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You know, the likes of David Miliband and Alan Johnson can whine all they like about being outed as the friends of torturers and butchers while trying to supress the details of Binyam Mohamed’s treatment, but it’s not as if New Labour don’t have previous form on this.

To suggest that the government fought this case to avoid embarrassment or save face is just plain wrong…

…is weapons-grade horseshit from our estimable Foreign and Home secretaries.

Tell it to Sandy Mitchell, Les Walker and Bill Sampson who were tortured by the Saudi Arabian government in 2002. The then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the mens’ families ‘not to rock the boat‘. Labour hired top-notch lawyers to make sure then men didn’t get redress. Was that to avoid embarrassment or save face? A bit of both considering we sell billions in arms to our Saudi mates.

Tell it to Craig Murray who, as UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, was smeared and sidelined for saying he wasn’t too happy that the Uzbek government (our pals in The War Against Terror) had a thing for boiling people to death. Jack Straw had a hand in that as well. His fingerprints were all over these torture cases back in the day. Was Murray’s treatment to avoid embarrassment or save face? Again, arms sales figured in the equation as did the fact that Uzbekistan borders Afghanistan and was the ideal location for coalition air bases.

Tell it to the Egyptian asylum seekers who Tony Blair wanted to deport despite being told the people faced torture and execution. ‘This is crazy. Why can’t we press on?’ said the great man of God. Avoiding embarrassment and saving face? That and appeasing the right-wing press and securing freebie holidays.

This squalid little crew always worked hardest when it came to avoiding embarrassment and saving face. If only they’d put as much energy into running the country.

The Prime Minister celebrates a man released from torment…

His story reminds us that that there is no corner of the earth so far away, no injustice so entrenched, no enemy so powerful that people of good conscience cannot campaign for change and win.

No, he wasn’t talking about Binyam Mohamed.

Away from the calamity and misery Blair’s government visited upon brown people, have you seen the misery and calamity his successor’s is visiting upon brown people?

How about…

A group of women being held at Yarl’s Wood immigration centre are refusing food for a fifth day in protest over the length of detention and being separated from children… On Monday, day four of the hunger strike, a group of about 50 women tried to move around the centre and were locked in a corridor. The women say they were held there for hours on end without water or access to a toilet. They told campaigners some of them had fainted.

…or…

Claims that asylum seekers are mistreated, tricked and humiliated by staff working for the UK Border Agency are to be investigated in parliament… Louise Perrett, who worked as a case owner at the Border Agency office in Cardiff for three and a half months last summer… alleges that one official boasted to her that he tested the claims of boys from African countries who said they had been forcibly conscripted as child soldiers by making them lie down on the floor and demonstrate how they shot at people in the bush. Perrett… said interviews were conducted without lawyers, independent witnesses or tape recorders. If a case was difficult, Perrett claims, she was simply advised to refuse it and “let a tribunal sort it out”. Only cases raised by MPs appeared to be dealt with properly… One of her cases involved a Congolese woman who had the right to remain in the UK. Perrett says a superior nevertheless decided the woman and her children should be removed…

The BNP’s immigration aspirations are enough to bring people onto the streets. And yet the active and dangerous immigration policies of a so-called Labour government elicits barely a squeak much beyond refugee advocacy groups. It’s time to give less attention to the damage a potential (and impossible) Griffin government might do to refugees and time to start having a look at what damage a very real Brown government is doing to refugees.

Where’s the outrage? Where are the eggs and howling mobs for the people who are actually doing this rather than the the people who will do it if a billion-to-one psephological chance comes to pass? How about taking a little bit of the anger reserved for fools like Nadine Dorries and directing it at the thugs of the UK Border Agency?

You can say a Tory government would be worse than New Labour on immigration and the way it treats refugees but the way New Labour has treated refugees over the last 13 years is one of its deeper shames amongst many. It cracks wide open the big shitty lie of Gordon Brown’s claim of having a ‘moral compass’.

