For most people, Brexit is about something more visceral: national identity. The perceived need to “take back control” over Britain’s borders, and sharply limit the number of foreigners permitted to live and work in the country, was endorsed by a narrow majority of voters in the 2016 referendum. For nationalists, Brexit is a simple choice to withdraw from an economic bloc that effectively erases the borders between member states by requiring the free movement of people, as well as goods and services.

What few Brexit supporters on the British mainland seemed to realize at the time, though, is that their country, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, has just one land border with the EU, and it is a highly contested one — the line of partition that the British Empire imposed on Ireland a century ago. For the past 20 years, it has been easy to forget about the mayhem and death caused by the imposition of that border, since joint membership in the EU facilitated a peace agreement that stopped the bloodshed in Northern Ireland and removed the need for security and customs checks along what one Irish writer has called the “line of malice” dividing Ireland.

For all the talk of a British exit, however, it is important to understand that Brexit was primarily an English decision: Eighty-seven percent of the votes in favor of leaving were cast in England, and two-thirds of those who consider themselves more English than British voted to leave.

While English nationalists rallied around nostalgia for a British Empire they once dominated, majorities in two other constituent parts of the U.K. — Scotland and Northern Ireland — voted against Brexit, setting the stage for one or both to eventually leave the union.

That support for Brexit — like support for the British Conservative party — comes mainly from England helps to explain why talks with the EU over the country’s withdrawal are currently deadlocked over an issue that English nationalists seemed all but unaware of until recently: the frozen but still unresolved conflict in England’s first colony, Ireland.

Had English rulers never embarked on the centuries-long process of colonizing Ireland, or never imposed a partition on the island in 1921, to create a loyalist enclave where the descendants of British Protestant settlers outnumbered the native Irish Catholics, it would today be a relatively simple matter for Britain, encompassing just England, Scotland, and Wales, to exit the EU.

Instead, Prime Minister Theresa May now finds herself locked in complex negotiations over how to extract the whole of the U.K. from Europe’s single market and customs union without undermining the fragile peace in Ireland. That’s because the customs and immigration checks that English nationalists see as a minor inconvenience, worth tolerating to live in a less multicultural society, would require border infrastructure along the old partition line in Ireland, causing a range of headaches for Irish businesses and commuters, and making a return to violence all but guaranteed.

At the annual Cross Border Organized Crime Seminar in Ireland last year, police chiefs from both parts of Ireland warned that “the more infrastructure there is at the border, the greater opportunities that creates” for violence by political dissidents and former paramilitaries already involved in smuggling.

Unlike many of the Brexit hard-liners in her party, the British prime minister does at least seem aware of the fact that Britain has a moral and legal responsibility, under the terms of the 1998 peace agreement, to prevent the bloodshed that would likely follow any move to repartition Ireland by re-establishing the border.

May also finds herself in a bind because the European Union, which takes its role in preventing conflict on the continent seriously, has insisted that no talks on a future trade relationship with the U.K. can even begin until she first signs a withdrawal agreement guaranteeing that the border with Ireland will remain open.

That’s easier said than done, however, because the logic of Brexit, and of the European Union, demands a closed external frontier.

Then there’s the problem that the winding, 300-mile-long frontier defined as the border of the new province of Northern Ireland by the British government in 1921 was in no sense a natural border. There is no mountain range or body of water dividing Ireland in two parts, there is just a line on the map, hastily drawn by retreating colonial civil servants — a strategy later termed “divide and quit” by Penderel Moon, a British colonial officer involved in the empire’s equally ill-conceived partition of India in 1947. (Four decades later, the British viceroy who oversaw the bloody partition of India, Louis Mountbatten, was killed by the I.R.A. while vacationing in Ireland.)

The 1921 partition line that created the new, British-controlled province of Northern Ireland, along ancient county borders that these days run through fields, towns and houses, was also drawn in the service of a blatant act of large-scale gerrymandering. It was a new line drawn on the world map to divide one island nation into two parts so that a retreating colonial power could ensure that the descendants of its settlers would control an enclave in which they would be in the majority.

That division gave rise to decades of political violence and terrorism in Northern Ireland and Britain, known with Ulster understatement as “the Troubles,” during which more than 3,500 people were killed, basic civil rights and due process were suspended, and the British Army erected watchtowers and checkpoints and destroyed hundreds of roads, bridges, and country lanes to control the flow of people and goods between the two parts of Ireland.

