Tom Griffin | ukwatch.net

Security services colluded in unlawful detention

tim — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:56:11 +0000

In a key intervention in the 42 days debate last month, the former head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller stated: “arguments can be made to justify any time of detention, just as in other countries, although mercifully not here, they can be made to justify any method of interrogation.”

That remark elided key questions about how far the security services are complicit in interrogation practices overseas, questions which were raised anew in a High Court judgement on Thursday.

Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones ruled that British security services colluded in the unlawful detention and interrogation of Binyam Mohamed, a UK resident detained in Pakistan six years ago.

The judges stated:

By seeking to interview BM in the circumstances described and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship between the United Kingdom government and the United States authorities was far beyond that of bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.

The details of Mohamed’s treatment, as reported to the security services in 2002, are set out in a separate closed judgement. The court ruled that the Foreign Secretary has a duty to provide information that could support Mohamed’s case that he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco before being sent to Guantanamo Bay.

The court stopped short of ordering the Foreign Secretary to hand over the information to Mohamed’s lawyers, in order to allow time for the national security implications of the ruling to be considered. A decision on this point is due at another hearing next week.

Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, who has represented Mohamed since 2005, said of the ruling:

This is a momentous decision. The Bush Administration committed crimes against Binyam Mohamed. The British government may have been Bush’s poodle, but the British courts remain bulldogs when it comes to human rights. Compelling the British government to release information that can prove Mr. Mohamed’s innocence is one obvious step towards making up for the years of torture that he has suffered. The next step is for the British government to demand an end to the charade against him in Guantánamo Bay, and return him home to Britain.

Commons Apology Over 1971 Bomb Disinformation

Tim Holmes — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:08:32 +0000

The Government this week apologised for smearing the victims of one of the first major bombings of the Troubles.

McGurk’s Bar on North Queen Street in Belfast was blown up on 4 December 1971, killing 15 people including two women and three children. Allegations quick surfaced that the dead included IRA members who had accidentally detonated their own bomb.

Among those smeared was 73-year-old Philip Garry, the great-uncle of Linlithgow and East Falkirk MP Michael Connarty, who raised the case in a Commons adjournment debate on Monday.

Connarty highlighted documents uncovered in the National Archives which revealed the Army’s role in spreading the smears:

The Pat Finucane Centre submitted those reports, having found them, to the historical inquiries team. It is clear from the reports that there was a travesty involving the Army, which said in the report that the bomb was clearly inside the pub, because five men standing around it were blown to smithereens. The Army said that the bombing was clearly an IRA own goal—it said that the bomb was, in effect, in the pub in transit. That was then. The historical inquiries team report says that it was recommended that the Secretary of State answer a question in the House confirming that story.

That was never done, but, sadly, a former Member of the House, now Lord Kilclooney, said on television and in Stormont that the bomb was an IRA bomb. He said that there was no question that the bombing was a Protestant paramilitary operation.

The Army’s account was reflected in press reports at the time. The truth only began to emerge in 1977, when one of the bombers, UVF member Robert Campbell, was arrested on a separate matter.

For six years, the approach taken in all the police reports—this is clear from the historical inquiry team’s report of the police reports—was to keep trying to turn the evidence to suggest that the Army report was correct. The reports said things such as that the forensics showed there was no doubt that the bomb had been inside the pub. The forensic evidence did not come out until February, but Dr. Hall, who produced it, said that there was no doubt that the bomb had been placed outside the door or adjacent to it—not in the pub at all. However, the police reports still spread the same story, and every single inquiry in the report shows that the police tried to pin the bombing on the people in the bar to show that they had killed themselves and their fellow citizens from the community. That is unforgivable.

The debate was closed by Northern Ireland Minister Paul Goggins,who delivered an apology on behalf of the Government.

Although we cannot speak for the Ministers who made statements at the time, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I are deeply sorry not just for the appalling suffering and loss of life that occurred at McGurk’s bar, but for the extraordinary additional pain caused to both the immediate families and the wider community by the erroneous suggestions made in the immediate aftermath of the explosion about who was responsible. Such perceptions and preconceived ideas should never have been allowed to cloud the actual evidence.

Goggins told the House that the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s Historical Inquiries Team had found no evidence that the security forces had colluded in the bombings. However, some relatives question why the army was so quick to lay a false trail of suspicion.

Philip Garry’s grandson, Robert McLenaghan, has called for an investigation into allegations that the bombing was a false flag operation.