Like I said, where’s the outrage? All I can hear is a Daily Mail silence. A Tory silence.

(More information at the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns where you can sign up for email alerts and help campaigns.)

…or the nuclear industry and my part in its downfall.

There’s a big story breaking at Greenpeace today. Despite assurances from the nuclear industry that things had been cleaned up, Greenpeace has found that the villages near the uranium mines in Niger are still contaminated with radiation…

I’m extremely pleased to say that I played a small part in helping bring the scandal to light. Back in January I wrote a rather strident post for Greenpeace’s Nuclear Reaction blog about just what the French nuclear company AREVA had been getting up to at its uranium mines in Niger.

AREVA weren’t very happy about that and in their response they invited Greenpeace to go to Niger and see what was going on for themselves. The Greenpeace nuclear campaign accepted the invitation and this month, after much hard work and planning, sent a team to Niger. And they certainly did see for themselves… AREVA nuclear scandal: Greenpeace finds radiation on the streets of Niger.

One is a fat, wonkey-eyed loser with repugnant attitudes towards immigration, and the other is the leader of the British National Party.

One has his thugs break down foreigners’ doors at dawn, and the other is the leader of the British National Party.

One has his thugs intern foreigners and their children, and the other is the leader of the British National Party.

One has his thugs regularly and frequently beat foreigners, and the other is the leader of the British National Party.

One has his thugs traumatise foreigners’ children, and the other is the leader of the British National Party.

One is loading darkies on to planes and sending them back to some of the world’s worst hellholes, and the other is the leader of the British National Party.

As the Yarls Wood door clanged shut on her, no doubt Adeoti Ogunsola said to herself, ‘thank God Gordon Brown isn’t a fascist’.

As the life drained out of him, no doubt Manuel Bravo said to himself, ‘thank God Gordon Brown isn’t a fascist’.

As the bullets thudded into him, no doubt Adam Osman Mohammed said to himself, ‘thank God Gordon Brown isn’t a fascist’.

Half the country seems up in arms that Nick Griffin is being allowed near a television studio but when a man, who has done things to foreigners that would give Griffin wet dreams from here to eternity goes, goes on GMTV barely anybody squeaks. Hell, a huge chunk of them voted for him.

Some fat wannabe-Nazi pillock goes on the telly and you’d think the barbarians were at the gates. The Prime Minister is shipping darkies off like so much freight and we’re more worried about whether the one with all the teeth from Girls Aloud is lip-synching on Saturday night TV. And yet Griffin’s never going to wreck the number of lives Brown has – not if he lives to be a thousand.

Griffin’s a bastard in a small, squalid way. You want to see a proper scumbag? He’s running the bloody country.

Trafigura. Gagging. Injunctions. Suppressed reports. Caustic Soda. Freedom of Speech. Carter-Ruck. The Minton Report. The Ivory Coast. Birth defects, miscarriages and deaths…

All you need to know is right here.

(Via Nick Barlow on Twitter)

You need to have a serious talk to someone about how the Internet and search engines work. This was the first page of Google.co.uk search for Trafigura earlier this morning…

Click for the bigger picture

For those coming in late…

Welcome to the United Kingdom, 2009…

Reading the high court judgment, you have to pinch yourself and remember that this isn’t Kenya under Daniel arap Moi, but good old Blighty, where the police are impartial, the civil service disinterested and a minister’s word is his bond. In a civilised country, at least half a dozen senior officials would now be charged with perjury, the secretary of state for defence would be facing impeachment hearings and a number of soldiers would be on trial for torture and murder. But in the United Kingdom, where we see only what we choose, the judgment sinks without a ripple. We carry on believing what we have always been told: that unlike other countries, we do things properly here.

But anyway. What’s Jordan been up to lately?

This week is Refugee Week. Like all highly politicised and emotive issues, the use of language used when we talk about refugees is extremely important and worthy of study.

In this case, I defer to Steven Poole in his indispensable book, Unspeak.

