Gestapo Watch - Student researching al-Qaida held for 6 days

[scubadiver]

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2282045,00.html

[fish5133]

Thought crime.

[Mark Gobell]

Thought crime implies some kind of random occurrence.

None of this is random.

It is all planned.

Bill "I am confident that Iraqi WMD's will be found" Rammell, hasn't got a clue. Check out Harlow for his ministerial efficacy . . .

Even though he warned us all about "extremism in universities", back in November 2006.

[Reflecter]

Well he got off lighter than Kalid Kaliq for the same US document download!

http://j7truth.blogspot.com/2008/03/justice-defiled-conviction-of-khal id.html

It appears to be available on Amazon too LOL...WTF
http://www.amazon.com/Al-Qaeda-Training-Manual/dp/1414507100/ref=sr_1_ 1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207604388&sr=8-1

[Disco_Destroyer]

Both the student and tutor are being deported over this according to Stop The War!!

[Reflecter]

Yeah I was annoyed and saddenned to see that development. It appeared at first it was just the detention and luckily short term psychological torture he was treated to at our majestys pleasure. Seems they are going to town on them now, whilst as Kbo pointed out elsewhere a genuine hijacker is working at heathrow!

[TonyGosling]

Elite institution colluding in racism - names and addresses of principle & vice principle please
Lecturer Suspended for Defending Innocent Muslim Students
9:56 pm, Mon 9 May 2011
Rod Thornton, an expert in counter-insurgency at Nottingham University, was suspended on Wednesday for criticising the University's treatment of a Muslim student and Muslim employee. He has accused the university of passing "erroneous evidence" to police and attempting to discredit a student.
Readers may recall these two Muslims were Rizwan Sabir, a masters student, and Hicham Yezza, an ex-student and then an employee at the University, who in 2008 were arrested for possessing an Al Qaida manual.
University officials called in the police after a colleague noticed the document on Yezza's computer. Yezza and his friend, Rizwaan Sabir, were held for six days, despite Sabir's tutors giving statements within two days that the document was directly relevant to his research, not to mention that it was freely available at the University's library, as well as on a US Government website.
They were released without charge, however the consequences are still lasting.
Thornton, who is also a former soldier, wrote his paper for the British International Studies Association (Bisa), in which he hoped to explore the issues of how young Muslims can become so easily tarred with the brush of terrorism; but Bisa has now taken the paper off their website.
In the paper, Thornton wrote:
Despite being made aware of the mistakes it had made, the university not only refused to apologise to the two arrested men, but it also began to resort to defensive measures that attempted to discredit the names both of the two accused and of innocent university employees.
Untruth piled on untruth until a point was reached where the Home Office itself farcically came to advertise the case as 'a major Islamist plot' ... Many lessons can be learned from what happened at the University of Nottingham.
This incident is an indication of the way in which, in the United Kingdom of today, young Muslim men can become so easily tarred with the brush of being 'terrorists'.
He says the university's administration notified police, but had never given any indication they they had carried out "even the simplest of internet checks or ... [sought] either advice or guidance from elsewhere."
In his paper, Thornton describes how the concerns he was raising led him to get disciplinary action against himself, how he tried to get the Vice-Chancellor to investigate some of the issues he was raising, however, was told by him that he was making "un warranted allegations? and there began yet more "investigations? into Thornton's behaviour. Now he has been suspended.
This case severely questions the amount of academic freedom at universities and freedom of speech, which seem to be slowly eroding; but more worryingly, for a lecturer to be suspended for trying to get two Muslim students justice, also alludes that this kind of discriminatory treatment of Muslims is acceptable.
It is now up to Muslim students to help this man, after he has put his job on the line for justice. Join the discussion on MPACUK Facebook.
http://www.mpacuk.org/story/090511/lecturer-suspended-defending-innoce nt-muslim-students.html

[TonyGosling]

Rod Thornton's suspension is a serious attack on academic freedom

Thornton's paper on Nottingham University's actions during my wrongful arrest over terrorism has led to him becoming the victim

Hicham Yezza - guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 May 2011

Two weeks ago, Dr Rod Thornton, a respected lecturer and counter-terrorism expert at the University of Nottingham, published a "whistle-blowing" paper, running at 112 meticulously detailed and footnoted pages. The document makes serious allegations about the conduct of senior university managers in the lead-up and aftermath of the arrests three years ago, under the Terrorism Act, of two university members: Rizwaan Sabir and myself. As I read Thornton's paper, my curiosity soon turned to astonishment and, page after incriminating page, to fury.

