The gloves have come off in Great Britain where the government has moved swiftly to grab 10 foreigners seen as a “threat to security” in pre-deportation moves.
The foreigners, thought to include Abu Qatada, once described as the spiritual ambassador of Al Qaeda in Europe, were detained in early-morning raids across Britain by police forces in London, Leicester, Luton and the West Midlands area around Birmingham. All are cities with strong Muslim minorities. Mr. Clarke said he would not identify the detainees by name.
At the same time, a British-based radical cleric, Omar Bakri Mohammed, was being held in Lebanon, according to officials there who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. The officials said he could be held for 48 hours but had not been charged with any specific offense.
Mr. Bakri Mohammed left Britain last Saturday saying he was going on vacation. There was no immediate confirmation in Britain that Mr. Bakri Mohammed, who was born in Syria, had been detained in Lebanon.
Mr. Bakri Mohammed left just a day after Prime Minister Tony Blair announced a broad range of new antiterrorism measures, including the deportation of clerics fomenting violence, the threatened closure of some mosques and actions to bar Islamic militants from entering Britain.
In a statement today, Mr. Clarke said: “In accordance with my powers to deport individuals whose presence in the U.K. is not conducive to the public good for reasons of national security, the immigration service has today detained 10 foreign nationals who I believe pose a threat to national security.”
“They will be held in secure prison service accommodation and I shall not disclose their names,” he said.
The AP notes an interesting part of this action’s timing:
The detentions came a day after Britain signed an extradition agreement with Jordan, where the Palestinian cleric Omar Mahmoud Abu Omar, who is better known as Abu Qatada, has been sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment on terror charges.
The Home Office didn’t identify the detainees, but a British government official confirmed that Abu Qatada was in custody.
The cleric’s lawyer, Gareth Peirce, also released a statement condemning the arrests and complaining the individuals had not been allowed to see their attorneys.
The Home Office said the foreigners would be deported once Britain was assured they would not face torture of mistreatment in the countries to which they were being sent.
Times Online has this excellent summary of what is likely to happen next. And the BBC has THIS PAGE seeking readers’ response to this question:”Have the circumstances of national security changed sufficiently to warrant extradition?”
Meanwhile, Bloomberg notes that the government has moved swiftly to adjust policies in the wake of the London bombings:
Britain has been unable to deport some people in the past because the law forbids the government from sending them to countries where they might be tortured or face the death penalty.
To remove this problem, Prime Minister Tony Blair said Aug. 5 that the U.K. is asking certain countries to promise that deportees won’t be tortured or killed. Britain already has Jordan’s assurance, and Blair said there are negotiations with 10 other mainly North African countries including Algeria and Lebanon.
It also has this quote which sums up the situation:
“The circumstances of our national security have changed,” Clarke said. “It’s vital that we act against those who threaten us.”
Human rights groups are now criticizing the move, the BBC reports, expressing fears over what will happen to the people who have been seized:
Shami Chakrabarti, of human rights group Liberty, said it would take “more than a piece of paper to convince me that Jordan and some of these other possible north African and Middle Eastern regimes are suddenly safe”.
And Amnesty International’s Mike Blakemore said the assurances the government was trying to obtain were not worth the “paper they were written on”.
“We are taking the word of known torturers that they won’t do this again,” he said.
But the Muslim Council of Britain’s Abdul Jalil Sajid said people should be thrown out if they were a threat.
But, he added, he had serious concerns on “memorandums of understanding” guaranteeing treatment of deportees.
The Manchester Evening News adds this:
At least half those detained today were said to be subject to control orders, created by Home Secretary Charles Clarke in March to keep suspected terrorists in a form of house arrest.
Jordanian national Qatada was described by a senior British judge as a “truly dangerous individual” when he was one of the so-called “Belmarsh detainees”.
If you boil it down in day-to-day-language, what’s happening is this: Britain is kicking out people who it feels it has reason to believe endanger the lives of large numbers of its citizens — people who may believe that blowing infants, teens, men, women and children to bits is politicking.
It’s a classic case of a government having to decide whether the milieu has changed so that standard operating procedures have changed. It’s a case of a government, in effect saying, “for the lives of our citizens, can we afford to have these people living within our midst?”
Also, Britain can get written assurances about the fates of the deportees but in the end it’s going to be up to the governments that receive them to make sure the agreement is taken seriously. The odds of that happening? In some cases, slim. But, then, everyone eventually learns that decisions and actions have consequences. Britain can no longer be a home or safe haven for them.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.