The claims surfaced last year, when a number of newspaper articles quoted a loyalist using the pseudonym ‘John Black.’ He claimed to have been working with the a secretive British Army unit called the MRF. Some of Blacks claims, such as the suggestion that MRF members were present in Derry on Bloody Sunday, are regarded as outlandish within the North’s human rights community. However, the MRF is known to have conducted plain-clothes patrols in Belfast in the early 1970s, and to have recruited paramilitaries from both sides.

On a visit to England last month, McLenaghan called on former British service personnel who may have knowledge of Black’s allegations to come forward. “We would like a public forum, which is international and independent of both the British and Irish Governments for him and others like him to be allowed to speak, he said.

A New Encounter with an Old Standpoint

eddie — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:30:05 +0000

The website of Standpoint, the new magazine published by the Social Affairs Unit, is now live. In his inaugural column, editor Daniel Johnson highlights the magazine's neoconservative credentials:

“When you have a good idea, start a magazine.” This, according to our board member Gertrude Himmelfarb, is the motto of her husband Irving Kristol. In a long and fruitful life, he has started three. (Their son Bill has started one, too.) The first was Encounter, which Kristol co-founded with the late Stephen Spender in 1953. It was a transatlantic monthly in which the intellectuals of the free world could debate with one another and their communist counterparts. To write for Encounter was a privilege.

Johnson doesn't mention it explicitly, but it is, of course, well-known that Encounter was founded and financed by the CIA as part of its psychological warfare strategy during the early cold war. According to historian Hugh Wilford, the magazine's "greatest achievement was in creating 'a certain kind of intellectual-cultural milieu' in which American and European interests came to appear as if they were identical."

It's noteworthy that Johnson is happy to embrace the martial aspects of the parallel:

Ever since it folded at the end of the Cold War, many people in Europe and America have lamented the old Encounter. But it was only when a new kind of assault came from a very different quarter on 11 September 2001 that a new Encounter again became an urgent necessity. The aftermath revealed such moral cowardice and intellectual confusion on both sides of the Atlantic that the battle of ideas has sometimes seemed in danger of being lost by default. To defend and celebrate Western civilisation is not merely desirable; it is imperative.

The content is pretty much what you would expect. We get this from Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali:

Happily Marxism, in its various forms, has been shown to be the philosophical, historical and economic nonsense that it always was. But we are now confronted by another equally serious ideology, that of radical Islamism, which also claims to be comprehensive in scope. What resources do we have to face yet another ideological battle?

Nazir-Ali is an advisor to the Social Affairs Unit's Centre for Social Cohesion, whose director Douglas Murray also has a piece in the magazine. In the past, Murray has argued that Europe "has unsustainable demographic issues which – if un-addressed – will eradicate the continent as we know it within three or four generations" and that "Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board."

(For a good antidote to this kind of fear-mongering see this article from Alex Harrowell at A Fistful of Euros).

The Independent reports that the Social Affairs Unit is heavily funded by Alan Bekhor, an associate of the Reuben brothers, who had a big stake in Russian aluminium in the 1990s, before selling out to Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky.

I don't claim to understand the details, but it would be interesting to know where these events fit in to the wider story of the dynamic between Berezovsky and Vladimir Putin.

It's pretty clear, though, where Standpoint stands on "Putin's New Evil Empire."

The Euston Manifesto: Made in the USA?

Tim Holmes — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:53:52 +0000

The Euston Manifesto is a declaration published by a group of British intellectuals in 2006, chiefly notable for its staunch support of American foreign policy. There is little original about this development, except its choice of targets. It represents an application of cold war propaganda techniques to the new circumstances of the war on terror.

“there was a meeting in a pub in London”

According to its authors, the manifesto takes its name from a pub in Euston where some 20 people met after the June 2005 election. Finding themselves “increasingly out of tune with the dominant anti-war discourse”, the group held several further meetings and ultimately drew up the manifesto which was published in the New Statesman in 2006.[1]

A public launch took place a month later at the Union Chapel in Islington, where journalist Nick Cohen chaired a panel consisting of Norman Geras, Shalom Lappin, Eve Garrard and Alan Johnson. One account of the meeting described “an audience of around 200 that was disproportionately heavy with suited, middle-aged men.”[2]

Cohen made it clear from the start that he wanted the meeting to be about the top table. He told us that any audience participation should be limited to questions to the platform, “not 10-minute contributions” outlining the political platform of some obscure sect.[3]

