CIVIL LIBERTIES IN BRITAIN Sarah Parker argues that to understand the attacks on civil liberties in Britain we have to look at them in the context of the US War on Terror and of European efforts to strengthen the EU as an economic and military bloc. 6 UNDERSTANDING THE ATTACKS ON
n Europe the pressure to take away hard-won liberties comes from two main sources: first from the USA, which, in the context of its war against terrorism, wants all its subordinates to put in place measures to control local populations. The Patriot Act is its model. Second, sections of the ruling classes of Europe require similar measures - including harsher physical and social control of the populations and borders of the EU - to protect their own interests. It is a mistake to look at developments in Britain alone and overlook the European dimension.' In fact in recent years Britain has often taken the lead in forcing through new measures within the EU, especially in asylum policy and the European-wide anti-terror lists. Developments in Britain connected to US and EU policies It is critical to understand these attacks as part of global policies whether inspired from the US or as part of the EU agenda to contain unrest and impose social control. One major factor in this is the shift of large-scale production from the US and Western Europe to cheap labour economies. process is combined with the phenomenal economic growth and competition from India and China, and together they represent a downwards pressure on the price of labour. This will increasingly lead to under- and unemployment for large sections of the population both in the US and Europe. These processes have been going on since the 1980s, but are speeding up and will certainly lead to more civil unrest and social upheaval - in other words class struggle. At the same time global warming will make parts of the globe uninhabitable threatening social dislocation and the rule of law, as mass migrations of refugees from climate change are compelled to flee its consequences. The Pentagon document (2003) sketching a possible scenario for 2020, reveals their awareness of these issues. Imperialism already faces battles, ranging from rebellious and alienated youth in France or Birmingham, to the need to contain whole countries in turmoil, such as Bolivia and Venezuela. There is the issue of the control of valuable natural resources - oll, water, precious metals, plants with medicinal properties - and struggles where national or cultural self- determination plays a part. Their need to suppress movements for self-determination is an important factor in the introduction of 'anti-terrorist' laws. Many of those interned in Belmarsh countries such as Algeria where fierce battles for control of the country have been going on for many years; or they were allegedly involved in solidarity campaigns around the wars of self- determination in Chechnya, Kashmir or Palestine. Criminalisation of major political organisations also functions to hamper and obscure the movement for self-determination of the Kurds. We are starting to see hints that certain support for the resistance in Iraq could be criminalised in Britain - from denunciatory BBC articles about George Galloway, to police use of anti-terrorism laws to eject Walter Wolfgang from the Labour Party Conference. US military - armed wing of globalisation If the US forces are an armed wing of globalisation, we can suggest that, in its attempt to control all major world THIS POLICING OPERATION HAS TO BE LEGITIMISED, OTHERWISE PEOPLE WILL NOT ACCEPT IT resources and strategic areas, either for its own use or to deny them to others, it requires its subordinates to assist ever more energetically in policing their territories. It will brook no dissent. But this policing operation has to be legitimised, otherwise people will not accept it. In the 1950s, the ideological justification was the fight against communism and for the American dream. Today it takes the form of proclaiming the battles for 'freedom', 'democracy', the free market, and against terrorism. Just as the Cold War was fought all the world and its effects made themselves felt at many levels within society, culturally, ideologically and in terms of the criminalisation of people with unorthodox views, so the scope of the war on terror is very broad. It also has effects at many levels and across many places in Britain are from sectors of society, both ideologically and through the impact of harsher measures of social control, including attacks on civil liberties, being introduced in most countries worldwide. The War on Truth For the US a key tool in the war on terrorism is the demonisation of Islam. The War on Truth by Ahmed Nafeez Mosaddeq argues that there has been semi-secret Western encouragement and manipulation of Islamist groups to provide a new global bogeyman to replace the so-called communist threat. He examines evidence, much of it available on public record, on the relationship of US ruling circles and intelligence agencies to the Al-Qaida phenomenon, with special reference to the attacks on the Twin Towers. He explains the many 'failures' to roll up certain networks active in the USA. He presents a very convincing picture of medium and low- level police, intelligence agents, and a few congressmen, who repeatedly tried to investigate persistent reports of planned terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, including by airplane. Their efforts were blocked. He argues that the