For anyone who grew up in the shadow of that border in Ireland — I spent childhood summers visiting my mother’s family on either side of it — it is impossible to forget the emotional impact of the hours spent waiting at one of the few authorized crossing points, the tense encounters with armed soldiers at the heavily fortified British Army checkpoints. And yet, for the past two decades, under the auspices of the EU, security and customs checkpoints have been removed, and the border between the two jurisdictions on the island is now as scarcely perceptible as the line between any two American states. It is like the disappearance of a scar.

Watching the Brexit talks from Ireland, Denis Bradley, a journalist and former vice chair of the police board for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, observed that both the U.K. and the EU have underestimated the determination of the Irish people who suffered through the years of violence to tolerate a border. “The Border doesn’t need a solution because it is already solved,” Bradley wrote in the Irish Times.

“Twenty or so years ago the Irish Border disappeared,” Bradley explained. “The old customs posts had long disappeared and then, one day, the British army lifted its gear and went home. Most of the people felt a burden lift off their shoulders — a people who had lived in the shadow of its presence were, for the first time, free of the inconvenience and the scar on the landscape. Since then they have lived with that freedom, and they have judged it to be right and good, and they have no intention of giving it up.”

“The question of the Irish Border needs to be isolated from the sphere of economics and considered in the context of fundamental rights,” Eoin McNamee, a novelist and screenwriter who grew up crossing the border on his way to school, wrote last year. “Theresa May can insist that her country leaves the European Union. The EU can dictate what conditions it wishes. But neither of them can dictate or insist that a line of malice be redrawn across this island.”

The reality of that time, McNamee reminded readers, was “cratered roads, corpses dumped in black plastic bags, surveillance towers, bullet-riddled gospel halls, bullet-riddled homes. You got the full force of it at night. Driving on the empty roads through eerie zones emptied of all except watchfulness and ill-intent.”

I spoke with McNamee in London last week. “The economics are not the key matter,” he told me. Partition, he said, was “a moral wrong, in the sense that the Berlin Wall was a moral wrong, an affront to civilization.” A decade after the border infrastructure had been removed in the wake of the peace deal, and the scar tissue had begun to heal, McNamee recalled his brother suddenly turning to him to ask, “Was that all a dream?”

For the U.K. or the EU to insist on the repartition of Ireland, McNamee says now, would be like telling the German people that the Berlin Wall has to be reconstructed. “It’s not just that people don’t want it — they don’t want it — but they can’t go back to it.”

Or, as the Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell put it recently when asked if there was a solution to the Irish border question: “It’s not the Irish border — it’s the British border in Ireland. The Irish border is the beach.”

Unlike pro-Brexit nationalists in her Conservative party, May seems desperate to strike some sort of deal to keep the whole of the U.K. as close to the EU as possible, not just to prevent a return to bloodshed in Northern Ireland, but to protect British industry. For that reason, earlier in the negotiations over the terms of the U.K.’s withdrawal, May seemed willing to accept an offer from the EU to protect the peace in Northern Ireland by granting the region special status after Brexit, allowing it to remain both in the U.K. and in the European customs union and single market, making border checks for goods and people traveling to and from Ireland unnecessary.

Unfortunately, however, while May signed off in principle to this deal late last year — at least as a “backstop” that would come into force only if the U.K. is unable to negotiate a future trading relationship with the EU that is so close as to render border checks unnecessary — she is now too politically weak to convince the rest of her party to go along.

Perhaps even more importantly, with no parliamentary majority after her disastrous decision to call an early general election last year, the prime minister also needs the support of 10 Northern Irish members of Parliament from the Democratic Unionist Party, a group of Christian fundamentalists who campaigned for Brexit, but against the 1998 peace agreement. While the DUP pays lip service to the idea of keeping the border open, they have threatened to bring down May’s government if she makes any move to accept special status for the region, which would involved customs checks on goods moving to and from Britain. The party’s leader, Arlene Foster, recently described her red line against any such concession as “blood red.”

The halting, drawn-out talks over Brexit have created a deep sense of exasperation shared by supporters and opponents of the policy. In late June, when two full years had passed since Britain had voted to leave the European Union, but there was still no sign of what that would mean in practice, one English soap opera star had had enough. “Who knows about Brexit? No one’s got a fucking clue what Brexit is,” actor Danny Dyer told a stunned Piers Morgan during a television talk show.

“No one knows what it is,” Dyer added, as the camera cut to his fellow guests, Pamela Anderson and Jeremy Corbyn. “It’s like this mad riddle that no one knows what it is.”