Made in the USA

From the beginning, there were those who saw a deeper story behind the manifesto’s emergence on the British scene:

take another look at that Manifesto website and this time notice the background art in the masthead. Those cursives and serifs come not from Richard Overton’s An Arrow Against all Tyrants, or John Lilburne, Gerard Winstanley or even a transatlantic radical like Tom Paine, but, as every American schoolboy knows, from our Declaration of Independence. The final deception is that despite its debut on the pages of your own New Statesman, and its supposed humble origins “at a pub near Euston Station” this project, whose politics and personalities have been shaped far more by the crew at Dissent magazine (and which shares Dissent founder Irving Howe’s fixation on the mote in the eyes of the left rather than the beam blinding American foreign policy) than anything native to these shores, really ought to be stamped Made in the USA.[4]

For a British initiative, the manifesto made a remarkably swift impact across the Atlantic. Writing in the Weekly Standard, leading neoconservative activist, William Kristol welcomed ‘an impressive document’ that ‘articulates 15 principles reminiscent of the much-missed liberal anti-totalitarianism of the early Cold War period.’[5]

The CIA and the Non-Communist Left

Kristol was well-placed to make this illuminating comment. In the 1950s his father, Irving Kristol, was at the centre of ‘liberal anti-totalitarianism’ as an editor of Encounter, the London-based magazine of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).[6] It is now well established that the CCF was a creation of the CIA, part of a strategy to sponsor the non-communist left as a counter to Soviet influence. Key figures were ex-communists like the philosopher Sidney Hook, who were prepared to denounce the use of front organisations by the Communist Party, while nevertheless using similar tactics for their new employers.

The Congress attained significant influence on the European left, not least in Britain, so controversy was inevitable when its CIA funding was exposed in 1967. Strangely, much of the detail was revealed in an article by Tom Braden, the former head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division. This has led to suggestions that the Agency deliberately blew the operation to terminate its relationship with its allies on the left.[7]

In the face of the growing anti-Vietnam movement these ‘cold war liberals’ were becoming increasingly isolated. In the early 1970s, they coalesced around Democrat Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, the first stage of a rightward shift that would see many of them moving, under the label ‘neoconservatives’, towards the Republican Party.

Social Democrats USA

For Sidney Hook and others, the vehicle for this shift was the Social Democrats USA, a political party founded in 1972.[8] Despite strong ties to organised labour and initially to the Democratic Party, the Social Democrats provided a number of appointees to the Reagan administration, many of whom were particularly identified with Reagan’s Central American policy. They included the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elliot Abrams, a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.[9] The ultimate symbol of the party’s political journey came in 1985 when Reagan awarded Sidney Hook the Presidential medal of freedom.[10]

The Social Democrats did not enjoy the same favour in the George H.W. Bush administration, but retained a key powerbase in the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Founded under Reagan in 1982, the NED funded favoured political and cultural activities abroad, doing openly what the CIA had done covertly through the CCF.[11] Carl Gershman, a former chairman of the Social Democrats, has been the NED President since 1984.[12]

New recruits

The Social Democrats returned to prominence with the advent of the neoconservative ascendancy in the George W. Bush administration. In May 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, the party held a Washington conference entitled Everything Changed: What Now for Labor, Liberalism and the Global Left?[13]

The event was chiefly noted at the time for a spat between the liberal writer Paul Berman and the prominent neoconservative Joshua Muravchik, sparked by Muravchik’s comment that “I want to welcome Paul Berman on board. It seems that in every big conflict we reap some important new recruits. In the wars of Central America, we reaped the Radoshes and the Leikens. There were some more after Bosnia. Now the war against terrorism has brought us Hitchens and Berman — very nice indeed.”[14]

Among those present at the conference was one of those previous recruits, Robert Leiken, a prominent supporter of the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s.[15] He chaired a panel on ‘Europe, the Left and Anti-Americanism’, which considered the wave of opposition that the Iraq War had aroused across the Atlantic.

A central question for our next panel might be summarized this way: what role did the European left play in encouraging the strident attacks on the United States that have been mounted in Europe and elsewhere over the past year or so?

A second issue might this: In the years following World War II, when Stalin’s army was in Eastern Europe and Stalinist parties seemed on the verge of coming to power in Western Europe, American and European intellectuals and sections of the labor movement rallied to found such institutions as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter magazine. Is such a grouping conceivable today? [16]

Leiken was followed by Andrei Markovits, a Professor at the University of Michigan who has specialised in studying European Anti-Americanism, and then by Jeffrey Herf, a Professor at the University of Maryland who had written a 1991 study on West German opposition to the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles.[17]

The final speaker of the session was a British fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy named Michael Allen who extended Leiken’s analysis:

