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The London Elections and Strategic Voting
The London elections loom. On 1 May 2008 people will be voting for the Mayor of London and the London Assembly, which has both constituency and London-wide members.
London Strategic Voter is an website not linked to any single political party. It claims to provide independent advice to voters looking for a progressive alternative to New Labour and the Tories, but who are frustrated by the unrepresentative first-past-the-post system we are currently saddled with. And there are more of you than you might think. According to LSV, in the 2004 elections 48% of Londoners voted for parties other than Tory or New Labour.
This site gives ward-by-ward information on how the 2004 London elections went, which can be accessed by postcode. The project aims to build a strong base of London progressive voters ready, willing and enabled to vote strategically at the next General Election to target a hung parliament by getting rid of pro-war, anti-environment and pro-privatisation New Labour MPs across London.
You can check out their advice and perspectives at: http://www.strategicvoter.org.uk/
Not a day longer
The Unsubscribe campaign at AI (UK) is asking people to pressure their MPs to reject the latest UK government attempt to extend executive detention without trial. This Tuesday proposals to extend pre-charge detention get their second reading in Parliament.
On 1 April (no, its sadly true…) proposals are being put in front of Parliament to extend the time people can be held without charge in the UK to 42 days – in other words the government want to be able lock people up for six weeks without having to say why. A clear and unnecessary erosion of habeus corpus.
The good news is that there are a lot of MPs and Lords prepared to fight this – but they need your encouragement and support. Others may be persuaded to make a stand if their constituents demand it.
So here’s what Amnesty suggest you can do:
1 Write to your MP and ask them to stand up for our civil rights and oppose this draconian extension of pre-charge detention. Simply pop your postcode into http://writetothem.com and the site will channel your mail to your own MP. It is important that you write in your own words (inspiration here).
2 Get everyone you know to sign their petition http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/notadaylonger
3 Spread the word everywhere you can on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, blogs and anywhere and everywhere you are active online.
The Iraq Surge… Again
With fighting surging in Basra and other parts of Iraq, the Government is, yet again, squirming out of holding an enquiry into how this whole mess got started. With 4,000 dead Americans and a current best estimate of 1,200,000 dead Iraqi’s, Tony Blair is taking a little time out from solving the Middle East conflict to to talk about ‘Faith and Globilisation’ at Westminster Abbey. Marvellous.
To keep track of some of the people who are actually responsible for starting our involvement, its worth a look at http://www.holdthemtoaccount.com/.
To get an update on how others in the inner circle of war initiators has prospered read Catherine Bennett here. However, even there one of the biggest beneficiaries of the WMD scam is not mentioned. John Scarlett, was promoted in May 2004 to be head of MI6. This followed his role in overseeing the ‘intelligence’ behind the dodgy dossier as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Transparent corruption at the highest level.
This is definetely a long term Project for the New “choose your own” Century. So, if you are still at school and thinking of joining up for this never ending jolly foreign colonial escapade, better check this out first: http://www.beforeyousignup.info
Update: A British soldier was killed in Iraq in the early hours of this morning.
Update 2: Sounding out Tony Blair is going to try and ensure his appearance at Westminster Abbey is not a quiet event…
Five Years of Progress
Amnesty International describes the curent state of play:
Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the country is still in disarray. The human rights situation is disastrous, a climate of impunity has prevailed, the economy is in tatters and the refugee crisis continues to escalate.
Seumas Milne sums it up brilliantly in The Guardian:
There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy
The problem in Iraq, we’re now told, was a lack of preparation, or the wrong kind of planning, or mistakes in implementation. If only, say the neocons, we had put our man Ahmad Chalabi in charge from the start, the Iraqis wouldn’t have felt so humiliated. If only we hadn’t dissolved the army, the pragmatists insist, the insurgency would never have taken off. If only the Brits had been running the show, mutter the old Whitehall hands, all would have been different. The problem, it turns out, was not the invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab oil state on a tide of official deceit, but the way it was carried out…
…For the future, so long as the disaster of Iraq is put down to mistakes or lack of planning, the real lessons will not be learned, but repeated – as appears to be happening now in Afghanistan. Gordon Brown has at last promised a full Iraq inquiry when British troops are no longer in the firing line. But any more delay to a proper accounting of what has taken place – including, as the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said at the weekend, the nature of the US-British relationship – will only further corrode the political system. The disaster of Iraq has at least had the effect of demonstrating the limits of imperial power and restraining further US attacks. The danger is, however, that next time they’ll just try and do it differently – without the mistakes.
