A tale of two experiences
This week three British citizens have been hosted by the US authorities in Connecticut. One has been wined, dined, feted by celebrities and beauty queens and encouraged to attend sports events. The other two have been confined to tiny cells, shackled whenever they leave for any purpose, even to take a shower, and allowed only the most minimal contact with the outside world. Which one of the three do you think boasts of having shot at innocent people?
Babar Ahmad, aged 39, and Talha Ahsan, 33, grew up in south London, went to school and university and led unremarkable and law-abiding lives. Neither has ever come into any conflict with the British legal system, nor been accused of any crime in Britain; yet from 2004 and 2006 respectively until October 2012, they were incarcerated in a maximum security British prison. Their detention related to extradition warrants issued in a US court, alleging that they were involved with a website which at one time was hosted in Connecticut, and which, between 1997 and 2004 is said to have encouraged support for Islamic fundamentalist fighters in Afghanistan and Chechnya. They strenuously deny any involvement with terrorism, but have to date never had the opportunity to defend themselves in court. In October 2012, having exhausted all legal appeals against extradition, they were flown to the US and are now held in maximum security conditions in the Northern Correctional Institution (NCI).
The Connecticut Department of Corrections describes NCI as ‘a level five, maximum security institution…designated to manage those inmates who have demonstrated a serious inability to adjust to confinement posing a threat to the safety and security of the community, staff and other inmates.’ As with most supermax prisons in the US, many of the prisoners housed there – like Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad – simply do not fit this label and are being held there purely in order to label them as ‘dangerous’ and justify their continued, indefinite incarceration.
Conditions are stark and brutal. Communication with the outside world is severely restricted and before getting out of their cell to use the telephone, prisoners must submit to a strip-search, including squatting; they are then dressed in a yellow jumpsuit, handcuffed, and sometimes shackled at the ankles, with the shackles then tethered to the cuffs. ‘Recalcitrant’ prisoners are sprayed with mace and removed to furniture-less strip cells.
Henry Charles Albert David Windsor (aka Prince Harry) aged 28, did less well at school and joined the British army rather than going to university. A ‘chip off the old block’ of his well-known racist grandfather Prince Phillip, in 2005 he was forced to apologise for wearing a swastika armband, and at Sandhurst military academy in 2006 was filmed using racially abusive language about south Asian colleagues, for which he escaped any disciplinary sanction.
In recent years, when not getting his kit off in hotels, playing polo and performing other similarly vital royal duties, Harry has been participating in the military subjugation of Afghanistan, where since 2001, at least 17,000 civilians have been slaughtered by US, British and other occupying forces. Earlier this year, Prince Harry boasted of his involvement in the carnage, telling the press that co-piloting an Apache helicopter and firing Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, rockets and a 30-millimetre gun was ‘a joy for me because I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox…’
On 15 May, as Harry played a charity polo match in Greenwich, Connecticut, to round off a US trip which had seen him mobbed by groupies and applauded for his plans to bring the ‘warrior games’ (jingoistic military version of the Paralympics) to Britain, on the other side of the state, Talha and Babar were receiving the news that their trial, originally scheduled for October 2013, has been adjourned until March 2014. There appears to be no guarantee that it will go ahead then, and they remain detained without an end in sight.
All this demonstrates, once again, the brutal nature of imperialism, with the US and Britain united in their barbarity.
Nicki Jameson
For further information on the campaigns in support of Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad go to: freetalha.org and www.freebabarahmad.com
For background information on their cases see: Theresa May and Britain’s racist, hypocritical extradition practices and Extradition to isolation