The viral success of the clip owed much to the fact that Dyer went on to call the former prime minister, David Cameron, a “twat” for having called the referendum and then “scuttled off” to enjoy a nice retirement “in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up” after his side lost. But the actor also voiced a frustration shared by millions of Britons who voted for the decision to leave the EU, only to discover that their political leaders had no actual plan for how to do it.

The reason for the long delay is that Cameron’s successor, May, has indeed been trying to solve a riddle that just might have no answer. But the fact remains that more than two years after she took power with the vague pledge that “Brexit means Brexit,” the prime minister has still not spelled out exactly what sort of future relationship she wants with the EU or how she plans to both take full control of the country’s borders without threatening the peace in Ireland.

She initially promised to deliver two things. First, there is the clean break with Europe that the anti-immigrant far right of her party demands — leaving both the customs union and European single market. Second, May promised to negotiate a future trade relationship with the remaining EU members that would satisfy Conservative moderates who worry that leaving the customs union and single market could destroy a British economy deeply entwined with the rest of Europe.

But a third requirement is proving itself to be the most problematic: May is constrained by her promise to find some way to pull the entire U.K. out of the EU without jeopardizing the fragile peace along that previously contested and militarized border.

In a recent Twitter address to the leader of the Brexit campaign, Boris Johnson, Patrick Kielty, a comedian from Northern Ireland whose father was murdered by paramilitary gunmen during the Troubles, explained that the EU was a key component in the “devious magic” of a peace deal by which mainly Protestant “Unionists were guaranteed that Northern Ireland would be part of the U.K. until the majority voted otherwise,” and “the border was removed and the island linked” so that mainly Catholic Irish “Nationalists could pretend they were already living in a United Ireland.”

“Some of these Nationalists then accepted being part of the UK as their day to day lives were essentially Irish,” Kielty continued. “This cunning plan was sold to us on the basis that we were all part of the EU therefore fixation on nationality was so last World War.”

By removing the EU from this spell, pro-Brexit politicians “have opened a Pandora’s box for Northern Ireland,” Kielty added. “It’s one reason why the majority of people in [Northern Ireland] voted to remain in the EU”

Experts like R. Daniel Kelemen, a professor of political science and law at Rutgers University, have tried to alert May to the fact that there is only one way to keep all three of her promises: “magical thinking.”

You really need to look at this. It is impossible to keep all three promises you’ve made. Accept reality and choose. pic.twitter.com/mxgrucuzSZ

— R. Daniel Kelemen (@rdanielkelemen) May 13, 2018

Determined to press on regardless, May has continued to float proposals that satisfy no one and have raised fears that the U.K. could run out of time to strike a deal before the country’s membership in the EU expires at 11 p.m. on March 29, 2019. If that happens, a so-called No Deal Brexit could disrupt everything from the flow of food and medicine into the country to air travel out of it.

A shocked cabinet was today told no-deal Brexit may force government to own or operate lorry ferries, because freight through Dover and Channel Tunnel could fall 85% and we’d run out of vital goods, food and medicine https://t.co/gbFn5wsDxH

— Robert Peston (@Peston) October 23, 2018

Brexit has become like a declaration of war on ourselves. Emergency ships will be chartered for food and medicine if we leave the EU with no deal. But at least when we're using ration books and running out of drugs, we'll have taken back control.https://t.co/Kf6Pw4nzPf

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) October 23, 2018

That’s led to demands from the EU for May to simply embrace the fallback plan she had agreed to last year, which would grant special status to Northern Ireland after Brexit. Under pressure to satisfy the hard-liners in her own party and the DUP, May angrily rejected the same plan she had agreed to last December as an attempt to divide her country in two, ignoring the fact that Northern Ireland exists because Ireland was divided in two by Britain in 1921.

As May’s former aide Matthew O’Toole pointed out in The Spectator last month, what the prime minister fails to acknowledge is that the peace agreement signed in Belfast on Good Friday in 1998 already gave Northern Irish citizens special rights that will tie them more closely to the EU after Brexit. As a result of the peace agreement, all citizens of Northern Ireland are entitled to hold Irish and U.K. passports, which means that after Brexit, it could be a region of a non-member country entirely populated by EU citizens. The Good Friday Agreement also gave the region permission to secede from the U.K. and join the Republic of Ireland if a majority of voters ever approves that change in a referendum. So, O’Toole notes, “It is the only part of the United Kingdom where citizens have both a permanent legal right to E.U. citizenship, and a formal route back to E.U. membership via a future referendum on Irish unity.”

