Welcome Home Talha Rally - 5pm Sunday 17th August 2014 - Home Office

With so much devastation unfolding in the world, we risk overlooking the significance of the few rays  of light that reach us. The freedom of Talha Ahsan is one such ray, his US judge did not fall for the lies upon lies of US-UK governments, and her judgement effectively decriminalises a genealogy of Muslim activism from the 90s which the mendacious War on Terror Industry has succeeded in pushing beyond the pale, until now.

Following early elation in the immediate aftermath of the good news of Talha's impending release (he is due back in August), we need to spread the word of the Welcome Home Talha Rally scheduled for Sunday 17th August at 5pm at the Home Office. A substantial mental and physical presence at the rally is important, even as Israel's western backed ethnic cleansing of Gaza continues to politicise and mobilise the disgust and resistance of new generations of taxpayers, voters, consumers, activists and writers.

Just as the imperialism overseas and at home are interconnected, decolonial movements need to also connect causes in the core, periphery and semi-periphery. The short-lived Equality Movement (spawned from the Student Protests of 2010 and laid to waste by riots triggered by the police killing Mark Duggan in Summer 201) made this important point.

The lawfare and geography of Talha's case, detention without trial, extradition and eventual plea bargain is this connective tissue. Everyone's rights and dignity are eroded by UK extradition laws, which among others,  have caused, and continue to cause great distress to families and waste human life.

The British government have stolen 8 years of a young, talented man's life and every department and individual in the chain should be identified, shamed and brought to book for it. The rally is as much about the moral-legal failure that continues to make such state injustices possible, as it is about the Free Talha Ahsan campaign and its widening audience of crocodile smilers.

Unless we pull the tracks and engine out of the bulldozer, it will continues to wreck havoc.

The movement to cower and depoliticise UK Muslims continues unabated,and we struggle to learn and draw strength from allied causes like the Hillsborough Justice Campaign (whose Sheila Coleman is a hearty supporter of Talha and will address the rally). With HSBC last week, we saw an entrenchment of the British establishment's political and economic persecution of charities, activists and the families of activists acting lawfully and in solidarity with the people of Palestine. The private sector follows the public sector in this respect and we remember, protest and fight the  persecution of activists and community workers like Moazzam Begg and Mahdi Hashi, who refused to play footsie with British government spooks.

Below is a Facebook banner image promoting the Welcome Home Rally for Talha at the Home Office on Sunday 17th August at 5pm. It is our duty to bear witness to and challenge the ongoing injustice of Extradition Law, the suffering of humans in Supermax and solitary confinement, and the underlying hegemonic politics it serves.

Please bring sweets and imagery to share. The speakers list looks amazing.

Azadi Mubarak Talha

Last night the good news arrived of Talha Ahsan's freedom and Babar Ahmad's near freedom. Decolonial duas to all who remain unjustly incarcerated over all time and space. 

Talha is a scholarly poet from Tooting, who suffers Aspergers syndrome, and had been unjustly held by the UK and US governments since 19th July 2006. He entered into a plea bargaining arrangement and was sentenced to time served by a Federal District Judge Janet Hall in Connecticut. Plea bargaining is the only choice for innocent people with the Supergun of a Superpower threatening you with Supermax prison. It is a corrupting legal instrument by which the state covers its arse, and the victim agrees to admit something that the state wants them too, in exchange for freedom.

 

 

"In my view," the judge said, "jihad does not equal terrorism. In a perversion of what Islam teaches, terrorists have misappropriated the concept of jihad from its true meaning – struggle. But jihad is not what happened on 9/11."

Kudos to Janet Hall, who did not take the prosecution at face value, and to the defense team Sheehan and Reeve. A shaking spear to the cruel bastards who did this to Talha and his family. This whole ordeal has been an exercise in state terror that has largely worked, to scare Muslim people away from challenging activism and even speaking up in defense of their inalienable rights. I say largely because the campaigns; family, community and otherwise, have built important courageous and creative muscle, across justice struggles and internationally..

Sadly, Talha and Babar's troubles aren't over, as they return to a Britain that securocrats and civil illibertarians have turned into a bit of a pigsty for Muslims who don't play footsie. Not only will they have to live with the 'terrorism conviction' stigma, but sh!tstirrers are eager to make capital out of them, from the government, the press and the extremism industry, and cause further hassles and political imobilisation.

They haven't even touched down in the UK, and already we have seen the BBC 's Home Office's Dominic Casciani framing an awful 'noble savage' narrative around the story for middle England, featuring none other than selfish self publicist sellout Usama Hasan near enough inviting Babar to join the Quilliam Foundation. After the TrojanHoax, which bears many of their fingerprints, Quilliam must be feeling a little gutted that Micheal Gove got shuffled away and a key source of their funding dried up. Meanwhile Home Secretary Theresa May remains at large and unrepentant for her role in this sorry affair.