common sense were just inefficient or only had vague information about impending attacks does not hold water: the incoming information was precise and grew to a crescendo as September 11 approached. It came from many intelligence agencies across the world, including Jordanian, Moroccan, Russian, British and Israeli. He details the puzzle of the failure of air traffic control and the air-force their normal procedures for when a plane goes off course or otherwise gives cause for concern, and to scramble air defences effectively. Finally he documents how those around Bush and top people at the Pentagon systematically blocked an effective air response to the attacks. He even cites an article by US defence analyst William Arkin referring to a classified document Rumsfeld's Defence Science Board in 2002 which recommended a new method for fighting the war on terror. The main vehicle for these methods would be, a super-intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, (PZOG)...Among other body would launch secret operations aimed at 'stimulating reactions' among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction - that is for example, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to 'quick-response' attacks by US forces.' 7
will be at high risk of further torture or What Sort of State are we moving From Global Grabs to Micro-management It is easy to see that the efforts to control the Middle East revolve around oil, gas and water supplies. the search of US capitalism for unfettered access to resources to be plundered and exploited, as is being done by Haliburton and others in Iraq. But is there a common thread if you look at a micro-level - at the attacks on civil rights in Britain, whether ASBOS against young people, ID cards for the population - or the assault on the workers at US-owned Gate Gourmet? And what about such diverse phenomena such as the 'dumbing down' of British TV over the last ten years (at least partially a response to the threat of deregulation and US competition held over the BBC governments), and ITV by successive or the obsession with brand name and designer clothing amongst young people, and the fascination with commercialised the lives of celebrities at the expense of any sort of independent sporting or cultural or intellectual activity? One function of all these different processes is to create a docile, conformist, unthinkingly obedient to the dictates of the market and the authorities, keen to consume but willing to do it on credit rather than fighting for higher wages. to mark off, exclude and punish those from these norms. The most obvious example is that of Middle Easterners or Muslims branded as hate figures. This followed years of political and media propaganda that constructed a widely accepted and hated stereotype Torture and Extraordinary Rendition Torture is a key question in the 'War on Terror', especially for us living in Britain, with Blair a key US ally who leads the fight within the EU for harsher control of migration to Fortress Europe. Torture is at the heart of US methods of control: the profitable US prison system, the widespread use of torture in Iraq, perhaps even more widespread than under Saddam Hussein, Guantanamo Bay, the 'secret' worldwide network of gulags, and the practice of 'extraordinary rendition', now the subject of a snowballing scandal and crisis, provoking the risk of widespread enquiries and cover-ups into allies' complicity with US requests. It is also the link to one of the most important features of current British immigration knowingly and policy: that Britain deliberately deports 'failed' asylum seekers to dangerous places where they 8 death. The internees in Belmarsh were notorious because of the conditions they were held in and because the grounds for holding them was alleged involvement in terrorism. But thousands of others are deported from Britain every year, a good proportion facing persecution or even death on return. They are often detained without charge before their deportation even though they have committed no criminal offence. The callousness shown by the Home Office and the majority of judges who uphold the Home Secretary's decisions from the can currently be seen treatment of Zimbabwean and Iraqi Kurd asylum seekers. Because deportations o THE LABOUR GOVERNMIENT MISSES NO OPPORTUNITY TO BRING IN NEW RESTRICTIONS to Zimbabwe are currently blocked by the courts, the Home Office is trying to remove some Zimbabweans by Claiming that they are really South Africans. They tell the public that they are returning Iraqi Kurds to a 'safe environment where they can help rebuild their country', and sometimes dropping hints that there would be fewer potential Islamic terrorists here if more Iraqi Kurds were deported. But in November, the Home Office was obliged to admit that the 22 people on the first forced removal flight had been made to wear helmets and flak jackets for safety reasons by their British military pilots. The fact that these people probably came to Britain because they were persecuted by Islamic groups in Kurdistan, or had problems with Britain's allies, Barzani and Talabani, is not supposed to enter the picture. Making the links between these different victims of torture, encouraging people, are already including lawyers, who worried about the tremendous assaults on civil liberties in Britain and worldwide, to join the various campaigns will be towards? The havoc wrought by neo-liberalism and the introduction of 