I want to make three key points. First, the anti-Americanism that we’ve seen on the European left is itself a symptom of the degree of ideological confusion and the strategic dead end that European social democracy finds itself in. Second, as Bob Leiken suggested, the situation is uncannily analogous to the late 1940s and early 1950s, in that uncomfortably large sectors of the left have a degree of intellectual infatuation with authoritarian and incipiently totalitarian ideologies. Third, organized labor must be a key component of any intellectual and political response to the situation we find ourselves in.[18]

Allen went on to reiterate the call for a new Congress for Cultural Freedom:

It’s important that center-left initiatives avoid sectarianism. We need to engage, as the Congress of Cultural Freedom and other initiatives did, with democrats on the right, in the center, on the liberal left. Remember how the Congress for Cultural Freedom brought together Sidney Hook and Raymond Aron and Edward Shils and Isaiah Berlin. We need to make common cause today with those people who may not share all of our philosophies. I think this is particularly the case in countries like France, where there’s still a disturbingly strong residue of Marxism and anti-Americanism.

Irving Kristol once said that when intellectuals decide that they need to act, they set up a magazine. Today, of course, whenever anybody wants to have an impact on the real world they start a web site. That could be one important first step.[19]

Democratiya

Two years later, Allen wrote for the inaugural edition of Democratiya, a British online magazine with a very similar analysis to the one outlined at the Washington conference. Ironically, his piece dismissed the idea that ‘an umbilical link exists between the anti-communist Left and contemporary neo-conservatism.’[20]

Later editions of Democratiya included articles by Herf, Markovits and others close to the Social Democrats USA, such as Eugenia Kemble, Rachelle Horowitz and Barry Rubin.[21] There were interviews with Joshua Muravchik and Paul Berman, and even posthumous contributions from leading Social Democrats including Sidney Hook himself.[22]

This was a significant departure for Democratiya’s editor, Alan Johnson, who had written only a few years earlier that Hook ‘began by speaking eloquently of truth and beauty but ended up receiving the Medal of Honor from Ronald Reagan as a reward for dressing up the Contra butchers as freedom fighters.’[23]

Johnson would go on to become one of the authors of the Euston Manifesto along with other Democratiya contributors such as Norman Geras, Nick Cohen, Shalom Lappin and Brian Brivati.[24]

“The reconfiguration of progressive opinion”

The Democratiya link between this group and the Social Democrats USA suggests that Irving Kristol was right to see the manifesto’s antecedents in the cold war. It also raises the question whether the Manifesto is an attempt to answer the Social Democrats’ call for a new Congress for Cultural Freedom.

One way to address that question is to compare the methodologies of the CCF and the Euston Manifesto Group. In her invaluable study of the CCF, Frances Stonor Saunders, describes its role as follows:

It was to engage in a widespread and cohesive campaign of peer pressure to persuade intellectuals to dissociate themselves from Communist fronts or fellow travelling organizations. It was to encourage the intelligentsia to develop theories and arguments which directed not at a mass audience, but at that small elite of pressure groups and statesmen who in turn determined government policy.[25]

The preamble to the Euston Manifesto displays a very similar preoccupation with policing respectable opinion:

Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values. It involves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not.[26]

This does not preclude some room for disagreement:

The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against. We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. [27]

Such carefully circumscribed debates were explicitly provided for in the ground rules laid down by Tom Braden for the CIA-sponsored non-communist left in the 1950s:

‘Limit the money to amounts private organizations can credibly spend; disguise the extent of American interest; protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy.’[28]

“Backstopping for the European Effort”

One way in which the Congress for Cultural Freedom disguised the extent of American interest was by establishing its own American arm as a kind of double bluff. According to the CIA’s Frank Wisner, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was ‘inspired if not put together by this Agency, for the purpose of providing cover and backstopping for the European effort.’[29]

“You had to have an American Committee.” The CCF’s Melvin Lasky told Stonor Saunders. “How could you not? It would have been an inexplicable anomaly. You say you’re international so where are the Americans?”[30]

In the light of this history, it is interesting that an American counterpart to the Euston Manifesto appeared in September 2006, only a few months after the original.[31] Jeffrey Herf gave an account of its creation which emphasised its European inspiration:

In late summer, the Euston Manifesto group in London helped to put the American signers of the statement in touch with one another via e-mail. I wrote a draft of an American liberal’s response. Following several weeks of discussion with Russell Berman (Stanford), Thomas Cushman (Wellesley), Richard Just (The New Republic), Andrei Markovits (University of Michigan), Robert Lieber (Georgetown), and Fred Siegel (Cooper Union), we agreed on the revised text of “American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto.” We then sought support from prominent intellectuals and scholars. The Euston Manifesto group agreed to post it on its website.[32]

