Because we can't have these brown folks reading, now can we?

This May, Rizwaan Sabir, a postgraduate student in international relations at the University of Nottingham was detained for almost a week without charges. He has an excellent op-ed in The Guardian about his experience:

After failing to find justification to detain me any longer, on day six of our ordeal, I was released without a charge, without an apology; but with a police warning against accessing an openly available, widely cited al-Qaida document considered relevant to my postgraduate research by me and my academic supervisors. I was only put under threat of future arrest, but Hicham's terrifying detention was prolonged by the authorities, under immigration charges – his ordeal continues to this very day.

What was our offence?

Our offence was that we had in our possession an edited version of a document referred to as the "al-Qaida training manual". A document freely available on the US Department of Justice website and that of the Federation of American Scientists. A document widely available elsewhere on official and unofficial internet sites, in either edited or full versions. A document purchasable in paperback from Amazon. A document I had downloaded months ago for my masters dissertation and upcoming PhD. A document a lecturer knew I was consulting. A document I had sent months ago to Hicham who was helping me draft my PhD proposal. A document many other academics and students studying terrorism will have had in their possession. A document extensively cited in books on terrorism. A bog-standard source. Nothing extraordinary or remarkable about its possession – one would think.

His fellow arestee, Hicham Yezza, is still facing deportation over the same phony outrage. Here is his op-ed on his experiences:

'm constantly coming across efforts being made to give detention without charge the Walt Disney treatment: the crushing weight of solitary confinement is painted as a non-issue; the soul-sapping nothingness of the claustrophobic, cold cell is portrayed as a mild inconvenience. Make no mistake: the feeling that one's fate is in the hands of the very people who are apparently trying to convict you is, without doubt, one of the most devastating horrors a human being can ever be subjected to. It is (to misquote Carl von Clausewitz) the continuation of torture by other means.

"Those who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear," goes the tautological reasoning of the paranoia merchants calling for harsher, ever more draconian "security" measures - as we saw throughout the 42-days debate. They should read Kafka: nothing is more terrifying than being arrested for something you know you haven't done. Indeed, it is the innocent who suffers the most because it is the innocent who is tormented the most. The guilty calculates, triangulates, anticipates. The innocent doesn't know where to start. The answers and the questions are absolute, unbreachable, towering conundrums.

I underwent 20 hours of vigorous interrogation while entire days were being completely wasted by the police micro-examining every detail of my life: my political activism, my writings, my work in theatre and dance, my love life, my photography, my cartooning, my magazine subscriptions, my bus tickets.

Aspects of my life that would have been seen as commendable in others were suddenly viewed as suspect in my case for no apparent reason other than my religious and ethnic background. I was guilty of being that strangest of creatures: a Muslim who reads; who studied engineering yet writes about Bob Dylan; was a vocal opponent of the Iraq war yet owns all of Christopher Hitchens' writings; admires Terry Eagleton yet defends Martin Amis; interviews Kazuo Ishiguro, listens to Leonard Cohen, goes to Radiohead concerts, all of which became the subject of rather bizarre questioning.

O'Brien nominated for Orwell award

Oh, wait, I meant Alastair Campbell! Yes, he is nominated - longlisted, that is - for the Orwell award. That's Orwell as in George Orwell, author of 1984. The Orwell award is for people who fulfill Orwell's ambition to "make political writing into an art". Note: art, not fiction.

For those of us who are just joining us, Alastair Campbell, former communications director for Tony Blair, is a man who - and this is a matter of public record - lied for a living. His lies helped lead his country into an unneccessary war in Iraq. He said one thing openly while doing another thing covertly. To put it another way, he would probably not qualify for the Orwell Award which is something else entirely than the Orwell Prize.

Somebody possibly winning an award for political writing which was obviously untrue, someone holding opposing thoughts in his head at the same time? A state which misleads its own citizen... There's an adjective for this: orwellian. Maybe the judges confused the term when they awarded the prize.

I'll leave you with this little snippet from Campbell's Wikipedia page, just to remind you of who we're dealing with.

A few months later he became embroiled in further controversy after the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan broadcast claims that the government had included evidence it knew to be false (famously described as "sexed up" by another BBC journalist) in an earlier dossier (about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction). In a later newspaper article Gilligan said that his source had specifically identified Campbell himself as responsible for the alleged exaggerations. Campbell demanded a retraction and apology from the BBC, but none was forthcoming.

The BBC's source, Dr David Kelly, identified himself to his employers at the Ministry of Defence. The government released this news and under questioning from newspapers desperate to identify the source gave sufficient hints for his identity to become public. Kelly committed suicide shortly afterward and the Hutton inquiry into the circumstances of his death pushed Campbell further into the limelight. The inquiry showed that Campbell had been working closely with the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), in which the different sections of the intelligence services meet, and made suggestions about the wording of the dossier. He had also been keen that Kelly's identity be made public writing in his diary, "It would fuck Gilligan if that were his source". However, Lord Hutton cleared Campbell of acting improperly, as JIC had taken all editorial decisions. Hutton also found that Kelly's name would have had to be made public to avoid allegations of a cover-up. The Hutton report was widely criticised in the media, however, and Campbell's "Presidential"-style press conference afterwards was perceived by some to be misjudged, with Campbell attacked for appearing to gloat over the BBC's misfortune. This criticism increased when Campbell sold a signed copy of the Hutton report at a charity auction. Comments in his recently published diaries are contradicted by some of the statements made during the Inquiry, leading some to call for a re-examination of the evidence, particularly telephone calls made to Dr. Kelly in the week before his suicide. Although this seems unlikely as the Hutton inquiry had access to Campbell's diaries for the period.