For those unfamiliar with the case, a brief summary: on the morning of 14 May, 2008, I hurried to my office at the university, where I was a member of staff, having been informed it was full of security officers. To my surprise, far from being the victim of a break-in, I turned out to be the suspect: a terrorism suspect no less. I was immediately handcuffed, bundled into a police car and taken away.

Two days earlier, a colleague of mine was using the computer in my office when they noticed three documents: two academic papers on radical Islam, as well as a publicly available booklet, downloaded from the US justice department website, and obtainable from the university library, entitled the al-Qaida training manual. They reported this to senior managers, who called the police.

These documents had been sent to me by Sabir, an MA politics student at the university. I had been, since 2003, the editor of Ceasefire, a political and cultural magazine. Sabir, who was also arrested, had asked me to advise him on his research and routinely sent me copies of articles and books he was using. I quickly explained this misunderstanding to the counter-terrorism agents interviewing me, confident we would be freed within minutes. Instead, the police continued digging. On the seventh day we were eventually released, without charge. However, I was immediately rearrested for immigration issues that had "emerged", and was informed that I was to be deported on the next available flight to Algeria.

Outraged, a campaign of support erupted in Nottingham and beyond, leading to my hurried "whisking away" being cancelled. A legal fight subsequently ensued over the next two years, culminating in a victory over the Home Office that confirmed my right to live and work in this country.

Drawing on hundreds of pages of official evidence, including internal correspondence, Thornton's paper sheds dramatic new light on to what had happened. More specifically, Thornton alleges that senior management, in calling the police without seeking appropriate expertise, had ignored not only government guidelines, but also their own.

Worse, his paper suggests that, instead of coming to our assistance, senior management engaged in a sustained, systemic campaign of disinformation, innuendo and spin targeting myself, Sabir and others. The university has since released a statement in which it "rejects utterly", what it deems to be "baseless accusations he [Thornton] makes about members of staff". It says the report was "highly defamatory" of of a number of Thornton's colleagues.

If confirmed, Thornton's revelations about my alma mater are particularly hurtful. As an undergraduate and PhD student, I had spent the best part of 10 years serving the university, including as a member of its senate and student union executive. I was a key point of contact between management and Muslim students on campus. For a decade, university prospectuses carried a profile of me, quoting my description of the institution as "excellent".

And yet, once arrested, I became a non-entity whose connection with and contribution to the university were either downplayed or denied. Sabir did not fare much better: upon returning to his course, he says he was subjected to repeated attempts to prevent him from getting on to the PhD programme, causing him enormous distress and leading him, within weeks, to leave for Strathclyde University, where he is now a doctoral researcher.

Amazingly, instead of engaging with Thornton's findings, the university has now suspended him. The British International Studies Association, which had published the paper, has also removed his paper from its website acting, it stated, "on legal advice".

Thornton's suspension is a serious attack on academic freedom. The university claims in its statement that "academic freedom is a cornerstone of this university and is guaranteed in employment terms under the university's statutes". But it is precisely critical voices such as his that must be encouraged if freedom of expression is to mean more than facile sloganeering. The suspension appears even more senseless considering that Thornton says that he had spent the past three years exhausting all avenues to have these grievances addressed internally, only to be ignored and dismissed by management.

This is not about irrelevant campus squabbling, but about the irrevocable damage done to the lives of two innocent Muslim men, and the silencing of an academic who dared to speak up in their defence. This is about protecting the reputation for religious and ethnic tolerance of an institution that belongs to all of us, and whose senior management, as Thornton's paper convincingly argues, has a case to answer.

If we are serious about fighting extremism on campus and beyond, the fight starts here. This is not a side battle but the very core of the fight. I therefore add my voice to that of Noam Chomsky and others, who called here for Thornton's immediate reinstatement, and for an independent public inquiry to be conducted into the very serious allegations raised in his paper. Indeed, if, as the university seems to be claiming, Thornton "defame[s] [his] co-workers and attempt[s] to destroy their reputations as honest, fair and reasonable individuals", then it should be the first to welcome such an inquiry.

Nottingham students are protesting on Thursday against the suspension; I hope senior management will take note. There is no shame in them admitting error, but they must understand that any efforts to protect a few red faces at the top, at the expense of Nottingham University's good name, would be irresponsible and, ultimately, bound to fail.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/11/rod-thornton-suspe nsion-nottingham-university-terrorism