Also a threat to the fictionally homogeneous ‘community in Britain were ‘asylum seekers’, those seeking to stay in the country on the grounds that they were persecuted in their place of origin. The term ‘asylum seeker’ had gradually replaced ‘refugee’, shifting the emphasis from what a person was fleeing to the demands he was making on the country he arrived in. It was safe to call people ‘refugees’ as long as they remained elsewhere in the world (as, for example, those displaced by the 2004 Asian tsunami); but as soon as they arrived on British shores they became ‘asylum seekers’.

It’s a process of dehumanisation. You strip any element of compassion by painting refugees as scroungers which has the double effect of obscuring any possible mention of what benefits – cultural and economic – that refugees can bring to Britain. It’s simple, elegant and horribly effective.

When brutality and terror and abuse are government tools, used against people whose only crime is to want to come to this country for a better life, it’s a vital time to fight for the rights of refugees.

It’s Refugee Week from June 15 – 21. There’s loads happening. Perhaps a simple act is in order.

Pass it on.

So, Daily Telegraph lawyers take incoherent gobshite and toe-curling political embarrassment Nadine Dorries’ blog offline after she makes certain remarks about the newspaper’s methods and the ‘motives’ of the newspaper’s owners, the Barclay Brothers.

In the spirit of solidarity Craig Murray is hosting the offending remarks on his blog. Go and judge for yourself. It’s in no way comparable to the Alisher Usmanov affair that took down several prominent blogs and her supporters who say it is are trying to grab a little reflected honour for Dorries’ sorry fantasies.

Throwing lawyers at her elevates her to a high-ground she’s neither earned nor deserves. She’s no martyr however much she likes to make herself out to be one when she’s losing an argument (which is often). It’s good to see her increasingly shrill outbursts getting a hammering. She’s deserving more of laughter than litigation. Let her whine away I say – it’s one of the finest spectator sports there is.

Remember the notorious threats to public order, four year-old Arouna Gaye and his mother, Fatou Felicite Gaye, who were interned in Dungavel detention centre after a dawn raid in Glasgow?

Glasgow SNP MP John Mason raised their case in the House of Commons yesterday:

This four-year-old has already been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder caused by previous interaction with the Border Agency.

Post-traumatic stress disorder in a four-year old boy. That phrase ‘previous interaction’ is doing a lot of work there. I imagine it involves shouting and pushing and screaming and crying.

In who is that supposed to instil confidence about how our asylum system works other than voters for the British National Party? True or false: we have a humane asylum process in this country.

The revolting immigration minister Phil Woolas, in that sociopathic tic required of all government minister that allows them to view human life as an abstract concept (unless they’re grovelling for a discount in Tesco), said he ‘could not discuss the case in detail’. He did manage to call the situation ‘regrettable’. He didn’t say who’d be doing the regretting.

Look, this MPs’ expenses cataclysm is a side show. While we’re hurling rotten fruit at the government they’re carrying on doing their job and rounding up the real bastards. All I can say is thank Christ these public menaces had their doors kicked in at dawn and were dragged to a detention centre:

A woman from the Ivory Coast and her four-year-old son are being held at the Dungavel detention centre following an early morning raid in Glasgow.

It comes days after details of measures to improve the treatment of failed asylum seekers were announced.

And look at these scumbags…

Ismail Cherbal and Safia Aouf, nationals of Algeria, and their British-born children Sonia aged four and son Aya aged 15 months have been detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre for the past 32 days.

Fifteen months old? Well, you can’t be too careful. You might think that New Labour are a bunch of grasping venal bastards but under all the brouhaha with expenses, the true heart of our government still beats.

What sort of country sends a dozen uniformed officers to haul innocent sleeping children out of their beds; gives them just a few minutes to pack what belongings they can grab; pushes them into stinking caged vans; drives them for hours while refusing them the chance to go to the lavatory so that they wet themselves and locks them up sometimes for weeks or months without the prospect of release and without adequate health services?