Whatever the outcome of the talks, many Irish observers have been stunned to see how blithely their concerns about what would amount to the effective repartition of Ireland have been dismissed by May’s government and the hard-line, self-described “Brexiteers” pushing her party to the right.

May steering the Titantic straight for the iceberg. Speech almost completely at odds with reality.

— Karl Whelan (@WhelanKarl) September 21, 2018

You do get the sense that HMG has never taken Ireland seriously and that this condescension, once widespread but essentially an anachronism in today’s UK, may be the fatal flaw that drives their country over the no deal cliff https://t.co/JCBO280gvV

— Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke (@kevinhorourke) September 20, 2018

Oh, sorry … excuse me … apologies … am I in your way? … whoops, I … though … now I think of it … you did put me here to be in the way … sorry and now … I’m in your way … you have to admit … that’s kind of funny … no, you’re right it’s not … sorry I can’t

— The Irish Border (@BorderIrish) October 14, 2018

One of the leaders of the arch-conservative faction, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has consistently downplayed the risk of chaos if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal. He has attracted particular derision in Northern Ireland — where a majority voted against Brexit — for saying that there was no need for him to visit the 300-mile-long Irish border, which might be sealed after Brexit to prevent British goods from being smuggled into the EU.

.@Jacob_Rees_Mogg tells @MarkCarruthers7 on @bbctheview that visiting the Irish border wouldn't give him "any greater insight" – https://t.co/DmkO3XVGkb pic.twitter.com/tf8VuBZzLY

— BBC News NI (@BBCNewsNI) May 11, 2018

Rees-Mogg argued that he gets all the information he needs on the border from members of the DUP, whose aim is to keep Northern Ireland inside the United Kingdom. However, none of those Northern Irish MPs actually represent communities along the border with Ireland, which all voted decisively against Brexit in the 2016 referendum.

The DUP (whose 10 seats in the UK Parliament, from just 36% of the vote, are shaded red) act as if they have a veto over all proposals to keep the Irish border open, but they do not represent a single constituent who actually lives on the border. (Green areas voted Sinn Fein) pic.twitter.com/EMQBN64l4Z

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) December 3, 2017

“He’s a very good example of the cocoon that ardent Brexiteers are living in — he knows nothing about the Irish border, he has no interest in it,” Deirdre Heenan, a professor of social policy at Ulster University, said recently of Rees-Mogg. “The man is living in denial; living in some sort of deluded dreamland that post-Brexit, we’ll go back to a grand, imperial Britain.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg shows "the cocoon that ardent Brexiteers are living in; he knows nothing about the Irish border," @deirdreheenan said in May. He is "living in some sort of deluded dreamland that post-Brexit we'll go back to a grand, imperial Britain." pic.twitter.com/jDfkmcQkJ8

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) September 26, 2018

Over the summer, video circulated of Rees-Mogg admitting in an offhand way that Brexit might require a return to the sort of border checks carried out during the 30-year civil war of the Troubles.

Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests that after Brexit, people crossing the Irish border should be subject to 'inspections, just like during The Troubles'. pic.twitter.com/pEnBNBBasU

— Stephen Ruth (@stephen_rth) August 24, 2018

“There would be our ability, as we had during the Troubles, to have people inspected,” Rees-Mogg said at a seminar. “It’s not a border that everyone has to go through every day, but of course for security reasons during the Troubles, we kept a very close eye on the border, to try and stop gun-running and things like that.”

The Conservative member of Parliament — who seemed concerned only with preventing European immigrants from crossing into the U.K. via Northern Ireland — sounded unaware of just how intrusive and provocative those searches were. For the three decades before the 1998 peace agreement in Northern Ireland, which gave all residents the right to both U.K. and Irish passports, most cross-border roads were closed by the British Army, and every car that did cross was inspected at heavily fortified checkpoints, first by armed soldiers and then by customs officers.

Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, reacted with horror to the Conservative politician’s ignorance of how traumatic, and deadly, the recent past was in Northern Ireland. “It’s hard to believe that a senior politician is so ill-informed about Ireland and the politics of the Brexit Irish border issue that he could make comments like these,” Coveney observed on Twitter. “We have left ‘the troubles’ behind us, through the sincere efforts of many, and we intend on keeping it that way.”

Last month, there was a more poetic, but equally jagged response to Rees-Mogg and others who have dismissed the hazard of reimposing the border from the Northern Irish playwright Clare Dwyer Hogg and the Belfast-born actor Stephen Rea in a lyrical, Financial Times opinion piece filmed along the border.

