British terror plots

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator – and watch my band The Four Fathers playing ‘Stand Down Theresa’, a cover of The Beat’s classic protest song, ‘Stand Down Margaret.’   It was all going so well until Saturday. As I explained in my article, The Spectacular and Unforeseen Collapse of […]

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator.   Note: This article is largely derived from comments I made on Facebook yesterday — but I realise not everyone who reads my work is necessarily on Facebook, hence my reworked posting here. In what I intend to be my only comment on Wednesday’s […]

Some horrors may await us on the economic front when George Osborne, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, finishes sharpening his scythe, but for those of us who care about human rights and civil liberties, and who have been aghast for the last 13 years at the Labour government’s paranoid, cruel and chaotic anti-terror legislation, […]

Today, the new coalition government faces its first major test regarding the confusing legacy of anti-terror laws inherited from the Labour government, after Mr. Justice Mitting, the judge in the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), the body charged with handling terror cases involving deportation, refused to allow the government to deport two Pakistani students, despite […]

The following account of a hearing last week in SIAC (the Special Immigration Appeals Commission), regarding the bail hearings of seven Pakistani students seized in April as part of a round-up of twelve men in connection with a purported “terror plot,” was written by Maude Casey, a campaigner from Brighton, who was the only non-legal […]

The following is the statement that David Davis MP made to the House of Commons on the evening of July 7, which exposed the extent of British complicity in the torture in Pakistan of British citizen Rangzieb Ahmed. For further information, see the article “Britain’s Secret Torture Policy Exposed.” Four years ago today, this country […]

On Tuesday evening, Britain’s secret torture policy was blown wide open when, in the House of Commons, David Davis MP used the protection of parliamentary privilege to tell the House how, in 2006, the British government and the security services allowed Rangzieb Ahmed, a British citizen, to travel to Pakistan, where they “suggested” to the […]

For the Guardian’s Comment is free, “Outsourcing torture to foreign climes” is an article I wrote following up on Ian Cobain’s article in today’s Guardian exposing the story of Jamil Rahman, a British citizen, raised in south Wales, whose claims of abuse in Bangladeshi custody while British intelligence officers stepped out of the room provide […]

The Washington Post broke the news on Friday that Binyam Mohamed, British resident, Guantánamo prisoner, victim of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, and the subject of high-profile court cases on both sides of the Atlantic, will be returning to the UK “early next week,” according to “a source involved in the process, who spoke on the […]

To date, I have not written about the recent –- and recently foiled –- terrorist attacks in the UK, largely because I was struggling to comprehend how it was possible that doctors and medical students –- people dedicated to saving lives –- could embark upon plans to slaughter civilians in the mistaken belief that it […]