Our country, apparently.

(See also the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns)

While we’re on the subject of Gordon Brown’s heroes and heroines, another featured in his book was Dame Cicely Saunders. She was regarded as the founder of the modern hospice movement, helping terminally ill people to die with dignity and as comfortably as possible.

You wonder what she would have made of the likes of this, done on her admirer’s watch…

Hospices are struggling with debts as funding promised by the government has failed to materialise, campaigners say.

…or this…

The Government has rejected calls to boost funding for children’s hospices to equal that of adult services.

…or this…

More than a third of hospices expect they will fail to raise enough money this financial year to fund their services.

…or this…

A HOSPICE for terminally ill children from Gloucestershire is appealing for toys and presents for the children following a major cut in funding.

What, if any, example or guidance Brown has taken from his heroine? Speaking late last year about an assisted-suicide law, Brown found a scrap of what passes for his personal morality, and said he opposed such a law because ‘I think we have got to make it absolutely clear that the importance of human life is recognised’. And then you read something like this…

The standard of care of the terminally ill in the NHS in England has been criticised by MPs. Palliative care has been given a low priority, said members of the Committee of Public Accounts.

[...]

They said people who died in hospital did not always receive first rate care, such as the most effective pain management, and were not always treated with dignity and respect.

In other words, the dying should grit their teeth and show some Brownian courage. To be fair, he doesn’t get much dignity and respect either.

The closer Gordon Brown’s Courage: Eight Portraits gets to the remainder bins, the more perverse it becomes as a joke. Gordon Brown and courage in the same sentence. We laughed at the time. We’re not laughing now.

For those who don’t remember, just before being anointed New Labour leader and Prime Minister, Brown released his anthology of profiles of Edith Cavell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Raoul Wallenberg, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Dame Cicely Saunders* and… Aung San Suu Kyi. Nobody really knows why. Theories abound about the book being a rather pathetic pitch for some sort of reflected glory.

With most of them dead and Mandela already out of the nick, it’s been interesting to watch Brown’s actions for Aung San Suu Kyi. There haven’t been many. For instance, Brown’s heroine has received just five public utterances of support from her biggest fan since he became one of the world’s supposedly most powerful men, according to the Number 10 website.

So what can we expect from Gordon now that Aung San Suu Kyi is ‘to face trial for breaching the conditions of her detention under house arrest‘ (the breach consisting of being under house arrest when a bloke decided to swim a lake to visit her uninvited)?

It’ll be worth keeping an eye on the news. The Burmese junta had better back off before Gordon is forced to express regret and concern. Maybe we could bomb the top security prison where Ms Suu Kyi is being held with unsold copies of Gordon’s book.

(You can join Amnesty International for as little as two pounds a month.)

Video of Craig giving his evidence is here.

Update: BBC coverage.

ORIGINAL DOWNING ST SMEARS VICTIM RETURNS TO HAUNT NEW LABOUR

Thatcher Room
Portcullis House
Tuesday 28 April 1.45pm
Formal Evidence Session on UK Complicity in Torture
Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights
Witness: Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan
(currently Rector of the University of Dundee).

In 2004, Craig Murray told us that:

- The British Government was complicit in the most vicious forms of torture
- He had been the victim of a lurid smear campaign initiated by New Labour
- The government was lying about all this

In 2004, much of the public and media was not willing to accept that the government would cooperate with torture or with false allegations against an innocent man. Many still had trust in the basic honesty and decency of government.

The evidence that Craig Murray was telling the truth about torture has now become overwhelming, including from the case of Binyam Mohammed. The UK “benefited” continually from intelligence passed on from the CIA waterboarding programme and from torture in countries including Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Egypt.

Craig Murray suffered the most high profile sacking of any British Ambassador for a century. But in 2005 the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee refused to hear him in evidence, despite allowing Jack Straw to appear and attack him.

Astonishingly, this is the first time Craig Murray will ever have been allowed to give formal evidence in the UK on his grave allegations, and be questioned on the truth of his testimony.

