Extra? programme to state: I?m well on the record as never having approved of either Margaret Thatcher?s social or economic policies ? that?s clear if you look at the interview. He also commented that he would not be following Gordon Brown (and Tony Blair before him) of inviting Margaret Thatcher for tea. Subsequently Salmond said about his remarks: I was commenting on why Scots, in particular, were so deeply resentful of Thatcher and I think here her social message epitomised in the unfair poll tax and her comments of ?no such thing as society? cut against a very Scottish grain of social conscience. That doesn?t mean that the nation liked her economic policies, just that we liked her lack of concern for social consequences even less. Now it does not take a Kremlinologist to work out the difference between Salmond?s first and last statements. The quote that Scots ?didn?t mind the economic side so much? is a tacit acceptance and endorsement of Thatcherism?s economic agenda; in his follow up comments Salmond attempted to quote his ?economic and social side? remarks and deny that they were in any way support for Thatcherite economics. What was as revealing was the reaction to the remarks. The ?cybernat? community tried to defend Salmond saying this was not an endorsement of Thatcherite economics; that New Labour has more embraced it, and so on. Labour politicians attacked Salmond?s ?own goal? and ?praise of Thatcherism?. Most interesting of all was the comments from some of Salmond?s critics in the Nationalist community. Jim Fairlie, a senior figure in the party in the 1980s called the remarks ?a qualified acceptance of Mrs. Thatcher?s economic policies? and talked of Salmond?s ?drift to the right?. Jim Sillars, SNP victor of the 1988 Govan by-election commented: It is revisionist nonsense for Alex Salmond to suggest that our society only objected to her social policies, while we accepted her economic ones. What is going on here is that Salmond has violated the first cardinal rule of Scottish politics after Thatcher: that is namely to vilify, degrade and denounce Thatcher and Thatcherism with every word in your vocabulary, while being influenced, shaped and following in her footsteps. To be flattering, he made the ?political error? of being too relaxed and speaking with a degree of honesty. All of Scotland?s mainstream political parties have had their policies and philosophies altered by Thatcherism, while at the same time, they continue to articulate a social democratic centre-left politics which has been diluted and diminished by Thatcherism; you can even include the Scottish Tories in this equation as they have been consistently devoid of a right-wing agenda and gone with the grain of Scottish politics. When you combine this mix with the national question, Scottish centre-left politicians have to emphasise even more than south of the border, their distinctiveness and moral disgust at the world Mrs. Thatcher brought about. The ?Catch-All? Nature of the Scottish Nationalists Alex Salmond?s remarks and the controversy they have caused have to be seen in this context. He has inadvertently blown open the Alice in Wonderland mentality and Janus-like attitude which exists across the whole of the UK and the political spectrum about Thatcher and Thatcherism, which is just more acute and sensitive north of the border. The SNP like Labour north and south of the border are a broad coalition of social democratic sentiment which has acquiesced with Thatcherism and the neo-liberal project. It is not for nothing that the SNP, like Scottish Labour and New Labour, is ominously silent on the central issue of political economy. Salmond?s acceptance of the dominant economic order was evident in remarks in the same interview: I suppose I have tried to bring the SNP into the mainstream of Scotland. We have a very competitive economic agenda. Many business people have warmed towards the SNP. We need a competitive edge, a competitive advantage. That side of SNP politics ? get on with it, get things done, speed up decision making, reduce bureaucracy. These remarks reveal the ?catch-all? nature of the SNP?s political agenda, and the reality that for all its popularity, statecraft and progressive elements which have been on show since it came to office, social democracy and challenging the vested interests of the global order, are just as unsafe in the SNP?s hands as they are in Scottish Labour?s. The political project of the SNP is a ?Scotland plc? ? not that different from the kind of economy and society envisioned by Labour modernisers, only independent. That is one of the defining features of Scottish politics: the lack of a real, distinct set of political differences between Labour and the SNP beyond independence. And that leads us to the second cardinal rule of Scottish politics after Thatcher: because of that lack of substantive difference, Labour and SNP go at it upping the ante and vitriol between each other. The current Nationalist vision of the world is one where a ?national project? will see an independent Scotland and its government align with business and corporate interests to promote the nation and compete in the global economy. Jim Mather, Enterprise Minister, an ardent marketer, once commented: ?Any notion that an independent Scotland would be left-wing is delusional nonsense?; Mike Russell, Environment Minister, penned a book ?Grasping The Thistle? one year before becoming a minister, filled with the most fundamental free-market proposals. Alex Salmond, once a radical left-winger in the days when he was an economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland in the 1980s, has now undergone a full conversion to celebrating and advocating corporate interests. This can be seen in Salmond?s fully fledged support for Donald Trump?s luxury golf development in North East Scotland, or his consistent advocacy for the corporate interests of the Royal Bank of Scotland: the fifth largest banking group in the world. Sometimes it seems as if Salmond sees the interests of RBS and the Scottish economy as being one and the same; this is a bank which employs 8,500 people in Edinburgh. 1979 And All That: The Power of the BBC Consensus There is a larger set of questions for Scottish and UK politics posed by this episode. How long are politicians in Scotland and the UK going to continue being defined and shaped by Thatcher and Thatcherism? For how long are we going to continue to allow them to act in the two-faced, hypocritical, talking one way and acting another manner towards the Thatcher legacy? Alex Salmond inadvertently has hit a raw nerve with his recent comments. He has shown the lack of straightforwardness and honesty that lies within the SNP acceptance and continuation of Thatcherism, that is much like Labour?s. By doing so has exposed the narrowness of the SNP?s rationale as a party to the ?left? of Scottish Labour. 1979 was a long, long, long time: over a generation ago. Yet, its myths, folklores, triumphs and limitations still shape our politics, our political debate and political horizons and imaginations. The current political, economic and social impasse has a direct linkage and causal relationship to the events and forces which emerged in 1979 and this cannot go on forever. However, no political settlement just collapses because of the weight of its own internal contradictions, but requires a counter-movement and set of stories. It took over thirty years before the previous watershed – 1945 – was challenged and overthrown. But that was part of an international, neo-liberal mobilisation for a new global arrangements. Despite the limitations of Thatcherism and flaws in the neo-liberal worldview, of which the ?credit crunch? is the latest example, we don?t yet have any countervailing economic and social strategy. Instead, we still live in the world created by Thatcherism: the world of the BBC consensus: Blair, Brown and Cameron (with Alex Salmond providing a supporting role). It is aptly titled for it is comprehensively signed up to by the influential and powerful in the UK whether they are in politics, the corporate world or the media. The bandwidth of what is politically possible and imaginable is defined by these elites, and what passes for their commentary unquestioningly supports the present political, economic and social order. We should be grateful to Alex Salmond for being relatively honest about this and scornful of the hypocrisy of those in the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats who want to deny their subordination to the Thatcherite hegemony. It is up to progressives and democrats of every and no party to challenge this state of affairs. We have to push and pull, dream and work, to devise new counter-movements and widen our political horizons and imaginations from their current straightjacket. Gerry Hassan is a writer, commentator and policy analyst and author and editor of twelve books on Scottish and UK politics including The Scottish Labour Party: History, Institutions and Ideas, After Blair: Politics after the New Labour Decade and The Political Guide to Modern Scotland. He can be contacted on: gerry.hassan@virgin.net
Size Matters28 Aug 2008There have recently been some fantastic investigative features in the print and electric press on the touchy subject of female surgical circumcision, also called cosmetic labiaplasty. One of the best, curiously enough, appeared in this month’s DIVA. This is a topic that needs airing and re-airing, but I’m going to take this space to tentatively suggest that there is also room in the feminist movement for a discussion of that curiously taboo subject: male genital mutilation. In a culture of commodified testosterone, growing numbers of boys and men, some as young as three or four, some as old as eighty, are turning to genital mutilation as a form of self-harm. This in itself is not a new phenomenon, but as the culture of shame, anger and idolisation around the male sexual organ continues to increase, the phenomenon of boys and men damaging their own genitals, sometimes with extreme violence, is gathering pace. There are myriad individual reasons for this phenomenon, many of which are exacerbated by mental illnesses such as depression and paranoid schizophrenia, but the baseline reasons are fairly simple to grasp: a lot of boys have no frame of reference for what their penis should look like. Men are taught to see the appendage as a source of unimaginable sexual shame and embarrassment, or as a symbol of a sick, overzealous , hypermasculised culture in which they did not ask to be included, or, more frequently, both. It’s not only the mentally ill who mutilate their genitals in private: you can pay a surgeon to inflict far more radical damage, a snip (literally) at £3-12,000. I’m talking, of course, about the booming industry of surgical penis ‘enlargement’, the nearest male equivalent to labiaplasty. We’ve all had versions of those relentless spam emails, offering in poor English to furnish us with a magnificent schlong for the price of a university education. Well, they keep coming because some people keep clicking – millions of