Herf had of course met Andrei Markovits three years earlier, when they had both been panelists at the Social Democrats USA conference along with Robert Leiken and Michael Allen, who also signed the American statement. Many of the other American signatories came from the same milieu. Prominent neoconservatives included Michael Ledeen, a central player in the Iran-Contra affair.[33] At least one, Eliot Cohen, had served in the Bush administration, while others like Will Marshall are associated with the most hawkish section of the Democratic Party.[34] With Daniel Bell and Walter Laquer, the Euston Manifesto United States could even claim two veterans of the original CCF.[35]

All of this suggests that the Euston Manifesto is best seen not so much as a spontaneous movement of British intellectuals, but as an offshoot of a transnational movement whose centre of gravity is in the United States. Its specific role is influencing British opinion on the War on Terror, in the same way that the CCF and Encounter magazine influenced opinion during the Cold War.

State-private networks

There is no direct evidence that the Euston Manifesto is state-sponsored in the way that the CCF was. It is perhaps best understood through concepts such as that of the state-private network, applied to the non-communist left of the 1950s by Hugh Wilford, and of the ‘flex group’ applied by Janine Wedel to the contemporary neoconservative movement.[36]

In Wedel’s conception, flex groups are characterised by “their ease in playing multiple and overlapping roles and conflating state and private interests. These players keep appearing in different incarnations, ensuring continuity even as their operating environments change.”[37]

Flex players are not necessarily engaged in unethical activity, but they always help each other out in furthering their careers, livelihoods and mutual aims. Even when some players are “in power” within an administration, they are flanked by people outside of formal government. Flex groups have a culture of circumventing authorities and creating alternative ones. They operate through semi-closed networks and penetrate key institutions, revamping them to marginalize other potential players and replacing them with initiatives under their control.[38]

Michael Allen provides a good example how state and private connections overlap amongst the members of such networks. As well as speaking at the Social Democrats USA conference, Allen wrote for Democratiya, and signed the British and American editions of the Euston Manifesto. He is also an official of the National Endowment for Democracy, and edits Democracy Digest, the magazine of its Transatlantic Democracy Network. [39]

The Israeli dimension

While the US is clearly the key hub in this network, there are other dimensions. one of these is support for Israel, reflected in the Manifesto’s hostility to ‘anti-zionism’, which it states “has now developed to a point where supposed organizations of the Left are willing to entertain openly anti-Semitic speakers and to form alliances with anti-Semitic groups.”[40]

DD Guttenplan described the Manifesto as “an alliance between anti-anti-Zionists and anti-anti-imperialists.”

Some of the signers are well-known – even distinguished – advocates for Israel. Anthony Julius, for example, has never previously shown a penchant for sectarian struggle (or much enthusiasm for the left in general, for that matter). Others come out of Engage, originally formed to oppose the Association of University Teachers’ boycott of Israel, now a self-appointed scourge of anti-Semitism on the left.[41]

Although himself an opponent of the boycott, Guttenplan suggested that Engage was part of “an already overweening, powerful pro-Israel lobby whose aggressive policing of acceptable opinion has done more to poison intellectual debate on Israel and Palestine than a dozen boycott motions.”

A number of the signatories of the American manifesto have links with the Washington Israel lobby. One example is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) which has played an important role in the interaction between neoconservatives and major defence contractors since its foundation in 1976.[42] Joshua Muravchik, Michael Ledeen and Peter Rosenblatt sit on JINSA’s advisory board alongside former Bush administration luminaries like Richard Perle and John Bolton.[43] Others such as New Republic editor Martin Peretz are associated with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think-tank spun off from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 1985.[44]

A key figure is Barry Rubin, who has been a senior fellow at WINEP, a member of the advisory council of the Social Democrats USA, a contributor to Democratiya and a signatory of the American version of the Euston Manifesto. Rubin is also the director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center in Herzliya, Israel, and editor of its Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA).[45] An article from MERIA was famously plagiarized in the British Government ‘dodgy dossier’ cited at the UN by Colin Powell in the run-up to the Iraq War.[46]

Labour Friends of Iraq

Another dimension of this network is highlighted by the Euston Manifesto’s acknowledged links with the Labour Friends of Iraq (LFOI), and its director, Gary Kent, a member of the Euston Manifesto Group.

Prior to the Iraq War, Kent was immersed for many years in the politics surrounding the Irish Troubles. Dean Godson described him as a ‘former Troops Out supporter who changed under the influence of Democratic Left stalwart Seamus Lynch.’[47]

Kent subsequently became involved with New Consensus, which was delicately described by the Irish Times’ Frank Millar as ‘a less-than-nationalist Irish peace group.’[48] In 1996, under its later name of New Dialogue, the group organised a fringe meeting which enabled David Trimble to become the first unionist leader to attend a Labour Party conference.[49]

Later that year Kent became one of the first people in London to meet Sean O’Callaghan, a former IRA member and MI5 informant who he had been visiting in Maghaberry Prison.[50] It was ostensibly O’Callaghan who had the idea for a pan-unionist unity conference, which Kent attended a year later at the home of Viscount Cranborne, the most staunchly unionist member of John Major’s cabinet. [51]

When O’Callaghan and Trimble were spotted drinking together in 1998, Kent’s briefing to the press helped to conceal the extent of their relationship, which would see O’Callaghan became an advisor to the UUP leader. O’Callaghan would later describe Kent as “a supposedly left-winger who is more right-wing.”[52]

In LFOI, Kent has played a remarkably similar role as a link between Westminster, the Labour Party and Britain’s local allies in Iraq. A notable example is the Kurdish Regional Government, with which LFOI co-hosted the screening of a documentary on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities.[53] The film was by Gwynne Roberts, who played a key role in exposing the Halabja massacre of 1988, but whose later work includes more questionable material. In 2001 Roberts reported on allegations that Iraq had conducted a nuclear bomb test, claiming that “Iraq is now emerging as a nuclear power, causing the threat to peace to be far more real than ever before.”[54]

Kent himself has visited Iraqi Kurdistan several times, and recently visited Baghdad, where he raised the possibility of Iraq joining the Commonwealth.[55]

Two years on

Alan Johnson highlighted the network of institutional links surrounding the Euston Manifesto in a piece marking its second anniversary in April 2008.[56]

The intellectual and campaigning energies that created the manifesto continue to pulse. Go online and look at normblog, Harry’s Place, Engage, Labour Friends of Iraq, Democratiya, and the work of all the contributing online journals, blogs, signatories, journalists and activists.

Johnson also drew attention to a new anthology, Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews, which he edited at the suggestion of Rachel Kleinfeld, a former World Bank consultant who heads the Washington-based Truman National Security Project. [57]

In one respect, the book’s contents pointed to a significant fracturing of the consensus that had prevailed at the conference of the Social Democrats USA five years before. In an interview with Johnson, Joshua Muravchik criticized Robert Leiken, who had chaired the session on Europe, over his stance on engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood.[58]

In a 2007 Foreign Affairs article Leiken had written:

“U.S. policymaking has been handicapped by Washington’s tendency to see the Muslim Brotherhood — and the Islamist movement as a whole — as a monolith. Policymakers should instead analyze each national and local group independently and seek out those that are open to engagement. In the anxious and often fruitless search for Muslim moderates, policymakers should recognize that the Muslim Brotherhood presents a notable opportunity.”[59]

This was a significant departure from the Eustonian critique of the anti-war left. The Muslim Brotherhood was central to the case that the left/Muslim alliance against the Iraq War represented an embrace of totalitarianism. Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way exemplified the argument:

Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists demonstrated against the 2003 war, but the only religious group the Stop the War coalition promoted was an outfit called the Muslim Association of Britain. Its speakers and propaganda appeared at antiwar meetings and its officers co-organized the anti-war marches. Most British Muslims new little about it because it was an Arab organization and most British Muslims’ families were from the Indian subcontinent or East Africa. It turned out to be the closest Britain had to a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and was, by Twentieth Century standards, a movement of the extreme right.[60]

Leiken by contrast, had come to praise “the Brotherhood’s collaboration with Scotland Yard in purging jihadists from London’s notorious Finsbury Park Mosque.”[61] By 2008, similar views were appearing in the pages of the New Republic, a publication which had provided several signatories for the US Manifesto. An article called ‘The Unraveling’ credited the Muslim Brotherhood with turning the tide against Al Qaeda.

Most of these clerics and former militants, of course, have not suddenly switched to particularly progressive forms of Islam or fallen in love with the United States (all those we talked to saw the Iraqi insurgency as a defensive jihad), but their anti-Al Qaeda positions are making Americans safer. If this is a war of ideas, it is their ideas, not the West’s, that matter. The U.S. government neither has the credibility nor the Islamic knowledge to effectively debate Al Qaeda’s leaders, but the clerics and militants who have turned against them do.[62]

Ironically, this could be seen as a subtler application of the Congress for Cultural Freedom template than the one advocated by the Social Democrats USA, and implemented in the Euston Manifesto. Perhaps it was not the anti-war left who went down a strategic dead end in 2003.

