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I am so appalled at this latest turn in the saga of Great Britain's immigration policies that I can hardly find the words. You would think after the even worse incidents in France (picture above from a notorious video of French police beating women and children during a protest by immigrants there) that the UK would be keen to be seen as more humane in their treatment of "failed asylum seekers".
I have visions of the scene toward the end of my favourite movie, Lawrence of Arabia, where a British doctor comes upon a marketplace full of dead and dying Turkish soldiers and no one doing anything to help them, and he keeps shouting "Outrageous" in an impotent fury. That's how I feel about most immigration stories I read, but this one really is outrageous, not for naked aggression, as in France, but for an utter failure to do the right thing, for pandering to racist tabloid media, for treating and thinking of asylum seekers and economic migrants as less than human.
After campaigning on the "moral outrage" of children of asylum seekers being kept virtually imprisoned, the LDs as part of the coalition government have helped to hatch this cynical flash-deportation scheme, trying to circumvent both human rights rules and liberal public opinion.
The briefing paper also shows that the border agency is worried that ending the use of detention could give families facing deportation more chance to launch community protest campaigns backed by the media and MPs. It says more police may need to be involved in deportations because "significant public order problems" could follow removals. "The alternative is not to inform the family of the exact time and date of removal, so that they are not prepared. However, this has its own difficulties, which would need analysing and addressing." The document says it is undecided whether a specific time and date should be given, or a longer period of a couple of days.
Following the SCOTUS decision that corporations have "free speech" rights, Facebook has a got a fan page advocating a Constitutional Amendment to assert that human rights only apply to individual humans. If you think that's over-reacting, or if you tend to be swayed by the fuzzy logic of bone-headed so-called Libertarians on this issue, read the article called Inhuman Rights from McSweeney's Internet Tendency. It is a brilliant example of the argument "ad absurdem", right up there with Swift's Modest Proposal.
For over 20 years, I have supported the campaign to close the School of the Americas in south Georgia. All the while, there was this other military academy of torture that was even worse, that was probably the source of much of SOA's curriculum and that I had never even heard of. The author of this article, himself a "graduate" of the SERE, surmises that military interrogators would think something along the lines of "I survived waterboarding, so it's OK to do it to this guy". Well, I remember a top Pentagon / DOD official actually articulating that argument, with no apparent recognition of the essential sickness of what he was saying.
The thing is, both SERE and SOA, and also the "hazing" in military academies (not just in the US, despite what David Morris thinks - there is an ongoing scandal in the British Armed forces involving suspicious deaths of young recruits in training) are symptoms of the whole military culture that allows them to happen. That is not going to change by closing the schools, by presidential edict or by legislation. Not that I know how it can be changed. I thought bringing women into the military might help, over 30 years ago when I still had my idealism, but that theory has been quashed by the evidence at Abu Ghraib.
It's not just I who am saying, it's The New York Times as well. I think they hit the nail on the head with this one.
The story as covered in the Guardian. The four men have been taken into police custody, despite protests from their many supporters and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which believes they need treatment before interrogation. However, experts says thay can expect to be released within days.
No, I did not miss the story that the remaining Britons held at Camp Delta were to be freed, announced rather quietly a little over a week ago. I just neglected to blog about it. To be fair, they aren't here yet, are they? And the whole deal is being done in a very opaque manner, the better to frighten the populace, I suppose. It's also not as if just releasing these men, after a long and brutal detention with no obvious crime having been committed, is going to make the wrong go away, or the political embarrassment to the UK government.
And it's not as if they are closing Camp Delta down; that would be the only just outcome, to end all of the illegal horrors that may or may not go on there.
 The BBC news website is carrying daily eyewitness accounts from inside Fallujah, filed by a journalist who lives there and is trapped inside the city. There is no water, no electricity, no food, no medical care at all. People are burying their children and parents, when they die from stray gunfire, falling buildings or disease, in their gardens, and some bodies are just left out in the street. I got this link from Riverbend of Baghdad Burning, and also this report from aid agencies, all of whom decry the "taking of Fallujah" as an unmitigated human rights disaster. Riverbend calls it genocide and I do not dare to disagree with her.
More on Fallujah: American Samizdat has republished a shocking picture of armed and booted Marines resting between the labours on the "plush red carpet" of a despoiled mosque. Here is what zeynep has to say about that:
Somebody please tell Lt. Brandon Turner that he's insane, that the Pentagon is insane, whoever is allowing the marines or any American soldiers "rest" on that "plush red carpet" with their shoes, uniforms and machines guns is insane. Does anyone understand anything about religious feelings in general or about Islam in particular? Have they spent even half a day watching a documentary or two about Islam and noticed that people carefully and respectfully take their shoes off before entering a mosque, where they will kneel and put their head on that carpet? (Those "plush red carpets", by the way, are prayer rugs, or "sajjade." And you don't step on them with your combat boots, especially inside a mosque, and smile for the cameras unless you really want to fight to the death with up to a billion people.)
Seriously, this is either the most arrogant, incompetent, ignorant occupation, ever, or the most clever, insidious, skillful effort towards bringing about an apocalyptic world war. Are they asleep at the awheel, drowning under their own ignorance, or simply want to end life on earth as we know it? Jeanne of Body and Soul was also shocked by this picture and her comment on it is tied back to the speech G W Bush made in the National Cathedral days after the 9/11 attacks, in which he claimed a sort of avenging god-hood. My god is bigger than your god. Beyond that symbolism, can anyone explain what the point of attacking Falluja is? Does control of that city matter if it angers the rest of Iraq? The liberal blogosphere is pretty united in its shock and horror at this picture, and yet the liberal media in the US (I haven't checked it out but I haven't seen it here) apparently do not see anything noteworthy in it, merely using it as backdrop to more of their tame reportage of the military's view of the war. It's really a case of parallel universes.
