On the North West 10(12): postcoloniality, the British racial state and the war on terror

Abstract

In April 2009, 12 men were arrested by the North-West Counter-Terrorism Unit on suspicion of participating in terrorism-related offences and plotting a major attack in North West England. Within 13 days of their arrest after no evidence was found against them, the charges were dropped, but 10 of them, all Pakistani nationals, remained in detention charged with violating their immigration status, and one of the students, Abid Naseer, has been called for extradition to the United States. This article presents the case of the North West Ten as an exemplar of the War on Terror on Britain's shores, exploring the territorial inscriptions of colonising power as they play out in the metropole. It highlights the importance of rooting analyses concerning the treatment of Muslim subjects in the War on Terror within (post)colonial and imperial racial governmentalities.

Keywords:

• War on Terror
• Britain
• postcolonialism
• Muslims
• racial state

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Virinder Kalra, David Theo Goldberg and Rizwaan Sabir for engaging with me on earlier drafts of this article, the NW10 campaign group for speaking with me about the case and to the reviewers of Identities for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. The official story is that 12 men were arrested and that 10 were detained postrelease with a view to deportation but, in reality, the details of the number of men caught up in the arrests remains vague. An article in the Daily Mail on 10 April 2009, for example, referred to 14 raids (Williams and Slack 2009).

2. Similar legislation has been passed by other European states either through the passing of terrorism or emergency legislation or by building on existing public order, criminal justice and aliens’ legislation (Fekete 2004). In the US, the Patriot Act was passed in 2001 for similar purposes.

3. This is most epitomised through the creation of a terrorism threat level which rates the level of threat against terrorism in the UK on a daily basis, adjusted at different times to suit different political moments.

4. The case offered Brown the opportunity to show himself as taking a strong line against terror. In response to criticisms that Brown had made a statement which was potentially prejudicial to any future criminal proceedings, Lord Carlile reported that ‘certainly it is unusual for the Prime Minister to say anything about arrests that have just taken place, especially where the suspects have not been charged’ (Carlile 2009, p. 7).

5. The press coverage of the arrests that followed prolifically reported that the students were thought to originate from ‘poor tribal regions’ of North West Pakistan as a way of associating them with the Taliban and al-Qaeda (see Williams and Slack 2009, for example).

6. In a confidential briefing by the Association of Chief Police Officers responsible for ‘Terrorism and Allied Matters’, their model of intervention and activity set out four tiers of intervention (ACPO 2008). While the fourth tier was concerned with taking an ‘enforcement approach’ for those ‘actively breaking the law’, even the first tier which required a ‘universal approach’ mapping the activities of the entire [Muslim] community. This model of counter-terrorism is framed directly on the counter-insurgency model set out by David Kilcullen (2011) which strongly influenced US military strategy in Iraq. Kilcullen himself seconded to the United States Department of State Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism as Chief Counterterrorism Strategist. Thanks to Rizwaan Sabir who drew my attention to this and discusses this relationship in great detail in his forthcoming PhD thesis.

7. The extent of the absurdity of some of the evidence being used was even noted in the BBC, where in an article detailing ‘what happened’, they reported ‘it also emerged that a hiking trip to Wales had been initially flagged up as a potential jihadist bonding session. The men had taken silly photographs of each other flexing their muscles. The Home Secretary withdrew this element of the case’ (Casciani 2010). This statement accompanied the silly photograph of the supposed terrorists and can be viewed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8689439.stm.