FRFI 165 February / March 2002
11 September – the backlash
The USA Patriot Act, approved by Congress without debate and signed into law on 25 October, constitutes the most sweeping expansion of state powers to spy, search, restrict speech, arrest, incarcerate, interrogate, punish, deport, and withhold information the United States has ever seen, all unchecked by judicial review. In Britain the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act became law on 14 December. DALTON HILLIARD and NICKI JAMESON report.
US government tramples on the Constitution
‘He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone…He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power…to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation’
Thomas Jefferson was writing about King George III, but he might as well have had George Bush II in mind. His anti-terrorism legislation and Executive Orders blow a hole so large through the US Bill of Rights that a Supreme Court overturning would be assured – were this not the most reactionary Supreme Court in recent history, which has the added benefit of having elected the President. Amendments IV,V,VI, and VII to the Constitution have been seriously compromised. They used to protect ‘against unreasonable searches and seizures’, ‘due process’, the right ‘to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation’ and ‘the right of trial by jury’.
Most of the new powers apply to citizens and non-citizens alike, including a wide expansion of the government’s capacity to spy with impunity. Previously, the FBI had to prove ‘probable cause’ to obtain a warrant to search property, tap phone-lines or intercept email. Now prosecutors must simply certify that the information is ‘relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation’ and the judge is obliged to issue the warrant. There is a new category of forbidden speech called ‘advocacy that undermines our anti-terrorism efforts’. If non-citizens found guilty of such advocacy cross US borders, they will be prohibited from returning, even if they are permanent legal residents.
The US ruling powers have exploited the issue of terrorism to introduce laws to control domestic dissent, signalling a direct return to the illicit operations of the 1960s and 1970s. Operations CHAOS and COINTELPRO were used to spy on, attack and murder civil rights leaders, anti-Vietnam activists and black nationalists. The difference, though, is that then such tactics were technically illegal, which at least meant that the ‘fruits’ of any rotten searches could not become evidence in court.
In the racist dragnet following 11 September several thousand ‘individuals of Middle Eastern descent’ were summarily rounded up, and the Attorney General has made clear that 5,000 more are to be ‘interrogated’ soon. Immigrants suspected of terrorism face indefinite internment without the right of appeal and without knowing the nature of the evidence against them. Abdallah Higazy was arrested in November, held in solitary confinement, denied all communication with the outside world and refused legal representation during interrogation (all legal under the USA Patriot Act). His identity, location and the nature of the suspicion against him were undisclosed to relatives and the public (also legal). The evidence implicating him in the World Trade Centre attacks was kept secret (legal), but since the Attorney General determined that the evidence provided ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ involvement in terrorist activity, he faced ‘indefinite detention’ (legal).
Higazy was held because a pilot’s radio had been found in the safe of a hotel room in the Millennium Hotel, where he stayed on 11 September. The radio had ground-to-air communication capability, and Higazy’s room on the 51st floor had a clear view of the WTC. ‘Reasonable grounds’?
A month later, the real owner of the radio, a private pilot and US citizen, came forward. The case fell apart and Higazy was freed, given a $3 metro ticket by the Department of Justice. And if the pilot had decided not to pick up his radio…? But another detail from the case is at least as disturbing. During interrogation (from which his attorney was forcibly absent), Higazy confessed, on three occasions, that the radio was his.
Dr Mazen al-Najjar, a Palestinian university professor living in Florida since 1981, was arrested in 1997 as a suspected terrorist and imprisoned on the basis of secret evidence. After three years and seven months, a judge reviewed his case, found no evidence linking al-Najjar to terrorism and ordered his release.
The racism of the legislation is undisguised. The government carried out dozens of secret evidence cases between 1997 and 2000, all but one against Arabs, the other against an Indian Sikh. Thirteen cases had been overturned, and there was, for a time, a momentum to do away with secret evidence trials. But that was before 11 September and the USA Patriot Act. Since 11 September, Mazen al-Najjar has been arrested again. He is currently held without bail, in solitary confinement, based on ‘secret evidence’.
