Crooked Timber

There’s been a marked increase in the harassment of photographers by the police, quasi-police, security guards and suchlike since 9/11, and the UK is no exception. Photographers have been (illegally) forced to delete pictures by officious police and have been told plain untruths about what the law says on the matter. A recent anti-terrorism campaign even has posters with the legend “Thousands of People Take Photos Every Day. What if One of Them Seems Odd?”, and invites the public to involve the constabulary. Since photography is a hobby that disproportionately attracts slightly nerdy loners, lots of photographers “seem odd”, but they ought to be spared this sort of attention!

Now Austin Mitchell MP, himself a keen photographer (and a past victim of such behaviour), is taking a stand, and has introduced an early day motion in the House of Commons

That this House is concerned to encourage the spread and enjoyment of photography as the most genuine and accessible people’s art; deplores the apparent increase in the number of reported incidents in which the police, police community support officers (PCSOs) or wardens attempt to stop street photography and order the deletion of photographs or the confiscation of cards, cameras or film on various specious ground such as claims that some public buildings are strategic or sensitive, that children and adults can only be photographed with their written permission, that photographs of police and PCSOs are illegal, or that photographs may be used by terrorists; points out that photography in public places and streets is not only enjoyable but perfectly legal; regrets all such efforts to stop, discourage or inhibit amateur photographers taking pictures in public places, many of which are in any case festooned with closed circuit television cameras; and urges the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers to agree on a photography code for the information of officers on the ground, setting out the public’s right to photograph public places thus allowing photographers to enjoy their hobby without officious interference or unjustified suspicion.

Readers in the UK could email their MPs and express their support for Mitchell’s stand, they could also email Mitchell himself. Since it seems to be the trendy thing to do, I’ve also set up a Facebook group in support .

British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, defending proposals for 42-day detention :

Ms Smith said the Government could not afford to “sit on our hands” in preparing for potential future risks – but denied she was legislating for a hypothetical situation.

“We need to legislate now for that risk in the future,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“It won’t be hypothetical if and when it occurs. We are not legislating now on the basis that we are bringing it in now for something that might happen in the future; we are bringing in a position for if it becomes unhypothetical.”

Indeed, or indeed not …

John Sides at The Monkey Cage asks whether whites are more likely to support the death penalty when they think black people are being executed, and finds that the answer is yes.

In a 2001 survey conducted by Mark Peffley and John Hurwitz, a random subset of whites was asked:

“Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 29%
Strongly favor: 36%

Another random subset of whites was asked:

“Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 25%
Strongly favor: 52%

That is a 12-point increase in overall support

See more here (and original paper here.

The Wall Street Journal has a confusing (to me) editorial about the attempt by the Italian courts to prosecute CIA agents involved in “extraordinary rendition”. Here’s what is supposed to have happened:

Nasr, a radical imam also known as Abu Omar, is a terrorist suspect who had been under Italian police surveillance since 9/11. In the covert operation that took place in February 2003, Italians and Americans worked together to apprehend Nasr, before whisking him back to Egypt against his will and without the permission of an Italian court.

(Nice use of the word “whisking”, that. Next time I’m charged with kidnapping I’ll tell the police that I was just planning to whisk my victim from A to B.)

The conduct of the Italian courts is deeply wrong according to the WSJ:

No one seriously claims, however, that the CIA agents were in Italy without the explicit knowledge and participation of Italy’s security services. This is the crucial point—and explains why the indictments are a hostile act against the U.S. By long-established international legal practice, the official agents of one country operating in another with that state’s permission are immune from prosecution. The status of forces agreement that governs U.S. troops stationed in Italy enshrines this principle at least for official conduct.

