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prisoners of predictive judgements .....

prisoners of predictive judgements ....

from the Drum …..

While America's indefinite detention policy is kept at arm's reach from its citizens, the men, women and children that Australia keeps in legal limbo can be found in the perfectly ordinary suburb of Broadmeadows in Melbourne, writes Jeff Sparrow.

Indefinite detention is the worst form of torture. I am an innocent man. […] But if anyone believes that I have done anything wrong, I beg them to charge me with a crime, try me, and sentence me. If not, release me. Even a death sentence is better than this. Instead of a swift execution, we are being subjected to a cruel, slow, and cold-blooded death.

That's a man called Musa'ab al-Madhwani. It's a message smuggled from Guantanamo Bay, where detainees have embarked on a mass hunger strike.

Yet so deep has Australia descended into a moral abyss over refugees that the passage might equally have come from Melbourne and the eerily parallel struggle currently taking place there.

If the ... government does not release us, we ask that they kill us mercifully … [we] can't keep living like this. We are not in detention. We are in a cemetery.

The Fairfax papers yesterday reproduced that snippet from a document written by 27-hunger-striking detainees at the Broadmeadows detention centre.

The similarities are chilling - shamefully so.

There are 166 detainees still in indefinite detention at Gitmo, with no legal remedies available to them. In the public mind, Guantanamo looms as a prison designed for "the worst of the worst", so that anyone detained in it seems tainted by association.

Yet many of the men remaining were simply low-level Taliban soldiers, often sold to the Americans for bounties.

A US government taskforce has already assessed nearly half of them for immediate release. Yes, that's right. The government has cleared them to leave. But they remain locked in cages because there's nowhere to send them - the US won't, for instance, send Yemeni prisoners home, apparently because they might subsequently be influenced by people hostile to America.

By refusing to eat, the detainees have embarked on the only form of protest available to those with nothing whatsoever to lose.

It's the same in Melbourne.

All 27 of the strikers in detention at Broadmeadows have been assessed as genuine refugees. That means that the Immigration Department acknowledges that they faced persecution in Sri Lanka. But they can't be allowed into the community because they have received adverse assessments from ASIO.

What do these assessments say? The refugees don't know. They are not permitted to see the accusations against them, nor can they appeal. Though they have been charged with no crime, they now face detention without end.

As Stephen Blanks, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told Fairfax:

It is absolutely unarguable that keeping these people in detention on national security grounds is one of the greatest injustices Australia has inflicted on individuals.

An 'adverse assessment' from ASIO sounds frightening. But what does it mean? Andrew Zammit quotes ASIO director-general David Irvine:

ASIO has, over the years, developed very careful processes that enable us to eventually make a predictive judgement as to whether this person might be a potential security risk to Australia, and the security here being defined in terms of section 4 of the ASIO Act. Someone who might be coming to Australia to conduct espionage, someone who might be coming to Australia to conduct an act of sabotage, someone who might be coming to Australia to conduct an act of terrorism, and so on. [Emphasis added.]

Think about that. These men (whom we know, remember, to be genuine refugees) must remain in custody forever, without trial or appeal, not on the basis of anything they have actually done, but on ASIO's prediction of what they might do in the future!

Most of us would scream blue murder if council allowed its parking inspectors to write tickets on the basis of 'predictive judgements'. Yet that's the basis on which we're confining refugees for years.

Furthermore, the notion that ASIO - of all people - should be blindly trusted in such matters will seem utterly extraordinary to anyone with the slightest knowledge of that organisation's dire history. Under the 30-year rule, you can read in the some of its earlier documents now in the national archives. Here is its 'predictive assessment' of the Vietnam moratorium and its leader, Jim Cairns:

Cairns' activities could lead, via civil, industrial and political unrest to the growth of elitism in every sphere, to the manipulation of people by demagogues, to the fascist cult of the personality, to the worship of force, and to the destruction of the democratic parliamentary system of government and its replacement by a form of collectivism ... That way lies anarchy and, in due course, left-wing fascism.

That might seem a document from another age, a bizarre screed by some anonymous right-wing zealot. Yet security forces operating with great power and little accountability are notoriously susceptible to going off the rails.

