The FAC said there should be a thorough analysis of interrogation techniques used by the US given the differences in how torture is defined by the two countries. The committee also reminded the government that it was under a legal obligation to ensure flights entering UK airspace or land at UK airports are not used for extraordinary rendition, even if there are no detainees on board (e.g. refueling).

The report also called on the government to investigate Pakistan’s role in torturing British suspects who have dual (British/Pakistani) nationality.

The full report by the FAC can be found online (pdf).

Glenn Greenwald has some more on this from an American perspective.

Academics have no “right” to research terrorist materials and they risk being prosecuted for doing so, the vice-chancellor of the University of Nottingham has told his staff..

The article is raises a glaring contradiction between the police account in a letter to Sabir and the reported views of Sabir’s lecturers. The police claim in a letter to Sabir that (my emphasis):

“The university authorities have now made clear that possession of this material is not required for the purpose of your course of study nor do they consider it legitimate for you to possess it for research purposes.”

Yet the article says (again my emphasis):

Mr Sabir’s personal tutor Bettina Renz, a lecturer in international security, and his MA supervisor, Rod Thornton, a terrorism specialist and former soldier, have both said they told police that Mr Sabir’s possession of the document was legitimate given his research interests.

So, which is it?

A commentator at the Times Higher Education website notes that the other man arrested (but also never charged) alongside Sabir, Hischam Yezza, has received no help from the university despite studying and working there for over a decade.

One question not addressed by the article is whether Rizwaan Sabir would have been arrested had he been called, say, ‘Roger Simpson’. I honestly hope this is not interpreted as an attempt to keep Muslims away from pursuing degrees in similar fields (terrorism, international security, war and peace studies, etc).

What authority will this board hold? Who will define the label ‘Muslim’? Ministers are quoted by the BBC as saying the board will “reflect the diversity of Islam and Muslim communities in the UK”. What does that even mean? Does this include Muslims who may hold unpopular views regarding women, liberalism or gay rights? Or how about those on the other side of the spectrum (e.g. Muslims who are also gay, people who self-define as ’secular Muslims’)?

At first glance, this looks like an extra-legal attempt to set up so-called  ’sharia courts’, but without the accountability element.

No separation of church and state, please. We’re British.

Britain has Pakistan.

(Via Septic Isle.)

UK liberal hawk website Harry’s Place has been threatened with a libel action by the British Muslim Initiative over claims that the BMI’s president, Mohammad Sawalha, had railed against the “[evil Jew/Jewish evil] in Britain” in Arabic. This reported on the Arabic al-Jazeera website, which later changed the wording to “Jewish lobby in Britain” (without the “evil” bit), as if that were somehow better. Medyan Dairieh, who wrote the al-Jazeera article, complained in the comments that it was all down to a spelling mistake.

Maybe Muslim newspapers should retaliate by publishing their own made-up stories. So it will be reported that “Barmy PC teachers in Leicester have banned children from playing Noughts and Crosses, claiming the cross reminds Church of England kiddies of the suffering undertaken by Lord Jesus. A spokesman for the Board of Education said, ‘We have to be sensitive. Which is why we’ve replaced the game with ‘Noughts and Hexagons’. We did look into calling it ‘Noughts and Crowns of Thorns’ but decided Hexagons was more appropriate.

“

The classic scene is the journalist showing headlines that have appeared in newspapers here in the UK, with the words ‘Jew’ or ‘Black’ substituted for ‘Muslim’, and seeing the double standards.

An investigation for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme discovered many violent episodes and attacks on Muslims, with very few reported; those that do get almost no publicity.

As I type, Channel 4 are airing Oborne’s It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim as part of Dispatches War on Terror series.

One of the claims that will be made in the documentary is that when it comes to ‘Muslim outrage’ stories, you can just make up stories without investigating the facts. An infamous example is the “Muslim hate mob” story which was published The Sun, which turned out to be completely false.

*Dispatches is the same documentary series that received a lot of stick from Muslims over its “Undercover Mosque” programme.