For the first time, some of the nation’s most prominent Muslim leaders will visit Tampa en masse to jump into the Sami Al-Arian fray. They’ll gather today at the federal courthouse downtown to express their frustration over Al-Arian’s treatment and rally for a resolution.
Category Archives: State Oppression
The forgotten prisoners
Peace campaigners accused the Blair government of complicity in the US “barbarities” at Guantánamo Bay yesterday and demanded the release or trial of British detainees held there.
Families and supporters of British residents held in Guantánamo Bay for the past three years without charge or trial demanded that they be either released or repatriated to face trial in Britain. The Save Omar Deghayes Campaign delivered giant postcards, depicting Home Secretary Charles Clarke, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Prime Minister Tony Blair as the Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Speak No Evil monkeys, to their respective offices to highlight their demand.
Today is the deadline for a High Court response to demands for a judicial review of the British government’s refusal to represent these men on the grounds that the refugees are not British citizens.
Morning Star, 5 January 2006
Spies, lies and censorship
Human rights campaigners demanded a full inquiry yesterday into mounting evidence that MI6 agents were involved in the abduction and torture of terror suspects in Greece.
The Ministry of Justice in Athens has launched its own inquiry into allegations that 28 Pakistanis were held and mistreated in the wake of the July 7 London bombings.
Greek lawyer Frangiskos Ragoussis has filed a criminal complaint against eight Greek agents and one British agent – Athens MI6 station chief Nicholas Langman – for the alleged abuses. If formal charges are filed, Mr Ragoussis said that he will seek Mr Langman’s extradition.
The controversy deepened after British newspapers colluded with a voluntary government “D-notice” to prevent them from naming Mr Langman, although Greek Sunday newspaper Proto Thema – with the biggest circulation in the country – had already revealed his identity, adding that he had plotted the operation on Greek soil.
US tapped main communications, mosques
The US National Spy Agency (NSA) has “directly” tapped the country’s main communications systems without court-approved warrants, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has monitored mosques and private homes of Muslims to monitor “radiation levels”, news reports have revealed.
Citing current and former government officials, the New York Times said the volume of information gathered from telephone and Internet communications by the NSA was much larger than President George W. Bush has acknowledged.
They said the NSA sought to analyze communications patterns to gather clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, as well as the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Some officials described the program as a large data mining operation, the Times said.
Bush has defended an executive order he signed in 2002 allowing eavesdropping without warrants, saying it was limited only to monitoring international phone and e-mail communications linked to people with connections to Al-Qaeda. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires court approval of wiretaps and electronic surveillance.
Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday, December 23, on the Times report.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed on Tuesday, December 20, that the FBI was using counterterrorism resources to monitor and infiltrate American political organizations that criticize business interests and government policies.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) advocacy group said the report, coupled with news of the domestic eavesdropping, “could lead to the perception that we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights.”
“The message they are sending through these kinds of actions is that being Muslim is sufficient evidence to warrant scrutiny,” CAIR’s spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told the Washington Post.
Surge in stop and search of Asian people after July 7
The number of Asian and black people stopped and searched in London streets by police using anti-terrorism powers increased more than 12 fold after the July 7 bombings, The Guardian has learned.
In the two months after three underground trains and a bus were bombed more than 10,000 people were stopped and searched by the Metropolitan police. None of the searches resulted in an arrest or a charge related to terrorism.
Before the attacks Asian people were already more likely than their white fellow Londoners to be stopped under counter terrorism powers, according to police figures. But the gulf grew bigger after the attacks. According to Met figures 2,405 Asian and black people were stopped while walking, compared with 196 last year.
Netherlands considers ‘burqa’ ban
The Dutch immigration minister says she will look into the legality of banning the burqa, the robes worn by some Muslim women to cover their bodies. Rita Verdonk made the pledge after a majority in parliament said it would support such a ban. The proposal was put forward by independent politician Geert Wilders.