Remember, in 2007, Justice Adams found that, in the case of Sydney medical student Izhar Ul Haque, two ASIO operatives had "committed the criminal offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping at common law", and engaged in conduct that was "grossly improper" and that they knew was "unlawful".

Read the reports of how those particular ASIO agents behaved ("a gross breach of powers") and ask yourself how you would feel about people like that assessing whether you might commit a crime some time in the future!

But it gets worse. The hunger strikers are overwhelmingly Tamil. Last month, the UN condemned, for the second time in two years, ongoing human rights violations in Sri Lanka (despite efforts of the Australian government to water down the resolution). Human Rights Watch comments:

Since the Human Rights Council adopted a resolution at its March 2012 session calling for action, the Sri Lankan government has taken no significant steps to provide justice for victims of abuse and accountability for those responsible for war crimes and violations of human rights in the country. Instead, over the last year, the Sri Lankan government has continued its assault on civil society, human rights defenders and media.

And where do you suppose that ASIO obtains the information for its "predictive judgements"? Almost certainly, much of this "intelligence" comes from the Sri Lankan state: that is, the very people most implicated in the dirty war against Tamils.

This is the point that Hannah Arendt made about the refugees of the 1930s: the treatment they received was largely determined by their oppressors. "Those whom the persecutor had singled out as scum of the earth […] actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere," she wrote. The Tamils brutalised and deprived of their rights in Sri Lanka receive more of the same when they get to Australia, almost as if the Sri Lankan regime has outsourced its cruelty to an independent contractor.

Such is the Guantanamisation of refugee policy.

There is, however, one point at which the comparison breaks down. Citizens in the US at least have the excuse that Gitmo is located in Cuba, a long way from the everyday lives of mainstream Americans.

Here, by contrast, the men, women and children that we keep indefinitely detained can be found in the perfectly ordinary suburb of Broadmeadows.

In other words, when future generations ask us how we allowed our government to do this, we will not be able to say that we did not know.

Australia's Guantanamo isn't offshore: it's in Melbourne

 

a false promise ....

In 2009, defending the promise he made to close Guantánamo Bay, President Barack Obama insisted: "The existence of Guantánamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained."

This weekend, the case for the closure of Guantánamo Bay, promised by Obama on his second day in office, has never been more compelling. A hunger strike by the camp's inmates, half of whom had been cleared for release, has underlined the growing desperation of those 166 still detained. Of that number, some 86 had been approved for transfer (while the rest had been earmarked for trial) but have become stuck in a political and legal limbo that has seen such transfers almost completely halted in the last two-and-a-half years. A recent report by a bipartisan panel of experts has condemned both the conditions there and the use of abusive interrogation techniques.

One of those trapped in this Kafkaesque nightmare is Briton Shaker Aamer. As the Observer reports today, despite a skeleton deal that could pave the way for his release to Saudi Arabia, Aamer rightly insists he should be allowed to return to the UK to rejoin his family.

After 11 years, it is hard to see the rationale for keeping Guantánamo open. It is a fundamental principle of open and democratic societies that those accused or suspected of serious crimes should be submitted to due legal process within a reasonable time period. Indefinite detention of those cleared of any crime, or if those authorities have insufficient evidence to prosecute, is a gross violation of human rights.

The US government's decision last month that Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden's son-in-law and an al-Qaida spokesman, should be tried in a federal court rather than before a military commission at Guantánamo has underlined the principle that domestic courts are the best place to try terrorism suspects. Indeed, as Human Rights Watch has pointed out, military commissions in Guantánamo have been proved unreliable, unable to deliver real justice and subject to changes in rules and bogged down in procedure.

For those who have not been charged with any offence, their long detention has come to be one of the most serious stains on the human rights record of the US, amounting to open-ended and indefinite incarceration without charge or due process. As David Ignatius argued compellingly in the Washington Post yesterday, there are strong arguments, too, for releasing and transferring Taliban detainees back to Afghanistan. The CIA's assessment is that even if those individuals returned to the battlefield, it would have no net impact on the military situation, while it might provide impetus in talks with the Taliban.