“Jacob Rees-Mogg you’re right. You don’t need to visit the North of Ireland to understand the border — you need to have lived here,” Rea says, standing at the border. “We live here, and we’re holding our breath again.”

Correction: Wednesday, Oct. 24, 12:22 p.m. EDT
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell as Northern Irish. Although Maxwell has relatives in Northern Ireland, he is from Dublin, which his accent makes abundantly clear.

The post To Unlock Brexit Talks, Britain Must Atone for a Sin of Empire: the Partition of Ireland appeared first on The Intercept.

The lack of any 9/11-type catastrophic attack on U.S. (or any Western) soil for the past 17 years, along with the killing of a pitifully aged, ailing bin Laden and the erosion of ISIS, has severely compromised their ongoing viability as major bad guys. So now — just as a film studio revitalizes a once-successful super-villain franchise for a new generation of moviegoers — we’re back to the Russians occupying center stage.

That Barack Obama spent eight years (including up through his final year-end news conference) mocking the notion that Russia posed a serious threat to the U.S. given their size and capabilities, and that he even tried repeatedly to accommodate and partner with Russian President Vladimir Putin, is of no concern: In the internet age, “2016” is regarded as ancient history, drowned out by an endless array of new threats pinned by a united media on the Russkie Plague. Moreover, human nature craves a belief in an existential foreign threat because it confers a sense of purpose and cause, strengthens tribal unity and identity, permits scapegoating, shifts blame for maladies from internal to external causes, and (like religion) offers a simplifying theory for understanding a complex world.

One of the prime accusations sustaining this script is that the Kremlin is drowning the West in “fake news” and other forms of propaganda. One can debate its impact and magnitude, but disinformation campaigns are something the U.S., Russia, and countless other nations have done to one another for centuries, and there is convincing evidence that Russia does this sort of thing now. But evidence of one threat does not mean that all claimed threats are real, nor does it mean that that tactic is exclusively wielded by one side.

Over the past year, there have been numerous claims made by Western intelligence agencies, mindlessly accepted as true in the Western press, that have turned out to be baseless, if not deliberate scams. Just today, it was revealed that Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra lied when he claimed he was at a meeting with Putin, in which the Russian president “said he considered Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states as part of a ‘Greater Russia.'”

“Fake news” is certainly something to worry about when it emanates from foreign adversaries, but it is at least as concerning and threatening, if not more so, when emanating from one’s own governments and media. And there are countless, highly significant examples beyond today’s of such propaganda that emanates from within.

Russian Interference in Brexit Vote

The Guardian, January 10, 2018:

Reuters, February 8, 2018:

Russians Responsible for #ReleaseTheMemo Campaign

Associated Press, January 22, 2018:

Daily Beast, January 23, 2018:

Russian Interference in German Elections

Reuters, July 4, 2017:

New York Times, September 21, 2017:

Russians Hacked Macron Campaign:

Telegraph, May 6, 2017:

Associated Press, June 1, 2017:

And this is all independent of all those cases when the U.S. media was forced to retract, or issue humiliating editor’s notes, about stories regarding the “Russian threat” that turned out to be false. Even in those cases in which some evidence can be found suggesting that some “Russians” were engaged online in support for a particular cause, the size and impact of it is usually so minute as to be laughable. In response to months of demands and threats to Twitter from the U.K. government to investigate how its service was used by Russians to support the Brexit referendum, Twitter — to satisfy mounting complaints — finally came up with this:

For the six decades of the miserable Cold War, those Americans who tried to argue that the Russian threat was being exaggerated for nefarious ends and who advocated for better relations between Washington and Moscow were branded as “traitors,” Kremlin apologists, or at best, “useful idiots.” The revitalization of Russia as prime villain has also given new life to those old right-wing tactics, though this time wielded by the same people who were once its targets:

But the reason this matters so much — this coordinated devotion to once again depicting Russia as a grave threat — is because of the serious, enduring policy implications. New Democratic Party star Joseph Kennedy III is following in the footsteps of his Cold Warrior ancestors by proposing massive new military, propaganda, and cybersecurity programs to combat the Russian threat. Senators such as Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican John McCain routinely refer to “acts of war” when discussing U.S.-Russia relations. British generals and tabloids are hyping the Russian threat beyond all measure of reason in their quest to obtain new weapons systems and increased military spending at the expense of austerity-battered British subjects.

