In the cause of fear and ignorance

People snatched from their homes in Britain following September 11 are being consigned to a Kafkaesque oblivion and worse.

John Pilger | Socialist Worker, July 1, 2008

THE BRITISH lawyer Gareth Peirce, celebrated for her defense of miscarriage of justice victims, wrote recently: "Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, 'shoot to kill,' the use of torture...brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant."

Columnist: John Pilger

John Pilger is a renowned investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker who was called "the most outstanding journalist in the world today" by the Guardian. He is the author of numerous books, including most recently Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire, a collection of investigations into the effects of war crimes and globalization. His books and films are featured at JohnPilger.com.

Referring to the conflict in Northern Ireland, she was drawing a comparison with "our new suspect community," people of Muslim faith, against whom a vicious, sectarian and mostly unreported war is well under way.

As Peirce points out, "internment, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland," now allows, not 42 days, but the "indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the 'evidence' to be heard in secret with the detainee's lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him."

Those snatched from their homes in Britain following September 11, 2001, have all but vanished into an Anglo-American gulag, which in this country joins Belmarsh Prison, where people are consigned to oblivion, with Broadmoor psychiatric prison, where they are sent as they go mad, and with Kafkaesque versions of "home" where others are interred under "control orders."

One such home prisoner, wrote Peirce, "a man without arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact anyone without committing a criminal offense, subject to a curfew and allowed no visits unless approved in advance by the Home Office." Going into the garden, arranging a plumber, speaking to a child's teacher, all require permission. The families go mad, too.

Preferring "a quick death...to a slow death here," one man who took a risk and returned to Algeria has been lost in the subcontracted gulag, where his new torturers have given the British government "assurances" and are themselves reassured by the fact that BP, the ethical oil company, has sunk $12 billion into getting oil out of Algeria's Southern Sahara. Jordan, another subcontractor, is held economically afloat by the U.S. so George W. Bush's "renditions" and torture can proceed there.

No British court has found any of these people guilty of any crime, but as Tony Blair, a genuine prima facie criminal, put it so well, "the rules of the game have changed."

Continued . . .