Civil liberties - new material (62)
01 September 2005
Revealed: the diary of a British man on hunger strike in Guantanamo, Omar Degahayes. Independent on Sunday 11.9.05. As many as 200 detainees are on hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay in protest at US "justice" - a justice that incorporates indefinite detention in deliberately inhumane conditions outside of the Geneva Conventions, regular torture and abuse and the rejection of independent legal advice, culminating in a military tribunal. In these extracts from his diary, which cover the month of July, the British resident Omar Degahayes, who has been incarcerated in Guantanamo since September 2002, describes the current situation and expresses his fears for the future. The British government has made clear that it has no intention of intervening in the case of Degahayes or other British residents incarcerated in Guantanamo.
Torture of Prisoners in US Custody, Marjorie Cohn. Covert Action, Spring 2005, pp. 42-46. This article examines the responses to allegations of torture by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush and contrasts them to an account of its origins by the author Seymour Hersch. Hersh argues that the roots of Abu Ghraib can be found "in the creation of the "unacknowledged" special-access programme (SAP) established by a top-secret order signed by Bush in late 2001 or early 2002." SAP was extended to Iraq in 2003 when Rumsfeld personally approved the use of "physical coercion and sexual humiliation to extract information from prisoners." Hersh consulted a military specialist with close ties to Special Operations about the war crimes who said: "What do you call it when people are tortured and [are] going to die and the soldiers know it?" - "Execution".
Expensive, pointless, dangerous. Who needs these mistaken identity cards? AC Grayling. Times 17.10.05. Grayling considers the evidence presented to the Home Affairs Committee on the introduction of identity cards which "overwhelmingly demonstrated that ID cards would be ineffective, costly [estimates range from £5-18 billion] and a gross violation of civil liberties". He writes: "ID cards...carry comprehensive information about you, stored on a microchip connected to an Orwellianly named "National Identity Register". This changes, he says, your relationship with the State entirely. You are no longer a private citizen, but in effect a number-plated unit who can be monitored by the authorities for any purpose. In fact, ID cards would be better named "surveillance" cards, because they provide central authority with a means for monitoring all your activities and give permeant access to all your personal details." Recent trials have indicated that as many as one in 1,000 people could be inaccurately identified by the scans being planned for identity cards. Grayling is the author of a study of ID cards for Liberty, In Freedom's Name: the case against identity cards.
Evenin' all. Name, address, DNA sample..., Simon Davies. The Times 27.7.05. Davies examines a raft of new police laws and amendments to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Criminal Justice Act and the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act which have "created police powers that would be unthinkable in most democracies." He also considers The Children Act which "provides for the profiling and analysis of all children to detect which infants may be potential criminals" and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act "which makes provision for the universal archiving of all communications records (phone, e-mail and internet visits) for possible later use by authorities."