If there’s any lesson that should unite everyone in the West, it’s that the greatest skepticism is required when it comes to government and media claims about the nature of foreign threats. If we’re going to rejuvenate a Cold War, or submit to greater military spending and government powers in the name of stopping alleged Russian aggression, we should at least ensure that the information on which those campaigns succeed are grounded in fact. Even a casual review of the propaganda spewing forth from Western power centers over the last year leaves little doubt that the exact opposite is happening.

Top photo: The Dutch minister of foreign affairs Halbe Zijlstra speaks during a joint press conference with the German minister of foreign affairs Sigmar Gabriel at the ministry of foreign affairs in Berlin, Germany, 16 November 2017.

The post Dutch Official Admits Lying About Meeting With Putin: Is Fake News Used by Russia or About Russia? appeared first on The Intercept.

Rejecting the prosecutor’s pleas that “the British courts should trust the United States to provide what it said it would provide” in order to secure Love’s health and safety, the court instead invoked extensive medical and psychological testimony that conditions inside American prisons are woefully inadequate to treat Love’s ailments. As a result, extradition and incarceration inside the U.S. prison system would exacerbate those health issues and produce a high risk of suicide.

Love, 33, is accused by the U.S. government of participating in the 2012 and 2013 hacking of the computer systems of various U.S. military agencies and private companies. The U.S. Justice Department, citing a confidential FBI source who claimed to have accessed chat rooms in which Love plotted with others on how to use the stolen data, indicted Love in three different states (New Jersey, New York, and Virginia) on felony hacking and theft charges. Love (pictured above after Monday’s victory) was arrested in 2013 by British authorities and released on bail. Ever since, the U.S. government has sought his extradition from the U.K. for him to stand trial, and ultimately be imprisoned, in the U.S.

In September 2016, a British lower court judge ruled that Love was eligible for extradition, and two months later, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd ignored the pleas of 100 members of Parliament to keep Love in the U.K. and instead ordered him extradited to the U.S. In ruling Love eligible for extradition, the lower court judge rejected claims that extradition would severely worsen Love’s physical and mental health problems, accepting promises from U.S. prison officials that they would ensure Love did not kill himself.

Specifically, prison officials told the court that, on the trip to the U.S., Love “would be restrained and escorted by Marshals, who would observe him within close proximity during the flight, having checked him for anything he might be able to use to harm himself,” and that once in prison, he would be kept in isolation if suicide appeared to be a serious risk. As a result, the judge found, U.S. authorities could and would adequately safeguard Love’s welfare.

That was the conclusion emphatically rejected by the British appeals court. The court concluded that suicide prevention programs in U.S. prisons are so crude and harsh that they actually increase the likelihood of a prisoner’s suicide. The court placed particular emphasis on the warnings of neuropsychiatry professor Michael Kopelman that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’s “suicide prevention program” — which “involve[s] an inmate on suicide watch being put into a suicide prevention room, wearing a suicide smock, and being monitored for 24 hours a day, without any unapproved personal items” — would likely exacerbate all of the conditions it was ostensibly designed to treat:

The appeals court also relied on the testimony of Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge professor of developmental psychopathology who specializes in autism, who “took issue with the sufficiency of the protocols operated in America, to support prisoners with Asperger Syndrome, depression and at high suicidal risk.” In particular, “mentally ill inmates were often put in solitary confinement where they cannot access mental health services, with especially negative consequences for Mr. Love,” and “he would not receive treatment for clinical depression until it reached ‘crisis/suicidal’ level.”

Extensively analyzing ample medical testimony along with standard procedures in U.S. prisons for treating inmates with physical and mental illnesses, the British appeals court concluded that U.S. prison “treatment” would not effectively help his illnesses but would do exactly the opposite: They “would be very harmful for his difficult mental conditions, Asperger Syndrome and depression, linked as they are; and for his physical conditions, notable eczema, which would be exacerbated by stress. That in turn would add to his worsening mental condition, which in its turn would worsen his physical conditions.”

In sum, concluded the court, the way in which U.S. prisons “treat” inmates with mental illnesses and suicidal impulses — with segregation, isolation, and a lack of ongoing medical and mental health care — almost certainly means that extradition to the U.S. would worsen Love’s health and create a very high likelihood of driving him to suicide:

Suicide watch is not a form of treatment; there is no evidence that treatment would or could be made available on suicide watch for the very conditions which suicide watch itself exacerbates. But once removed from suicide watch, the risk of suicide as found by the judge, cannot realistically be prevented, on her findings. … Mr Love already experiences severe depression at times. It is very difficult to envisage that his mental state after ten years in and out of segregation would not be gravely worsened, should he not commit suicide.

