internment after 9-11
Submitted by antarchi on April 25, 2010 - 20:10
[After 9-11], Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security. Each of the dozen men snatched from his home on 17 December 2001, and delivered to HMP Belmarsh, expressed astonishment: first at finding himself the object of the much trumpeted legislation and, second, at discovering who his fellow detainees were. Each asked why, if he was suspected of activity linked to terrorism, he had never been questioned by police or the Security Services before it was decided that he was a ‘risk to national security’.
...Each man was told that, for a reason that could not be disclosed, he was in some unspecified way thought to be linked to unspecified persons or organisations, in turn linked to al-Qaida.
