Torture on New Labour's hands

With the expected arrival back today of Binyam Mohamed, the young British resident held for four years in the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp after his “rendition” by American forces in Pakistan, New Labour’s complicity in his torture has become blindingly clear. 

In past years, rogue soldiers, lawyers and whistleblowers have gone public to detail kidnapping, interrogation, physical and mental torture carried out in secret prisons around the world – and how European governments have connived in “rendering” suspects from country to country in their “war on terror”. 

What has been less widely known is the connivance of the British secret services and government in these illegal acts of barbarity. But now the evidence is pouring in thick and fast and New Labour will have trouble wriggling out, even though Foreign Secretary David Miliband claims that the UK does not condone torture. 

Clive Stafford Smith, the courageous lawyer who has represented Binyam, notes: “The fact that British intelligence was being used by torturers doesn’t in itself prove that the British knew torture was going on. But, given what we now know, they are at best pleading guilty to an unbelievable lack of curiosity”.   

Stafford Smith says that the UK government is suppressing evidence of torture. “Every essential of Binyam’s story [torture in Pakistan at the behest of the US authorities, rendering to Morocco and more torture, imprisonment in Bagram air base, Afghanistan, isolation in Gitmo, etc] has been corroborated,” Stafford-Smith says. “We have slowly dragged the torture documentation from unwilling governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet virtually none of these documents have been made public.” 

A month after Mohamed’s seizure on April 10, 2002, a British agent came to see him in Pakistan, allowed in by his American captors. The agent B encouraged Binyam to co-operate with his captors, and assured him that the British would look into his case. What Mohamed did not know was that the Americans had already shared a number of documents with the British. “These included admissions by American agents that they were torturing Binyam. Yet Agent B did not even ask him how he was being treated. Binyam was then rendered to Morocco,” says Stafford Smith. 

“He told me that his darkest point came one morning in Morocco. For the four months after Agent B’s visit, he waited for the British cavalry to appear. It was a mirage. Marwan, his Moroccan torturer, came into the interrogation room with questions and photographs that had clearly been provided by the British.” 

Stafford-Smith’s account is powerfully corroborated by the respected US organisation, Human Rights Watch (HRW). Despite detailing its concerns to the UK government as far back as last October, HRW has received no response. New Labour was clearly in a crisis at that time, as the attorney general had to decide whether there was to be an investigation into the treatment of Mohamed by British spooks.

HRW investigator, Ali Dayan Hasan led an investigation based in Pakistan, the results of which will be published in March. Sources within the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) provided “confirmation and information” that British agents colluded in the interrogation of terror suspects. These were not maverick elements, Hasan says, but “a significant number of UK agents”. He has collected evidence that M15 questioned at least 10 British citizens after they had been tortured by Pakistani intelligence agents. The HRW cites the case of Rangzieb Ahmed from Rochdale who had three of the fingernails of his left hand removed. Ahmed was later convicted of being a member of al-Qaida at Manchester Crown Court without the jury being told about this. 

Despite the phasing out of Guantanamo, there are still 1,100 prisoners being held beyond the rule of law in Bagram air base in Afghanistand, where they have no human rights whatsoever, a position confirmed by the Obama administration at the weekend. Thousands more languish in secret prisons in Iraq, Dijoubti, on prison ships, or are held by US proxies in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. Voiceless human beings, rendered, tortured and victims of the Anglo-American “war on terror”. 

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

 

An inspector calls

As lovers of good detective stories know, the gradual accumulation of seemingly unconnected facts unerringly, but in always surprising ways, weaken the defences of the guilty, and end in a damning conclusion. And so it is proving for the British state.

First: The High Court has ruled that British security services colluded in the unlawful detention and facilitated the interrogation of Binyam Mohamed, a UK resident detained in Pakistan six years ago. Two judges found that the foreign secretary had a duty to hand over to Binyam Mohamed's legal team secret information that could support his case that he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco before being sent to Guantánamo Bay where he remains locked up.

Second: The Home Office has lost confidential information on every prisoner in the country and more than 40,000 serious criminals. The records had been transferred to contractors PA Consulting as a consequence of the privatization of public services. The latest data scandal follows the loss of 25 million child benefit records last year and details of millions of learner drivers and army recruits earlier this year. Whitehall departments were ordered to tighten procedures in the wake of the previous crises and the latest loss has stunned insiders. There are concerns that prisoners may have the right to demand rehousing following the unlawful disclosure of their addresses. The potential costs are incalculable.