That the U.S. prison system is cruel and abusive when it comes to treating inmates’ mental health problems is well-documented. A decade ago, the Department of Justice itself acknowledged that “more than half of all prison and jail inmates had a mental health problem, including 705,600 inmates in State prisons, 78,800 in Federal prisons, and 479,900 in local jails.”

As the U.S. prison population has exploded — the U.S. imprisons more of its citizens than any other country, including those (such as China and India) with triple or quadruple the population sizes — the ability of prison officials to treat mental health has worsened. A comprehensive report last June by Maggie Puniewska in Vice documented that “many mentally ill inmates are often abused and denied care, even when it’s clear that they are suffering,” and “inmates on suicide watch would be left alone for days at a time — ironically, no one was watching them.” Worse, “mentally ill inmates can find themselves in solitary confinement, also called segregation, which is more often a placement that can aggravate their condition.”

Indeed, the pervasive use of prolonged solitary confinement in U.S prisons — which many medical professionals now regard as a form of torture — often exacerbates the suffering of inmates with mental health problems. A clinical study published in 2013 noted that “in recent years, prison officials have increasingly turned to solitary confinement as a way to manage difficult or dangerous prisoners,” and that “many of the prisoners subjected to isolation, which can extend for years, have serious mental illness, and the conditions of solitary confinement can exacerbate their symptoms or provoke recurrence.”

In 2009, Human Rights Watch testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that “prisons are ill-equipped to respond appropriately to the needs of prisoners with mental illness. Prison mental health services are all too frequently woefully deficient, crippled by understaffing, insufficient facilities, and limited programs. Many seriously ill prisoners receive little or no meaningful treatment.” As a result, “mentally ill prisoners suffer painful symptoms and their conditions can deteriorate.” The American Civil Liberties Union has repeatedly sued various prison systems for inadequate mental health care on the grounds that it constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” as barred by the U.S. Constitution.

Monday’s ruling by the British court is certain to infuriate the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2012, U.S. law enforcement denounced the decision of then-Home-Secretary Theresa May, now the British prime minister, to refuse the extradition to the U.S. of accused British hacker Gary McKinnon “on human rights grounds because of medical reports warning that McKinnon, 46, who has Asperger’s syndrome and suffers from depressive illness, could kill himself if sent to stand trial in the U.S.” As the BBC noted at the time, May’s decision was “the first time a home secretary had stepped in to block an extradition under the current treaty with the U.S.”

That a British high court has now blocked another extradition request by the U.S. for a hacker regarded by American authorities as a serious criminal is certain to heighten tensions further between these two close allies. Even more importantly, this decision — as comprehensive and emphatic as it is — could be critical for shining international light on the oppressive and brutal conditions inside the solitary-confinement-loving American prison system, particularly for people who struggle with ailments of mental health.

Top photo: Lauri Love waves to supporters outside The Royal Courts of Justice in London, Monday, Feb. 5, 2018.

The post Citing U.S. Prison Conditions, British Appeals Court Refuses to Extradite Accused Hacker Lauri Love to the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

BBC reporting that, during her visit, Theresa May did not meet any of the survivors of #GrenfellTower for "security reasons"

— James Doleman (@jamesdoleman) June 15, 2017

Feeling genuinely angry that Theresa May would go to the scene of a disaster like Grenfell and choose not to speak to residents.

— Jonn Elledge (@JonnElledge) June 15, 2017

https://twitter.com/kriscarter12_/status/875314917745807360

Theresa May has just "privately visited" #GrenfellTower She didn't meet residents or media, but was quite happy to get a photo-op out of it. pic.twitter.com/vbS46mYxt3

— Hicham Yezza (@HichamYezza) June 15, 2017

May, whose new chief of staff has been accused of failing to implement the recommendations of a fire safety review that might have prevented the tragedy, also refused to permit journalists to accompany her during a briefing by firefighters.

That shielded her from uncomfortable questions — about her own role in “radical reforms” that saved money but cut the number of firefighters by 10,000 nationwide — and made for a striking contrast with a visit by Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, who spent an emotional half hour with residents and relatives of the victims.

At one stage, Corbyn hugged a distraught woman who handed him a poster of Jessica Urbano, a missing 12-year-old girl last heard from in a phone call to her mother from the 20th floor of the tower early Wednesday morning.

