Liberty’s campaign du jour encourages members to write to the Home Secretary asking him to scrap control orders altogether.
If you click on the link, “What are control orders?”, you are taken to this briefing, where we learn the following:
The real cost of control orders
Before being allowed to follow his family to Jordan in July 2009, Mahmoud Abu Rideh was punished without charge in Belmarsh prison for three years and then under a control order for four and a half years. His subsequent breakdown and stay in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, as well as suicide attempts have been devastating to his wife and small children. Read more of Abu Rideh’s story in The Independent, July 2009.
Remarkably, Liberty has failed to update this account, to explain what happened after their campaign to list Abu Rideh’s control order succeeded.
To recap: Abu Rideh was an Al Qaeda fundraiser and activist. He and Moazzam Begg worked together to build a school for the children of Arab fighters in Afghanistan. His control order having been quashed, Abu Rideh received public funds which he used to take himself to Afghanistan, where he joined up with his Al Qaeda colleagues. He was killed, before Christmas, in a missile strike.
The real cost of lifting control orders is this.
Men like Abu Rideh are determined to impose a totalitarian theocratic Taliban state on Afghans. They are happy to die in order to achieve that aim. The return of the Taliban terrifies Afghans more than anything else.
You might conclude that, even so, control orders are wrong on principle. But let’s not whitewash the nature of this vicious and dangerous man, eh?
Write to Liberty and ask them to update their account of Abu Rideh’s plight. Their contact details are here.