As the victims try to recover a new normal and dignity, there are many more victims to work justice for, Shaker Amer (Guantanamo, still), Mahdi Hashi ( Manhatten) and Moazzam Begg (Belmarsh), to name a few, not to mention redress for these immoral detentions and state kidnappings.

Below, young Marium Begg, the daughter of the detained justice struggler Moazzam Begg speaks movingly about her memories of the father, the two times he was taken from her and leaves us with the following wisdom.

So yes, sometimes knowing too much can be a curse (reference to Moazzam's last tweet before arrest). But my message to you is, know too much, gain knowledge ... because yes they will come for you, and I promise ... that they will come for you and come for the people you know and the people you love. And when they do, you need to know more about them than they could ever know about you.

Plea Bargaining as Blackmail, and the Quest for Exhoneration under Imperialism

News is emerging that two Britons, Poet Talha Ahsan and IT engineer Babar Ahmad, who were extradited to the US last year after years of detention in the UK without trial, have taken the only option available to them - the plea bargain.

Some of the current coverage gives less context than others, for example the recent Telegraph piece omits the plea bargain issue which I believe is fundamentally miscarrying justice here. The BBC's Dominic Casciani has been following the case has penned an article at least includes this.

Thankfully we do not need to rely on the corporate media to know more as both men's families have run family campaigns ( Talha | Babar). Dr Ian Patel of KCL's International State Crime Initiative wrote a good article about Talha's particular predicament in the New Statesman earlier this year, while Turab Shah's extradition film (27 mins), which was made prior to the extradition, provides a good grounding on them both. Not to mention Clare Cameron's 3 minute short on Talha's family called 'Dinner Time'.



Plea bargaining is a legal form of judicial blackmail. However, the term 'bargain' is a misnomer as this scenario pits an arrogant part of a superpower against a young Muslim male away from home in War on Terror Times. Through a plea bargain, the defendant agrees to plead guilty to something in exchange for the prosecution's leniency. It is torture at an epistemological level and poet Talha has Aspergers syndrome to boot.

Recent extraditees, David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew and Christopher Tappin entered plea bargains in order to get on with their lives. As a result they were repatriated, but not exonerated. In the video below David Bermingham talks about his experiences of extradition and plea bargaining to an audience in the UK Houses of Parliament.

I remember him saying how only an insane man would not take a plea. 

Then I think of these two men who have spent pretty much all of their days over the past year in solitary confinement in Supermax prison conditions widely recognised as torturous. 

Supermax is terrible and Florence ADX even has a documentary about it.

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The Extraditions of Talha and Babar, and the Decolonial We

Last week the poodley government of the UK of A extradited 5 Musalmen to the USA. I've not heard from them other than that (Kobi) Talha and Babar have pleaded non guilty in the US court they were hauled in front of.

Pre-trial detention is likely to be solitary confinement which is an extreme form of torture that leaves no visible scars. We realise that plea-bargaining is the modus operandi of this Empire's injustice system. This is why we resisted their extradition.

Observations

• It could be anyone next, this is a stark warning for all activist communities. If all it boils down to is writing something on a website that is hosted on a US server, then we are pretty much all for the chop if they click their fingers.
• These kinds of campaign are long and require endurance. Watch how the tyrant uses time.
• The Home Office communications strategy seems to have worked, to connect all of the 5 detainees with the image of Abu Hamza the Muslim bogeyman, their inside man.
• The judge giving the verdict did not even try to pronounce the name of Talha Ahsan correctly, the young Asperger's suffering poet that he was about to throw to the wolves. He said 'Ashan' on more than one occasion.
• Institutional racism is certainly there, but what undergirds it is institutional epistemicide. Nothing we feel say or do counts as valid information to these pirates.
• Anjem Choudhury is auditioning for Abu Hamza's spot. He showed up last week at the verdict to pose for cameras, complete with battery begums and hairy's..
• These campaigns must join hands with the Irish community who know it all so well and the Black community which is suffering from so many killings in police custody. We must embody a Decolonial We.

Actions

• Make sure you have seen the Extradition documentary, show it to families and friends. www.extraditionfilm.com [please overlook the PRESSTV tag]
• Arts Against Extraditions have a postcard callout. Its easy to submit something on A5 and they will really make the Exhibition special.
• Encourage your Islamic Society, community organisation or pimp to host film screenings, panel discussions et on Extradition. Suggest replacing depoliticizing Charity Weeks with Extradition week.
• Zakat is due to free prisoners of war. Talha, Babar and others are victims of this phoney War on Terror.
• Pay attention to the appallingness of the press coverage and feed comments and feedback into the echo chamber with grace and high frequency.
• Wear a Free Talha badge. This is good for the shy because it can spark a normally unknowable interaction with a random human being.
• Write to your MP asking them to hound the Foreign Minister William Hague about the people detained.

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)