Following directly on from the story below, the Observer today has this piece about a number of retired or serving military officers and experts who are now coming forward to blow the whistle on the dubious intelligence value of Camp Delta interrogations. I wonder if it is because Bush is just now beginning to appear like a lame duck after his poor showing in the debate? Or is it just a coincidence in timing? Whatever the reason, this week will see the publication by British journalist David Rose of "Guantánamo: America's War on Human Rights" which contains the testimony of Ret. Lt. Col. Anthony Christino and three other intelligence officials against Bush and Rumsfeld's pursuit of the war on terror. Among other things there are charges that "the 'screening' process in Afghanistan which determined whether detainees were sent to Guantánamo was 'hopelessly flawed from the get-go'" and that "General [Geoffrey] Miller [former commandant of Camp Delta and now running Aby Ghraib prison] had never worked in intelligence before being assigned to Guantánamo, and his system seems almost calculated to produce entirely bogus confessions."
Caution: Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo content.
A few days ago, Body and Soul posted this excellent post about Seymour Hersh's book Chain of Command and a fairy tale that she was reading to her daughter called Ella Enchanted. This may seem like an odd juxtaposition but it is not. And it gave rise to this beautiful bit of prose from Jeanne:
The idea that evil is stupid is comforting in a children's book. It is not comforting in Hersh's.
I haven't gotten very far into Hersh's book, but so far, this is what I know: Within a few months of the Guantánamo Bay prison's opening, three things were obvious:
1. The Bushies wanted prisoners treated harshly in order to extract information quickly.
2. Treating prisoners harshly wasn't going to extract information -- quickly or otherwise.
3. The vast majority of Guantánamo prisoners had no information to give.
Bush and Company believed so firmly in the first point that the easiest way to kill a career was to mention the second or third points. Not that some people didn't try -- but they failed to have any influence. To have any interest in facts, any connection to reality, was to be branded soft on Al Qaeda.
Some of the Guantánamo prisoners were mentally ill old men. Under different circumstances, they might have had promising civilian careers in the Pentagon.
In some ways, this is the most frightening of all the stories in the grim saga of America's War on Terra - er - Terror. At Rio Rancho High School in New Mexico, the prinicipal commits an egregious violation of the First Amendment rights of the whole student body. It all started with an extracurricular club of students learning to perform in "poetry slams" and the very successful reading by one girl student of a poem critical of Bush administration war policies and education policies. The principal of the school and its military liaison then went on a massive witch-hunt, firing the teacher advising the poetry group, banning all teaching and reading of poetry in the school, tearing down posters and art-work they deemed "un-American" and subjecting the students to patriotic assemblies where they were told to "shut their faces" if they disagreed with the prinicipal's politics. The mother of the offending student poet, also a teacher, was ordered to destroy her daughter's work, which she refused to do, also being threatened with dismissal. (Note: I have been meaning to post this for a few days and forgot. Thanks to my non-blogging friend James who sent it to me in an e-mail and prodded my memory.)
The New York Times has an almost blow-by-blow account of the arguments before the US Supreme Court on the question of the legality of "indefinite detention". This case is about US citizens, rather than non-citizens such as those held at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Supremes heard that case last week, but decisions have not been handed down at this point. It is striking how disingenuous and cynical some of the government's arguments are in this case. For example, when asked by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor why a "neutral decision maker" could not have been used to screen detainees before they were committed to detention, government attorney Paul D. Clement said 'the potential detainees' initial screening, sorting those to be held from those who need not be, met that requirement. "For all intents and purposes, that is a neutral decision maker," he said.' Excuse me? Then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked why the detainees were not given a forum to explain themselves, and Clement replied "The interrogation process itself provides an opportunity for an individual to explain that this has all been a mistake." (Note that in earlier cases the government's legal team saw no reason why torture in interrogation should not be permitted in certain cases. Hey it worked for centuries in the past - like the 12th through the 17th centuries. Why forsake a proven formula?) This government demonstrates over and over again that they hold most of the world and its institutions in contempt and clearly think they can and are entitled to get away with literally anything.
Jeanne of Body and Soul has an update on the upcoming hearing for James Yee, the Islamic chaplain to the prisoners at Camp Delta. Initially arrested on suspicion of espionage, he has never been formally charged with anything. The military lacked evidence for espionage, so Yee was released, only to be charged with downloading pornography and adultery. (I don't know about you, but I find that ironic on several levels.) Neither of these latter-day charges is very well-supported and it is possible that they will be dropped. Supporters believe he was charged with whatever came to hand, to prevent him speaking out about the conditions at Camp Delta.
Britain as the deep south is the title of an article by Heaven Crawley which details the worsening situation of anti-traveller racism. Explanatory note for non-Brits: Gypsies or Romani people are commonly called Travellers in Britain; there are also non-Romani Travellers, usually called "new age travellers." Some of the discrimination that the Romani experience is also directed at new age Travellers and this fact is used to justify the excuse that anti-traveller prejudice is not racism. I think this is mere semantics; it is a cultural discrimination, it is, for want of a better word, tribalism. It doesn't matter what you call it, some of the actions arising from anti-traveller-ism are barbaric and truly on a par with anti-black vigilantism experienced in the US. This also reminds me forcefully of what was done (is still being done) to the Dine (Navaho) and Hopi people in the American Southwest; they were also forced into inappropriate housing that destroyed their chosen way of life and broke their culture.
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