Political Censorship - The Scottish Prison Service and Guantanamo Bay

POLITICAL CENSORSHIP


A jail manager at HMP Glenochil in Stirlingshire has decreed that any material,
written or musical, that is critical of the US detention/torture center on
Guantanamo Bay is banned from being circulated within the jail.



Kate Middleton, a senior manager at Glenochil, in a written reply to a prisoner's
complaint that a music c.d. handed in for him by a visitor was being withheld from
him on the grounds that it was 'sectarian', said: 'Apart from the issue of the disk
being a copy, it contains several very political tracks, e.g. a track regarding
Guantanamo Bay, which may cause offence to certain people living and working in this
establishment.' Apart from the obvious question of how many of the Scottish working
class prisoners at Glenochil would feel outraged and offended by criticism of the
torture regime operating at Guantanamo, an equally obvious question is why Kate
Middleton is being allowed to censure information and criticism, in whatever form,
concerning Guantanamo Bay, or indeed any major world issue, within the prison?



Unfortunately, within the hidden and totalitarian world of prison, right-wing bigots
and confirmed fascists tend to occupy positions of omnipotent power over prisoners,
and see their role as one not just of controlling and containing the body of the
prisoner, but essentially the mind as well.



When Kate Middleton was challenged by the prisoner to define 'sectarianism' in
relation to criticism of Guantanamo Bay, she wrote: "I did use the term sectarian
instead of political, wrong word." Obviously wrong politics as well as far as
Middleton is concerned, especially when the politics concerned are informed by a
concern for human rights.



Criticism of the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is now world-wide and
expressed by governments and every leading human rights organisation around the
globe, and yet within a state institution staffed by individuals supposedly
answerable to the public, an individual such as Kate Middleton has a free,
unrestrained hand to ban and suppress any material remotely critical of Guantanamo
Bay.



The human right to express and share information and ideas critical of established
systems of power, and the abuse of that power, is established in international and
UK law, but unfortunately, not here apparently within an institution where a senior
manager feels some affinity with her colleagues running Guantanamo Bay.





John Bowden

9 August 2007