We might pause to note the last five words of that paragraph and wonder whether the “whisking” constituted “official conduct”. It is also worth noting the slippage between “explicit knowledge and participation of Italy’s security services” and “operating … with that state’s permission”. Would the Wall Street Journal really contend that all and any acts (kidnappings? assassinations?) performed by foreign agents on US soil with the “knowledge and participation” of US government agencies (such as the CIA, or its operatives) should be taken to be acts carried out with the permission of the US government? Would they want to say that the perpetrators of such acts should be immune from prosecution in American courts? I rather doubt it.

OpenDemocracy has a very good article by Martin Shaw on the recent International Court of Justice decision that found that the charge of genocide against Serbia in relation to the Bosnian was not established, a finding that has been seized upon by Milosevic apologists everywhere. As Shaw points out, the court did find that members of a protected group were systematically killed, raped and abused, and did decide that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide. Perversely, though it also found that it had not “been conclusively established that the massive killings of members of the protected group were committed with the specific intent (dolus specialis) on the part of the perpetrators to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such.” Also whilst conceding the involvement of the regular Yugoslav forces with the Bosnian Serb perpetrators of the pre-Srebrenica (and therefore not-genocidal) operations, the court limits their responsibility for the massacre that they are forced to characterize as genocide principally to that of mere omission. A feeble verdict.

LOL, best headline so far this year. The story describes two related but not identical issues. First that the Home Office statistics function is doing a piss-poor job of managing the ‘data’ it uses to back up its policies, namely the unreliablility of data-sets used to report on ASBOs, and other crime, prisons and immigration data. Secondly, the story brings in some more recent HO blunders on tracking crimes committed by Britons abroad, which would seem to have more to do with international data-sharing on criminal records than the HO’s statistical function.

There is a related but unmentioned issue; recent and long overdue moves to make the UK’s Office for National Statistics an autonomous agency that is completely independent of government. Now, as far as I understand it, the NSO does not have responsibility for statistics related to criminal justice, and perhaps it never will. But the current shambolic state of affairs at the HO shows that the only policy numbers worth having are those prepared independently of the advocates of that policy. As we all know, the incentive to cook the books or ignore data that doesn’t support the minister’s/civil servants’ desired policy is just too strong.

Via Billmon , I see that the Bush administration is now proposing amendments to the War Crimes Act in order to protect CIA operatives and former military personnel from prosecution for violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The proposal is to replace general protections against degrading treatment with a list of specific offences. Guess what gets excluded:

… humiliations, degrading treatment and other acts specifically deemed as “outrages” by the international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia—such as placing prisoners in “inappropriate conditions of confinement,” forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and merely threatening prisoners with “physical, mental, or sexual violence”—would not be among the listed U.S. crimes, officials said.

Steven Poole seems to have gone on holiday, so it must fall to others to catalogue the emergence of new unspeak terms. “Rebalancing” seems to be the vogue word with British government ministers at the moment. It is used when the government wants to restrict the rights of people accused of crimes, to promote summary punishment of offenders, to impose harsher sentences, and so on. The open admission that the government wants to restrict civil liberties would cause many people to worry about justice. “Rebalancing”, with its tacit reference to the scales of justice, and its suggestion that this or that measure is merely the tuning of a delicate machine, aims to calm such anxieties. Authoritarian thug Home Secretary John Reid is a frequent user of the word, and I see that blogger Oliver Kamm likes it too .

When I heard Jonathan Edelstein, aka the Head Heeb, had been to Ireland recently and was planning to write something about it, I knew we’d be in for a treat. Today he’s posted a very informative piece on immigration in Ireland. It’s a good overview from someone who has a lot of comparative knowledge about immigration and can place our experience in a wider context. From being a net exporter of people up to 1995, we’ve been an immigration nation since, with 10% of people living in Ireland today born elsewhere. And it’s only getting started.
Continue reading “Incoming!”

A rather important political development in Italy. Marco Mancini, the second-in-command of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency has been arrested, along with his former boss, General Gustavo Pignero, for his part in the extraordinary rendition/kidnapping of Abu Omar. The NYT also has a piece on this, but its focus is on the magistrates’ decisions to issue arrest warrants for four Americans who were allegedly involved. It seems to me that the SISMI part of the story is the more important one. There’s no prospect that the US is going to comply with warrants issued against its agents, but there is a real possibility of substantial political repercussions from the SISMI arrests.