'anti-terrorism' measures worldwide should prompt us to ask questions about what sort of society or state we are moving Since the Patriot Act was towards. introduced in the USA there has been a debate about the 'hollowing out' of democracy. Is the term also applicable here? Some commentators suggest that because neo-liberalism unsustainable and contradictory, the US ruling class will decide to rein in the processes of privatisation and plunder in the third world and return to some sort of global Keynesianism. But this must be just wishful thinking. Hitherto there has been no sign that Bush and Co see any need to backtrack at all, although they are now under severe pressure, mainly because of the crisis over the war in Iraq. This is shown by events in the US itself - both the mass anti-war movement and events in Congress. Examples include McCain's successful demand that torture be outlawed; the rumpus over phone tapping on US citizens; the Senate vote on 16 December to refuse to renew the Patriot Act. Then there is Bush's low poll ratings, Bush and Powell's recent admission that they relied on false intelligence for their public justification and Cheney's for the attack on Iraq, abrupt return on December 20 from the Middle East to take part in a close vote. It remains to be seen whether early signs of mounting concern within the US ruling class about policy under the neo-cons will lead to any effective movement to replace them and change the policy. At the moment the heat is still being slowly turned up on Iran and Syria, and there is clearly a programme in place to defeat and no the revolution in Venezuela, sign of any let-up in the asset grabbing anywhere else in the third world. In Britain, Blair justifies all governmer: attacks on democratic rights - on habe_: corpus, on innocence until proven gui.:. the erosion of trial by jury - by sta: : that the world has changed. Terre-:- has made the world more dange:. and so the 'old ways' (read: demos":" rights and freedoms) do not wore : more. The Labour Government msse: opportunity to bring in new res: ::: social crisis has been ex=: The in this regard, for example .: introduction of Asbos. policies themselves == The contradictory as can be sea- attitude to alcohol ise. police have pointec : : ::: ::
licensing hours will encourage youth drinking, already out of control. New Labour has been utterly determined to abolish licensing hours and has been even keener to do it than the Tories, who were themselves renowned for being in the brewers' pockets. In answer to critics, New Labour announce stronger for the police, who will be allowed to execute 'summary justice' on offenders, but of course they take no responsibility for their own contribution to the multiple pressures people that encourage them to engage in such behaviour. How many rights, some won centuries ago, have to disappear, and how narrow can the field for legal struggles become before it can be said that Britain no longer live in a 'bourgeois' democracy? Is the EU a super- state in formation? When we look at the way in which new EU powers are brought in via the Council of Ministers and see that there is no genuine check on this process via the European Parliament, in what sense can we say that people in the EU still live in a 'democracy'? These are some of the questions that the left has to grapple with. Can the War on Terror and attacks on democratic rights be defeated? The drive to spread the war on terror is not going unchallenged, including within ruling elites. But there are of course various types of resistance. The resistance struggle in Iraq itself combined with the huge anti-war movement internationally, which crucially, is gaining momentum in the USA, is pushing the neo-conservative strategy into crisis. In Britain the powerful anti-war movement and the votes for Respect in elections, the Gate Gourmet dispute, some limited solidarity with self-organised campaigns by asylum seekers, and campaigns against the war on terrorism have all challenged New Labour's policies. But the war on terror, with all its military and democratic implications, is a massive and powerful operation on a global scale, with huge military and economic and propaganda forces at its disposal, and it reflects very deep imperatives from within capitalism, combining the drives to literal war as for example in the Middle East, with intensified commodification of every human, natural or intellectual resource across the globe. It is at the same POLICE time an attempt to change fundamentally the way societies are controlled structured, with an objective basis in the conditions created by neo-liberalism, and the battle to defeat it will be long For campaigns in Britain on these see the November/December 2005 issue of Socialist Resistance. 1. Comprehensive material on the astonishing growth of powers taken by the EU including in the fields of biometrics and surveillance is available from Statewatch www.statewatch. org. This website contains a good introduction ("Unaccountable Europe"). 2. An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security http://www.heatisonline.org/ 3. There is not space here to go into detail on US strategy, but I would strongly recommend Ahmed,Nafeez Mosaddeq (2005). The War on Truth:9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism, Arris Publishing Ltd: Gloucestershire. for readers interested in the unanswered questions' about 9/11 and US relatiors with Islamic terrorist groups. 4. The War on Truth 325. g