The Zimbabwe Elections
On the 29th March Zimbabwe will go to the polls. From the outside its a complex thing to get to grips with. However, one thing appears plain. Change is badly needed and Zimbabawe needs fair elections, and for Robert Mugabe to loosen his grip and hand over power in a peaceful transition. But will it happen?
Fay Chung is one independent candidate who has decided to run in this potentially risky election process, and instead of supporting the MDC has thrown in her lot with Simba Makoni. Her international support blog is now running at http://zimbabwe-now.blogspot.com/ and provides some interesting alternative views.
For news on the situation in Zimbabwe try http://www.irinnews.org/
The case of Khaled al-Maqtari
Amnesty International has made a fresh call on the United States government to make known the whereabouts of people subjected to its secret detention operation in the ‘war on terror’.
The call came as Amnesty International released a detailed 48-page report on the case of a Yemeni man held in total isolation by his US captors, including information on how he was allegedly severely tortured – with a battery of physical and psychological methods – and how he was moved from prison to prison in three different countries (including to a secret ‘black site’ detention facility) over a period of nearly three years.
The report also includes an account of how British ‘Special Forces’ personnel in Iraq were involved in investigating the detained man (though not in his interrogation or torture) and how these apparently did nothing to raise the alarm about the his torture at the hands of American interrogators.
Five years on
From Stop the War
Next Saturday 15 March, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, will see a day of global
protests. The London demonstration will assemble at 12 noon in Trafalgar Square and march down Whitehall on a route which will surround Parliament. The rally in Trafalgar Square will
highlight the disasters of five years and more of war.
Speakers will include Tony Benn, ex-SAS trooper Ben Griffin, representatives from Palestine, Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas, Lindsey German from Stop the War Coalition and film director Nick Broomfield. Joining us on the stage will be Omar Deghayes, recently released from the Guantanamo torture centre, where he was held for five years.
Rendition and Torture: US and UK Governments Move to Suppress Evidence and Opposition
In late February, Ben Griffin, former member of the SAS, released a statement on the attempts by the UK government to suppress his testimony on British involvement in rendition and torture during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“As of 1940hrs 29/02/08 I have been placed under an injunction preventing me from speaking publicly and publishing material gained as a result of my service in UKSF (SAS).
I will be continuing to collect evidence and opinion on British Involvement in extraordinary rendition, torture, secret detentions, extra judicial detention, use of evidence gained through torture, breaches of the Geneva Conventions, breaches of International Law and failure to abide by our obligations as per UN Convention Against Torture. I am carrying on regardless “
Meanwhile, the non-debate, being held in the US on the definitions of torture and ill treatment were placed in context by an ex-prisioner of the Japanese during world war II , Eric Lomax (The Railway Man). Having survived waterboarding he is left in no doubt as to what this means and its legal status.
The American Civil Liberties Union comment on the moves by George Bush to retain torture for legal use by the US:
In a brazen move signaling a callous disregard for human rights, President Bush today vetoed the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act largely due to a provision that would have applied the Army Field Manual (AFM) on Interrogations to all government agencies, including the CIA.
Revelations about detention flights in Diego Garcia highlight need for full inquiry
Further inquiries into allegations of rendition flights announced by the UK government should not be a substitute for a full, independent investigation into any other UK involvement in renditions, Amnesty international said following the admission by the US and UK governments that two rendition flights had landed in Diego Garcia in 2002.
“As recognized by the UK government, the revelation that US planes, involved in the transfers of detainees, landed in Diego Garcia directly contradicts its own repeated assurances and public denials to the contrary. It highlights the need for full investigations into the USA’s detention and rendition practices and any involvement or complicity of European countries,” Claudio Cordone, Senior Director at Amnesty International said today.
“European governments must now recognize that reliance on US assurances about renditions has been an inadequate response to an unlawful practice. The Diego Garcia admission must spur into action all European countries by initiating thorough, independent investigations. Governments must heed the calls by the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe and the European Parliament. They must also take immediate steps to ensure that the practice of rendition is not allowed to happen again.”
