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)

Integrative Government not Differential Government

Every couple of days, the different political groups are sitting with the election commission (EC) (yes another desh post) to discuss proposed rule changes and make suggestions. Here is the meeting schedule.

33% lady quotas and the material sceince of ballot boxes arent my favourite issues, instead this is about democratic civilians pissing away vital opportunities at the EC and integrative cabinet government.

I had a vain hope that some of these chaps would have had some thinking or learning experiences since this time last year, but unfortunately not. Given an opportunity to contribute constructively to the rules, an opportunity that these gimps would not normally get, a lot of these politicos have fallen into the self pleasuring habit of railing against religion in politics, war criminals and most telling of all, the use of scales as the electoral symbol for JI, given its association with justice.

Rather than, admit that the war is over, surpass JIs appeal with greater organisational prowess, clarity of purpose and depth of resonance, they seek to cheat.

The playing field must be tilted, otherwise I shall throw all my toys out of the Cot.

JI's political baggage is not a factor that its adherants take lightly when considering allegiance. Most of them have nothing whatsoever with rape, loot, pillage with the pakistan army, and the new one 'collaboration with the British'.

Perhaps everybody with the last name, Choudhury, Talukdar... should be banned too?

One of the problems of the existing system is that its very good at promoting the scum of the earth into power and authority. ('we live in a globalised world' is not an excuse) Your party wins, and you give your lads ministries to 'play with', irrespective of their expertise, fairness of mind, preparedness and state of knowledge. That is the parliamentary system, which is plodding along in the UK, but only because HM Govt did the lions share of loot and plunder and nation building a long time ago, and the average level of education is high.

Theres a lot of work being done by the govt, and id like for it to be better, for us to settle down and get down to sodding work. Any minister needs to have a degree of talent and intelligence to battle the beurocracy, comprised at the top of people who actually studied hard at university.

We would be better suited to a system that allowed the best man for the job to get the job, at the fundamental layer. A judgement call delegated to a man or 'panel' judged worthy by the Bangladeshi voterhood. Basically can somebody who is not Gen Mueen U Ahmed make a strong case for some of that Presidential Administration flavour.

The late General Zia has some virtues, one of which was integrating talented people into government and assigning responsibilities to competant people. He didnt care whether they came from Secular or Islamic forces. Some refused because they had issues with not being elected, for which I hope they get reward in the akhira.

Anyway back to the rules lark, I really dont hold up much hope that anybody other than the AL (if they bother to show up) or JI (who can be credited for the now failed CTG system) coming up with anything interesting that the beurocrats havent already pondered upon. I hope the AL start on a new page and dont just regurgitate their Moha Jote agenda and take the 'kill Zamaat' agenda to a higher level of drunkenness.

Decentralisation
The gulf between the Union Council level and the National parliament level of politics is too wide. There are two important layers of administration, the Upazila (covering ~12 unions) and the District(spatially covering ~5 MP constituencies) both headed by first class BCS officers. To stick two layers of elected government in one go would be stupid, so for Fugstarnagar its a question of whether a new layer would go in at a smaller or larger scale.

I think the higher scale might work better, and attract a higher quality specimin of politician into the fray for a few afternoons a week. Like a headmaster or two. At present the Upazilas arent 'grown' enough for that scale of election to acheive anything other than thousands of construction tenders all at once.

Decentralisation at the administration level got done by Ershad, now we have 64 districts rather than 19. Not all districts have the same adminstrative legacy, for example Gaibandha was carved out of the Greater Rangpur in 1984, whist neighbouring Bogra has been on the cards since 1821.

Then economic, political and environmental bits of geography come in to accentuate the difference between regions. We remember how economic disparity can pull regions apart and perpetuate itself from the Pakistan Era. Cultivating district identities further might be a good laugh.... to death.

The main road from Bogra to Rangpur skips Gaibanda Town making it a pocket district, the Rivers Jamuna and Teesta are making a meal of Gaibandha District and withing a decade or so could easily be asking for the keys to the town(though its a lovely place and host the best primary school in the country). On the other hand Bogra has a Cantonment, a 'Banani', a 'Shatmatha' junction and has produced a Prime Minister of Pakistan Md Ali Bogra, a President of Bangladesh General Zia as well as a national liability.

So who is likely to to come on top if districts start getting testosterony with eachother? What if I the finance 'growth centres on my mind' ministry reason that 100 crore investment in Bogra has a much better return for the national interest than 100 crore in Gaibandha.. all the time? With the good leaders of Bogra restrain me from acting in their interests.

As a testing ground for wannabe MPs and ministers and as a forum to think through and resolve localish problems outside dhaka, the elected district/division/hydrological zone councils would be something to look forward to.