Third: The government's official statistics on property sales in the UK have been withdrawn from publication because they appear to be wrong. Or perhaps they’re just so shocking the government fears a revolt? HM Revenue and Customs said that revisions to the previous months' figures, going back to March this year, had cast doubt on their accuracy.

Figures for July were due out, but have been postponed. "Outputs obtained whilst updating the monthly series contained some significant and unexplained differences with the statistics published last month," a statement said. "All months in the statistical series are affected, with the differences showing falls in some months and increases in others," it added. "Our statisticians have come to the conclusion that something doesn't look quite right," explained an HMRC spokeswoman.

June's figures appeared to show that property sales had fallen that month to just 77,000. That was a 45% drop from the same month last year, when 140,000 properties were sold. This chimed closely with many other figures, which show that the market has gone through a sudden slump this year because of the credit crunch. For instance, the most recent report from the Land Registry for England & Wales showed that sales in April were down by 39% over the previous 12 months. The number of mortgages approved by lenders for house purchase was down by 69% in June, according to the Bank of England.

Also shaking the foundations of the economy built on property debt recycled through the City of London, comes news that - with a devastating and worsening slump in the housing market - some finance companies are paying people to take their mortgages elsewhere. Take this together with statistics from the Council of Mortgage Lenders confirming that of the few who have been taking on new loans, the bulk of mortgage lending this year has been to people who are not, in fact, moving house. Previous figures from the CML have shown that so far in 2008, only 29% of mortgage lending has been to house buyers.

Whilst the state and the economy was suffering a collective nervous breakdown yesterday, Gordon Brown was making a surprise visit to get closer to British troops serving in Afghanistan. He may well need their support the way things are going. But comparing their performance in the mad military adventure in Afghanistan to the pampered pussycats doing their thing at the Beijing Olympics may not have been the best message he could have delivered!

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

The 'Tsar' of Downing Street

Louise Casey is an archetypal New Labour apparatchik. She doesn’t care too much about human rights (if at all) and believes that the state’s priority is to identify and punish people as a way of changing behaviour. Listening to her is enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Casey is a classic case of a poacher turned gamekeeper. She made her name in the housing world, rising to deputy director of Shelter. Recruited to New Labour in 1997, Casey was appointed to head the government's rough sleepers unit and earned the title, "homelessness Tsar". She immediately declared that handing out soup and sleeping bags to those living on the street was merely perpetuating their misery.

The government was determined to rid the streets of the destitute and claimed a great success. Her old employers disputed her claims. The charity points out that the number of homeless people is at record levels and now stands over 100,000. "Homelessness is now a hidden problem. We want the government to build more affordable homes," says Shelter.

After this great achievement, Casey was appointed “respect Tsar” and headed the Home Office’s so-called anti-social behaviour (ASB) unit. This immediately set about criminalising young people by handing them ASB orders (Asbos) through the civil courts. When the orders were invariably broken, the teenagers were often jailed. Other “undesirables” also became targets, leading Harry Fletcher, from the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo), to say of Casey. "She seems to be defending every Asbo ever made. We are concerned that the original purpose of the legislation has been exceeded."

Napo is one of 30 organisations, including Liberty and the Howard League for Penal Reform, that banded together to form "Asbo Concern". Fletcher adds: "[The orders] are being used to sweep anybody off the street who is deemed to be undesirable: the mentally ill, those with Asperberger's syndrome and so on. People are being locked up for breaching orders imposed for offences, such as prostitution or begging, that are not imprisonable.” While she was “respect Tsar”, Casey famously made an expletive-ridden speech to senior police officers which joked about binge drinking.

After the respect issue was taken care of, Casey turned her attention to the criminal justice system. Now A cabinet office adviser and would-be “crime Tsar”, Casey today announced that the system is "distant, unaccountable and unanswerable". Her analysis was typically brutal and authoritarian: "We're all a little tired of hearing about the human rights and civil liberties of people who break the law. For years we have been listening to that - who is speaking up for the rights of law-abiding decent people?" she told BBC Breakfast. She recommends that offenders serving community sentences be made more "visible" to identify that they are being punished for breaking the law.

Casey said: "Once these people commit crimes they disappear into the system. We need to get over some of the hand-wringing that says we cannot put them in a uniform." She also suggests the government should consider contracting out enforcement of community work from the probation service and that probation officers be given powers to extend the time served by offenders on community service.

So now Britain is set to become a sort of Guantanamo Bay camp, where the unfortunate inmates at the notorious Camp X-ray wear orange jump suits so that they can be more easily identified. When you see someone in the street wearing an offender’s “uniform”, you will have Casey and New Labour to thank for the latest in a long line of human rights abuses that resonate with some of the darkest days of European history.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor