My next talk in the UK will be a keynote at the renowned CIJ summer school on 16th July. One of the major themes this year is whistleblowing, for obvious Wikileaks-related reasons, and it appears I shall be in good company.
My talk is at 2pm on the Saturday. I understand the keynotes are open to the public, not just summer school attendees, so come along if you can and please spread the word!
The Guardian’s spook commentator extraordinaire, Richard Norton-Taylor, has reported that the current chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) in the UK Parliament, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, wants the committee to finally grow a pair. Well, those weren’t quite the words used in the Grauny, but they certainly capture the gist.
If Rifkind’s stated intentions are realised, the new-look ISC might well provide real, meaningful and democratic oversight for the first time in the 100-year history of the three key UK spy agencies — MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, not to mention the defence intelligence staff, the joint intelligence committee and the new National Security Council .
For many long years I have been discussing the woeful lack of real democratic oversight for the UK spies. The privately-convened ISC, the democratic fig-leaf established under the aegis of the 1994 Intelligence Services Act (ISA), is appointed by and answerable only to the Prime Minister, with a remit only to look at finance, policy and administration, and without the power to demand documents or to cross-examine witnesses under oath. Its annual reports are always heavily redacted and have become a joke amongst journalists.
When the remit of the ISC was being drawn up in the early 1990s, the spooks were apoplectic that Parliament should have any form of oversight whatsoever. From their perspective, it was bad enough at that point that the agencies were put on a legal footing for the first time. Spy thinking then ran pretty much along the lines of “why on earth should they be answerable to a bunch of here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians, who were leaky as hell and gossiped to journalists all the time”?
So it says a great deal that the spooks breathed a huge, collective sigh of relief when the ISC remit was finally enshrined in law in 1994. They really had nothing to worry about. I remember, I was there at the time.
This has been borne out over the last 17 years. Time and again the spies have got away with telling barefaced lies to the ISC. Or at the very least being “economical with the truth”, to use one of their favourite phrases. Former DG of MI5, Sir Stephen Lander, has publicly said that “I blanche at some of the things I declined to tell the committee [ISC] early on…”. Not to mention the outright lies told to the ISC over the years about issues like whistleblower testimony, torture, and counter-terrorism measures.
But these new developments became yet more fascinating to me when I read that the current Chair of the ISC proposing these reforms is no less than Sir Malcolm Rifkind, crusty Tory grandee and former Conservative Foreign Minister in the mid-1990s.
For Sir Malcolm was the Foreign Secretary notionally in charge of MI6 when the intelligence officers, PT16 and PT16/B, hatched the ill-judged Gaddafi Plot when MI6 funded a rag-tag group of Islamic extremist terrorists in Libya to assassinate the Colonel, the key disclosure made by David Shayler when he blew the whistle way back in the late 1990s.
Obviously this assassination attempt was highly reckless in a very volatile part of the world; obviously it was unethical, and many innocent people were murdered in the attack; and obviously it failed, leading to the shaky rapprochement with Gaddafi over the last decade. Yet now we are seeing the use of similar tactics in the current Libyan war (this time more openly) with MI6 officers being sent to help the rebels in Benghazi and our government openly and shamelessly calling for régime change.
But most importantly from a legal perspective, in 1996 the “Gaddafi Plot” MI6 apparently did not apply for prior written permission from Rifkind — which they were legally obliged to do under the terms of the 1994 Intelligence Services Act (the very act that also established the ISC). This is the fabled, but real, “licence to kill” — Section 7 of the ISA — which provides immunity to MI6 officers for illegal acts committed abroad, if they have the requisite ministerial permission.
At the time, Rifkind publicly stated that he had not been approached by MI6 to sanction the plot when the BBC Panorama programme conducted a special investigation, screened on 7 August 1997. Rifkind’s statement was also reported widely in the press over the years, including this New Statesman article by Mark Thomas in 2002.
That said, Rifkind himself wrote earlier this year in The Telegraph that help should now be given to the Benghazi “rebels” — many of whom appear to be members of the very same group that tried to assassinate Gaddafi with MI6’s help in 1996 — up to and including the provision of arms. Rifkind’s view of the legalities now appear to be somewhat more flexible, whatever his stated position was back in the 90s.
Of course, then he was notionally in charge of MI6 and would have to take the rap for any political fall-out. Now he can relax into the role of “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”. Such a relief.
I shall be watching developments around Rifkind’s proposed reforms with interest.
A recent interview on Press TV about the spies’ manipulation of the media:
My recent talk at the excellent How the Light Gets In philosophy festival at Hay-on-Wye. With credit and thanks to IAI TV and the staff of the Institute of Art and Ideas, the organisers the event.
This article in today’s Guardian about the ongoing repercussions of the Mark Kennedy undercover cop scandal earlier this year piqued my interest.
It appears that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has suppressed key evidence about the all-too-apparent innocence of environmental protesters in the run-up to their trials. In this case Mark Kennedy aka Stone, the policeman who for years infiltrated protest groups across Europe, had covertly recorded conversations during the planning sessions to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.
Kennedy offered to give evidence to prove that the unit he worked for at the time, the private and unaccountable ACPO-run National Public Order Investigations Unit (NPOIU), had witheld this key evidence. It now appears that the police are claiming that they passed all the information on to the CPS, which then seems to have neglected to hand it over to the protesters’ defence lawyers.
Which makes it even more fascinating that in April this year the Director of Public Prosecutions, famous civil liberties QC Keir Starmer no less, took the unprecedented step of encouraging those same protesters to appeal against their convictions because of potential “police” cover-ups.
It’s just amazing, isn’t it, that when vital information can be kept safely under wraps these doughty crime-fighting agencies present a united front to the world? But once someone shines a light into the slithery dark corners, they all scramble to avoid blame and leak against each other?
And yet this case is just the tip of a titanic legal iceberg, where for years the police and the CPS have been in cahoots to cover up many cases of, at best, miscommunication, and at worst outright lies about incompetence and potentially criminal activity.
A couple of months ago George Monbiot provided an excellent summary of recent “misstatements” (a wonderfully euphemistic neologism) by the police over the last few years, including such blatant cases as the death of Ian Tomlinson during the London G20 protests two years ago, the ongoing News of the World phone hacking case, and the counter-terrorism style execution, sorry, shooting of the entirely innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, to name but a few.
Monbiot also dwelt at length on the appalling case of Michael Doherty, a concerned father who discovered that his 13 year-old daughter was apparently being groomed by a paedophile over the internet. He took his concerns to the police, who brushed the issue aside. When Doherty tried to push for a more informed and proactive response, he was the one who was snatched from his house in an early morning raid and ended up in court, accused of abusive and angry phone calls to the station in a sworn statement by a member of the relevant police force, sorry, service.
And that would have been that — he would have apparently been bang to rights on the word of a police secretary — apart from the fact he had recorded all his phone calls to the police and kept meticulous notes on the progress of the case. Only this evidence led to his rightful acquittal.
As Monbiot rightly concludes, “justice is impossible if we cannot trust police forces to tell the truth”.
It appears that the notion of “citizen journalists” is just sooo 2006. Now we all need to be not only journalists but also “citizen lawyers”, just in case we have to defend ourselves against potential police lies. Yet these are the very organisations that are paid from the public purse to protect civil society. Is it any wonder that so many people have a growing distrust of them and concerns about an encroaching, Stasi-like, police state?
This is all part of engrained, top-down British culture of secrecy that allows the amorphous “security services” to think they can get away with anything and everything if they make a forceful enough public statement: black is white, torture is “enhanced interrogation”, and war is peace (or at least a “peacekeeping” mission in Libya.…). Especially if there is no meaningful oversight. We have entered the Orwellian world of NewSpeak.
But plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. This all happened in the 1970s and 80s with the Irish community, and also in the 1990s with the terrible miscarriage of justice around the Israeli embassy bombing in 1994. If you have the time, please do read the detailed case here: Download Israeli_Embassy_Case
We need to remember our history.
Over the last few years there have been a number of egregious cases of police and state cover-ups in the UK around the deaths and wrongful prosecutions of innocent people.
This brings to my mind the appalling miscarriage of justice that occurred in the 1990s when two Palestinian students, a young woman called Samar Alami and a young man called Jawad Botmeh, were both wrongfully convicted of conspiracy to bomb the Israeli embassy in London in July 1994.
In this case a highly sophisticated car bomb as detonated outside the embassy. Thankfully nobody was killed, but a number of people suffered minor injuries. Alami and Botmeh had connections to Palestinian political support groups based in London at the time, many of whom were rounded up during the investigation. Botmeh had naively helped out a shadowy and never-identified figure called Reda Moghrabi, who asked for assistance in buying a second-hand car at auction. This was the car that was used in the explosion.
Why is this case an example of establishment cover-up? Well, this was one of the cases that former MI5 officer David Shayler blew the whistle on during the 1990s. He revealed the existence of two relevant documents that should have been disclosed to the defence but, for some unaccountable reason, were not.
The first, an agent report from a credible and trusted source, pointed to a non-Palestinian group planning the attack before it had even occurred. This report was not acted upon by the MI5 officer responsible, who then tried to cover up her mistake. She was caught out, and there was a much-discussed internal inquiry into the matter within MI5’s G Branch (international terrorism) in late 1994.
But there was another document — one written by G9/1, the senior MI5 officer who oversaw the post-incident investigation. His view was that Mossad, the external Israeli intelligence agency, had carried out a controlled explosion outside its own embassy (the shadowy and unidentified Reda Moghrabi being the potentially crucial missing link) in order to acquire the long-demanded additional security protection around Israeli interests in the UK, and also to shatter the Palestinian support networks in London — a long-term objective of Mossad.
The government at the time tried to dismiss these disclosures. However, the much-missed Private Eye investigative journalist, Paul Foot, and the indefatigable lawyer, Gareth Peirce, followed them up and pursued them tirelessly through the media and the courts.
And guess what? It turns out that these two key documents had indeed not been disclosed to the legal defence team during the trial of Alami and Botmeh — and not just by the hapless spooks. It emerged during the appeal hearing that no fewer than seven people from a variety of police and intelligence organisations had failed to disclose the relevant documentation to the defence. This cannot be explained away as an innocent oversight, a cock-up — it bears all the hallmarks of a deliberate, systemic establishment cover-up.
All this represented, at the very least, a need for a retrial but also a possible gross miscarriage of justice. And yet, while acknowledging that these documents did indeed exist during the appeal hearing and beyond, the presiding m’luds decided to ignore all case law and European law and let those two innocents rot in prison. After all, it would be terribly embarrassing to vindicate the actions of an intelligence whistleblower, wouldn’t it?
As a result, the poor pawns in this sick establishment game, Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami, ended up serving their full sentences, despite the overwhelming body of evidence proving their innocence, and were finally released in 2008 and 2009 respectively.
For anyone interested in the detailed horror story behind this flagrant miscarriage of justice, here is the relevant chapter from my long-defunct book: Download The_Israeli_Embassy_Case
Former head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett — he of the dodgy September Dossier fame that led inexorably to the UK’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the death, maiming, depleted-uranium poisoning and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people — has complacently stated during his recent talk at the Hay Literary Festival that:
“One of the problems of intelligence work is that fact and fiction get very easily mixed up. A key lesson you have to learn very early on is you keep them separate.”
Well, no doubt many, many people might just wish he’d listened to his own advice way back in September 2002.
Scarlett is, of course, the senior UK spook who made the case for the Iraq war. Here’s the link: Download Iraq_WMD_Dossier.
No doubt you will remember the li(n)es: not only that Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” could be launched within 45 minutes, but also that fake intelligence documents had persuaded MI6 that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger , as Colin Powell asserted during his persuasive speech to the UN in 2003.
Scarlett publicly took the rap and, by protecting Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, was rewarded with the top job at MI6 and the inevitable knighthood. No doubt a suitable recognition for his entirely honourable behaviour.
But it gets worse — now he has apparently landed a lucrative job as an advisor on the situation in Iraq working for Norwegian oil mega-corporation, Statoil.
You couldn’t make it up…
… or perhaps you could if you’re a former top spy with an undeserved “K” and a lucrative oil contract who has difficulty separating fact from fiction.…..
Here’s the text of an article I wrote for The Guardian a while ago, where I suggest we need a fresh perspective and some clear thinking on the role of the spies in the UK.
Worth reiterating, following the pre-emptive arrest of protesters:
The cascade of revelations about secret policemen, starting with PC Mark Kennedy/environmental activist “Mark Stone”, has highlighted the identity crisis afflicting the British security establishment. Private undercover police units are having their James Bond moment – cider shaken, not stirred – while MI5 has become ever more plod-like, yet without the accompanying oversight. How has this happened to our democracy without any public debate?
From the late 19th century the Metropolitan Police Special Branch investigated terrorism while MI5, established in 1909, was a counter-intelligence unit focusing on espionage and political “subversion”. The switch began in 1992 when Dame Stella Rimington, then head of MI5, effected a Whitehall coup and stole primacy for investigating Irish terrorism from the Met. As a result MI5 magically discovered that subversion was not such a threat after all – this revelation only three years after the Berlin Wall came down – and transferred all its staff over to the new, sexy counter-terrorism sections. Since then, MI5 has been eagerly building its counter-terrorism empire, despite this being more obviously evidential police work.
Special Branch was relegated to a supporting role, dabbling in organised crime and animal rights activists, but not terribly excited about either. Its prestige had been seriously tarnished. It also had a group of experienced undercover cops – known then as the Special Duties Section – with time on their hands.
It should therefore come as little surprise that Acpo, the private limited company comprising senior police officers across the country, came up with the brilliant idea of using this skill-set against UK “domestic extremists”. Acpo set up the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). This first focused primarily on animal rights activists, but mission creep rapidly set in and the unit’s role expanded into peaceful protest groups. When this unaccountable, Stasi-like unit was revealed it rightly caused an outcry, especially as the term “domestic extremist” is not recognised under UK law, and cannot legally be used as justification to aggressively invade an individual’s privacy because of their legitimate political beliefs and activism. So, plod has become increasingly spooky. What of the spooks?
As I mentioned, they have been aggressively hoovering up the prestigious counter-terrorism work. But, despite what the Americans have hysterically asserted since 9/11, terrorism is not some unique form of “eviltude”. It is a crime – a hideous, shocking one, but still a crime that should be investigated, with evidence gathered, due process applied and the suspects on trial in front of a jury.
A mature democracy that respects human rights and the rule of law should not intern suspects or render them to secret prisons and torture them for years. And yet this is precisely what our spooks are now allegedly doing – particularly when colluding with their US counterparts.
Also, MI5 and MI6 operate outside any realistic democratic oversight and control. The remit of the intelligence and security committee in parliament only covers the policy, administration and finance of the spies. Since the committee’s inception in 1994 it has repeatedly failed to meaningfully address more serious questions about the spies’ role. The spooks are effectively above the law, while at the same time protected by the draconian Official Secrets Act. This makes the abuses of the NPOIU seem almost quaint. So what to do? A good first step might be to have an informed discussion about the realistic threats to the UK. The police and spies huddle behind the protective phrase “national security”. But what does this mean?
The core idea should be safeguarding the nation’s integrity. A group of well-meaning environmental protesters should not even be on the radar. And, no matter how awful, the occasional terrorist attack is not an existential threat to the fabric of the nation in the way of, say, the planned Nazi invasion in 1940. Nor is it even close to the sustained bombing of government, infrastructure and military targets by the Provisional IRA in the 70s-90s.
Once we understand the real threats, we as a nation can discuss the steps to take to protect ourselves; what measures should be taken and what liberties occasionally and legally compromised, and what democratic accountability exists to ensure that the security forces do not exceed their remit and work within the law.
Well, this is an interesting case in the US. Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the American National Security Agency (NSA), the US electronic eavesdropping organisation, is being charged under the 1917 US Espionage Act for allegedly disclosing classified information to a journalist about, gasp, the mismanagement, financial waste and dubious legal practices of the spying organisation. These days it might actually be more newsworthy if the opposite were to be disclosed.…
However, under the terms of the Espionage Act, this designates him an enemy of the American people on a par with bona fide traitors of the past who sold secrets to hostile powers during the Cold War.
It strikes me that someone who reports malpractice, mistakes and under-performance on the part of his (secretive) employers might possibly be someone who still has the motivation to try to make a difference, to do their best to protect people and serve the genuine interests of the whole country. Should such people be prosecuted or should they be protected with a legal channel to disclosure?
Thomas Drake does not sound like a spy who should be prosecuted for espionage under the USA’s antiquated act, he sounds on the available information like a whistleblower, pure and simple. But that won’t necessarily save him legally, and he is apparently facing decades in prison. President Obama, who made such a song and dance about transparency and accountability during his election campaign, has an even more egregious track record than previous presidents for hunting down whistleblowers — the new “insider threat”.
This, of course, chimes with the British experience. So-called left-of-centre political candidates get elected on a platform of transparency, freedom of information, and an ethical foreign policy (think Blair as well as Obama), and promptly renege on all their campaign promises once they grab the top job.
In fact, I would suggest that the more professedly “liberal” the government, the more it feels empowered to shred civil liberties. If a right-wing government were to attack basic democratic freedoms in such a way, the official opposition (Democrats/Labour Party/whatever) would be obliged to make a show of opposing the measures to keep their core voters sweet. Once they’re in power, of course, they can do what they want.
One stark example of this occured during the passing of the British Official Secrets Act (1989) which, as I’ve written before, was specifically designed to gag whistleblowers and penalise journalists. The old OSA (1911) was already in place to deal with real traitors.
And who voted against the passing of this act in 1989? Yes, you’ve guessed it, all those who then went on to become Labour government ministers after the 1997 Labour election landslide — Tony Blair, Jack Straw, the late Robin Cook and a scrum of other rather forgettable ministers and Attorney Generals.…. And yet it was this very New Labour government in the UK that most often used the OSA to halt the free-flow of information and the disclosures of informed whistleblowers. Obama has indeed learnt well.
It’s an oldie but still a goodie: as one of my lawyers once wryly told me, it doesn’t matter whom you vote for, the government still gets in.….
An interesting story on Channel 4 TV news today: four London police officers are being prosecuted for beating up Babar Ahmad in 2003 while arresting him on suspicion of terrorism charges. And it turns out that the key evidence for the prosecution comes not from Ahmad’s complaint, nor from photographs of his injuries, but from the product of an eavesdropping device, more commonly known as a bug, planted in his home by the UK Security Service, MI5.
It’s interesting in itself that MI5 has released this information for court proceedings against Met counter-terrorism officers. I shall resist speculating now, but shall be watching developments with interest.
But the point I want to make quickly today is about the use of intercept material as legal evidence in UK courts. This can potentially be crucial for lawyers when speaking to their clients, journalists who wish to protect their sources, polticial activists, and those who simply wish to protect their inherent right to privacy as the encroaching electronic surveillance state continues to swell.
It can also be potentially useful information for MPs talking to their constituents. Indeed, returning to the years-long case of Babar Ahmad, there was a media furore in 2008 when it was revealed that the Met had authorised the bugging of his conversations with his MP Sadiq Khan during prison visits.
And who was the commanding officer who authorised this? Step forward former Met Counter Terrorism supremo, Andy Hayman, that much esteemed defender of British civil liberties who recently suggested “dawn raids” and “snatch squads ” be used against political activists.
Unlike most other western countries, the UK does not allow the use of telephone intercept as evidence in a court of law. As I’ve written before, it’s a hangover from the cold war spying game. MI5 has traditionally seen phone taps as a source of intelligence, not evidence, despite the fact that much of their work is notionally more evidentially based in the 21st century. It also still remains a subject of debate and a fiercely fought reargard action by the spies themselves, who claim telecheck is a “sensitive technique”.
As if we don’t all know that our phones can be bugged.….
However, eavesdropping devices that are planted in your property — your home, your office, even your car — can indeed produce evidence that can be used against you in a court of law. All this requires a Home Office Warrant (HOW) to make it legal, but Home Secretaries are traditionally reluctant to refuse a request in the interests of “national security”. Moreover, if the owner of the property agrees to a bug, even without a HOW, they can be legally used. So if you live in rented accommodation, befriend your landlord!
Not a lot of people know all that — but we should.
I did two sessions at Hay-on-Wye philosophy and music festival — How the Light gets In in May 2011.
The first was a debate called “An Age of Transparency” with neo-conservative commentator Douglas Murray, and philosopher Nigel Warburton.
The second was my talk about “Spies, Lies, and Life on the Run”.
Here’s a link to a video of my talk.
Well, yes, for some perhaps, and no doubt for the happy couple.
However, others spent the glorious day in a bare, concrete police cell, pre-emptively arrested for what they might do and untraceable to their loved ones and lawyers. Effectively they were “disappeared”, taken off the streets in case they uttered something that might mar the great day or, heaven forbid, caused some embarrassment.