As the Scotland Yard investigation proceeds into MI5 and MI6 collusion in 16 cases of torture, Craig Murray will argue that it is not the security service operatives, but the Ministers who set the policy – and specifically Jack Straw – who should be facing criminal charges.

Contact: Craig Murray on 07979 691085 or craigmurray@mail.ru
Transcript of Craig Murray’s formal evidence statement is at http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/trying_again_my.html

While we’re on the subject of New Labour’s attitude towards human rights, we have this…

A failed asylum-seeker who returned to Darfur under a government repatriation scheme has been murdered by Sudanese security officers after they followed him home from the airport in Khartoum, The Independent has learnt.

Adam Osman Mohammed, 32, was gunned down in his home in front of his wife and four-year-old son just days after arriving in his village in south Darfur.

Adam was a ‘a non-Arab Darfuri’. A UK Border Agency spokesman says ‘in July last year we took the decision to stop returning non-Arab Darfuris until the courts decided it was safe to do so’. And yet Adam was deported in August last year. Clearly someone didn’t get the memo and a man paid with his life.

Still, it doesn’t do to examine individual cases. It prevents us from treating refugees as a single vague, amorphous entity and ignoring what happens to them.

I wonder if they got him to sign a waiver.

(Via Councillor Bob)

* That’s what Lin Homer called the misery factory she presides over.

Here we go. Several British nationals allege being tortured under the auspices of that great moral crusade, The War Against Terror. Pakistan, Syria, Bangladesh and Egypt are just some of the high-class venues on the sales tour for ‘universal values‘.

Just one snag. Instead of screaming their outrage from the rooftops, the moral force for good in the world, the British government, instead decided to keep schtum…

The Foreign Office has admitted failing to make complaints on behalf of British nationals who say they have been tortured after being detained overseas during counter-terrorism investigations.

The Foreign Office, however, does have a fine reason for not discussing the case of Azhar Khan who says ‘Egyptian intelligence officers who detained him when he flew into the country last July to stand on the same spot for five days, with little rest, while beating him and subjecting him to electric shocks’.

They’re worried about his rights…

“The FCO takes data protection seriously, and we would not want to place Mr Khan in a position where he felt that his rights under the act had potentially been compromised,” a spokesman said.

How nice of them. How convenient for them. Please read that again. Savour it. Think that someone sat in a room and thought hard until that idea struck them. Imagine the sighs of relief all round at the Foreign Office.

So, I’m starting a little chart of how the British government prioritises the rights of its citizens. This is what I have so far…

At least illegally detained prisoners can console themselves with the fact that, as the scalpel sweeps at their reproductive organs or the fist swings at their kidneys, their secrets are safe with the UK government.

Were you one of the hundreds of people who sent an email to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights asking them to listen to former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray’s evidence on the UK government’s policy of using intelligence from torture?

It’s quite likely your public servants deleted it without even reading it.

I think we have to file this under YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME!!!

JACQUI Smith, the Home Secretary who has championed moves to imprison terrorist suspects for 42 days without charge, is a member of the human rights charity Amnesty International.

But… but… She’s what?

Being indoctrinated into the cognitive bifurcation techniques that all New Labour ministers must master if they are to be truly successful, Ms Smith no doubt considers her membership of Amnesty as compatible with her series of attempts to have people disappeared.

Me, I need a lie down. This simply can’t be true, can it? Is it actually some kind of government psychological warfare operation to mess with liberals’ heads? It’s worked.

The author this morning

MINDFUCK UPDATE: David Blunkett is a member as well! Waaaaaaah! I want my mum…

MINDFUCK UPDATE UPDATED: It’s exactly a year to the day since I wrote this.#

MINDFUCK UPDATE UPDATED: There are two Amnesty members in the cabinet. Secretary of State for International Development Douglas Alexander is also member. I strongly urge you to examine his parliamentary voting record to attempt to identify the compatibility.