Notes

[1] Introducing the Euston Manifesto, Norman Geras, Comment is free, 13 April 2006.

[2] Off the Rails, by Paul Christopher, Weekly Worker, 1 June 2006.

[3]. Ibid.

[4] No sects please, you’re British, by DD Guttenplan, Comment is free, 17 April 2006.

[5] A Few Good Liberals, by William Kristol, The Weekly Standard, 1 May 2006.

[6] Who Paid the Piper: the CIA and the Cultural Cold War, by Francis Stonor Saunders, Granta, 2000, pp 175-180.

[7] Stonor Saunders, op. cit., pp 397-404.

[8] Profile: Social Democrats USA, RightWeb, accessed 17 May 208.

[9] Profile: Elliot Abrams, RightWeb, accessed 5 June 2008.

[10] Sidney Hook, Political Philosopher, Is Dead at 86, by Richard Bernstein, New York Times, 14 July 1989.

[11] National Endowment for Democracy – Sourcewatch, accessed 5 June 2008.

[12] Profile: Carl Gershman, RightWeb, accessed 5 June 2008.

[13] EVERYTHING CHANGED: What Now for Labor, Liberalism and the Global Left?, Social Democrats USA, accessed 18 May 2008.

[14] Debs’s Heirs Reassemble To Seek Renewed Role as Hawks of Left, By Joshua Micah Marshall, Forward, 23. May 2003.

[15] Nicaragua Conversion of a Timely Kind, by Jill Smolowe, Time magazine, 21 April 1986.

[16] EVERYTHING CHANGED: What Now for Labor, Liberalism and the Global Left?, Social Democrats USA, accessed 8 June 2008.

[17] AndyMarkovits.com, accessed 8 June 2008. Jeffrey Herf, Department of History, University of Maryland, accessed 8 June 2008.

[18] EVERYTHING CHANGED: What Now for Labor, Liberalism and the Global Left?, Social Democrats USA, accessed 8 June 2008.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Book Review: The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and the Politics of Global Order, by Michael Allen, Democratiya, Summer 2005.

[21] The Berlin Republic and the Past, by Jeffrey Herf, Democratiya, Spring 2008. Why Europe Dislikes America, by Andrei Markovits, Democratiya, Summer 2007. Cosmopolitanism vs. the ‘Post-Left’, by Andrei Markovits and Gabriel Noah Bram Jr, Democratiya, Spring 2008. Looking for Albert Shanker, by Eugenia Kemble, Democratiya, Winter 2007. Archive, the Life of Tom Kahn, by Rachelle Horowitz, Democratiya, Winter 2007. The Truth about Syria, by Barry Rubin, Democratiya, Autumn 2007. Confessions at a Funeral, by Barry Rubin, Democratiya, Spring 2008.

[22] Interview with Joshua Muravchik/ On Neoconservatism, Democratiya, Winter 2007. The Legacy of Michael Harrington: An Exchange, by David A. Guberman and Joshua Muravchik, Democratiya, Spring 2008. Interview with Paul Berman/Terror and Liberalism, Democratiya, Summer 2006. Archive, the Social Democratic Prospect, by Sidney Hook, Democratiya, Winter 2005.

[23] The Cultural Cold War: Faust Not the Pied Piper, New Politics, vol. 8, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 31, Summer 2001.

[24] The Euston Manifesto, Norman Geras and Nick Cohen, New Statesman, 17 April 2006.

[25] Stonor Saunders, op. cit., pp 98-99.

[26] The Euston Manifesto, accessed 5 June 2008.

[27] ibid.

[28] Stonor Saunders, op. cit., p 98.

[29] Stonor Saunders, op. cit., p 201.

[30] Stonor Saunders, op. cit., p 208.

[31] American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto, by Jeffrey Herf et. al., eustonmanifesto.org, 12 September 2006.

[32] The New Republic Online: American Liberalism And The Euston Manifesto, Jeffrey Herf, eustonmanifesto.org, 10 October 2006.

[33] Profile: Michael Ledeen, RightWeb, accessed 5 June 2008.

[34] Profile: Elion Cohen, RightWeb, accessed 5 June 2008. Profile: Will Marshall, accessed 5 June 2008.

[35]For Bell, see Stonor Saunders, op. cit., p 391. For Laqueur, see Stonor Saunders, op. cit., pp 214-215.

[36] On state-private networks, see Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War, Frank Cass, 2003, p148. On flex groups, see Flex Power: A Capital Way to Gain Clout, Inside and Out, by Janine R. Wedel, Washington Post, 12 December 2004.