anxious men and boys, in fact, all over the world, every day. Yes, it’s fucking political. Male sexual neurosis is massively damaging, to feminism, to society, and to men themselves. This is not male apologism, or backsliding, it’s one feminist’s request for more discussion of a damaging socio-sexual taboo, in the context of a blog post in which I get to shout ‘COCK!’ a lot. There, I’m glad I got that out of my system. Gruesome butchery as labiaplasty undoubtedly is, the butchery involved boils down to a fairly straightforward amputation. Not so with penis ‘extension‘: I’ll spare you details of just what can go wrong, because Penny Red is a welcoming family blog, but suffice it to say: lots. And often. If you enjoy Bizarre magazine, you may click here now. Thanks to the stalwart work of feminist writers and bloggers, there are now a lot of good, informative sites out there setting the record straight on what real female genitals look like. Sites that reassure women of all ages that they, too, are far less abnormal than they might have feared. Sisters working tirelessly and for free to undo the visceral harm done by the iconography of pornography and the language of fiction, erotica and women’s magazines in persuading girls that their vulvae should present as neat, hairless, odourless, tight pink slits with the sole purpose of funnelling equally tight, odourless, virginal vaginas, where all sexual sensation occurs. This is an ugly and damaging lie. So where is the equivalent iconoclasm working to tear down the damaging fictions that young men internalise about their gender and physical sex? The rhetoric of dickhood is entirely misleading, with emphasis on stiffness, straightness, rigidity, awesomeness, bestiality and hard, raging, pole-like qualities. The myriad of slang terms for the appendage range from the sublime – schlong, manhood, prick, dick – to the ridiculous – one-eyed trouser snake, luncheon meat truncheon! In fact, as most people are secretly aware, even the most impressive penis is no fearsome beast. They are extremely fragile things, normally soft, squishable and defenceless, generally flaccid, delicate , painful when struck, sensitive to touch and temperature. Freud was wrong. It’s not women who ‘envy’ the fiction of the perpetually hard, straining, bestial cartoon-penis – it’s other men,. That envy can largely be blamed on the shocking lie culturally perpetrated to convince young boys that their genitals are supposed to symbolise their masculinity and accordingly be other than the sweet, small, defenceless things they are. If you’re laughing, stop. Now. I don’t believe it’s possible to call oneself a progressive feminist whilst taking the piss out of the sexual organs of just under one half of the human race. When it comes down to it, everyone’s genitals are ridiculous: messy, demanding, confusing and difficult to manage, with no instruction booklet and contents that generally differ wildly from the serving suggestion on the box. This does not mean that they are abnormal, inadequate or worthy of the childlike awe, tentative mockery, anger and aggrandisement that by turns characterise the treatment of the human prick in contemporary culture. It is not surprising, then, that so many men and boys turn to surgery to change what they see as defective or abnormal, or to self-harm when they see a part of themselves as shameful and socially loaded in ways they reject. We just do not know how many men go through these experiences, how many operations are botched or how many wounds inflicted in private, because the subject matter is so sensitive that there simply isn’t enough data, and no comprehensive study has yet been done. All that we know is that it’s happening, and that it’s happening more and more. The cultural markers of femininity are worn like a cloak and meticulously judged – from breasts to width of the waist and hips to degree of ‘curviness’ to hairstyle to set of the face and features. For men, only one specific part of the body is sexualised, and it’s kept under wraps, endlessly mythologised and certainly not featured in any fashion spreads. Feminists might argue that because women’s whole bodies are inevitably sexualised, men have it easier. Those feminists are right: men do have it easier. But that doesn’t mean that men don’t get a raw deal too – where little girls grow up seeing examples of perfect sexual bodies plastered everywhere they look, little boys experience the opposite – the cock is spoken of in hushed tones and never revealed, fictionalised, aggrandised, reduced to a few furtive glances in locker-rooms and arcane priapic symbols scrawled on playground walls and toilet cubicles. In a perfect world, school PHSE lessons would include mandatory classes on sex and gender, in which children would be shown lots of photographs – not crude and misleading technicolour ink-drawings – of what real genitals look like. During these ideal lessons there would be open discussion of gender roles, physical sex, sexuality, feminism and gender egalitarianism. It won’t happen on these prudish little islands any day soon, not here where so recently we had laws banning the discussion of homosexuality in schools, but it’s nice to dream. Some girls dream of ponies. Today I’m dreaming of full-frontal PHSE photography with explanatory notes. It’s a vision thing. The movement to reclaim the female body as a self-defined space is still a vitally important one, and it is perhaps just as vital to complement that discussion by extending its rhetoric to the male form. Talking about the realities of the female body in its many forms is a starting point for massive amounts of crucial feminist discussion of physical femaleness, of personal femininity, and of the difference and interaction between the two and the socio-political realities they produce. Talking about the male body in a similar way, and specifically about the cock – unlike for women, the only explicitly sexualised part of a man’s body – might just promote similar much-needed debate about physical maleness, personal masculinity and the difference between the two. Or at very least, it might make a few more people hesitate before doing inadvisable violence to the most sensitive parts of their body and paying for the privilege
SATs Fiasco28 Aug 2008On August 15, the British Labour government?s regulatory body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), terminated the contract of the company responsible for marking Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) school test papers (which are mandatory for all school children in England aged 11 and 14 years.) The QCA had only signed the 156 million, five-year contract with ETS Europe (a branch of the US-based Educational Testing Service Global BV) in February 2007. However, a series of major problems with the administration and marking of the tests this year caused almost a month?s delay in publishing the majority of results for key stage two (11-year-olds) and three (14-year-olds). Key stage three results were not released until August 12, although some were still incomplete. Not only was the deadline missed, but the accuracy of marking was severely compromised, with many schools reporting that inexplicable results in some cases suggested that the markers either did not understand the questions themselves or that there was not adequate time to check. When ETS was awarded the contract to administer the SATs, it had boasted of a new method to ensure marking accuracy. Markers would have to sit online tests every time they had assessed 80 exam papers, supposedly to ensure they were marking to the given criteria. In practice, however, the markers were given no feedback other than a pass or fail and could not adjust their marking accordingly. Not only was the marker training inferior to previous years, but markers did not receive papers in sufficient time, as they were sent from schools to a central depot and then on. This meant the papers had to be marked under tremendous pressure during school term time, further undermining accuracy. Papers/scripts that were near the borderline of grades were not double-checked, as was the case in previous years. On top of this, some markers received no papers at all, while others received papers for the wrong subject. Unlike in previous years, pupil registers had to be checked online and marks for every single question submitted online?an extremely time-consuming if not futile exercise, exacerbated by crashed websites and helplines that went unanswered. Following the virtual collapse of the test paper marking system, the QCA and ETS Europe agreed to dissolve the contract with immediate effect. Under the agreement, ETS Europe is expected to pay back 24.1 million of the nearly 40 million it received to run this year?s testing process and is to be stripped of the five-year deal. Government agencies will now oversee the delivery of the last 30,000 results and the appeal process. ETS has been banned from contacting schools directly. ETS Europe had hoped to prove itself in the English school system so as to expand elsewhere in Europe. It won the SATs contract despite a catalogue of past failures to deliver on its commitments. In 2002, software errors by ETS led to serious failures, including giving the wrong marks, in the graduate management admission test (GMAT) in the US. According to the New York Times, in 2004, mismanagement by ETS led to more than 40,000 teachers taking a flawed exam and ETS paying out millions of dollars in compensation. From the very start of its contract in England, there had been problems with the delivery and collection of test papers from schools, the electronic registration and moderating system crashed, and markers and schools could not log on. The helpline was constantly engaged. Thousands of teachers dropped out of the marking scheme, and many other markers resigned. A backlog grew, forcing ETS to set up 24-hour emergency marking centres. According to the Guardian newspaper, at one point, the National Assessment Agency went in and found 10,000 unopened emails from increasingly desperate schools. Now, the exams regulator, Ofqual, has asked Lord Sutherland to head an inquiry into the delays. Ofqual head Kathleen Tattersall said that if there is a significant rise in schools appealing over results, then all 1 million SATs results should be annulled. The general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Mick Brookes, said that such appeals ?are set to rocket.? He has urged the schools inspection body Ofsted to disregard SATs results when making a judgement on a school. Results that Ofsted deems poor could contribute to a school being placed in the failing category of ?special measures,? in some cases resulting in heads and teachers losing their jobs. State education given over to the market While no parent, teacher or child in England will shed a tear on the departure of such a clearly incompetent company from schools across the country, the more fundamental issue exposed by this latest crisis is not the marking but the actual tests themselves. But rather than replace the testing system, as most teachers, educationalists and parents have been arguing?well before the latest marking fiasco?the government intends to replace one company with another in order to continue with the whole flawed testing enterprise. Teacher unions have already cast doubt on whether a new contract could be awarded in time to deliver next year?s SATs and called on ministers to overhaul the system. Schools secretary Ed Balls said he was ?open to reform long-term.? He floated ?lower-intensity? testing but flatly ruled out suspending SATs for 2009. The government has hinted that the data-handling firm Capita may be contracted to run next year?s SATs. Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, said it would launch an urgent tendering process and that he expected organisations that previously expressed an interest to bid again. ETS was one of five companies short-listed two years ago. According to the Guardian, two of the three other major exam boards have already ruled themselves out of the contract, on the basis that they did not believe there was a strong enough educational rationale for the SATs tests. Greg Watson, head of the OCR exam board, said it did not bid because the tests were used to measure schools against one another, rather than qualifying a child at a certain level and diagnosing skills. A second exam board, AQA, also said it had not bid because of concerns about the purpose of the tests. One unnamed senior examiner said that the process was so educationally ?vacuous? that it would actually be more suited to a company such as Capita, which is used to dealing with large-scale public sector data projects rather than educational examinations. So indefensible have the SATs now become that a former aide of Tony Blair admitted recently that they risked turning schools into ?drab, joyless assessment factories? where preparation for tests crowds out real learning. The disparity between the overblown election promises the Labour government made on education policy and the subsequent mess that it has made in the school system has been widely acknowledged. But the government and the media are seeking to conceal how and why this has happened. The cash-starved and moribund education system that emerged after 18 years of Conservative-rule was the one of the most glaring examples of the socially regressive policies of the Thatcher and Major administrations. In the absence of a mass socialist alternative to address this, the right-wing ?new? Labour Party under Blair successfully capitalised on popular support for a radical break with the pro-market policies of the past and for a reduction in the levels of social inequality that rocketed following the speculative boom of the 1980s. On taking office in 1997, Blair and then-chancellor Gordon Brown kept rigorously to Tory spending limits while introducing cosmetic changes in education?such as more classroom assistants and the introduction of learning mentors. Most significantly, however, the Labour government sought to introduce the most pro-business agenda in education for a generation. Virtually every area of education was opened up to corporate profit making; from the building of school infrastructure, the development of business-friendly ?specialist schools,? the increase of ?faith schools? and to the setting up of private ?academies.? State schools have become testing grounds for ever-more uninspired ways to narrow the already prescriptive national curriculum and force children through a selective testing system. The effects of teaching to the tests?as in the present SATs?on especially young children is to squeeze out the joy of learning that should be inherent in an imaginative, widely scoped, generously resourced syllabus. This contributes significantly to the growing levels of disaffection amongst pupils that has been confirmed by international reports on the levels of unhappiness amongst children in the UK. Furthermore, teachers have been demoralised as they are turned into part-time administrators of prescribed curriculum, while being scapegoatd and even publicly hounded by the government for its own policy failures. Many well-meaning teachers have found themselves grubbing for each test paper point instead of being free to open young minds to the exploration and discovery of the world around them. Crowning it all, each school faces the constant threat of government inspection whereby they are monitored, praised or punished on the basis of fulfilling increasingly arbitrary targets. Schools are encouraged to compete against one another?via league tables?in a desperate bid for decreasing resources. At the end of this process, parents are thrown into a scramble to get a place at the ?best? school for their children. The end result of the corporate-inspired curriculum and the assessment system?the implementation of which has been the mainstay of the Labour government?s education policy since taking office in 1997?is the straitjacketing of the intellectual and imaginative capacities of children in order to provide for the demands of big-business and industry. The government?s education policies have long since alienated millions of parents, but such is the damage it has caused, the very corporate interests that it sought to serve have signalled their dismay at the results of the school system. After complaining about the low literacy and numeracy levels of school leavers, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) announced recently that it was withdrawing its support for the government?s new diplomas, which were intended to replace the current A-Levels (taken at 18 years of age). Whatever new schemes Labour devises in response to such criticisms, its continued drive to redistribute wealth away from working people to big business and the super-rich, further fuelling social inequality, means it is incapable of arriving at a ?better,? or more just education policy.
Olympic games won’t deliver28 Aug 2008The closing of the Olympic Games in Beijing and the record haul of gold medals by “Team GB” became the perfect excuse for an outpouring of British patriotism last week. Even London mayor Boris Johnson got in on the act, declaring that “virtually every single one of our international sports were either invented or codified by the British” and that London was “the sporting capital of the world”. The Daily Mail could barely restrain its enthusiasm for the newfound national pride. It reminded its readers that in addition to netting 19 gold medals, Britain is the fourth strongest military power in the world. “Our armed forces are the best in the world,” it added, which is why the Royal Navy has ordered two enormous aircraft carriers to befit our place in the world. Even the Guardian could not resist jumping on the “Back Britain” juggernaut. It decreed that the 2012 London Olympics “offer a once-in-a-generation chance to define the capital and the country for a global audience”. Those caught up in the enthusiasm are making a myriad of claims about the positive effects that the games would have on Britain, on the deprived areas of east London where the 2012 spectacle will be centred ? and even upon thousands of young people at risk of obesity. East London’s five host boroughs are among the most deprived in Britain. One third of all adults in Newham are “economically inactive” and 65 percent of households have an income of less than 30,000 a year. Rocketing rents and the building of thousands of “yuppie flats” for those working in the business districts of the City and Canary Wharf have accompanied a chronic shortage of rented accommodation. Sports secretary Tessa Jowell and British Olympic boss Lord Coe promise that the Olympic Games development will bring an extra 9,000 new homes, “many affordable for local people”. But what does “affordable” mean? Housing association East Homes is currently offering part-rent, part-buy two-bedroom flats in Stratford that are supposed to help people in Newham clamber on to the property ladder. Mortgage Their price list states that rent and mortgage payments are expected to be 1061.40 a month ? well beyond the reach of most people in the borough. And no one expects the flats being built to house athletes to be rented out at a level that ordinary people can afford. But what of the array of sport facilities that will remain after the games? Even here the talk of a “legacy” is seriously misleading. As 2012 draws to a conclusion, east London will be saddled with an enormous stadium that can handle large scale tournaments, but will be useless for the recreational needs of the local community. The 2012 mountain biking venue being constructed in South Weald in Essex is estimated to cost 5 million. The event it caters for will last just six hours ? and then the facility will be torn down. The Olympics Aquatics Centre in Stratford will have a seating capacity of 2,500. But its presence will speed the demise of nine local swimming pools in London ? including the best pool in the host borough of Waltham Forest, which is short of the 75 million it needs each year to remain open. Gordon Brown said that he hoped Britain’s success in the Beijing games could combine to help rescue grassroots sport and inspire healthy living. “The Olympics can inspire people. More people will give up smoking, less people will become obese,” he said. However there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the opposite will be the case. As the cost of the London Olympics has spiralled to 9.3 billion, funds are being diverted from local sporting projects that involve many thousands of people ? few of whom engage with sport in order to win a medal. The big money is now being driven towards creating “centres of excellence” in selected sports where a few hundred potential success stories will be groomed in the hope of Team GB winning a few more medals. The National Lottery is channelling 2 billion of its funds into the 2012 Olympics, while London council tax bills are expected to provide another 1 billion. Waiting lists for classes at local centres will grow, and prices will continue to rocket. The pressure to win doesn’t mean more young people getting involved in sports. It means elite sport for a minority of “winners”, as Brown made clear this week as he announced that schools should bring back “competitive sports”. Boxing “We want to encourage competitive sports in schools, not the ‘medals for all’ culture we have seen in previous years,” he said. He went on to say that children could be encouraged to take up boxing in state schools as a way of teaching them self-control. The notion that some people are “good” at physical games while others are “useless” remains a key part of people’s school experience of sport. It is one reason why so few people in Britain are regular participants in any sporting activity. Brown is now seeking to compound this view ? but perhaps this doesn’t matter if his rhetoric doesn’t meet the reality. Last week a headline in The Mirror declared that young people should be inspired by Olympic success to “drop their knives and take up cycling”. You can’t help but think that fantasy politics has overtaken fantasy football as a national pastime.