The path to justice in Italy is a long and tortuous one – arrest by magistrates is no guarantee of successful prosecution. But the arrest of a key figure in the Italian intelligence agency suggests that the unwritten rules of Italian politics are changing. SISMI has traditionally been a law unto itself, with many connections to shady right wing groups in Italian politics, and an unstated presumption of judicial immunity. This may not be true any longer. The Italian government has issued a statement which is a quite perfect example of the art of flowery Italian political rhetoric – effusive and entirely meaningless expressions of confidence in the loyalty of the Italian intelligence apparatus to the state, which strongly suggest to me that some of the principals of aforementioned intelligence apparatus are being measured for the chopping block. Readers of Laura Rozen and Josh Marshall will remember that there are many interesting things that Mancini’s boss, Nicolo Pollari, could reveal about Nigerien uranium and forged documents should he choose to. It’s still unlikely that he’ll be forced to make that choice, but it’s a little more likely than it was yesterday.

Just back from going to hear Tony Blair give a speech on the criminal justice system. It was the usual stuff about “rebalancing” the system in favour of the victim, with a lot of noise about the need for “fundamental debate” on principles but no actual discussion of said fundamentals. An important rheorical subtext in the speech was Blair-as-outsider, pitted against the “legal and political establishment”, which is a bit much coming from a legal professional from Derry Irvine’s chambers who has been Prime Minister for the past nine years! There was also a heap of cod sociology, reminiscent of Henry’s post the other day , about how we once lived in nice cosy communities but that this stable order has been swept away by globalisation to be replaced by anomie etc. Blair spoke as if he intends to go on and on, which will be bad news for Gordon Brown if true (but maybe PMs always talk like this).

There was an uncomfortable amount of attention to immigration and asylum seeking in the speech, including this:

Here is the point. Each time someone is the victim of ASB, of drug related crime; each time an illegal immigrant enters the country or a perpetrator of organised fraud or crime walks free, someone else’s liberties are contravened, often directly, sometimes as part of wider society.

I’m quite puzzled by why Blair thinks that the mere entry of an illegal immigrant amounts to a contravention of someone’s liberty.

It doesn’t shock me that Tookie Williams was refused clemency. It saddens me, as do all such executions, but it doesn’t shock me. I can even see things from Schwarzenegger’s point of view: the courts have had their say, the process has come to an end, and the state has determined what the penalty should be. It is difficult for an elected official to use his personal discretion at the last moment. But I was shocked to read , among Schwarzenegger’s justifications for his refusal, the following:

In addition to arguing that Williams’ continued claims of innocence should be counted against him, the governor made a point of quoting the dedication of Williams’ 1998 book “Life in Prison.”

In the dedication, Williams named 11 people, all of whom had been imprisoned or in custody. Among them were Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid leader; Malcolm X, the black nationalist leader assassinated in 1965; and Angela Davis, the black Marxist professor acquitted of murder charges in 1972.

Schwarzenegger and his aides focused on one name on the list — George Jackson, the author of “Soledad Brother,” a book about life in prison. Jackson was “gunned down on the upper yard at San Quentin Prison” on Aug. 21, 1971, in a “foiled escape attempt on a day of unparalleled violence in the prison that left three officers and three inmates dead,” Schwarzenegger said.

“The inclusion of George Jackson on this list defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems,” the governor said.

I posted a while ago about the British government’s plans to criminalize statements “glorifying terrorism”. Here it seems that if it tipped the balance of Schwarzenegger’s decision, Williams’s dedication of a book to a controversial historical figure, may have cost him his life. A book dedication hardly amounts to an endorsement of all of a person’s attitudes and actions anyway. What can Schwarzenegger have been thinking in including this in his statement?