I am justifiably in contempt of this Kangaroo Court

Tribunalgate is quite fluid these days.

Last night the Economist mumbled something about lawyers and  clearly stated that they were handed data of communications between Justice Nizamul Huq and Dr Ahmad Ziauddin (17 hours audio, 230 emails) and did not solicit them. The comments below the article are amazing, with raw relief from many at the sight of their truth finally in print, as well as secular-takfiri bloodymindedness that we have come to expect from people holding firmly onto the master narrative. Its quite a sad reflection on our internal conversation and adab (manners) that 1971 has become such an infantalising matter, enfooling and humiliating.

Legal eagle BangaliVabna finds the Economist a little limp-wristed, gives an insight into the tribunals social context and what they have already done to split, confuse and make fools out of the Bangladeshi nation.  David Bergman made an appeal to civil society to show some spine, but more conservative blogs haven't yet commented.

These tribunals don't end impunity, they reconstitute it.

In the real world, a journalist from the Bangladeshi newspaper Amar Desh (My Country)  wrote something brave,  based on what I imagine is the same data that the Economist received.  We probably won't see the western liberal media falling over themselves to protect him, but we should, as he really pushed the boat out. Mahmudur Rahman, the editor of the paper, might also come in for a spot of bother and Awami ultra violence.

The main exhibit of this post is an audio file of what appears to be a conversation between the Judge and the Academic-Activist. Whoever organised this information retrieval from deep inside the rotten core of the Bangladeshi injustice system has done well to make people who will not otherwise listen, look the lie in the face.

This post wiki wolf whistle features them complaining about ministers setting them unrealistic deadlines and discussing how to massage the judgement so that it appears like it meets the standards expected by western powers. In passing Ziauddin observes that the Bangladeshi public will not be critical about this process at all. It seems to me that they are cooking up a judgement. It seems that a key ideological campaigner is having more representation in the tribunal than the accused, whose defence witnesses are denied, kidnapped and written off.

Somehow I can't see myself wearing a t-shirts saying 'Bangladeshi Justice for Bangladeshi Citizens' at this moment in time. These situations do get you thinking about the nature of the human intellect, its moral detuning and role in power play. You can listen to some more of the alleged audio on SonarBangla and make up your own mind.

When I was on field work in Bangladesh, during the last-but-one government, a young man, who had a small mobile phone shop by the oncoming River Jamuna said to me:

Over here, the educated people try to make fools of the illiterate.

bad poem alert.

 

 The day their music died

The Awami League of Liars stared
Their version of the past declared,
An exaggerated Jatra play
A power game, a truth to flay

No party is exonerated,
Our ranks were still quite decimated,
Yet, may the future flow uphill in wonder,
With dignity and hope not blunder.

We recognise that modus operandi,
Can only beg for foreign candy,
Terrorise and halt the nation,
With political emaciation

Noble souls,
Our thoughts controlled,
Questions patrolled,
Now, may His truth unfold.

Extradition Documentary now online

Dear All,

With legal systems and political systems weighed against them, Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad and families could really use some justice and consideration right now. Such extradition situations could very easily greet any British citizen.

The following documentary is based around one of Talha's poem and created by up and coming filmmaker Turab Shah. It features the families and lawyers of the Tooting Two and furnishes the viewer with detail and feeling that no dry text would be able to. Please watch this with your family and pass it round.

Update on the extraditions of Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad

Given the European Court of Human Rights decision to reject the appeal of five men (including Talha and Babar) to be given up to the US by the UK government, and private prosecution charge led by Karl Watkin its time to take stock and focus on what is going on. This is my attempt to make constructive, connected sense of the unfolding situation and highlight actions and resources that you dear reader might take.

The Abu Hamza Bogeyman Card

The Home Office strategy has been to camouflage the travesty of justice at the heart of this issue by playing the notorious Abu Hamza bogeyman card, even though Talha and Babar are amongst the longest detained without charge in UK legal history. They say 'Abu Hamza and the others'.

Abu Hamza's face has covered the UK paper's and confused public perception of the matters at hand, of the differentiation of the cases, the Home Office's power to stop these extraditions and our goal of British Justice for British citizens. It is really shocking how successful their misinformation campaign has been swallowed whole, and anger-making given that Abu Hamza was a MI5 informant. British spooks did not mind him so long as the focus of his bad mouth was overseas.

This is not speculation but came out in his trial, see, even he got a trial. Tragi-comically, the Queen entered the arena yesterday, with someone recollecting in public that she had once wondered out loud why he had not been arrested for breaking some kind of law.

Challenging the Frame

The Preachers of Hate framing is readily reproduced by our press, and sadly become well embedded in the public sphere. Given the political theatre of our times ( that doesnt seem to be going away), the British public tires of endless Muslim Terrorist-talk and no doubt switches off prematurely before receiving facts. The challenge before us is to cultivate the social techniques to communicate through the noise and veils between us. Every human is a potential feeler of and reflector on the injustice of this situation.

The experience of campaigning on these extraditions is that people support UK trials for Talha and Babar once they get a fuller human picture of their ordeals, the flimsiness of the accusations and evidence, the behaviour of the Met Police and CPS and the ridiculous outsourcing of British judicial sovereignty to the USA. This is about encouraging the justice within us to surface.

Babar is a British citizen who has been locked up for 8 years and was beaten black and blue upon his first arrest, winning damages but no apology from the Met Police. Talha is also a British citizen, a Koestler Platinum Award winning poet diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, who has been detained for 6 years.