The real Olympic winners For most people, the Olympics will never be a basis for active participation in sport. They will be a TV spectacle and little else. And the big winners will not be the people of east London, but the multinational corporations who sponsor the event and the International Olympic Committee with its sale of billion dollar TV rights. There will, of course, be one other beneficiary ? the security industry. The home secretary’s Olympic Security Committee is pitching for a budget of 225 million. This is what it says will be required to make London the surveillance capital of the world during the 2012 games. I wonder how many swimming pools you could buy for that? Copyright Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original and leave this notice in place.
Not free speech martyrs28 Aug 2008Those who keep themselves mercifully removed from the murky world of blogging narcissism will not be aware that for a brief period today, Harry’s Place had their free speech violated. Their service provider removed their blog on the grounds that it violated the user agreement. The cry went up that censorship was afoot, and several blogs – several left-wing ones at that – protested in the name of free speech. It transpired that there had been a complaint. Someone had complained that a post on Harry’s Place concerning one Jenna Delich, a Sheffield-based academic, was slanderous. Allegedly, the complaint was from Jenna Delich herself. The service provider apparently agreed with the complaint at any rate and, referring to their terms of use, pulled the blog for several hours before restoring it. The post concerning Jenna Delich was actually one of a series of perfectly frantic and childish provocations about her – and, beyond her, about the true bte noire of Harry’s Place, the Left. Delich was and is the subject of Harry’s Place scrutiny for several reasons. The first is that she is an academic, and therefore is someone whose ideas can get her fired, particularly in light of well-known precedents. The second is that she contributes to the UCU mailing list, excerpts from which are regularly ‘leaked’ to Harry’s Place, and the UCU is a regular target of HP saucery because a significant number of its members are prepared to support the Palestinian campaign to boycott Israeli institutions. (See this for a past example of HP’s attempts to intimidate UCU academics). The third is that, in an absolute gift to Harry’s Place and its miniature deep throat, she chose to support an argument about Israel by linking to a story on the website of David Duke, the white supremacist and antisemite. In and of itself the story does not appear to be explicitly antisemitic or fascist – although its author, who is not David Duke, may well be. It was reproduced from another website, which is apparently devoted to ‘alternative’ theories about 9/11 and other major events (both paranormal and parapolitical). It may be objectionable for other reasons, or it may contain alarming formulations, but a casual reader might easily read it and mistake it for a useful summary of facts. In due course – or rather with indecent haste – Harry’s Place posted the comment that she had made, along with a crudely subtitled photograph of her with her name featured in white-on-black lettering. In the photograph’s subtitle, a deliberately ambiguous wording is deployed: “Sheffield-based academic, Jenna Delich – links to far right websites associated with the Ku Klux Klan”. This could be read as meaning that she has links to far right websites associated with the Ku Klux Klan, rather than that she has ‘linked’, once, to said websites. The ambiguity was, in all probability, intentional. They headed their post ‘UCU and the David Duke Fan’. Thus, Harry’s Place asserted, based on this single incident, that Jenna Delich was a ‘fan’ of a Nazi ideologist. Further to this, the post accused her of “viciousness against Jews”, which it said the UCU union had refused to act against (ie, it had refused to suppress her speech). None of this is subtle. It is not a dog-whistle, even if it did set off a round of ferocious barking. It is a quite explicit campaign of vilification and demonisation, fucking someone over before the full facts are known, while distorting such facts as are known. The effects of falsely identifying someone as a Nazi sympathiser and an antisemite, particularly if they work in an educational institution, can be terrifying for the person thus calumnied. Universities are charged by the government with combatting ‘extremism’, monitoring both staff and students as part of the UK’s ‘war on terror’. Academics can be dismissed if they are explicit racists or Nazis. Reading about herself online, the academic would have realised that being identified in this way could mean her being fired. She would have known that it could mean her not being able to work in education any more. At the very least it would draw opprobium from colleagues and students alike. Personally, unless someone was an explicit or obvious member of a Nazi organisation, I would not like to be the one to expose them to that risk. I am not an investigator, nor a jury of her peers, nor a judge unto myself. And I do not carry out God’s will, as far as I know (He is not as talkative as He once was). But Harry’s Place, which is no better qualified than I am, had no hesitation in putting Jenna Delich through all that, without knowing what the situation was. It could be that Ms Delich was or is an antisemite, but it could just as well not be the case. She may have made a mistake; she may have been careless; she may have posted in haste having followed a chain of links from other less toxic websites; she may not know a great deal about the American far right. When Harry’s Place decided to launch their attack on Jenna Delich, they did not know what the case was. Or did they? They may at least have had good reason to think that she goofed up and was not being deliberately malicious. Their secret informer will surely have told them that, contrary to their insistence that UCU is filled with antisemites, the posting by Ms Delich was met with immediate criticism. That person would not have ommitted to mention, either, that Ms Delich acknowledged her mistake and apologised. If Harry’s Place has been made aware of either fact at any point, it has ommitted to mention them. Instead, it has persisted with the insinuation that it is exposing a Nazi sympathiser and antisemite. Jenna Delich listened the advice of a Jewish socialist academic named Mike Cushman at the LSE, who was participating in the UCU forum. He advised her that she had a legitimate grievance, that she had been potentially libelled by Harry’s Place, and that the proper procedure was to complain to the internet service provider. Whatever one thinks of the libel laws, this does not seem to me to be an unreasonable response. Harry’s Place was quite vindictively sabotaging her career, and she had a right to seek accountability somewhere. However. Because the service provider in question warned the blog proprietors that they were in breach of their terms of use, and that as such it would be removed, Harry’s Place was able to reinterpret its attack on free speech as the defense of free speech. They have behaved unconscionably, thuggishly, in a manner that befits far right websites such as Redwatch (to my knowledge, one of the few other websites that posts photographs, personal information and inflammatory material about private individuals). Because their behaviour resulted in their being pulled, if only for a few hours, bloggers who had utterly ignored the campaign against Jenna Delich decided that Harry’s Place were free speech martyrs. It was a natural, but regrettable, instinct. They saw their own toys being taken away from them by moaning minnies, and their hearts went out to their fallen comrades. They extended ‘solidarity’ to the tormenters of Jenna Delich, but none to her. Even the Index on Censorship published a brief article about it, quoting David T, the blog’s proprietor. Jenna Delich has now been removed from the UCU discussion forum. In a message from the moderator, Matthew Waddup, it was averred that “having reviewed this and previous conduct; I have now suspended their list membership indefinitely”. Waddup implied that he had acted on the basis of information that he had not previously considered. My own provisional conclusion, (you may draw a different one at liberty), is that he is caving in under a virulently nasty campaign of vilification. According to one of her colleagues, Jenna is now receiving hate mail and death threats. Her sole crime, so far as I am aware, is to have posted a link to a far right website featuring an article that in itself made no explicitly antisemitic or Nazi-like claims. If this was malicious, intending to cause hurt and offense, I would believe that further action would need to be taken both within the union and her educational institution. But as she apologised and accepted her mistake, it ought to have gone no further than that. Those who decided to take it further, and to distort the evidence to fit a prefabricated template for discussing such matters, are bullies, not defenders of free speech. One last thing. It is important to at least take note of the broader political argument within which this preposterous, ugly saga has unfolded. David Hirsh of Goldsmiths College, and the website Engage, makes the argument explicit in his contribution: Antisemitism within the UCU started to become a serious problem when people in the union began to support the campaign to exclude Israelis from British universities as a protest against Israeli human rights abuses. This campaign has dominated academic union Congresses in 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. It is an antisemitic campaign. There is no proposal to boycott any academics from any country other than Israel. It seeks to exclude a significant proportion of the world?s Jewish academics. It treats Israel as though it was a unique evil in the world and as though it was an illegitimate state. Predictably the campaign for this antisemitic exclusion creates an antisemitic atmosphere within the union. The argument that a boycott campaign against Israel is ‘antisemitic’ is unsustainable and invidious. States have been singled out in the past and will be in the future. It is in the nature of politics that such ‘singling out’ will happen. Some states have been treated as illegitimate in the past (South Africa and Rhodesia, for example), and it is unsurprising that a minority of supporters of the Palestinians (myself included) don’t accept Israel’s inherent ‘right to exist’ as a state based on Zionist organising principles. Particularly since such an assumed ‘right’ seems to militate against the demands of justice for millions of refugees. What is distinctive about Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, however, is how little attention has been paid to it in the past, and how much effort went into explaining and justifying its actions. That this is no longer the case, and that a growing minority of people are deciding to take action in solidarity with the Palestinians – in this case, at the specific request of Palestinian trade unionists who are bearing the brunt of Israeli oppression – is not something to be angry about. Historically, the British Left has been complicit with the dispossession of the Palestinians, and a particular responsibility therefore falls on the British Left to help undo the effects of this (just as it once bore a particular responsibility for helping to combat colonialism and apartheid). In truth, there is something shameful and a little sordid about those whose response to this is to classify the whole enterprise antisemitic. Yet, without so branding it, and without therefore slandering thousands of well-meaning left-wing activists as antisemitic in toto, this cruel and idiotic spectacle would have been impossible.