A few days ago I wrote a piece highlighting my concerns about the threatened security response to possible protesters — drawing comparisons with the mindset, if not the violent tactics, of the thugs in Syria’s security apparatus. But still, in some deep recess of my mind and against all the accumulated evidence from my last 15 years, I found I still had an emotional, residual echo of the notion of British fair play that, really, we don’t do those kinds of things in the UK. Well, then I was a child, and spoke as a child.…
In the run up to the happy nuptials, the Metropolitan Police stated that it had no specific intelligence of any terrorist threat from either dissident Irish republicans, nor from any possible grouping emerging from the Middle East. Despite this, the security forces had launched a massive intelligence-gathering operation to hunt down known “anarchists” who might want to voice their protest against the concept of the monarchy. Activist pages on Facebook were suddenly deleted with no warning, but the company said it was because of registration issues, and not because of the police.
Yes, there may well have been some who wanted to cause violence — after which they could have been arrested legitimately under the terms of the law . However, what the police did in this case was in an altogether different league. Using the methodology if not the brutality of the Syrian mukhabarat, they organised house raids and snatch squads. They banned certain activists from London, and arrested others both in the days before the wedding and on the day itself.
Those caught in the security sweep included a Professor of Anthropology, Chris Knight, and his friends who were planning a bit of mildly amusing street theatre involving a fake guillotine and a Prince Andrew dummy (is that tautologous?).
Others swept up by the security forces included a bunch of environmentalist squatters who were busily tending their market garden, according to rightly concerned MP John McDonnell, and some random “zombies” who wanted to go to an alternative “not the royal wedding” garden party. Hardly the stuff of revolutionary nightmares.
And then there’s the case of Charlie Veitch, now denounced across the UK media as the known anarchist. Yes, Charlie is anti-royalist and wanted to voice his views, but he runs an internationally-known activist organisation called the Love Police, for chrissakes. The peaceful intentions of the organisation might possibly be given away by the name.…
So what happened? On Thursday evening two police officers, tooled up with proto-Borg tech, muscled their way into the Cambridge home he shares with his girlfriend, Silkie Carlo, declaring that they were there to arrest him and search the place. They had the presence of mind to film the whole process and ask some pertinent questions.
Charlie’s alleged pre-crime? That he had posted a frighteningly prescient video on Youtube saying that he thought he was being spied on, but still critiquing the royal wedding and suggesting that fellow activists get together in Soho Square, London (quite a distance away from the festivities) on the day. OK, so he had a bit of a rant — but that’s what people do on Youtube. Agree with him or strongly disagree, it’s called his freedom of expression — a much-vaunted, traditional British liberty.
But in the eyes of the police, apparently he was “conspiring to cause a possible breach of the peace”, and needed to be locked up. It’s like we’ve time-travelled back to pre-revolutionary 18th century France, where the king could issue a lettre de cachet to send people to the Bastille.
So at the very time that Prince William and his blushing bride were created Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, a British citizen was raided, locked up and hidden away in a police cell in that very city for exercising free speech.
On Thursday night he was hauled off to the Cambridge nick, which then refused to confirm to his understandably upset girlfriend where he was being held, before being transfered to the Met Police on Friday morning and held incommunicado for the rest of the day. Family and lawyers then apparently spent fruitless hours ringing around all the London police stations trying to track him down. So Charlie had effectively been “disappeared”, like a dissident in a totalitarian régime.
So let’s get this straight — we’re talking about the Metropolitan Police spying on known activists (as we all now know they do, after the undercover cop scandal earlier this year) to prevent them from expressing their legitimate political views about the wedding of Kate and Wills. The security forces had already stated that there was no specific terrorist threat, so this was all about preventing an embarrassing incident on the big day. And I’m sorry, but I don’t think that Prevention of Embarrassment is covered by the legal code.
Plus, these arrests were pre-emptive to stop a possible crime which might be committed — and let’s face it, only breach of the peace at that. Not a biggy.
So we are basically looking at the police spying on and then pre-emptively arresting campaigners for being potential dissidents, for ThoughtCrime. How much more Orwellian can it get?
I mentioned the tactics of the Syrian security forces and their brutal crack-down. I’ve also previously written about how the slide towards fascism began in Germany in the 1930s with the brutalisation of internal oppositionists and dissidents .
So let’s really stop and think about this — do we really want to let these early indications slide by, uncontested? After all, we have the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee next year, and no doubt the same, or extended, powers will come into force. How far will we let it go before we wake up to the threat?
As I’ve written before, with thanks to Pastor Martin Niemoeller:
First they came for the Irish in the 1980s,
But I was not Irish so I did not speak up.
Then they came for the Muslims after 9/11,
But I was not a Muslim, so I did not speak up.
Then they came for the “domestic extremists”,
But I was not an activist, so I did not speak up.
Then they came for me;
and there was nobody left to speak up for me.
My interview on 29 April 2011 for RTTV about the pre-emptive arrests of UK political activists in the run-up to the royal wedding.
Thoughtcrime appears to have arrived in the UK — and I accidentally became a royal wedding commentator (sort of).
Well, never say never in life.…
My recent article in The Guardian newspaper about the strange, sad case of yet another Guantanamo victim.
Guantánamo Bay files: Was Bin Hamlili really an MI6 source?
With dirty tricks rife in the secret service we may never know the truth about the Algerian carpet-seller’s version of events.
Another cache of intelligence nasties has emerged, blinking, into the mainstream media daylight by way of WikiLeaks. This time, the information is drawn from official Guantánamo reports on detainees, drawing on information gleaned over the years of “enhanced” interrogations.
One case that caught my attention was that of Algerian carpet seller Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili, an alleged “al-Qaida operative, facilitator, courier, kidnapper and assassin” who also apparently worked as an agent of CSIS (Canadian Secret Intelligence Service) and our very own MI6. So was this man a double-agent, playing his own lonely game and caught between the demands of his al-Qaida contacts and his western handlers? Or has MI6 been employing its very own al-Qaida assassin?
The report states that this is Bin Hamlili’s story in his own words – no doubt freely uttered as he emerged, spluttering, from yet another interrogation. It appears that he entered the mujahideen world when he was a child in the 1980s, fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. An era when the group was very much an ally of the west, funded, trained and armed by the CIA and MI6 in the fight against the Soviet Union.
This could very well have led to MI6 and/or CSIS approaching Bin Hamlili as a potential source of human intelligence. Humint sources are the crown jewels of intelligence work – able to reach parts beyond the range of electronic surveillance. The downside, of course, is that they are merely human and need strong support and backup to survive their dangerous job, year after year. This is something that is not always provided to them and they can often end up feeling exposed, increasingly paranoid and in real danger, playing every side just to survive.
While some agents do indeed suffer a genuine revulsion towards their earlier allegiances – the basic ideological shift – and try to atone by helping the spooks, most are entrapped by the other three points in the classic spy acronym: money, ideology, compromise, ego. These are more shaded, compelled motivations that can lead to resentment and potential double-dealing, and require close agent handling and care. Unfortunately, this is often lacking.
So welcome to the classic intelligence “hall of mirrors”. Was Bin Hamlili really an MI6 source? Or was this just an attempt to stop the torture in Guantánamo, however temporarily? Perhaps he was playing both sides? Or perhaps he faithfully reported back to his CSIS/MI6 handlers but his reports were not effectively acted on – this happens in the intelligence agencies – and the culpable officers brushed these mistakes under the carpet by claiming “agent unreliability” or “lack of co-operation”.
Or, more worryingly, Bin Hamlili might indeed have had an effective working relationship with his handlers and was actually tasked in his work as provocateur or even terrorist, for some arcane intelligence purposes. But once caught, he was deemed to be politically embarrassing and hung out to dry.
This would certainly not be the first time this has happened to intelligence agents. Dirty tricks were intrinsic in the dirty war in Northern Ireland from the early 1970s, and agents such as Martin McGartland, Denis Donaldson (deceased) and Kevin Fulton have learned all too brutally what the phrase “hung out to dry” really means.
This was not restricted to Northern Ireland. In 1996, MI6 illegally funded an “al-Qaida” coup to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi, using as its agent a Libyan military intelligence officer. The attempt manifestly failed, although innocent people were killed in the attempt. This was all hushed up at the time, but now seems rather tame as we watch our defence secretary, Liam Fox, fly out to discuss with his US counterpart, Robert Gates, the overt assassination of Gaddafi using predator drones. State terrorism as the new diplomacy?
I doubt we shall ever now know the truth behind Bin Hamlili’s report. The exposure of the Guantánamo régime highlights once again that torture is counterproductive – it panders to the preconceptions of the interrogators and acts as a recruiting ground for future potential terrorists. This used to be the consensus even within our intelligence agencies, pre‑9/11. They need to re-remember the lessons of history, and their humanity.