My niece Jessica is still missing #GrenfellFire we are searching hospitals and not been given any news please have her in your prayers pic.twitter.com/mHpL0U8wHO

— Ana Ospina ? (@beautbyana) June 15, 2017

Corbyn also promised residents that he would make sure those responsible for failing to prevent the fire were held accountable. Although the confirmed death toll reached 17 on Thursday, many more residents are missing and the structure is not yet safe enough for recovery teams to search it completely.

https://twitter.com/liamyoung/status/875316831615168513

Distraught woman resident tells Jeremy Corbyn: "Theresa May was here but she didn't speak to any of us. She was s**t."

— Andy Lines (@andylines) June 15, 2017

The Labour leader was accompanied by Emma Dent Coad, who was narrowly elected to Parliament last week to represent Kensington, the country’s richest constituency. Dent Coad told The Guardian on Thursday that “this fire was entirely preventable,” if only the Conservative-led local council had listened to the repeated warnings of fire safety lapses put in writing by residents.

She also suggested that the council, which is responsible for public housing blocs in the area, like Grenfell Tower, was at fault for not ensuring that a new facade, of aluminum rain-screen cladding added to the outside of the building recently to improve its appearance, did not pose a fire risk.

While some defenders of May and her party tried to argue that the tragedy was not a political matter, her housing ministry failed to follow advice to retrofit old housing towers with sprinklers following an investigation into a 2009 fire that killed six people.

"Don't politicise #GrenfellTower!"

"There is *nothing* more political than the allocation of public resources."

— Musa Okwonga (@Okwonga) June 14, 2017

https://twitter.com/will_coldwell/status/874939165598679040

Experts have suggested that the cladding might have acted like an exterior chimney, allowing a fire in one apartment to sweep up the outside and engulf the whole 24-story building.

“There is no way fire should spread that quickly on a newly refurbished building” – architect and broadcaster @MrGeorgeClarke #GrenfellTower pic.twitter.com/hiCEzHT97Z

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) June 15, 2017

Dent Coad added that the neglect of fire safety at Grenfell Tower appeared to be part of a wider lack of care for the area’s less working class and poor residents. “We have a very rich council which spent 26 million pounds repaving Exhibition Road for tourists at the same time as it was closing nurseries, pruning youth clubs, closing older people’s lunch clubs, not investing in social care.”

Anger at the prime minister’s decision to hide from those impacted by the fire came as new polling revealed that her net favorability rating had plunged from +10 percent in April, when she called an early general election, to -34 percent.

Theresa May's net favourability score plummets to -34 – about the level Corbyn was on in November https://t.co/F42LapVcLL pic.twitter.com/3FlQ5w0S5c

— YouGov (@YouGov) June 15, 2017

Public opinion towards…

May:
Favourable: 29% (-13)
Unfavourable: 63% (+16)

Corbyn:
Fav: 46% (+10)
Unfav: 46% (-4)

(via @YouGov, 11-12)

— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) June 15, 2017

According to the pollsters at YouGov, May’s personal popularity has plummeted by 29 points in the past two weeks. That period coincided with a terrorist attack in London — which focused attention on May’s role in cuts to the police force — and the prime minister’s decision to cling to power by forming an alliance with Northern Ireland’s ultraconservative Democratic Unionist Party.

London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, also visited the scene on Thursday and encountered angry residents. Khan told reporters that their outrage was understandable.

"They're justifiably angry and I share their anger" – @SadiqKhan talks to Sky News after meeting many affected by the #GrenfellTower fire pic.twitter.com/d0zNvXZ3fM

— Sky News (@SkyNews) June 15, 2017

The mayor also insisted that a public inquiry into the disaster May promised had to be completed quickly, given that so many other Londoners live in high-rise buildings that need to be made safe.

Khan’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, came in for plenty of abuse on social networks for his part in reducing the number of fire stations in the capital during his time in office.

My thoughts and prayers are with everyone caught up in the horrific towerblock fire in London.

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) June 14, 2017

Do you know what's better than thoughts and prayers? A properly funded fire department https://t.co/A3PRbKuRpb

— thierry ennui (@alexeptable) June 14, 2017

As Mayor of London, you told an Assembly member querying your claim that fire service cuts somehow 'improved' the service to "get stuffed". https://t.co/7jTB3H0lKp

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) June 14, 2017

Top photo: Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to Dany Cotton, commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, with members of the fire service as she visits Grenfell Tower on June 15, 2017, in London.

The post Theresa May Avoids Survivors of Grenfell Tower Fire During Visit to Scene of Disaster appeared first on The Intercept.