Kosovan Independence
Kosovo is apparently about to declare its independence from Serbia, against resistance from Serbia. I have mixed feelings about Kosovo, which is run by a particularly nasty Albanian mafia, but then if the people want self-determination, they should get it.
There is a very important point here for Scotland. We shall see how the EU and UN react. Gordon Brown, his tame UK government lawyers and the New Labour hack academic establishment in Scotland continue to argue, against the last twenty years of international experience, that it would be impossible in international law for Scotland to claim independence unilaterally without the agreement of the UK authorities. Kosovo is about to show that is not the international legal position in 2008.
Given that the UK will recognise Kosovo, it is ludicrous for the same people to argue that for Scotland to do the same as Kosovo would be illegal.
Meanwhile the citizens of Berwick Upon Tweed allegedly wish to rejoin Scotland, according to an opinion poll. Of course they are Scottish. But we certainly shouldn’t formally expand any further South after that for a while, or we’ll get lumbered with Northern Rock.
I love railways, and travel often over the main East Coast line on that beautiful curve over the glistening Tweed. But it still amazes me that the Victorians drove the track right through the keep of Berwick Castle, one of the most historic sites in the UK.
There is an important point in all this. Bringing Berwick into Scotland would of course move the potential lateral maritime boundary between England and Scotland. You may recall that, as Head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Maritime Section, I personally negotiated the UK’s current maritime boundaries with France, Denmark (the Faeroes) and Ireland. I calculate that Berwick would bring an independent Scotland about 1360 square miles of hydrocarbon rich seabed, when the oil price is making marginal and residual production increasingly attractive. So this is less frivolous than it sounds.
High Court Hearing on Legality of Iraq Invasion
Today is the last day of the hearing by the Law Lords brought by Military Families Against the War (MFAW). Beverly Clarke and Rose Gentle have argued that ministers breached their duty to Britain’s armed forces by failing to ensure that the invasion was lawful. They are demanding a public enquiry is established to look into how the war was initiated.
In particular, the women are challenging a Court of Appeal ruling that said the Government was not obliged to order an independent inquiry under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the “right to life”.
Over the last two days the law lords have been considering the mothers’ argument that servicemen and women have the right not to have their lives jeopardised in illegal conflicts.
Rose Gentle writes: “Blair and his cronies must be held to account. I want Justice for my son Gordon and all the other soldiers and civilians whose lives were lost due to this illegal and immoral war.”
The Bugging of Babar Ahmad
Having been a member of the Senior Civil Service for six years, I can assure you of two things:
a) The logging and tracking system for MPs’ – let alone shadow cabinet members’ – letters arriving into No 10 is very tight. It is not possible David Davis’ letter was lost and unrecorded. Nor do I see any reason to doubt that Mr Davis sent it.
b) There are some very right wing people in the security services. It is essential for our democracy that they are not allowed to interfere with our lawmakers.
Jack Straw has gone for the usual government whitewash ploy of choosing a safe conservative judge to mount a long inquiry. In fact, if Straw had any interest in the truth he could find out in a couple of hours if Sadiq Khan MP was bugged, particularly as the individual who allegedly did the bugging has come forward. It looks like this may well lead back to the appalling Sir Ian Blair yet again.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2252618,00.html
But one thing that nobody seems to be commenting on is the position of poor Babar Ahmad, whose wife and father I have had the privilege to meet. Ahmad has been in jail for many years, without a single shred of evidence against him being produced to any judge, ever. It is unclear what exactly he is supposed to have done. It relates apparently to websites supporting the Taliban and Chechen separatists, though supporting in what sense has never been spelt out.
Babar Ahmad denies any connection to any such websites anyway, and I repeat again that no evidence of any kind has ever been produced, nor do the police have any. That is why they have been bugging him for years. The bugging has produced no result either.
Ahmad is being held under the appalling 2002 extradition agreement with the US, which places the UK in the position of a vassal state. Provided the forms are filled in properly, the UK has to extradite its nationals to the US without any evidence being produced by the US that there is even a prima facie case to answer. Astonishingly, our lackey government signed up to this with no reciprocity – we have to extradite our citizens to the US, but the US will not extradite its citizens here without a hearing of evidence by a US court. This is one of the more startling proofs of the abandonment of UK autonomy by Blair that morphed the “Special relationship” into one of master and servant.