“That women should walk the streets in a totally unrecognisable manner is an insult to everyone who believes in equal rights,” he said. “This law is a comfort to moderate Muslims and will contribute to integration in the Netherlands,” he added in a statement.
His proposal is supported by two of the parties in the governing centre-right coalition, as well as the opposition right-wing party founded by the late Pim Fortuyn.
Mrs Verdonk did not say when she might complete her investigation. If the Netherlands does decide to ban the burqa, it will be the first European country to do so.
Australian Muslim scholar denied entry to US
The Houston office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Houston) today called on the Bush administration to explain why a well-known Islamic scholar was denied entry into the U.S.
Yahya Ibrahim, a Canadian-born resident of Australia, was reportedly barred from entering the United States earlier this week while traveling to speak at a conference that begins tomorrow in Houston. He was denied entry when he landed in Michigan and was later put on a plane to Canada.
Ibrahim says he was not given a reason for the denial of entry into the United States. He spoke at the same event last year without incident.
UK Muslims held at US customs, forced to miss conference
Muslim leaders who gathered Saturday to discuss their role in combating extremism within the Islamic community complained that two scheduled speakers missed the event after being detained at Los Angeles International Airport.
“People are upset,” said Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which organized the conference. “On one hand the U.S. government is asking us to do more, but on the other they are preventing us from doing our work.”
British citizens Mockbul Ali and Waqqas Khan had arrived on a flight from London at 4 p.m. but only cleared customs after 8 p.m., said Erin Robertson, a spokeswoman for the British Consulate-General in Los Angeles. Robertson said the reason for the delay was not clear.
Associated Press, 18 December 2005
That would be Mockbul Ali, the foreign office’s adviser on Muslim affairs, and Wakkas Khan of FOSIS. Unbelievable. (Mind you, after the experiences of Tariq Ramadan, Yusuf Islam and Zaki Badawi, perhaps they should be thankful they were allowed in at all.)
FBI grills California Muslim high schooler about ‘PLO’ doodle
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (LCCR) and the Sacramento Valley office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SV) today questioned why Elk Grove School District officials allegedly allowed FBI agents to interrogate a 16-year-old student without first notifying his parents.
The FBI interview concerned a doodle of the word “PLO” (referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization) that the student had scribbled on a binder two years earlier.
Administrators at Calvine High School apparently violated a school board policy that requires a student’s parents be informed whenever a law enforcement officer requests an interview on school premises. The boy’s family suspects that the teacher who had initially confronted the student about the drawing reported him to the FBI, chilling his right to freedom of speech at school.
On September 27, 2005, the student was pulled out of class and taken to a room in which two men identifying themselves as FBI agents were waiting to speak with him. The agents asked the student to recount an incident that had occurred two years earlier in a math class. He told the agents that his teacher had reprimanded him for having scrawled the letters “PLO” on his binder. The teacher said that anyone who supported the PLO was a terrorist.
Mosque plan dropped
Ministers yesterday dropped plans proposed by Tony Blair as part of his 12-point anti-terror plan in the wake of the July bombings to close mosques that are used to foment extremism after criticism from the police and religious leaders. The home secretary, Charles Clarke, proposed the police should have the power to secure a court order requiring trustees of a mosque or other place of worship to stop the activities of extremists or face a temporary closure.
Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that mosques were being “misidentified and stereotyped as incubators of violent extremism, while the social reality is that they serve as centres of moderation”. He said the bombers had been indoctrinated in a sub-culture outside the mosque and the notion of “influential back-door mosques” was a figment of the imagination. He noted that the Finsbury Park case was resolved by existing laws.
His concerns were shared by the government’s Muslim working parties which told ministers that the proposal was arbitrary and open to misuse with whole congregations being penalised by the actions of a few fanatics.
In the face of such a critical reaction, Mr Clarke said: “I will not seek to legislate on this issue at the present time, although we will keep the matter under review.”