Possession is nine points of the law

The UK Director of Public Prosecutions has declined to prosecute two terror suspects, Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan, who, along with the more celebrated 'radical Muslim cleric', Abu Hamza, are shortly expected to be extradited to the United States.

The offences of which they are accused, in most normal senses of the phrase, 'took place' in the United Kingdom but they are connected with a website which was hosted in the United States. Babar Ahmad has been detained without charge or trial in this country since 2004 and the refusal of the authorities to prosecute Abu Hamza in this country has for many years puzzled people from the Queen downwards.

The DPP has now stated 'I have refused to give my consent to Mr [Karl] Watkin to bring a private prosecution against Mr Ahmad and Mr Ahsan for offences under the Terrorism Act 2000. The underlying evidence in support of these alleged offences is in the possession of the USA. The material provided to me in support of the proposed private prosecution has been carefully considered by a specialist lawyer in the CPS special crime and counter-terrorism division.'

Evidence seized by the Metropolitan Police in 2003 was passed, for no clear reason, by them to the United States Authorities, but now, it seems, possession of persons is more easily transferred between states (as we have seen in other contexts since the beginning of the War on Terror, or the 'Long War' as others like to call it) than is possession of evidence, and the United Kingdom authorities would like to see persons removed to the United States. The fastidious UK is these days often keen to see unsavoury characters shipped off to other jurisdictions, even some equally unsavoury, to meet their legal or illegal fates.

Mr Karl Watkin (Member of the British Empire), who holds to the Quixotic belief that British people charged with offences conducted in British jurisdiction should be prosecuted in British courts, is separately seeking permission from magistrates to bring a private prosecution that does not require the DPP's consent. Meanwhile, the most senior British judge recently expressed his anger that cases such as this should have dragged on for so many years. How things have changed since Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Why do not accused people realise that it is 'in nobody's interests' for them to pursue every last avenue avail able to them under the law? Clearly the law should change and doubtless it soon will.

New found land

I wonder how Newt Gingrich's idea that the Palestinians are an 'invented people' is received by native Americans.

The Lives of Others

'Transcripts of those recordings have now been obtained by the Guardian, along with other police materials relating to Kennedy's deployment marked "restricted" and "confidential".

'They shed light on the extent of surveillance undertaken to keep tabs on a group of environmental campaigners. They reveal the minute details about the activities of campaigners being relayed by Kennedy, from discussions about football teams to types of biscuits eaten at a planning meeting.

'In one document, marked "secret", police chiefs lay out what they believed to be the legal justification for Kennedy's surveillance operation, stating that the environmental campaigners could cause "severe economic loss to the United Kingdom" and an "adverse effect on the public's feeling of safety and security".'

State secret

Pease Pottage

Last December our coalition government, in the form of deputy prime minister Nick Clegg promised that child detention would be ended this May. The “shameful practice that last year alone saw more than 1000 children – 1000 innocent children – imprisoned” would end. There would be not only a “big culture shift” (How did he imagine one shifts culture – or was his imagination, rather than his articulation, actually engaged at all?), there would be a “totally new process” for dealing with families in the immigration process. It is with immigrant families or children entering the UK or about to be forcibly removed after the failure of their appeals against refusal of their applications to stay that child detention mostly arises.

What we have is less a change of process than – if one were to be uncharitable – an interior design exercise. The grim and prison-like Yarl’s Wood has been replaced by the country retreat of Cedars. Families will be detained for much shorter periods. However, the numbers of children detained have not much reduced since May.

Cedars looks very different from Yarl’s Wood, inside and out, but inside it is staffed by G4S and outside there are security fences. It is inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons.

Controversially Barnardo’s, the children’s’ charity, has contracted to work with G4S and the government advising on both the fitting out and the running of Cedars. The chief executive of Barnardo’s describes Cedars as looking like an upmarket holiday resort, perhaps a bit like Center Parcs. One can see what she means, but the irony of the UK state’s willingness to extend this level of comfort and ease to would-be immigrants, many of whom will have no doubt been motivated to make their risky attempts to settle here at least partly by economic poverty, for something like an away-break, but not a life-time, will not be lost.

One regrets also that in our times our government no longer has within its own ranks the ability to envisage and implement a civilised and unintimidating environment for these people but must contract with a charity to achieve it. Likewise, it now almost passes unremarked that it must contract with a commercial organisation (much criticised for competence and humanity, but profitable none the less) to run its detention centre in all but name. The government has outsourced not only its executive functions but also its imagination. How far have we come from Victorian values and practices when the government no longer regards detention of the individual as the proper preserve of the democratic state? At least the décor has improved.

Correction

Perhaps, as a correction to my immediately previous post, I should cite this (‘Reprofiling’), and, for good measure refer my reader to this (‘The New Normal’), which, all combined, poses the question whether corrupt privilege is so entrenched in our system that it can never be reclaimed for the public good, or whether the financial system is so inescapably compromised and crippled with its distortions that its collapse may be only a matter of (not very much) time.

Accountability, justice and power

The millionaire head of the IMF, known to be moving the organisation in a more ‘progressive’ direction, and likely socialist candidate in the forthcoming French presidential elections, at a time when, under intense American and Chinese pressure, terms for IMF assistance to Greece are to be renegotiated and a new agreement struck with Portugal, is photographed brought into a New York court on charges of sexual molestation, handcuffed, unshaven and in an ill-fitting raincoat, to have bail set at one million dollars, as a ‘flight risk’, with the comparison made with Roman Polanski.

Could anyone imagine such a thing happening to a chief executive of one of the major international banking corporations? Indeed, why should one? Different standards hold.

War is the health of the state

'It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State’s chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression.
...
'What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the more mystical and personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our hand as a definite social group, with attitudes and qualities exact enough to mean something. On the Government we can put our hand as a certain organization of ruling functions, the machinery of lawmaking and law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But the State stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and from it Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the breath of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war — or at least, its significant classes — considers that it derives its authority and its purpose from the idea of the State.
...
'Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into society as into something in whose creation we had not the slightest hand. We have not even the advantage, like those little unborn souls in The Blue Bird, of consciousness before we take up our careers on earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment. We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group our own passionate inertia against change, against the effort of reason, and the adventure of beauty.

'Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is given, just as the fauna and flora of our environment are given. Society and its institutions are, to the individual who enters it, as much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There is, therefore, no natural sanctity in the State any more than there is in the weather. We may bow down before it, just as our ancestors bowed before the sun and moon, but it is only because something in us unregenerate finds satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there is anything inherently reverential in the institution worshiped. Once the State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest and its expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling class may compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State thus becomes an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the reverence which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into a general resistance toward a lessening of their privileges. The sanctity of the State becomes identified with the sanctity of the ruling class, and the latter are permitted to remain in power under the impression that in obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving society, the nation, the great collectivity of all of us. . . . '

War is the health of the state

RANDOLPH BOURNE 1918