The other interesting angle being ignored is, of course, that the results of bugging could not have been used in court here either. Commentators are generally puzzled by the government’s refusal to make bugging material admissible as evidence in court, and tend to take the view that this is a last vestige of liberalism.
In fact this is the opposite. Bugging material is in fact used in court, sanitised as “intelligence”, and given in tiny out of context clips to judges in camera to justify continued detention without trial or control orders. It is also used at the Special Immigration Appeals Tribunal, a de facto terrorism court. Brian Barder’s account of his resignation from that little known body is interesting.
http://www.barder.com/ephems/348
The defence and the “suspect” are not shown the “intelligence” or even given any hint what they are supposed to have done.
So the government’s objection to the use of bugging material in court is that it would, 99 times out of 100, help the defence. Rather than giving one or two apparently damning sentences out of context as “intelligence”, they would have to make full disclosure of all the transcripts to defence lawyers. As in the case of Babar Ahmad, the fact that years of covert surveillance revealed no bomb or terrorist plots, (which I know for sure) and may have revealed anti-terrorist views (which is speculation), would help the defence.
The same is true, incidentally, of the so-called liquid bomb plotters, some of whom were also bugged for over a year, revealing no plot to bomb up airplanes. Not helpful to have all that in court if you are trying to hype the terrorist threat.
This is not speculation. Remember I was on the inside of this “War on Terror”. I know.
Painstakingly scrupulously nuanced political analysis
1. Tim Ireland is a terribly nice man who has pioneered political blogging.
2. Paul Staines is a vindictive muck-raker and a bit of a wanker.
3. Err…that’s it. But I think that’s enough.
Sunday Morning Thoughts
Another sell-out for “The British Ambassador’s Belly Dancer” last night took us past our 1,000th person to experience it. We are one week away from moving into the Arts Theatre in the West End and hopefully welcoming that many people every couple of days – a scary thought. Baroness Sarah Ludford, LibDem MEP and (relevantly) Vice Chair of the European Parliament Committee on Extraordinary Rendition was in the audience last night. So far I’ve seen three ex-British Ambassadors – and they’re only the ones I’ve noticed.
More good news – Marks and Spencers have joined Tesco in the boycott of Uzbek cotton, and instituted audit trails to check there isn’t any in their products. This really is amazing.
I know some of my friends will find this hard to accept, but this commercial boycott has come about because, faced with incontrovertible proof of the mass exploitation of children and slave workers, these major British companies have acted out of their own desire to behave ethically, not out of consumer, governmental or judicial pressure, because there hasn’t been any. Discuss.
Yesterday was Australia Day which meant I had to hurdle prone bodies to get around Shepherds Bush. I have been trying to get my Rectorial Address into the right format to publish it as a booklet on Lulu, but it’s technically beyond me. Any volunteers?
A Life Saved!
I can’t really afford it, but I have just bought and opened a bottle of the best bubbly I can find in Shepherds Bush. Jahongir Sidikov has phoned me to say that the Home Office has just granted him asylum. You will recall that Jahongir had to physically resist deportation from Harmondsworth Detention Centre to certain torture and near certain death in Uzbekistan.
Jahongir has no doubt, and nor do I, that the actions of readers of this blog were crucial in preventing this appalling proposed deportation. Special thanks go to the MPs you activated. Several deserve thanks, but Bob Marshall Andrews deserves a really special mention.
It is not yet clear whether the Home Office now accept as a matter of policy that it is not possible to deport dissidents into the hands of the evil Uzbek regime. That is a point you might wish to take up with your MPs.
But for now, thank you and bloody well done. I am going to get rat-arsed.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/11/britain_institu.html
Amazon
Rather strangely, 10 of 21 customer reviews of “Murder in Samarkand” have been removed from amazon.co.uk, including most of the longest and more interesting ones. They have not disappeared in chronological order. In fact the one thing the ten had in common is that they were all five star. The overall rating has therefore unsurprisingly dropped. Anyone have an explanation?
