Criminalisation of opposition to war
On 29 June two cars containing petrol, gas cylinders and nails were found in central London. The following day a burning car loaded with gas cylinders was driven at the main terminal building at Glasgow’s international airport. In the days that followed arrests were made in Britain and Australia. These failed or aborted attacks couldn’t have happened at a better moment for new Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who on 6 July spoke to the BBC of ‘the best of Britain, people coming together in the face of a terrorist threat and Britain showing to the rest of the world that we would be unyielding any time that anybody tries to do damage to our country’. He promised a propaganda battle against extremism to ‘persuade people that the values we hold important are the values of all decent people in all religions and all faiths’. The British state is up to its usual tricks. NICKI JAMESON reports.
Defending ‘our way of life’
Brown brushed aside any suggestion that attacks in Britain are in any way linked to Britain’s war in the Middle East. Like Blair before him, he is desperate to ensure that these two are not connected, and that attacks by Muslim groups are depicted as senseless and arbitrary, with the British state the defender, not the aggressor.
It is the most blatant and obscene hypocrisy to talk of British ‘values’ and ‘decency’ while our government wages brutal wars in which civilians are slaughtered and prisoners tortured, and of which the clear aims are to conquer, oppress and occupy, steal resources and make profits. And despite state and media obfuscation, this hypocrisy and the connection between Britain’s wars and bomb attacks in Britain is clear to many. It is particularly clear to Muslims. The government is therefore engaged in a campaign, not just to isolate ‘extremists’ but to terrorise the whole Muslim population of Britain out of showing anything other than the mildest opposition to British and US occupation of the Middle East.
To achieve this, the government simultaneously employs a wide range of tactics, including: massive prison sentences both for those convicted of involvement in actual or planned attacks and those who merely write or speak about ‘jihad’; heavy surveillance and infiltration of Muslim communities; stop-and-search and general harassment of Asians and Middle Eastern people, irrespective of their religious or political affiliations. That police ‘intelligence’ is often wrong only adds to the fear instilled. There has been one high-profile raid on the homes of people who had done nothing, and dozens of less well-known ones. There have been hundreds of arrests, many highly publicised, after which the scared suspects, once interrogated, have been released without charge or charged with petty offences, often immigration violations. And there has already been one state murder of an entirely innocent man – Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes was gunned down by armed police on the London underground two years ago. The police immediately told lies about it and no-one has been punished for his death.
This is all accompanied by endless press rants against women in hijabs and burkas, mosques, imams, halal meat and illegal immigration. Whilst ‘incitement to terrorism’ carries a heavy penalty, this sustained incitement to view Muslims as subhuman is rarely treated as criminal or linked to the inevitable racist attacks that follow.
Alongside this full frontal attack on all Muslims, or anyone who might even vaguely look like a Muslim, there is a drive by the state to work in tandem with bourgeois sections of Muslim communities, to channel dissent into ineffective, parliamentary means. Elders and leaders are encouraged to dampen down radicalism and inform on ‘militants’. The angry crowds of young people mobilised by mosques to demonstrate against the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001-2 have been driven off the streets.
A benign and ineffective Stop the War movement is useful for the state as it can be co-opted against ‘extremists’, whilst its continued operation without overt interference helps show that the government tolerates peaceful dissent. This was clearly visible at the Scotland United Against Terrorism rally in Glasgow on 7 July when Stop the War happily shared the platform with the Assistant Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police.
All this is classic British government strategy for dealing with opposition. It was graphically described by General Frank Kitson, Commander in Chief of the United Kingdom Land Forces in Low Intensity Operations – Subversion,Insurgency and Peace-keeping (1971). Kitson was involved in ‘counter-insurgency’ in Kenya, Mal-aya, Oman, Cyprus and the north of Ireland. His strategy was studied and pursued by Kenneth Newman, Chief Constable of the RUC and Com-mis-sioner of Metropolitan Police in the 1980s. All the techniques now being used against the Muslim population of Britain were employed throughout the 1970s and 1980s against the Irish community.