A UK Window into CIA Abuses27 Aug 2008This Wednesday, unless the UK foreign secretary takes rapid action, Britain?s High Court will hold a hearing to assess whether the UK government should be ordered to hand over secret documents to lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee. The detainee in question, Binyam Mohamed, faces possible charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism before a military commission at Guantanamo. Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and former UK resident, was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002. Transferred to US custody, he was reportedly rendered by the CIA to Morocco, detained there secretly for over a year, and then moved for several months to a secret CIA detention site in Afghanistan. He then spent a few months in military detention at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and was ultimately brought to Guantanamo Bay in September 2004. Mohamed claims that he was brutally tortured during his time in secret detention, and that the evidence that will likely be used to prosecute him is a result of that torture. He also claims that the UK government has information that supports his claims of abuse. Last week, in an important judgment, the UK High Court ruled in Mohamed?s favor. It found that the British government was under a legal obligation to disclose to Mohamed?s counsel the information it possesses relating to Mohamed?s whereabouts, treatment, and interrogation between April 2002 and May 2004. The court emphasized that this information is ?not merely necessary but essential? to Mohamed?s defense against military commission charges. While the court stopped short of ordering the foreign secretary to hand over the information ? allowing additional time for the national security implications of disclosure to be considered ? it will reach the mandatory disclosure question at its hearing this week. From Britain to Pakistan to the Prison of Darkness Binyam Mohamed came to Britain in 1994, when he was a student, after having spend a short period in the United States. He converted to Islam while in the UK, and in mid-2001 he left the UK for Pakistan and Afghanistan. He claims that he traveled to the region because he wanted to kick a drug habit. The military commission charges that have been sworn against Mohamed allege that he attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and later received training in building remote-controlled explosive detention devices in Pakistan. While living at an Al Qaeda safe house in Lahore, Pakistan, the charges say, Mohamed allegedly agreed to be sent to the United States to conduct terror operations. Mohamed was arrested at the Karachi airport on April 10, 2002, as he attempted to leave Pakistan to fly to London. Although he was initially detained in Karachi, he claims that he was interrogated there by US agents. The UK High Court has also confirmed that a British agent visited Mohamed in Pakistani custody on May 17, 2002. Mohamed claims that he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco in July 2002. There, he claims, he was beaten, repeatedly cut on his genitals, and threatened with rape, electrocution and death. Interrogators reportedly asked him detailed questions about his seven years in London, based on information that his lawyers believe came from British sources. In late January 2004, Mohamed says, he was sent to Afghanistan, where he was held in a secret CIA prison ? called the ?Prison of Darkness? ? until May 2004. At that point, he was transferred to military detention, first at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo, where he remains. According to the UK High Court, the military commissions case against Mohamed is based on confessions Mohamed made while in military custody ? after May 2004 ? not on anything he said while being interrogated by the CIA. Mohamed claims, however, that it was the abuse in CIA custody that induced him to confess while in military custody, and so proof of those CIA abuses are crucial to his defense. Refusal to Disclose As part of a continuing effort to cover up the CIA?s misdeeds, US officials have refused to provide Mohamed or his lawyers any information whatsoever about his treatment or whereabouts from the time of arrest in April 2002 until he was transferred to Bagram in May 2004. To date, the UK government has similarly refused to provide Mohamed?s lawyers any such information, although it has acknowledged that some documents in its possession might be exculpatory. In last week?s ruling, the High Court noted that the UK foreign secretary had acknowledged that Mr. Mohamed had established an arguable case that he had been subject to illegal rendition and torture. The court also found that the British security forces had facilitated Mohamed?s interrogations by supplying information and questions to US officials, even while they knew that Mohamed was being held incommunicado in a non-military detention facility overseas. The court found, in short, that the relationship of the UK government to the US authorities with regard to Mohamed ?was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.? Because the UK was in some way a participant, not simply an observer, the court held that the UK is legally obligated to provide Mohamed with information relating to his abuse. Not only did the court deem this information to be ?essential? to Mohamed?s ability to adequately defend himself, it emphasized the need for the government to provide the necessary information as soon as is practically possible. The reason for the hurried timing lies in the military commissions? timetable. At present, military commission charges against Mohamed have been prepared, but the commission?s convening authority has not yet signed off on them. In order to potentially affect the charging decision, Mohamed has an important interest in getting exculpatory information to the convening authority before that decision is made. The Prospect of Mandatory Disclosure The UK court decried the fact that the US authorities have failed to provide this potentially exculpatory information to Mohamed?s counsel, particularly since both his counsel are security-cleared. But it recognized, as well, that the United States? failure is no excuse for Britain?s inaction. Unless the UK foreign secretary voluntarily provides the relevant documents to Mohamed?s counsel before Wednesday, the High Court will consider ordering disclosure. Such an order, which the court seems presently inclined to grant, would open an important crack in the wall of secrecy that surrounds the CIA?s rendition, detention, and interrogation abuses.
