Scum-watch: Did we get it wrong on 42 days? Oh look, here's Abu Qatada!
Imagine, if you will, that you've spent the best part of the last 3 years in the highest security prison without charge, awaiting deportation to a country that has routinely practised torture and where the trial in your absentia was almost certainly centred on evidence achieved under torture. Prior to that, you'd spent time on a control order, again without any charge actually being made against you. Your short time on a control order was the result of the law lords striking down your indefinite detention without charge, simply because you were a foreigner rather than a actual British citizen.Now, after the latest legal challenge that won on the one remaining argument that the British state cannot be complicit in torture whether in a foreign state or not, you've been released on bail. This isn't the sort of bail where you can go and potentially kill someone else, as others recently have. This is 22-hour curfew bail, harsher than a control order, where your freedom amounts to your house and a very small surrounding area around that house, where you can spend those two hours after 10am and after 2pm, with a tag that sends your movements directly to the police who'll be monitoring 24 hours a day. Your points of contact with the outside world will be your telephone, which will naturally be bugged. Anyone else who wants to visit will have to be approved in advance, and don't expect that they will be. You can't visit your place of worship, and if you wanted to get into contact with any of three named gentlemen for some reason, then you specifically can't.
Anyone would think that this is a very funny short of freedom and that this is a very arbitrary form of justice. When you're alleged to be the right-hand man of Osama bin Laden in Europe however, and despite being given asylum, albeit after you arrived on a false passport, then it's perfectly OK, and in fact, complete madness to not deport him immediately straight back to where he came from.
Here's where if you're a tabloid journalist and happen to be completely losing an argument over a related matter that you can do: start a hysterical, typically emotional campaign, conflated with a completely unrelated issue to try and get over your embarrassment. Hence "Sarah dies while Qatada is freed." This is apparently an "insult to our dead", which is especially curious. Generally when you're dead you can't decide what is and what isn't an insult to you, although grasping, opportunistic journalists will attempt to do just that.
The staggering hypocrisy and and contradiction at the heart of the Sun's argument needs to be seen to be believed. According to the paper, those like Sarah are fighting (and dying, in a pointless, unwinnable war which is currently being sickeningly spun as going tremendously well because the Taliban are turning to "terror tactics") for our freedom and for the freedom of the Afghan people. The latter is debateable; the former is complete nonsense. The Sun's solution to this is what we've seen over the last few weeks: to actually remove the very freedoms which those we are meant to be fighting hate, while also conspiring and giving the OK to the sort of mistreatment which breeds resentment and radicalisation.
Qatada is of course the most extreme example of this. No one is going to defend what he believed and preached, or at least, what he believed and preached. I have contended on multiple occasions that there would be enough evidence, were the authorities so inclined, that a case based on his teachings could be brought against him under our criminal justice system, not Jordan's. The Sun's own "discovery" of footage showing him preaching alongside all the other most notable extremists increases the possibility that this could be achieved. Instead, it has to be questioned exactly why we're so determined to get rid of him rather than try him. The suspicion has to be that this is because Qatada, like both Hamza and Bakri Muhammad, had an association with the security services. Unlike Hamza and Muhammad however, where the meetings and cooperation were slight, allegations have been put directly into the public domain that Qatada was a double agent, or at the least much more closesly associated with them than the others.
It was partly these swirling rumours that led directly to his stock dropping hugely amongst those who had previously looked to him as a spiritual leader. While on the run during 2002, even the French security services speculated that MI5 was directly helping to hide him. That appears not to have been so, but what has also directly left Qatada bereft of any support or real sympathy amongst jihadists was his direct appeal for the release of Norman Kember, held in Iraq by those who executed one of his co-captures. When such takfirists that support the likes of the Islamic State of Iraq bend over backwards to try to defend the atrocities that were and are being committed in that benighted country, including the gruesome beheadings of foreign hostages, Qatada was instead calling for the release of a man they considered as a crusader and indistinguishable from the other foreign troops. This lead some to speculate that his stays in prison had mellowed him, and even potentially turned him against al-Qaida, and he wouldn't be the first that has changed in such a manner after a period of imprisonment that inevitably leads to
True or not, the Sun's pathetic campaign is still resorting to casual smears. They complain about him sponging benefits worth £1,000 a month, but how is he meant to work when he can only use the telephone and leave the house for 2 hours a day, let alone how no one would employ him in any case? They moan of the £1 million cost of his bail, without mentioning how much it was costing to hold him in prison and how much it would cost to prosecute him rather than continuing with the deporting charade that shames us all.
Yesterday's Sun leader has disappeared in the ether, so we'll have to make do with tomorrow's:
THOUSANDS of Sun readers are backing our campaign to bundle hate preacher Abu Qatada onto the next plane out of Britain.
Here, let's check, does the HRA guarantee everyone a life free from fear? Hmm, nope. The prohibition of torture is however right there in Article 3, and unlike most of the other articles, there are no limitations on that right. The Sun's argument is, in any case, bollocks. Abu Qatada at the moment poses no threat to anyone, and if he were to be prosecuted, with the evidence against him put through an open court, with it possible that he would be convicted, he would pose even less than no threat.
As the case waits to go to the House of Lords, Britain’s highest court, our message is simple ....We don’t want to wait till Christmas before you give Qatada the Order of the Boot.
Thankfully, the law lords don't tend to listen to tabloid threats and bullshit, and judging by past decisions, it seems highly unlikely to disagree with the appeal court ruling.
Elsewhere, Kelvin MacKenzie treats us to why he decided not to stand against David Davis. Strangely, none of these reasons include the fact that he was going to get his backside handed to him over 42 days. They do however include his calling of Hull a "shocking place" (a joke, obviously, as he's never been) and the opinion polls that showed him on 17%. This is the real reason though:
But the clincher for me was the money. Clearly The Sun couldn’t put up the cash — so I was going to have to rustle up a maximum of £100,000 to conduct my campaign as candidate for the Red Mist Party.
As Tim points out, this is something of another reverse ferret. Last Friday, "the boss", Mr Murdoch, was good for it. What changed? It couldn't be that Murdoch rather decided that he was on the wrong side of the argument for once, could it? Still, Rebekah Wade has now come up her revenge: torture is fine as long as it's happening to nasty people. Who could possibly disagree?
Related:
Gareth Peirce - Is this what it was like for the Irish?
Labels: Abu Qutada, human rights act, jihadists, Kelvin MacKenzie, Scum-watch, Sun-watch, tabloid hypocrisy, terror suspects, torture
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