A Different Culture
The ever formidable Brian Barder had posted a fascinated observation on the growing weirdness of US political culture. Here is an excerpt:
It’s sad because it’s another example of the steadily widening gulf between the political culture in the US and that in the rest of the west, exemplified by the Iraq war (leaving aside, if possible, the UK’s culpable complicity in it), the so-called “war on terror” and its implications for civil liberties, extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay, the role of religion, attitudes to capital punishment and the treatment of prisoners, demonstrative patriotism, and now the role of the US sub-prime market in bringing about the impending recession which will engulf the rest of us as well as the United States. Alas, it’s no longer the case that the rest of the civilised world looks to the US as its moral and political leader. And I fear that the causes of this ever-widening gulf go much deeper than just the consequences of the catastrophic presidency of G W Bush: whoever succeeds him will not be able to build a durable bridge across it. Many of us small-L liberals used to feel that we had more in common with our American cousins than with our historical enemies just across the English Channel, the French and the Germans, and even our slightly more distant historical friends, the Scandinavians and the Dutch. I don’t think that’s true any more.
http://www.barder.com/ephems/754
The whole is well worth reading. Barack Obama leaves me stone cold too. I think we underestimate how different and dangerous the US now is. Last year I delivered a talk on Central Asia at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As I sat preparing my lecture, I had the television on low in my hotel room because I don’t like complete silence. Gradually I found myself listening intently to an evangelical preacher, telling his TV congregation that they should not worry about casualties in Iraq because the Bible showed us that there had to be a great and bloody conflict in the Middle East before the Second Coming of Christ. So the more people who died in these wars, the closer we are to Jesus.
Now that message would be acceptable to very few people in the UK – just Tony Blair and his immediate friends, really. I related this astonishing thing I had heard to some American lecturers over lunch. They told me that at least a third of their students would believe this stuff. And this was Ann Arbor, not the Deep South. It is essential that we all wake up now to the fact that the US is a deeply disturbed and psychotic society, and by far the biggest danger to world peace.
Peter Hain
I am really sorry Peter Hain has resigned. Of course, part of me is delighted to crow at the exposure of yet another New Labour financial scandal. But other feelings overrule this.
Peter Hain was the hero of my childhood, who inspired my interest in politics, and helped cement my values, through his anti-Apartheid campaign. I joined the Young Liberals and was soon on their National Executive and a contributor to Liberator. Hain was a talented footballer, and playing against him at a Young Liberal conference in Great Yarmouth around 1975, the only way I could cope with him was to kick him in the bollocks and have him carried from the field.
There was an amazing parallel to this in 2000 when I was playing alongside him in a charity game in Accra, and broke my shoulder in a nasty tackle – he helped carry me off the field.
It was the existence of Peter Hain as a Minister which was one of the factors which led me naively and disastrously to believe for a long while in Uzbekistan that our government could not be knowingly receiving intelligence from torture, and it must be a low level operation. When the government in consequence of my interventions on this issue tried to frame me with false allegations, in a personal way it came home to me hard just how completely Hain and the other New Labour careerists had sold their souls.
Yet I feel sorry for him now, which shows what a sentimental old twit I still am.
Imprisonment
Occasionally there is a moment of revelation, when an image makes plain an underlying truth. I think the Palestinian breakout through the Wall from Gaza into Egypt is such a moment. The joy of the ordinary Palestinians as they poured through the gap to do simple things like stretch their legs and shop, brought home graphically a truth which the Western media has been hiding for years: that an entire population is imprisoned in Gaza.
The images were so obviously reminiscent of the joy at the fall of the Berlin Wall, that it is going to be difficult to convince public opinion in most of the world that it is a good idea to wall the Palestinians up again. Only the most purblind can fail to realise that this terrible imprisonment and degradation is a major cause of Islamic radicalism, not only in the rise of Hamas but worldwide. It is essential that Egypt now resist pressure from the US and Israel to intern the Palestinians again.
Where is Tony Blair, the Middle East “Peace Envoy”? Not speaking out for the Palestinians right to freedom, certainly.
No doubt Aaronovitch and the Times will now call me anti-Semitic again.
Meantime back at home the government blindly pushes ahead with increasing Muslim grievance with yet another “Anti-terror” bill designed to curb our civil liberties still further. There is no possible justification for the desire to introduce internment at home. This will merely stoke still further the sense of grievance and alienation that can lead a tiny minority into violent reaction.