The reason that Guantánamo remains operational, and with so many stuck within it, has nothing to do with practical issues concerning release or transfer or how some should be tried. Instead, those trapped in Guantánamo are the victims of a political conflict, specifically between Congress and the White House over plans to house and try alleged terrorists in the US. Congress cut off funds to move accused men to the US for detention and insisted on onerous conditions for the transfer of those remaining out of the US, including elaborate arrangements for monitoring.

Obama too must be held responsible for this continuing disgrace. It was the president, after all, who signed into law the National Defence Authorisation Act, jeopardising his ability to close Guantánamo after threatening to veto it.

As Amnesty International and others have pointed out, despite the ban on US funds for transfers contained in the NDAA, another clause, Section 1028, does give Obama the broad right to resolve some cases – such as Shaker Aamer's – whose return has been requested by the UK government. The resolution of the Shaker Aamer case, as Amnesty argued earlier this year, would be a symbolic step that would demonstrate that Obama has not abandoned his commitment to close Guantánamo.

The well-documented deployment of sustained and abusive interrogation techniques, sexual humiliation and extreme violence in Guantánamo is something that demeans America. That an American president has allowed these depraved practices to continue on his watch is more shocking still. Until America closes Guantánamo Bay, it cannot, as it likes to, assert its moral authority over the rest of the world.

Guantanamo Bay Should Close

high crimes ....

The last British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay may never be allowed to return to his family in London because of an alleged "secret deal" between US authorities, Saudi Arabia and the British security services.

Shaker Aamer, 46, has been in the Cuban detention centre for more than 11 years without charge or trial, and has been cleared for release since 2007.

This month, two Metropolitan police detectives interviewed Aamer, gathering an estimated 150 pages of testimony and allegations that MI5 and MI6 were complicit in his torture. These included claims that a British officer was present while US soldiers tortured him and that MI6 officers made allegations to the CIA they knew to be false, including that Aamer was a member of al-Qaida. His legal team alleges that the US, Saudi Arabia – where Aamer was born – and the UK security services are trying to ensure that he never goes home.

Were he to return, he would almost certainly become a key witness in Scotland Yard's investigation into allegations of British complicity in torture in the post 9/11 era.

Despite Foreign Office pressure to bring Aamer back to his family in south London, it has been confirmed that he has only been officially cleared to be sent to Saudi Arabia, where officials have threatened him with imprisonment. A letter dated 18 February 2013 from William Hague, the foreign secretary, to Aamer's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, states: "It is our understanding that Mr Aamer has only ever been cleared for transfer to Saudi Arabia."

Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve, said: "It seems highly probable that the British security services are in bed with the Americans on trying to keep Shaker from coming back to the UK, since Shaker is such an important witness against them for their complicity in torture. We can only hope that Hague will hold them to account. Scotland Yard has got a lengthy statement from Aamer about his abuse and British complicity in that abuse. The only way to prevent that going forward is for Shaker to go to Saudi Arabia."

In an exclusive interview with the Observer, via an unclassified phone call to Guantánamo Bay between Aamer and Stafford Smith, he revealed his desperation to return to London. The father-of-four, who is approaching day 70 of a life-threatening hunger strike to highlight his plight, said: "I hope I do not die in this awful place. I want to hug my children and watch them as they grow. But if it is God's will that I should die here, I want to die with dignity."

An online petition calling on the British government to bring him home has more than 115,000 votes, triggering a parliamentary debate on the issue.

On Saturday, Saeed Siddique, Aamer's father-in-law, said: "Shaker did nothing wrong. He has been cleared for release twice by the US government. So why is he still rotting in the hell of Guantánamo Bay? Why can't the British government get him back?"

A Scotland Yard spokesman said that a joint panel involving the Crown Prosecution Service and police had convened to assess allegations of complicity in torture involving British officials. A statement said: "Having assessed 12 cases, it has referred three to the Metropolitan police. The Met has decided to undertake further investigation into these three cases."

The Foreign Office said it remained committed to securing Aamer's return to the UK and that the decision lay with the US government: "The position of the British government remains that Aamer should be returned to the UK."

Last British Resident In Guantánamo 'May Never Be Allowed Home'