Any other policy is a charter for false informants to wreak havoc by supplying misinformation for gain, perhaps thus taking revenge against their own, innocent enemies, and always risking miscarriages of justice.

The time to complain and protest and reject the peversion of British traditions and British standards was in the first year of the first Thatcher government.

Since then her and Major’s and Bliar’s and Brown’s surrender of every single British traditional value has been absolute.

We thought Bliar was going to roll back the authoritarian Ultra-Right Wing Tory State but within weeks he was using Oswald Mosley’s 1931 term for fascism (when he was still in the Labour Party) – ‘New Labour’ and had Mosley’s apologist son Max round to No 10 for drinks.

It was then that all hope disappeared.

I wish you luck, Dinah Rose, Gareth Pierce, Shami Chakrabarti and Ben Ward.
But I fear that you’re 30 years too late.

Remember what happened in Germany when so many people thought it couldn’t really be true, that there must be some mistake, that those who had nothing to hide had nothing to fear and that it would all come right in the end.

The best thing that any liberty-loving person in Britain can do now is what the wise did in 1930s Germany.
LEAVE.

This whole process in SIAC gives one a very queasy feeling. As Dinah Rose said, “It looks like a court”–but it isn’t one. The open material produced against the 5 men was as little deserving of the name “evidence” as the secret material. (I can’t bring myself to refer to secret “evidence” since that seems like a contradiction–isn’t “evidence” by definition something that is seen openly?)

The open material consisted of a “statement” composed by an anonymous “Home Office official.” It wasn’t an affidavit (not sworn, as far as I could see) and since the person or persons who produced it were themselves secret, there was no opportunity for cross-examination by the men’s barristers.
It was written a few hours before the SIAC session, and D. Rose had sight of it only 15 minutes before the procedure opened! She and the other barristers successfully demanded an adjournment, but the Home Secretary’s intention was that the hearing would have proceeded immediately.This looked to me like an attempt to stampede the Commission into a decision without proper time to examine the facts.

The only section of this statement on which I can properly comment was the part relating to Mr “U”, and that was not impressive.It was full of surmise and innuendo and half-truths and untruths,and relevant facts were omitted. Had there not been witnesses, in the form of “U’s” landlord and visitors, to point out these matters to his counsel, these tendentious statements might have got by without being properly challenged. That, I suspect,is why the Home Office was so opposed to having him stay in a house where there were people around to see fair play, and to point out the inconsistencies in the Home Office officials’ case. If they were compelled to let him live at a bail address, they wanted him to be alone and isolated, where any groundless accusations of breaching his bail would come down to his word against theirs.

Ultimately, it seems to me, secret material always trumps open evidence, which makes the procedure something of a pantomime. When the anonymous Home Office official’s statement was shown to be full of holes, the department quickly came up with some new, invisible, scary stuff that nobody is allowed to know about, but which Judge Mitting clearly felt he had to bow to. It was clearly rustled up in a bit of a hurry, because Counsel objected to the lack of notification about its use, but Judge Mitting over-ruled this objection, in order to avoid further delay.

I’m no lawyer, but the more I reflect on what went on in those proceedings, and the more I compare the Home Office’s assertions with what I know from my own observation, the more it troubles me.

I just wanted to say how important your comments are about secret evidence and hearsay, and the very real possibility that bribery — or, I must add, threats — played a part in encouraging “witnesses” to produce false allegations. It’s clearly a major part of the process, and much more hidden and submerged than at Guantanamo, where lawyers have been able, over the years, to demonstrate the extent to which false allegations — produced through torture, coercion or bribery — have provided the supposed justification for holding men without charge or trial.

So, to make it clear: the criminal justice system is capable of functioning openly, and protecting informers and methods of surveillance. It already does so, to a large degree, and although some additional tweaking may be required, we’re only in this mess because the government decided to regard “terrorism” as a brand-new existential threat, rather than a type of organized crime, which it is.

However, there are problems with the current system that need more than tweaking. For example:

1) The tendency of SIAC to accept, in a generally uncritical manner, whatever arguments are put forward by the Home Secretary to justify keeping evidence secret;
2) The fact that, if any risk to national security is proposed by the government, SIAC’s procedure rules prohibit it from weighing that risk against the interests of the accused;
3) The fact that, although some informers might need protecting, SIAC will not even disclose intercept evidence from a landline that, under the accused’s bail conditions, is the only phone that he can ever use, and that he knows is monitored;
4) The unjustifiable prohibition on contact between the Special Advocates and the accused, or their lawyers, once the Special Advocate has seen closed material. There seems to be a matter of trust here, which there should not be, as the Special Advocates are security cleared, and should clearly be regarded as trustworthy. It should be possible to arrange a method whereby the Special Advocates can take instruction without revealing any secrets, as the present situation is farcical, and yet another unnecessary obstacle to justice.

Very glad to hear that you’ll be mentioning “Britain’s Guantánamo” on Sunday.
Lots of stuff seems to be about to push its way out of the torture closet in the coming weeks, even if the damning OLC report seems to be being rewritten:
http://www.pubrecord.org/law/806-doj-watchdog-revising-report-highly-critical-of-john-yoos-legal-work.html
Levin’s unclassified report, for example, should be savage, but it does appear extremely difficult to waken enough sense of outrage in the Senate, or among the general public. Still, at least people are talking about it in the States. When the Home Secretary here ignored the court’s ruling, kidnapped the bail prisoners and sent them to prison, no one even noticed. Literally.