Who is on the Side of the Angels?27 Aug 2008Ever since Georgia invaded its break-away province of South Ossetia earlier this month, there has been a concerted attempt by both Georgia and its allies to portray its subsequent fight with Russia as a conflict between ?David and Goliath?. Georgia is the small David fighting the Goliath of the ruthless Russian army. Although it seems it retaliated to Russian provocation, it was Georgian forces that first moved into South Ossetia, sparking the wider conflict. However the predominant way the story has been reported in the west is that it is Russia that is the major aggressor. It is true that Russia has retaliated against the Georgian incursion into Ossetia with brutal, disproportionate force. However, the way that Georgia has tried to manipulate the crisis is in itself quite remarkable too. In the great tradition of spinning the truth in military campaigns, Georgia may have been comprehensively defeated militarily, but it is seen as having won the propaganda war. Little, brave Georgia has taken on the nasty Russian Republic. When the journalist Peter Whilby examined press releases issued by Georgia?s PR consultants, he noted that they used deliberate ?terms that trigger western media interest? in describing the Russian actions, such as ?civilian victims?, ?nuclear?, ?humanitarian?, ?occupation? and ?ethnic cleansing.? The Georgians had also cleverly targeted bankers and analysts on Wall Street in New York that had successfully filtered their message onto prime time American TV. The effect of this, claims Mark Ames, the editor of Moscow’s alternative paper The eXile, ?was brilliant?. He says ?now you’re starting to see the American media shift its coverage from calling it Georgia invading Ossetian territory, to the new spin, that it’s Russian imperial aggression against tiny little Georgia.? The propaganda battle between Russia and Georgia has even made the front-page of the magazine PR Week in the UK. In the article Georgia?s hired PR company, Aspect Consulting attacked Russian ?propaganda.? Aspect Consulting?s founding partner James Hunt told PR Week how he could not understand how the PR companies working for Russia could be ?comfortable about that.? He said bluntly: ?I?m on the side of the angels?. For someone who likes to portray himself on the side of good over evil, Hunt has had a controversial career. He has defended some of the biggest companies during three of the biggest environmental and health scandals of recent times in the UK. He worked for Shell on the Brent Spar debacle in the mid-nineties, when Shell attempted to recklessly dump its redundant oil platform in the Atlantic. A hugely successful public campaign by the environmental organization Greenpeace forced the oil giant to dispose of the Brent Spar on land. It also forced Shell into a comprehensive review of its environmental policies and practices. Hunt also worked for the global fast-food giant McDonalds over what was known as ?mad cow disease? in the mid-nineties as well as working with biotechnology seed companies over their promotion of genetically-modified crops, despite known health and ecological risks that those crops entail. Aspect?s current clients still include biotechnology companies such as Novartis and Exxon Mobil, the global oil company that has been at the forefront of action to deny climate change. Many would see his career as dancing with the devil, not flying with the angels. Aspect started working with Georgia last year to assist the country become part of both the EU and Nato. The agency was reportedly paid some $750,000 to promote the Georgian cause. The agency has been trying to spin the truth over what happened, arguing that it was not Georgia that started the war, and that the war was ?about punishing Georgia for wanting to pursue an Euro-Atlantic future?. Whilst there must be elements of this, the first major act of aggression was on Georgia?s behalf against the people of South Ossetia, although there are reports that Russia was trying to provoke a Georgian attack. Moreover in that conflict, Georgia ? a population of 4.4 million, with a military equipped by the Americans and Israelis – was far superior to the South Ossetians, who have a population of around 60,000. Initial reports coming out of South Ossetia talk of a ferocious assault by the Georgians in the capital city, Tskhinvali. There were reports of some 2,000 Ossetians killed, including woman and children sheltering in bomb shelters. There is also evidence that the Georgians would not have attacked South Ossetia without American military and logistical support. There are certainly close connections between the Georgians and US neo-conservatives. One of Georgia?s top lobbyists in the last few years has been Randy Scheunemann, who recently became the Republican presidential candidate John McCain?s senior foreign policy adviser. Scheunemann was one of the key neo-conservative pushing for the Iraq war when he was a project director at the Project for a New American Century. Scheunemann also headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which also called for a US invasion of Iraq. Scheunemann has a history of working with McCain on the Georgian issue. In 2005, when he was a registered lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a resolution in the US Congress that called got Georgia?s membership in NATO. The following year, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to Georgia. During the trip, McCain denounced the South Ossetian separatists, and speaking at the military base at Senaki, he declared that Georgia was America’s ?best friend.? McCain also added that Russian peace-keepers in the region should be thrown out. By April this year, Scheunemann had formally ceased his own lobbying work for Georgia. However the same day that McCain phoned the president of Georgia offering support for the country, a lobbying firm, called Orion Strategies that is partly owned by Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington. A Month later, Scheunemann was forced to distance himself from the firm, but despite this the Washington Post notes ?For months while McCain’s presidential campaign was gearing up, Scheunemann held dual roles, advising the candidate on foreign policy while working as Georgia’s lobbyist. Between January 1, 2007, and May 15, 2008, the campaign paid Scheunemann nearly $70,000 to provide foreign policy advice. During the same period, the government of Georgia paid his firm $290,000 in lobbying fees.? Having political advisors who are also paid lobbyists for a foreign country obviously raises serious conflicts of interest that the McCain team has hardly dealt with by forcing Scheunemann to break his formal ties with the Georgians. We should not forget how strategic Georgia is to the West because of oil. Although Georgia has no significant oil reserves of its own, it is a key transit point for oil from the Caspian and central Asia destined for the thirsty markets of Europe and the US. The 1,770km Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline pumps up to 1 million barrels of oil per day from Baku in Azerbaijan to Turkey. The pipeline route was specifically designed to avoid Russia, running in part through Georgia instead. Russia does not escape blame in the conflict either. Last week, the Independent newspaper quoted a senior Russian military analyst saying that Russia tried to provoke a conflict to ?prevent Georgia from joining Nato.? Russia has also been using PR companies to spin its message. The country uses two agencies that form part of the global giant Omnicom company. GPlus in Brussels and Ketchum in Washington. GPlus and Ketchum were first hired by the Kremlin to cover Russia?s presidency of the G8. Gplus has received significant criticism for handling the Russian account including during the current conflict. GPlus argues that all it does for the Russians is ?give them logistical support to assist spokespeople with handling the European media.? But their Georgian PR opponents have said that the PR companies acting for the Russians have been ?misleading foreign journalists? and pumping out Russian Government propaganda. However what we do know is that both sides are using propaganda and both sides have used indiscriminate force against civilians, which in itself is a war crime. The respected organization Human Rights Watch reported last week that there was ?mounting evidence? that both the Russian and Georgian military had ?used armed force unlawfully during the South Ossetian conflict.? According to Human Rights Watch, both sides had used ?indiscriminate force against civilians.? What we know is that in war, the situation is hardly ever black and white. The truth gets trampled on both sides, as they both issue propaganda to suit their own ends. It will be the innocent civilians who suffer, who will be bombed, killed, injured, terrorized, made homeless and starving. It will be the innocent who look for their loved ones in the burnt out buildings, over-stretched hospitals and over-flowing morgues. As the innocent die on both sides, no one can claim to be on the side of the angels. Because there are no angels in war.
Tame the fat cats27 Aug 2008The surge of support for a one-off windfall tax on energy firms’ obscenely excessive profits may be on the point of becoming irresistible. When even those on the fringes of government, such as Rob Marris and Steven Pound, feel emboldened to nail their colours to the mast, it is fair to say that times are changing. To some extent, this is because of the perceived weakness of the dead man walking in Downing Street, but it is also because increasing numbers of the parliamentary Labour party can see the dole queue beckoning. They realise that something must be done to show that the Labour Party is reconnecting with its grass-roots supporters or, currently, non-supporters. And there are few fat cats as brazen as the energy bosses, apart from, say, the water and rail privateers. But even the parasites presently living in luxury on the basis of our plundered railways and water services would find it difficult to compete in the daylight robbery stakes with the gas and electricity companies that have already put up prices twice this year and are returning for a third bite. The so-called energy regulator Ofgem ought to be prosecuted for taking money under false premises, smiling benignly as the big six companies have imposed double-digit price rises. Every shoddy justification for this blatant profiteering is nodded through by Ofgem, including the lie that prices to consumers have to rise because wholesale prices have gone up. Wholesale prices were lower this month and last, but still the oligopoly pushes up domestic prices. The big six also blame suppliers in Europe for overcharging us, but it is the companies themselves that neglected to build adequate storage facilities, in contrast to publicly controlled companies in other parts of Europe. And there is also a false dichotomy between wholesale and retail companies. Most gas suppliers are also gas producers, pushing up prices to their subsidiaries to be passed on to consumers and taking a double bite of profits on the way. And these super-profits that they make are not, despite corporate propaganda, being ploughed into investment in new resources. Nearly half of their 4.3 billion profits last year were paid out as dividends, 1,813 million worth of them, to the financial institutions that dominate shareholdings. Association of Electricity Producers chief executive David Porter tried to coax water out of a glass eye with his sob story that every 1 million taken by government from company profits would have to be raised elsewhere. Rubbish – this implied threat of passing on the cost to consumers could be countered by a legal price freeze. Let the shareholders take the pressure for once instead of working people. And as for his warning that a windfall tax would scare off investors, let them go. They are not investors. They are ponces on the energy wealth created by government investment. The energy companies, including the oil transnational companies, have become too used to a sweetheart relationship with new Labour. It’s time to tame these fat cats. Justice cries out for an immediate substantial windfall tax on the super-profits and, indeed the return to public ownership of the energy sector.
