Britain Has Started Stripping 'Terrorist Suspects' of Citizenship—Why That's a Dangerous Precedent

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http://www.alternet.org/world/britain-has-started-stripping-terrorist-suspects-citizenship-why-thats-dangerous-precedent

Britain Has Started Stripping 'Terrorist Suspects' of Citizenship—Why That's a Dangerous Precedent for the Rest of the World



The British government has turned to a disturbing new tool in its zeal to prosecute the war on terror: stripping the citizenship of those accused of terrorism. Over the past decade, 42 Britons have had their citizenship stripped, according to a count by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The trend, which has overwhelmingly targeted Muslims, puts Britain in the camp of repressive governments like Bahrain, and is taking place on a continent where anti-Muslim sentiment has grown exponentially.

The case of Mahdi Hashi is emblematic. He spends his days languishing in a Manhattan prison, cut off from meaningful human contact. Placed in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day—a practice deemed torture by the United Nations—the 24-year-old Hashi is awaiting trial on terrorism charges. He went on hunger strike in September 2013 to protest solitary confinement and being cut off from easy contact with his family.

The U.S. government accuses Hashi of being trained by al Shabaab, an Islamist militant group based in Somalia.

Most of his life has been spent in England, where he encountered harassment from British intelligence, which pressured him unsuccessfully to become an informant. Hashi, a British citizen, left the country in 2009 to see his ailing grandmother in Somalia. But in August 2012, Hashi was detained and allegedly tortured by security forces in Djibouti, interrogated by American intelligence agents, and then held for weeks in secret. When he disappeared in the East African country that borders Somalia, his family appealed to the British government. But no help was forthcoming—because Hashi wasn’t a British citizen anymore. After months of nobody knowing where he was, Hashi turned up in an American court in December 2012.

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth