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Entitled to Be a Radical? Counter-Terrorism and Travesty of Human Rights in the Case of Babar Ahmad

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Entitled to Be a Radical? Counter-Terrorism and Travesty of Human Rights in the Case of Babar Ahmad This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Poynting, Scott (2016) Entitled to be a radical? Counter-terrorism and travesty of human rights in the case of Babar Ahmad. State Crime Journal, 5(2), pp. 204-219. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/102931/ c Copyright 2016 International State Crime Initiative This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.13169/statecrime.5.2.0204 Entitled to be a Radical? Counter-Terrorism and Travesty of Human Rights in the Case of Babar Ahmad. Introduction This case study presents the experiences between 2003 and 2014 of a British Muslim man, Babar Ahmad, with the counter-terrorism forces of the United Kingdom and the United States, and with their justice systems, along with the acquiescence of the European Court of Human Rights. The account offered here demonstrates the reliance of the states concerned on unlawful violence in these processes. The unlawfulness includes, notably, breaches of international law dealing with human rights, but also involves illegalities perpetrated by the state in both the UK and the USA. That this state crime is routine and systemic is demonstrated by the impunity of the perpetrators. It is arguably ‘empire crime’, in that it is committed by agents of several states in concert, in the context of an unequal hegemonic alliance between the states involved. It involves the transnational criminalisation of expressing and propagating ‘radical’ religious and political views, even though these expressions may be quite lawful – and indeed formally guaranteed as human rights – in the place and at the time that they are expressed. The state response is deliberately terrifying and demonstrably disproportionate to any danger, and functions to ‘send a message’ to ‘othered’ communities designated as dangerous. In the process, members of these communities, such as Babar Ahmad, who are singled out as examples in shows of counter-terrorist force, are bereft of recognition of their humanity and their human rights. This case involves what Ahmad’s supporters claimed was the longest incarceration without trial in modern-day Britain1; it is an extreme case in that respect, but it is exemplary in demonstrating the targeted abrogation of human rights in the ‘war on terror’. Pre-Dawn Raid Before dawn on the morning of 2nd December 2003, 29-year-old British IT engineer Babar Ahmad and his wife were asleep in bed in their home in Tooting, London. They woke suddenly to loud banging as their front door was smashed in. Rushing to the window in his pyjamas, Mr Ahmad saw a line of police in riot helmets and dark clothing. They entered his house. He heard them on the stairs and saw them burst into his bedroom, shouting, ‘Police, police!’ He had his hands up, facing them passively. The officers shouted, ‘Get down, fucking get down!’, but before he could do so they grabbed his arms, twisted them behind his back and pushed him head first into the window. Mr Ahmad did not resist, at this or any other stage. At least two of the policemen punched him all over, and kneed him in the thighs. Though compliant, he was forced face-down onto the floor, and then beaten severely and at length by some five or six of them, all over his body, on his head, the side of his face, his ear, and his back and thigh. All this time his hands were held fast behind his back by a police officer. One officer grabbed him by the testicles and tugged them hard, causing severe pain (Ahmad v Commissioner of Police, 2007). The officer apparently in charge asked Babar Ahmad his name, and told him he was ‘under arrest on suspicion of having committed, instigated or prepared terrorist offences’ (Ahmad v Commissioner of Police, 2007). The assailants turned out to be counter-terrorism officers of 1 Unit 1 Area Territorial Support Group based at the high-security Paddington Green police station. The officers continued to beat Mr Ahmed in front of their senior officer. They handcuffed him behind his back with plastic ties, by which they painfully hauled him to his feet, causing him to scream in agony, and which they twisted to inflict further intense pain. One of the officers stamped repeatedly on his feet. He was propelled downstairs, where he was forced to his knees and bent into the Muslim prayer position, and taunted, ‘Where is your God now? ... Pray to Him’. Babar Ahmad’s wife, Maryam, witnessed all of these proceedings, which naturally traumatised her as well; she was also handcuffed and mocked by the police (Yusuf, 2006). Mr Ahmad was made to lie on the floor while his pyjama pants were taken down, and his genitals were handled amid laughter from the police. His pants pulled up again, he was once more dragged painfully to his feet by the cuffs, again had his feet stamped on, and was hit further on the head and back. He was bundled into a police van where he was once again deliberately tortured by manipulating the handcuffs and forcing him against the metal leg of the seat. He was told, ‘You fucking cunt, you’ll remember this day for the rest of your life, do you understand me, you fucking bastard?’ He was twice placed in a life-threatening neck hold that compromised his breathing and made him to feel that he was about to die. By the time he was pulled from the van at Charing Cross Police station in a collapsed state, as recorded on CCTV, some 73 separate injuries had been inflicted on Babar Ahmad, according to doctors who examined him over the following week (Verkaik, 2013). There was bleeding in his ears and blood in his urine. The custody sergeant later testified that his handcuff injuries were the worst he had seen in his 30 years as a police officer. The point here is not merely to recount this unlawful police violence, but to argue that this violence is not gratuitous, nor the work of errant individuals, but is systemic, purposeful, and serves the function of intimidating – indeed terrorising – communities from which the victims come, and imposing an awful and often prohibitive ‘price tag’ on political organisation and civil resistance by these communities. In a globalised empire, this function is global. The state criminality in question is also manifestly targeted through a process of racialisation of Muslims, as is borne out by some of the details of the particular violence here described, as well as by the statistics of raids, stop-and-searches, and other state action involving racialised profiling. It is state violence involving institutional racism. This applies not only to the violence of police beatings and other torture, but also to the violence of disproportionate, unjust, inhumane, indeterminate and solitary incarceration. ‘Grave abuse tantamount to torture’ Now none of the facts of the above account were disputed six year later, in the civil trial for battery against the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, before Mr Justice Holroyde at the High Court in London. Babar Ahmad was there awarded £60,000 compensation from the London Metropolitan Police (Babar Ahmad v the Commissioner of Police, 2009), for what their commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, then admitted was ‘gratuitous and sustained violence’ during this arrest: ‘Grave abuse tantamount to torture’ (Taylor and Williams, 2009). The compensation included ‘aggravated and exemplary damages to reflect the shocking conduct of the Metropolitan Police as an institution as well as of the individual officers’ (Bhatt Murphy Solicitors, 2009). Now that is a clear admission of state crime, and a rare one which does not attempt the ‘bad apples’ defence. It clearly involves breaches against the UN Convention on Torture. This convention requires that alleged cases of torture be prosecuted by the competent authorities (Article 7) and proceed to ‘a prompt and impartial investigation’ (Article 12). This eventually happened, if not promptly, in as much as four of the Metropolitan Police officers who engaged in the ‘grave abuse tantamount to torture’ were ultimately prosecuted for assault. The outcome was a travesty, in complete contradiction with the civil trial, as we shall see below. A more minor, but significant breach, of the law by the British state was committed while Babar Ahmad was preparing for his civil case against the Met. It is unlawful in Britain, under what is called the ‘Wilson doctrine’, to subject members of parliament to covert surveillance recordings. Ignoring this, British police did just that in 2005 and 2006 in bugging Sadiq Khan MP while visiting his constituent Babar Ahmad in prison.
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