The basic aim is to turn any effective opposition to the British state into a criminal act. Kitson argues that it is necessary to ruthlessly stamp out ‘subversion’ whilst simultaneously strengthening ‘moderate’ elements who support the state. ‘Psychological operations’ are used to isolate the opposition from the people. These include propaganda against the opposition cause, use of the press and media to put over the government position, government schemes to win over ‘moderate’ opinion, ‘dirty tricks’ such as fake leaflets, and eventually provocateurs and agents who masquerade as oppositionists to discredit the cause. Finally, if necessary, they will assassinate leading oppositionists.
Intelligence-gathering is an essential feature of the Kitson strategy and the method of gathering intelligence relies heavily on a ‘large number of low-grade sources’ – small pieces of information acquired by the police – collated to build up a total picture of the opposition. On 9 July Gordon Brown’s new Minister for Security, Admiral Sir Alan West, told the Telegraph that the danger to Britain from ‘both home-grown and foreign terrorists’ was at its greatest ever level and encouraged people to provide information about any suspicious behaviour. ‘Britishness does not normally involve snitching or talking about someone’ he said. ‘I’m afraid, in this situation, anyone who’s got any information should say something because the people we are talking about are trying to destroy our entire way of life.’
Detention without charge
In November 2005 the Labour government was defeated in its attempt to increase the maximum detention period for terrorism suspects to 90 days. Instead the House of Commons voted to double the then 14-day period to 28 days. Since then government ministers and the police have continued to lobby for an increase to 90 days. Gordon Brown supported the 90-day proposal first time around and continues to be a firm supporter of lengthy detention.
Upping the stakes still further, on 5 July Lord Carlile QC, the British government’s ‘independent reviewer of terror laws’ told a BBC interviewer he favoured detention that was ‘not one day too long, nor one day too short’ for dealing with what he described as an ‘international network of violent Jihadists’. Right on cue, Ken Jones, President of the Association of Chief Police Officers called for suspects to be held for ‘as long as it takes’.
All this set the scene for Brown’s speech on 25 July, revealing his plans for the Counter-Terrorism Bill, which will be included in the Queen’s Speech in October. Proposals include a doubling of the maximum detention without charge period to 56 days, as well as:
• A review of allowing intercept evidence in court
• A new system of electronic exit controls at UK borders from 2009
• Biometric visas to be extended to all visa applicants from March 2008
• Britain’s list of suspects under surveillance to be linked to the Interpol database
• £70m to help local councils and community groups with citizenship projects aimed at ‘combating extremism’
• Consultation on tightening bail conditions and travel restrictions on terrorism suspects
• A BBC Arabic channel and ‘an editorially independent Farsi TV channel for the people of Iran’.
Savage sentences
Meanwhile, the numbers detained and imprisoned under the existing anti-terrorism laws are increasing. A minority have been convicted of perpetrating or plotting acts of serious violence, while most of the remainder are in prison for holding and disseminating unpopular and unpleasant opinions, and those most recently convicted simply chanted slogans which some find offensive.
On 19 July Umran Javed, Mizanur Rahman and Abdul Muhid, who dem-onstrated outside the Danish Embassy last year against cartoons satirising the prophet Muhammed were sentenced to six years’ imprisonment each. Their crime was to call for British soldiers to be brought home in body bags and to chant slogans such as ‘Bomb, bomb Denmark, bomb, bomb USA’. Abdul Saleem was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for the single act of shouting through a megaphone ‘UK, USA, 7/7 on its way, UK you will pay, Bin Laden is on his way.’
Compare this with the four-month sentence given to David Wilson of the BNP in 2002 for inciting racial hatred against Muslims and the non-conviction of BNP leader Nick Griffin.
On 15 July prisoner Dhiren Barot, who the press claim is ‘a senior Al Qaida figure’, was attacked by other prisoners in Frankland prison. FRFI has been told that staff knew this was going to happen and did not attempt to prevent it.
Oppose Britain’s imperialist wars in the Middle East!
FRFI opposes the British occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, as we have always opposed all British imperialist interventions and occupations, including that of the north of Ireland. We unconditionally support the resistance against those occupations and we recognise that the political, judicial and propaganda offensive being mounted by the British Labour government is not simply aimed at neutralising violent religious extremists, but at terrorising entire communities out of making common cause with the oppressed who are resisting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.
FRFI 198 August / September 2007
