Under the heading “Militants invited to Commons by Short”, the Daily Mail (1 March) condemns the former minister’s decision to host a meeting with Hizb ut-Tahrir. Predictably, the campaign in the right-wing press is aided and abetted by Peter Tatchell.
Category Archives: State Oppression
US pays Muslim detainee £170,000
An Egyptian arrested after the September 11 attacks, detained for 10 months and then deported, has been awarded £170,000 by the US government. Ehab Elmaghraby, who ran a restaurant in Manhattan, was among dozens of Muslims detained after the outrages in New York and Washington. He sued the government with another former detainee, a Pakistani immigrant, who is still pursuing the action.
Mr Elmaghraby, 38, was held in maximum security conditions in Brooklyn from October 2001 until August 2002. In the lawsuit, filed in 2004, the men said they were shackled, shoved into walls and punched, kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and denied adequate meals and medical care. Haeyoung Yoon, Mr Elmaghraby’s lawyer, said her client had wanted to continue with the lawsuit but settled because he was ill and faced mounting medical costs.
Blair backs Hizb ban
“Organisations that support terrorism take enormous care to avoid infringing the strict letter of the law. Last August, I named Hizb ut-Tahrir as such an organisation. Within days, its website changed, putting out a very moderate message, and I was lambasted for trying to curb free speech. But this is an organisation which has been banned in Germany and Denmark: it is active on campuses where it promotes its extremist message. People should be prevented from glorifying terrorism. You can say it is a breach of the right to free speech but in the real world, people get hurt when organisations encourage hatred.”
Tony Blair in the Observer, 26 February 2006
Lawyer lambasts arrest of actors
Lawyer lambasts arrest of actors
By Daniel Coysh
Morning Star, 22 February 2006
Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith said yesterday that the arrest of two actors last week, who portrayed former Guantanamo Bay detainees was “an ugly farce.” The actors, along with the former prisoners that they played in Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo, were held at Luton Airport after returning from the Berlin Film Festival last Thursday.
The story was reported in the Morning Star on Monday after its online exposure by former British ambassador Craig Murray, but mainstream media sources have been reluctant to follow it up.
Human rights group Reprieve insisted yesterday that the four men had been “detained” at the Bedfordshire airport after returning from Germany on an easyJet flight.
Reprieve legal director Clive Stafford Smith said: “This may be a farce, but it is an ugly farce. First, the Special Branch adds insult to injury by harassing innocent men who suffered for two long years in Guantanamo Bay before being released without charge. As if that were not enough, the Special Branch then detains the actors who portray them in a film.”
Guantanamo film stars were held under terror laws, claims Murray
Guantanamo film stars were held under terror laws, claims Murray
Morning Star, 20 February 2006
Police arrested the stars of director Michael Winterbottom’s new film The Road to Guantanamo under the Prevention of Terrorism Act when they returned to Britain after winning a major award, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray said yesterday.
Mr Winterbottom had been showing the film at the Berlin Film Festival, where he won the best director award.
Mr Murray claimed that police arrested and interrogated three of the film’s stars on Friday, together with the three ex-Guantanamo detainees on whose story the film is based. They were held by Special Branch and questioned for several hours about where they had been and who they had met. Mr Murray also said that they had been questioned on Mr Winterbottom’s politics.
However, following legal intervention by human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, the group were eventually released.
The Road to Guantanamo traces the true story of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed, three Muslim friends from Birmingham who were picked up as aliens in Afghanistan by US forces and ended up in Guantanamo for three years, where they suffered brutal and humiliating treatment.
Mr Murray said that people had been questioning his source for the story and, “particularly, querying why it is not in the mainstream media if it is true. “Well, I was in Mr Winterbottom’s office and heard it first hand, from people who were there when it happened,” he said.
For more details, visit www.craigmurray.co.uk
Use of ‘stop and search’ terror law alienating Muslims, warns Yard
The head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch yesterday admitted that police use of controversial stop and search powers under the terror laws needs to be much more tightly focused. Peter Clarke told a London conference of security experts there had been difficulties with the use of powers under section 44 of the Terrorism Act after warning that anti-terror measures which alienate the Muslim community were fundamentally misguided.
Judge’s anger at US torture
A high court judge yesterday delivered a stinging attack on America, saying its idea of what constituted torture was out of step with that of “most civilised nations”. The criticism, directed at the Bush administration’s approach to human rights, was made by Mr Justice Collins during a hearing over the refusal by ministers to request the release of three British residents held at Guantánamo Bay.
The judge said: “America’s idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations.” He made his comments, he said, after learning of the UN report that said Guantánamo should be shut down without delay because torture was still being carried out there.
‘Extremist’ Muslim groups to be banned
Extremist Muslim groups who “glorify” terrorism are likely to be banned in Britain as early as this summer after Tony Blair yesterday overcame his second backbench rebellion this week to impose new laws designed to clamp down on the celebration of terrorism in speech, placards or on the internet.
MPs voted by 327 to 279, a majority of 38, to reinstate the laws banning the glorification of terrorism, a phrase untried in the legal battle against terrorism in Europe or the US. Only 17 Labour backbenchers rebelled yesterday, 10 fewer than the last time MPs debated the issue in November. Two of the prominent groups likely to be banned are Hizb ut-Tahrir and Omar Bakri’s al-Muhajiroun, groups already named by Tony Blair.
UN calls for Guantánamo Bay to close
The United States should close down its detention camp in Guantánamo Bay and give its detainees an independent trial or release them, a United Nations report released today suggests. The 54-page report called on Washington “to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.
UN report calls for closure of Guantánamo
A UN inquiry into conditions at Guantánamo Bay has called on Washington to shut down the prison, and says treatment of detainees in some cases amounts to torture, UN officials said yesterday.
The report also disputes the Bush administration’s legal arguments for the prison, which was sited at the navy base in Cuba with the purpose of remaining outside the purview of the US courts, and says there has been insufficient legal process to decide whether detainees continued to pose a threat to the US.
The report lists techniques in use at Guantánamo that are banned under the UN’s convention against torture, including prolonged periods of isolation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and humiliation, including forced shaving. The UN report also focuses on a relatively new area of concern in Guantánamo – the resort to violent force-feeding to end a hunger strike by inmates.