If extradited both face torturous Supermax detention for years before their cases come to trial in a strange country that is not a great place for justice right now, as witnessed by Noam Chomsky here.

What now?

Earlier this month activists, poets, artists, discussants and performers congregated in East London's RichMix for an evening entitled Extradite Me, I'm British. Over a hundred people attended, became informed and joined the campaigns to negotiate a way out of this grave injustice, that pits powerful governments against families that are multiply marginalised.

Several people have been asking what they can do to become more involved, and their are three specifics I will address here: the private prosecution, the postcard call-out and the press/public sphere.

Firstly 
Karl Watkin's private prosecution bid seeks to address the justice gap by trying the 'Tooting Two' in the UK, before a jury of peers. I guess this is trying to compel Keir Starmer QC,  Director of Public Prosecutions at the  Crown Prosecution Service to show some spine and initiate a public prosecution.

Please email him on  keir.starmer 'at'cps.gsi.gov.uk to support Karl's initiative.

Secondly
Arts Against Extraditions, creators of those fine, evocative campaign T-shirts have issued a postcard design call out on the concept of 'Extradite Me, I'm British'. This intends to mobilise creative resources and encourages raise the issues in ways led by our imaginations and reflections.

Please visit their site and circulate it around your creative pals, even have a go yourself.

Thirdly
The media are obscuring the issues by uncritically repeating the Home Office mantra of 'Abu Hamza and the others'. This is sadly enough to push the others beyond the pale. We have had clueless counsels for the American Embassy and hideously biased, uninformed academics (prof Glees) hogging vital airtime. The British press isn't having a particularly deep and challenging time these days, despite the wake up call of the Leveson Inquiry.   Fahad Ansari from the Free Babar Ahmad campaign and Hamja Ahsan from the Free Talha campaign are very able to address such assaults of our intelligence when given the microphone, but more needs to be done.

Please become informed with the particulars of the cases, examine press artefacts and be active citizens through the letters pages of newspapers, blogs, facebook and twitter  ( #freetalha and #freebabarahmad ).  Corresponding with elected and unelected authorities, in formal and informal fora is critical for the next days and weeks.

Contact details and articles covering the extraditions are given below for some of the major UK papers. Please write into them in reference to a specifically dated article, with your full name, address and telephone number, stressing as some of the talking points below in a kind/crisp manner.

• Babar and Talha are British citizens who were born, educated and paid tax in the UK
• They are accused of running websites hosted on servers in dozens of countries but operated from the UK.
• The UK has the oldest criminal justice system in the world and is capable of successfully prosecuting them both here. There a need to outsource our justice.
• Almost 150,000 members of the British public signed a government e-petition last year calling for Babar to be put on trial in the UK.
• Together they have spent over 14 years detained without trial in the UK, serving the equivalent of a 30 year sentence between them, arguably more than they would have even received if convicted.
• The CPS admitted last year that it had not viewed the bulk of the material seized from Babar's home which was sent directly by the police to their US counterparts and which forms the basis of the indictment against Babar and Talha
• The DPP has now been in possession of that material for several months and is reviewing it to decide whether Babar and Talha can be prosecuted in the UK.
• Support of Karl Watkin's private prosecution
• The freezing of the extraditions until the DPP has fully reviewed the material and made a decision as to whether or not to prosecute them in the UK.
• In 2005, Judge Timothy Workman said about the case: "This is a difficult and troubling case. The defendant is a British citizen who is alleged to have committed offences which, if the evidence were available, could have been prosecuted in this country." That evidence was secretly hidden from the CPS and Judge Workman for 8 years but is now available.
• Talha has been clinically diagnosed as suffering from Aspergers, the same illness afflicting computer hacker Gary McKinnon. Theresa May continues to postpone her decision on McKinnon's extradition case on account of his Aspergers - why should a vulnerable individual like Talha be treated in a far more brutal manner?

Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article3549504.ece 
letters@thetimes.co.uk

Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-extradition-that-changes-the-game-8176007.html 
letters@independent.co.uk 

Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/sep/24/abu-hamza-extradition-us?newsfeed=true 
letters@guardian.co.uk

Metro 
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/913106-bbc-apologises-to-queen-over-abu-hamza-revelations 
mail@ukmetro.co.uk

Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208204/Hate-preacher-Abu-Hamza-facing-life-U-S-prison-terrorism-charges-final-extradition-appeal-fails.html?ito=feeds-newsxml 
letters@dailymail.co.uk






Resources

The actor and musician Riz Ahmed (or Rix MC) from 'Four Lions' and the upcoming adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's 'Reluctant Fundamentalist'  recorded this message of solidarity, the government should be protecting its citizens.



Robert King, who suffered Supermax detention and was part of the Angola 3 offers his message of support.



Free Talha Site (family led campaign)

FreeBabar Ahmad Site (family led campaign)

Abdur Rob Khan is no more

So i was asking after this old journo(Bangladesh Observer) i had met in Sirajganj a few years ago, and it turns out that he has passed on. Innalillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun.

I spoke at length with him once and he recounted a lot of the local history with me, from when he was involved with the AL during the war, to Ismail Huseyn Shirazi who sounds like a rare religious man of much repute, the torture and murder of nonbengalis in Sirajganj Jail and other irresponsible and inflaming actions by bengalis at the time. These were confirmed elsewhere in the town much to the distress of another old dudes son-who-was-too-young-to-have-ever-been-witness-to-the-events who was having trouble accomotading some new phenomena to his own historical model.

He was unafraid to 'complement' the official narrative with his experiences, maybe because be was old and noone would act against him, maybe also because his spine was quite firm and he felt it important to transmit the memory.