UK Arms exports- the World’s Number One?27 Aug 2008?UK becomes biggest weapons exporter?, declared the Financial Times in June, triggering a flurry of media interest and a fresh flood of calls to the CAAT office. The Guardian ran the story in depth several days later. But any news involving both arms and statistics must be doubly suspect, so what?s the reality behind the headlines? In the complex world of arms orders, deliveries and licences, there are many and varied ways to calculate arms exports. However you do the sums, they nearly all show the USA to be the world?s top arms exporter, with the UK in the top five. One of the more simplistic calculations methods is simply to add up the value of orders within a given year ? regardless of how long those orders take to deliver. In most years, the USA still comes out on top. But in 2007 the UK was pushed into the lead by one huge order ? 72 Eurofighter aircraft to be supplied by BAE Systems to Saudi Arabia. This is the infamous Al Salam deal (it means ?peace? in Arabic ? feel free to laugh). It was this deal that the Saudi regime threatened to cancel until the British authorities dropped a corruption investigation into BAE in 2006. When lobbying for an end to the investigation, apologists for the arms trade argued that the deal would create thousands of British jobs. Once the deal was signed in September 2007, BAE admitted that most of the jobs would not even be based in the UK. So Britain?s role as ?world?s top arms exporter? is a temporary phenomenon, dependent on a questionable means of calculation. Nonetheless, the UK sadly retains a leading role in the arms trade, despite the growth in public opposition and the backlash triggered by the BAE scandal. Outstanding? When the figures were released, parts of the media asked whether British people should be proud of what trade minister Digby Jones called ?this outstanding export performance?. I debated this question on BBC Radio Five Live with Ian Godden of the Society of British Aerospace Companies. With Saudi Arabia accounting for nearly half of the 2007 orders, many callers to the programme clearly felt uneasy about a trade that relies on the whims of a violent dictatorship. There can be no doubt that most UK arms exports still go to oppressive regimes or to countries involved in armed conflict or regions of tension. I was challenged several times on the grounds that the arms trade supposedly brings benefit to Britain?s economy. The obvious answer is that arms companies in the UK are sustained by hundreds of millions of pounds in taxpayer-funded subsidies every year. Money is poured into research and development for the arms industry at a time when we desperately need to develop skills and technology to tackle climate change. And companies such as BAE have been cutting their UK workforces for years, shifting their focus to the USA but being quick to call themselves British when they want public support here. Real security that really is sustainable As Steven Schofield argues in CAAT?s recent report Making Arms, Wasting Skills, demilitarisation and an end to arms trade subsidies would provide the resources for major investment in renewable energy and the jobs and skills that would go along with it. This would place the UK at the forefront of real security and sustainable economics. Now that?s something of which we could all be proud.
Security Services on trial27 Aug 2008A London court has ruled that the British government must disclose information that could support the claim that torture was used to extract confessions from Binyam Mohamed, a former British resident who has been held in Guantnamo Bay since September 2004. The ruling by the Judicial Review?a special court that considers the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body?is a rebuff to Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who had initially argued that he was under no obligation to provide Mohamed?s lawyers with the information. Binyam Mohamed has now been incarcerated for nearly six and half years. He was first detained in Pakistan, and then subjected to ?extraordinary rendition??Washington?s euphemism for its programme of organised kidnapping and torture?to Morocco. Here he was held for 18 months while his captors used torture?including slicing his genitals with a razor?to wring a ?confession? out of him. He currently faces trial by a US Military Tribunal, charged with conspiring to commit terrorism and providing material support for terrorism in an alleged ?dirty-bomb? plot. He could face the death penalty if found guilty. The judges ruled that the information is ?not only necessary but essential for his defence?. Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, Director of Reprieve, who has represented Mohamed since 2005, told the press, ?This is a momentous decision. Compelling the British government to release information that can prove Mr. Mohamed?s innocence is one obvious step towards making up for the years of torture that he has suffered. The next step is for the British government to demand an end to the charade against him in Guantnamo Bay, and return him home to Britain.? In their ruling, the judges state, ?It is a long standing principle of the common law that confessions obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment cannot be used as evidence in any trial.? The Judicial Review was held at the end of July over five days in both open and closed sessions, also hearing testimony in camera from British Security Service and Secret Service officers who had been involved in the questioning of Mohamed while he was detained in Pakistan and elsewhere. The court?s 75-page open judgement was finally published last week, while a secret ?closed? judgement has also been made. Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones found there were compelling grounds that the ?exculpatory? information should be released in confidence to Mohamed?s legal representatives. No order for the provision of such information has been made until a further hearing considers the issues of ?national security? raised by the Foreign Secretary as grounds for its non-disclosure. At the Judicial Review, Dinah Rose QC, representing Mohamed, told the court that by cooperating with the US in its unlawful treatment of her client, the security and intelligence agencies were ?mixed up in wrongdoing?. It was also alleged that the US ?provided the UK with the fruits of his interrogation?. Rose said that a British agent?identified only as ?Witness B??had made a ?veiled threat? to Mohamed while he was being held in Pakistan, to encourage his ?cooperation?, with the implication that ?we won?t help you unless you confess?. She also asserted that MI5 had ?repeatedly? provided the US authorities with detailed information about Mohamed?s life in the UK, information that was then used by his captors during interrogation. In his summing up, Ben Jaffey, another of Mohamed?s legal team, highlighted the contradictions in MI5?s accounts; one MI5 officer had said that British security and intelligence agencies ?did not know? Binyam Mohamed?s whereabouts after he was flown out of Pakistan in 2002, whereas an MI5 representative had explicitly told the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee that it believed he was in US custody. Seeking to justify its refusal to hand over information that could uphold Mohamed?s claim that he was tortured, the government told the court that the UK was ?hugely dependent in a number of areas on US intelligence?. Moreover, it was a ?fundamental principle? that information passed between the countries not be disclosed to a third party without the consent of the country which had provided it. ?Any disclosure, however limited, would seriously undermine this principle to the point that future cooperation between the UK and its most valuable intelligence partner, the US, would be severely jeopardised?, posing a ?very serious risk to UK national security?. Judicial Review findings Binyam Mohamed?s case makes a mockery of the Labour government?s pretensions to oppose the use of torture and uphold human rights. While claiming to uphold the Geneva Conventions and international treaties outlawing the use of torture, British military personnel, as well as officers from the various intelligence agencies have been implicated in the mistreatment of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Binyam Mohamed, they have been caught red-handed. The judgement records that ?it was accepted on behalf of the Foreign Secretary… that BM [Binyam Mohamed] had established an arguable case (i) that over the period April 2002 to May 2004 he was first held by the United States incommunicado and without access to a lawyer or a court or tribunal in Pakistan, and then detained there or elsewhere by the United States until his arrival in Guantnamo Bay in September 2004 (ii) that he was subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by or on behalf of the United States during such detention and (iii) that he was subject to torture during such detention by or on behalf of the United States.? Moreover, the legal hearing and court ruling establish conclusively that not only did the British government know about the mistreatment of Mohamed, British agents also facilitated this ?wrongdoing?. The judges found that ?The relationship between the United Kingdom Government and the United States authorities was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing?. Even more damning, the court found ?that on the basis that what was done was arguably wrongdoing, the SyS [Security Service] facilitated it in the manner and to the extent described.? The court concluded that the ?conduct of the Security Service facilitated interviews by or on behalf of the United States when BM was being detained by the United States incommunicado and without access to a lawyer in Pakistan in the period April 2002 until at least May 2002… The Court also concluded that the Security Service continued to facilitate the interviewing of BM by providing information and questions after 17 May 2002, in the knowledge of what was reported to them as to the circumstances of his detention and treatment in Pakistan.? The Security Services then continued to provide further information and questions to their American counterparts, even when they knew that Mohamed had been moved from Afghanistan to a third country, where he faced serious mistreatment. Mohamed?s lawyers have been pressing the government to release information and documents they held that might sustain his claim that the ?evidence? against him had been extracted under torture. After an initial request for information was lodged by his legal representatives in April, government lawyers responded by saying the ?UK is under no obligation under international law to assist foreign courts and tribunals in assuring that torture evidence is not admitted?. Binyam Mohamed?s case was finally accepted for Judicial Review at the beginning of June. Recognising the urgency of his plight, Mr Justice Saunders agreed to an ?expedited? hearing, saying, ?If it is correct that in the course of an interrogation, in which material supplied by the Defendant [the British government] was employed, the Claimant [Binyam Mohamed] was tortured, then it is arguable that there is an obligation to disclose material which may assist Claimant in