The continuing triumph of the securocrats.
I recall that, many aeons ago, good ol' Nicholas Clegg asked for ideas on what could be included in a freedom bill. The end result, the Protection of Freedoms Act, is it must be said one of the coalition's very few decent achievements. The amount of time "terrorist suspects" can be detained prior to charge is now 14 days rather than the 28, just a slight reduction on the 90 Tony Blair tried to ram through parliament, the section 44 "anti-terrorist" power the police had that allowed them to search anyone they felt like has gone, as has the biometric data of more than 1m of those arrested but not charged with any offence by the police, although how certain we can be of the destruction of the information is another matter.
We are though still completely in the thrall of securocrats, as a quick glance at the Graun today records. As though the vast majority of the security checks at airports weren't pointless enough, the coalition looks to be resurrecting an old Labour proposal to install similar scanning technology at railway and tube stations. They quite obviously won't be put in place everywhere, and so won't stop those determined to cause carnage who'll be able to enter the system at quieter points, but they will no doubt cause misery at the major terminals. Still, can't be too careful, can you?
The government certainly can't, at least not with intelligence provided by other governments. Not content with ensuring that there will never be a repeat of the release of the seven paragraphs, a memo on Binyam Mohamed which showed we knew the Americans had been involved in "rendering" detainees to foreign climes where they were to be tortured despite our repeated denials, information that we failed to act upon when those detained included British residents, we now learn that the very application for a closed material procedure can also be kept secret if necessary, to of course, "protect national security". In other words, it seems likely that every such order will be kept secret, as by its very nature intelligence involves national security.
If you believe the Ministry of Justice (snigger), this will in fact make it more likely that such claims will go to trial rather than result in settlements, just that we won't be able to know of the documentation that was involved. Which just ever so slightly misses the point, as it's that documentation that established the truth in the first place, and which shows the depths to which our security services are on occasion prepared to plunge. With the cancellation of the Gibson inquiry, and no replacement on the horizon, the desperate need to learn the lessons of our complicity in torture during the first phase of the war on terror seems to have been forgotten.
We are though still completely in the thrall of securocrats, as a quick glance at the Graun today records. As though the vast majority of the security checks at airports weren't pointless enough, the coalition looks to be resurrecting an old Labour proposal to install similar scanning technology at railway and tube stations. They quite obviously won't be put in place everywhere, and so won't stop those determined to cause carnage who'll be able to enter the system at quieter points, but they will no doubt cause misery at the major terminals. Still, can't be too careful, can you?
The government certainly can't, at least not with intelligence provided by other governments. Not content with ensuring that there will never be a repeat of the release of the seven paragraphs, a memo on Binyam Mohamed which showed we knew the Americans had been involved in "rendering" detainees to foreign climes where they were to be tortured despite our repeated denials, information that we failed to act upon when those detained included British residents, we now learn that the very application for a closed material procedure can also be kept secret if necessary, to of course, "protect national security". In other words, it seems likely that every such order will be kept secret, as by its very nature intelligence involves national security.
If you believe the Ministry of Justice (snigger), this will in fact make it more likely that such claims will go to trial rather than result in settlements, just that we won't be able to know of the documentation that was involved. Which just ever so slightly misses the point, as it's that documentation that established the truth in the first place, and which shows the depths to which our security services are on occasion prepared to plunge. With the cancellation of the Gibson inquiry, and no replacement on the horizon, the desperate need to learn the lessons of our complicity in torture during the first phase of the war on terror seems to have been forgotten.
Labels: Binyam Mohamed, civil liberties, complicity in torture, MI5, MI6, security services, torture
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