Not got a lot of time for blogging today but didn’t want these to pass without notice.

Matthew Norman in the Independent on why the real treachery against soldiers comes not from dickheads with placards but from Gordon Brown:

On Tuesday, even as the PM railed against the disrespect shown to the troops, an article in the new edition of the revered military journal International Affairs dealt with the crisis in British defence. Before concluding that the “state of degeneration (is) perhaps more serious than at any time since the end of the Cold War,” its authors touched on the “critical shortage” of helicopters in Afghanistan. Whether any of the dozen Anglians, or “Poachers” lost in combat died because of this, insufficient training, useless or non-existent body armour, or inadequate troop strength left them outnumbered, I’ve no idea. But many British soldiers have lost their lives and been wounded because their Labour overlords failed to equip, prepare and protect them properly, and more will do so in Afghanistan in the years ahead.

Timothy Garton Ash has an excellent breakdown of the Binyam Mohamed affair and why next week’s Foreign Office’s annual report on human rights violations around the world will be a farce.

In these circumstances, and given all we know from the high court, any decision other than to hand this over to the director of public prosecutions will inevitably be interpreted as a political cover-up. Until we have got to the bottom of this dark well, using the unrestricted searchlight of the law, any lectures the British government tries to deliver to others on respect for human rights will be dismissed as rank hypocrisy.

Arm of the UK state uses Guantanamo-style psychological warfare on environmental protesters:

The report, launched by the Liberal Democrats, said the music seemed “an attempt to deprive attendees of sleep”.

The report also highlighted the police approach to participants of a “festival picnic” procession mostly made up of families and small children. A helicopter ordered them via loudspeaker: “Disperse now, or dogs, horses and long-handed batons will be deployed.”

So, on the matter of British complicity in torture, you know, our residents having their genitals mutilated by some Moroccan psychotic at the behest of the CIA and with the involvement of MI5, the Prime Minister insists it is the job of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee to investigate, not a separate wider inquiry by, say, a judge.

How much faith should we have in ISC and it’s abilities to get to the bottom of matters in a satisfactory fashion? Erm…

The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is made up of senior MPs and peers handpicked by the prime minister. The chairman, now Kim Howells formerly of the foreign office, is invariably given as a sop to a minister who has been sacked. It meets always in private and its reports are handed to Downing Street before publication so the prime minister and his advisers can censor them before they are published. So ponderous and careful is the process that the committee’s latest annual report covers the years 2007-2008, and was sent to Downing Street on 16 December but was only published today.

Published, that is, with what most of what parliament and the public wants to – and should – know redacted, with censored passages marked by asterisks.

It meets always in private and its reports are handed to Downing Street before publication so the prime minister and his advisers can censor them before they are published.

They’re going to get away with this, aren’t they?

Another display of governmental humanity at Yarl’s Wood…

The UK Border Agency wants to build a detention unit to house 500 single men at Yarl’s Wood and says it will be built to prison standards.

Built to prison standards? In case anybody needed reminding, refugees aren’t criminals. Treating them as such pleases who, exactly?

WARNING: RAMBLING AND SELF-INDULGENT WHITE HETEROSEXUAL MALE AHEAD…

My partner used to work in women’s refuges. Rochdale, Newbury, Chelsea. She’d come home with tales of what men had done to their partners that would, without a word of a lie, make an Uzbek prison torturer whistle in respectful envy. Truly grotesque, inhuman acts inflicted by men who claimed to love their victims.

Asking me to imagine myself in the place of these men and their acts is like asking me to breath custard. I imagine most men are the same. Ever since, there’s been a big red button inside me marked ‘DOMESTIC VIOLENCE’.

Which brings us to Amnesty International’s 1 in 10 campaign. It seems the campaign’s banner statistic of ‘Each year, around 1 in 10 women in Britain experience rape or other violence’ may be of a dubious provenance. It’s the conflation of rape with ‘other violence’ that raises concerns.

(more…)