Articles from 2003

It's just over a year since a number of Edinburgh men were woken by armed police and driven off to places the press could only describe as "secret locations in Scotland." A year on, the terrorism charges were dropped with just a week to spare before Scottish law would have required them to come to court. Something has gone badly wrong

Global and local echoes of the anti-war movement: a British Muslim perspective

During the war with Iraq, police used terrorism powers to suppress protests around air bases in Gloucestershire

Privately, the Americans admit that torture, or something very like it, is going on at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. The Independent's Paul Vallely> investigates

US led global counterterrorist legislation is responsible for human rights violations in every country that hasintroduced new legislation since September 11th. This legislation has seen 12,117 simply disappear intoanti-terrorist legislation vacuums; secret jails where access to legal help, the red cross andfamily have been denied.

Liz Fekete, Deputy Director of the Institute of Race Relations, spoke out against the anti-terrorism acts at public meetings in Edinburgh and Glasgow on 17th and 18th June 2003. She said that the new legislation has been driven by the USA's determination to redesign the world's security arrangements to meet its corporate and resource needs. A global security state is emerging, she said, and the USA and the EU are working in close partnership to create it.

The War on Terror was never a war in the traditional sense. It is, instead, a kind of brand, an idea that can be easily franchised by any government in the market for an all-purpose opposition cleanser. We already know that the WoT works on domestic groups that use terrorist tactics such as Hamas or the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (Farc). But that's only its most basic application. WoT can be used on any liberation or opposition movement. It can also be applied liberally on unwanted immigrants, pesky human rights activists and even on hard-to-get-out investigative journalists.

A deadly Franchise, by Naomi Klein

Report from Liberty and the Insitute for Race Relations surveys terrorism arrests

The ‘War on Terror’ is a war against dissent, solidarity and democracy. It is a fabricated emergency for generating and manipulating public fears. As in Orwell's 1984, permanent propaganda campaigns continually invent enemies to justify a perpetual war. Imaginary links are drawn between Iraq, al-Qaeda, refugees and organised violence here.