Racist British government steps up repression
On 18 December eight north African and middle eastern men were arrested under the new legislation in dawn raids in London, Luton and Birmingham. In January, 17 men were arrested in Leicester under a variety of police and immigration powers. Two were charged under the Terrorism Act 2000, the rest freed on bail or detained under immigration legislation. In Newcastle-upon-Tyne one man has been charged under the Terrorism Act with membership of Hamas. In January two Asian members of the Socialist Labour Party youth organisation were detained on their return to Britain from a conference in Belgium. One was held for 17 hours and they were questioned about their attitudes to the IRA ceasefire and 11 September, as well as their connections with the British and Turkish left. In total there were 124 ‘terrorism-related’ arrests between 11 September and 18 January 2002, and more are clearly in the pipeline.
Asian and north African communities are being openly targeted for surveillance and repression in exactly the same way the Irish community was in the 1970s and 1980s. The Financial Times was told that security officials are working on a theory of ‘concentric circles’, radiating from a core of would-be attackers, to the estimated 100 British supporters of Osama bin Laden, to a periphery extending to those in ‘mosques, universities and front organisations’ who ‘sympathise with anti-US feeling’.
The Anti-Terrorism Act legalises detention without trial. Detainees can apply for bail and their cases are ‘reviewed’ by the Special Immigration Appeals Tribunal, but no evidence needs to be produced to the effect that they are even thinking of committing a crime. All that is needed for ‘certification’ as a terrorist suspect is some kind of unspecified link either to a ‘terrorist’ organisation, or to someone else who is a member of one.
At the bail hearing of Moroccan Djamel Ajouauou the government produced an emotive 20-page ‘security service’ document, listing possible risks to Britain, including nuclear attack, chemical or biological attack, 11 September-style hijackings and attacks on the underground. No attempt was made to link any of these eventualities to Ajouauou, who was of course refused bail.
The document concluded with a meaningless soundbite justification of Britain’s decision to opt out of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which outlaws detention without trial: ‘The presence of extremists in the United Kingdom at this time and for the foreseeable future creates a situation of public emergency threatening the life of the nation.’
Seven ‘suspected international terrorists’ are currently held in the Belmarsh Special Security Unit, which was constructed to house Irish Republican prisoners and has been criticised by both Amnesty International and the government’s former chief medical officer for its repressive conditions.
In the event of future large-scale internment, it is possible that ‘suspected terrorists’ will be warehoused in the new immigration detention centre at Yarls Wood, Bedfordshire, run by infamous private security firm, Group 4. Yarls Wood has cost £80 million so far and can hold 900 asylum seekers, including entire families whose claims are being ‘clarified’.
A significant number of those arrested in the post-11 September hysteria have already had any suggestion of terrorist involvement dismissed but remain imprisoned on pretexts flimsily connected to their immigration status. With the government under pressure to speed up deportations and effect more ‘removals’, any excuse to trawl minority communities for possible targets is being seized upon. And this conflation of anti-terrorist and immigration powers is not merely convenient; it is deliberate, sending out the message that all asylum seekers are suspected terrorists, all refugees a threat to the ‘British way of life’.
On 27 December 2001, following the alleged ‘storming’ of the Channel Tunnel by ‘waves of refugees’, Home Secretary David Blunkett made this sentiment explicit, telling a radio programme that ‘we have every right to defend our boundaries, to defend the coherence of our nationality’.
While the prime targets of the repression are clearly immigrants, the British government, like its European partners, is also preparing further measures to ensure that no domestic dissent is permitted outside of the accepted norms of ‘parliamentary democracy’. In the wake of the mass anti-capitalist demonstrations at Gothenburg and Genoa last year, the European Union Council of Ministers is considering extending the provisions which prevent known ‘football hooligans’ travelling from one country to another, to ‘potentially dangerous persons’ who have supposedly participated in ‘public disorder’. Their names will be stored on a new dedicated database which extends the already vast Schengen information system in Strasbourg, where the details of 1.3 million people – mainly immigrants – are already stored.
