My screen cue is Tribune Dark, and it goes beyond allusion to this book’s title, Dispatches from the Dark Side. You can admire something ardently as it flings you into despair. So with the hundred pages here. Gareth Peirce begins with John Lilburne, apostle of a free citizenry, facing Charles I’s Star Chamber, secret, jury free and serving the absolutist Stuart state. (Ah the Stuarts, those charming romantics!) Charged with importing contentious religious books, Lilburne refused to answer. Questioned on the base of an informer’s report, source and detail kept secret, he refused to answer. Shackled, flogged through the streets, pilloried, then close confined without term, he refused and refused until, with a turn in fortune, the Long Parliament set him free as a hero.
Gareth Peirce has sustained throughout her professional life a disconcerting failure of compliance. She has fought through the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward, Moazzam Begg and Jean Charles de Menezes cases, confounding the convenience of ministers, the rage of ignorant public opinion and the malignancy of a Caliban press. She gives here a clear resumé of the conflicts in which government, under the strange, bright-eyed leadership of Tony Blair, has ignored every principle of the law in which he holds an Oxford degree. We learn how government reliably treated instant obligation of United States wishes as a priority requirement, a species of international room service. As for the US government itself, post 2001, she demonstrates its open ended indifference to all law.
The Long Parliament had concluded that the treatment of Lilburne was “illegal and against the liberty of the subject, and also bloody, cruel, wicked, barbarous and tyrannical.” We have here a well-evidenced case that in the country of John Lilburne, and even more so in the country of Thomas Jefferson, the Court of Star Chamber flourishes.
It had already made an early showing in 1971 when, in Northern Ireland, men were arrested and, at a secret site, were hooded, kept standing vertical, denied sleep, denied water and subjected to “white noise” – in other words, tortured without bruising. To the European Court at Strasbourg, the Heath government gave and kept an undertaking that our military would not use such methods again. In January 2002, official advice to MI6 men in Afghanistan, acknowledging witness of such ill-treatment of prisoners by the Americans, was that “the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this.” Security-vetted and eyes-averted, the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee reported on such things, redacting all unpleasant detail. In the same abject spirit, information obtained in Uzbekistan by boiling people was deemed, “as a matter of policy,” not to be reported. The Americans in Afghanistan rounded up 2,000 random people and, in Morocco, Poland and law-cleansed Guantanamo, questioned them under torture. This was after all, the War on Terror.
Let’s hear Gareth Peirce direct: “It would have been difficult to match Bush’s executive onslaught on constitutional rights in the US by means of the Patriot Act, the designation of ‘enemy combatants’ and their detention by presidential order; the abolition of habeas corpus, the subjection of detainees to torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo or their unofficial outsourcing to countries specialising in even more grotesque interrogative practices, many of them those same regimes which had long pressured the UK to take action against their own dissidents.
Claiming that a parallel emergency faced Britain, Blair bulldozed through parliament a new brand of internment: indefinite detention without trial for a dozen foreign nationals.”
That pre-eminent lawyer, Lord Megarry, remarked of a piece of Second World War legislation, also aimed at excluding evidence and argument, that “It might with propriety have been advanced in the court of Star Chamber in the reign of Charles I.” We have come full circle from John Lilburne. The point of such legislation is that it permits the arrest of anybody for nothing by way of executive say so. This perversion of law is power’s pure, ignorant, despotic self. “And when I speak, let no dog bark.”
The men seized here as “linked to al Qaeda” were not linked to al Qaida. A number had been supportive of the Chechens, also Muslims, when in 1999 unfettered executive action had been taken against them. So, indicated in the security mind as likely train and bus bombers, a dozen hastily fingered men were sent to Belmarsh. Moazzam Begg’s name was passed by British security to the Americans as a British Muslim living in Pakistan, suspect because a well, dug in Palestine at his father’s expense, had been named for him. He was taken to Bagram, where he saw two other inmates murdered, then to Guantanamo, the Foreign Office flatly denying having any information. In this narrative, belief is beggared on every page!
The standard argument against Gareth Peirce’s insistence on always following the safety and wisdom embodied in the English and American constitutional inheritance is “Don’t you know there’s a war on.” Such thinkers would endorse Winston Churchill’s 1940 statement about alien refugees. “Collar the lot.” Collaring the lot then involved internment of Mr Sidoli, a long resident Italian with an ice cream shop in Wellington, Shropshire, and three quarters of the future Amadeus Quartet, all Jewish. That, since Isle of Man detention was pretty casual, is the funny side of it. But, in Bellmarsh, eight men held fell into severe mental illness, four into florid psychosis and transfer to Broadmoor. Even with a war on, even after the New York trade centre massacre and the London tube bombs, the point is to find the guilty; and nothing in due process prevents that.
However, a big crisis can release an exultant hubris in executive personalities. There was an Egyptian lawyer, culpable of working for human rights under Mubarek’s family dictatorship. He had already suffered “truly terrible torture.” Egypt wanted him back. Blair, obliging and loyal US ally, wanted to send him, arguing that Egypt had assured no ill-treatment. The case went to court. A memorandum slipped into the public domain where perhaps all memoranda should go. The Home Office – the Home Office! – had argued that assurances from that regime about not torturing and not executing, should not be relied upon. Blair wrote in the margin: “This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?” Answer: “Because there are people like you.”
The Lords would subsequently rule against internment and all the institutions of Europe, Courts and Union, would direct their authority against all this denial of justice, a thought for Ukippers and sceptics proclaiming European tyranny. But New Labour and the security people had their own venomous ways to extra-judicial persecution. The House of Lords had made benign trouble about not admitting evidence obtained by torture. Those twelve detainees were resentfully released. Legislation was rushed through the Commons by dumb, submissive Labour MPs authorising grotesque controls. It would be Whitehall Farce if it were not utter cruelty.
Electronically tagged, a faulty, American voice recognition system on their phones, brought police regularly rushing into their homes. Permission was needed to go into the garden. As for the Egyptian, his assets were frozen, working made impossible and the Treasury, through reports demanded of his children monitored every meal he ate. This has nothing to do with security. It is the miserable spite of the new ministerial Star Chamber, denied the opportunity of abusing its powers. It is the next best thing to torture in Cairo.
There are many other things here, including a clear, compelling chapter called The Framing of al-Megrahi. But what registers, as secret power flourishes, is that the lesson about that secret power from the 1640s has been utterly lost. In Trafalgar Square, we have an empty plinth. If we put him there, John Lilburne might instruct us.