establishing before the American Military Court that he was tortured. Whether the Court should exercise its discretion not to order disclosure can only be determined at a full hearing.? It was not until this application for a Judicial Review was accepted that the Foreign Secretary then grudgingly acknowledged government documents ?could be considered exculpatory or might otherwise be relevant in the context of proceedings before the Military Commissions?. Geneva Conventions In its deliberations, the court considered whether the British government or its agents had contravened the Genva Conventions. ?The United Kingdom Armed Forces are trained in the laws of armed conflict set out in the Geneva Conventions. The Joint Services Intelligence Organisations? training documentation states that the following techniques are expressly and explicitly forbidden: (a) physical punishment of any sort; (b) the use of stress positions; (c) intentional sleep deprivations; (d) withdrawal of food, water or medical treatment and three other specified techniques.? Citing a 2007 report by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), established by the Intelligence Services Act 1994 to examine the policy, administration and expenditure of the Security Service (SyS), Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the court found that the SyS and SIS ?must have appreciated that it [rendition] was contrary to the rule of law.? The ruling also documents the fact that the government knew of the ongoing and persistent mistreatment of detainees being held by the American authorities, or those acting on their behalf. From December 2001, British intelligence operatives were able to interview detainees in Afghanistan, if permission was given by the US authorities holding them. The first SyS officers arrived at Bagram airbase on January 9, 2002 to begin this interrogation. A report from one such officer dated January 10, 2002 contained certain ?observations? about the conditions under which the detainees were being held. As a consequence, on January 11, 2002, instructions were sent to all SIS and SyS officers in Afghanistan that all prisoners, ?however they are described, are entitled to the same levels of protection.? Despite claims that this merely represented an ?isolated case?, the judgement records that there were reports of a ?further isolated case? in March 2002, and in April 2002 an SIS officer was present at an interrogation of a detainee by the US military, who complained of being kept ?in isolation?. In June 2002, according to an ISC report cited by the court, the SyS had discussed with Foreign and Commonwealth officials a US report that referred to the ?hooding, withholding of blankets and sleep deprivation of a detainee in Afghanistan?. Again, in July 2002, a SyS officer reported to his senior management that whilst in Afghanistan, ?a United States official had referred to ?getting a detainee ready?, which appeared to involve sleep deprivation, hooding and the use of stress positions.? The court ruling cited an official document that was sent to all Security Service and Secret Service officers in Afghanistan in January 2002: ?With regard to the status of the prisoners, under the various Geneva Conventions and protocols, all prisoners, however they are described, are entitled to the same levels of protection. You have commented on their treatment. It appears from your description that they may not be being treated in accordance with the appropriate standards. Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this. That said, HMG?s [Her Majesty?s Government] stated commitment to human rights makes it important that the Americans understand that we cannot be party to such ill treatment nor can we be seen to condone it.? Such is the Labour government?s venal double-talk: not only has the British government tacitly accepted the use of torture by the US authorities from the beginning of the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and benefited from the ?intelligence? it produces), British agents have actively facilitated it. All that counts is that HMG must not be ?seen? to condone it!
Manufactured Famine26 Aug 2008In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other extravangances, ?the most colossal and expensive meal in world history?, between 12 and 29 million people died(1). Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger. Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As Tony Blair?s favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he is the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty which will permit Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world?s poorest people. Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes from fish(2). Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population which ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; some two-thirds of these workers are women(3). Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal?s stocks. The European Union has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won?t confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to West Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result, Senegal?s marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country?s waters fell from 95,000 tons to 45,000 tons. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997(4). In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing families which once ate three times a day are now eating only once or twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The same thing has happened in all the west African countries with which the EU has maintained fisheries agreements(5,6). In return for wretched amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been looted. The government of Senegal knows this, and in 2006 it refused to renew its fishing agreement with the EU. But European fishermen – mostly from Spain and France – have found ways round the ban. They have been registering their boats as Senegalese, buying up quotas from local fishermen and transferring catches at sea from local boats. These practices mean that they can continue to take the country?s fish, and have no obligation to land them in Senegal. Their profits are kept on ice until the catch arrives in Europe. Mandelson?s office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements with African countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment. This means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people. The dodges used by European trawlers would be legalised. The UN?s Economic Commission for Africa has described the EU?s negotiations as ?not sufficiently inclusive?. They suffer from a ?lack of transparency? and from the African countries? lack of capacity to handle the legal complexities(7). ActionAid shows that Mandelson?s office has ignored these problems, raised the pressure on reluctant countries and ?moved ahead in the negotiations at a pace much faster than the [African nations] could handle.? If these agreements are forced on West Africa, Lord Mandelson will be responsible for another imperial famine. This is one instance of the food colonialism which is again coming to govern the relations between rich counties and poor. As global food supplies tighten, rich consumers are pushed into competition with the hungry. Last week the environmental group WWF published a report on the UK?s indirect consumption of water, purchased in the form of food(8). We buy much of our rice and cotton, for example, from the Indus Valley, which contains most of Pakistan?s best farmland. To meet the demand for exports, the valley?s aquifers are being pumped out faster than they can be recharged. At the same time, rain and snow in the Himalayan headwaters have decreased, probably as a result of climate change. In some places, salt and other crop poisons are being drawn through the diminishing water table, knocking out farmland for good. The crops we buy are, for the most part, freely traded, but the unaccounted costs all accrue to Pakistan. Now we learn that Middle Eastern countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are securing their future food supplies by trying to buy land in poorer nations. The Financial Times reports that Saudi Arabia wants to set up a series of farms abroad, each of which could exceed 100,000 hectares. Their produce would not be traded: it would be shipped directly to the owners. The FT, which usually agitates for the sale of everything, frets over ?the nightmare scenario of crops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals look on.? Through ?secretive bilateral agreements,? the paper reports, ?the investors hope to be able to bypass any potential trade restriction that the host country might impose during a crisis.? (9) Both Ethiopia and Sudan have offered the oil states hundreds of thousands of hectares(10,11). This is easy for the corrupt governments of these countries: in Ethiopia the state claims to own most of the land; in Sudan an envelope passed across the right desk magically transforms other people?s property into foreign exchange(12,13). But 5.6 million Sudanese and 10 million Ethiopians are currently in need of food aid. The deals their governments propose can only exacerbate such famines. None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to the rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power. This often means selling farm products, and increasing their value by processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but – in the short term at any rate – we will hardly notice. The rich world?s governments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve. References: 1. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London. 2. ActionAid, 11th August 2008. SelFISH Europe. http://www.illegal-fishing.info/uploads/ActionAidSelFISHEurope.pdf 3. ibid. 4. ibid. 5. Vlad M. Kaczynski and David L. Fluharty, March 2002. European policies in West Africa: who benefits from fisheries agreements? Marine Policy, Volume 26, Issue 2, pp75-93.
doi:10.1016/S0308-597X(01)00039-2 6. Tim Judah, 1st August 2001. The battle for West Africa?s fish. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1464966.stm 7. UNECA, EPA Negotiations: African Countries Continental Review, African Trade Policy Centre, February 2007. Quoted by ActionAid, ibid. 8. Ashok Chapagain and Stuart Orr, August 2008. UK Water Footprint: the impact of the UK?s food
and fibre consumption on global water resources. Volume one. http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwf_uk_footprint.pdf 9. Javier Blas and Andrew England, 19th August 2008. Foreign fields: Rich states look beyond their borders for fertile soil. Financial Times. 10. ibid. 11. Barney Jopson and Andrew England, 11th August 2008. Sudan woos investors to put $1bn in farming. Financial Times. 12. For discussions of how landrights in Africa are overruled, see: Lorenzo Cotula, September 2007. Legal empowerment for local resource control. International Institute for Environment and Development. http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/12542IIED.pdf and: 13. Camilla Toulmin, 2006. Securing Land and Property Rights in Africa: Improving the
Investment Climate. Chapter 2.3 of the Global Competitiveness Report, World Economic Forum, Switzerland.
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