[37] Four More Years of Richard Perle? by Janine Wedel, Alternet, 4 November 2004.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Michael Allen – Sourcewatch, accessed 5 June 2008.

[40] The Euston Manifesto, accessed 5 June 2008.

[41] No sects please, you’re British, by DD Guttenplan, Comment is free, 17 April 2006.

[42] The Men From JINSA and CSP, by Jason Vest, The Nation, August 15, 2002.

[43] JINSA Online – Advisory Board, accessed 10 June 2008.

[44] Washington Institute for Near East Policy – Board of Advisors, accessed 10 June 2008. On WINEP’s link to AIPAC see Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network, by Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service, 7 August 2003.

[45] Barry Rubin, MERIA, accessed 5 June 2008. For his links to the Social Democrats USA, see Officers and National Committee Members, accessed 5 June 2008.

[46] Blair Acknowledges Flaws in Iraq Dossier, by Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, 8 February 2003, via MERIA.

[47] Himself Alone, by Dean Godson, Harper Perennial, 2004, p263.

[48] No consensus over wearing of the shamrock, by Frank Millar, The Irish Times, 19 March 1994.

[49] Dean Godson, op. cit., p263.

[50] The Informer, by Sean O’Callaghan, Corgi 1999, p405.

[51] Dean Godson, op. cit., p309. On Cranborne’s unionism, see p122.

[52] Trimble, by Henry McDonald, Bloomsbury, 2000, p289.

[53] Special screening: “The Road To Hell“—Saddam’s genocide, by Gary Kent, eustonmanifesto.org, 5 November 2006.

[54] Saddam’s bomb, Correspondent, BBC News, 2 March 2001.

[55] A City Break in Baghdad, by Gary Kent, Slugger O’Toole, 19 May 2008.

[56] The Euston moment, by Alan Johnson, Guardian: CiF, 20 April 2008.

[57] Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews, edited by Alan Johnson, The Foreign Policy Centre 2007, p.3.

[58] ibid. P.315.

[59] The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood, by Robert S. Leiken and Stephen Brooke, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007.

[60] What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, by Nick Cohen, Harper Collins, 2007, p.305.

[61] To Talk or Not To Talk – That is The Question By Robert Leiken, The National Interest, 25 April 2007.

[62] The Unravelling: The jihadist revolt against Bin Laden, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, The New Republic, 11 June 2008.

The 'enfant terrible' of British neoconservatism

tim — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:25:41 +0000

Douglas Murray could justly be described as the enfant terrible of British neoconservatism. He has been a prominent advocate of the application of neoconservative ideas to Europe.

Influenced by the authoritarian philosophy of Leo Strauss, and the concept of ‘dhimmitude’ put forward by Baat Ye’or, Murray has argued that the ‘innate flaws of liberal democracy’ leave Europe vulnerable to domination by Muslim immigrants.

As head of the Centre for Social Cohesion, he has been a central figure in a wider neoconservative propaganda offensive against Islamist movements in Britain. He claims to have influenced Government policy, and his ideas have been influential in some NATO circles.

Early career

Murray began his literary career as a 16-year-old Etonian, when he persuaded the Home Office to give him access to papers relating to Lord Alfred Douglas, which had been embargoed until 2043.[1] He reportedly completed his biography of Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, before progressing to Magdalen College, Oxford where he read English. The book was published to critical acclaim in 2000 when he was still an undergraduate.[2]

Murray also began writing for The Spectator during this period, initially concentrating on reviews related to his literary interests. He has said that the attacks on the World Trade Center, which he visited in 2000, contributed to his increasing political focus.[3] Murray’s strong neo-conservative views became evident in his subsequent early writings as a freelance journalist.

In a September 2002 piece for openDemocracy, he criticised CND and the Stop the War Coalition for organising an anti-war march together with the Muslim Association of Britain, An early example of one of the most persistent themes of British neo-conservatism.[4]

In February 2003, he described the many first-time demonstrators who had joined the anti-war marches as “mainly ignorant (by choice or chance) of the machinations of international weapons inspections, oil and the rest of it”.[5]

Murray spent much of that year attending the Saville Inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre, which had moved to London from Derry to hear the evidence of military witnesses.[6] He condemned Richard Norton Taylor’s play based on the hearings as ‘no-strings-attached, neatly packaged, moral tourism.’ He intends to publish a book on the inquiry once it reports.[7]

In 2004, Murray attended the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly. He suggested that a full inquiry into the Iraq War was impossible because it would impinge upon the work of the intelligence services.

The security services are answerable to the government, but they must not be compromised and agents’ lives put at risk to satiate public appetite, nor must they (as I trust the Blair government has now learnt) ever be politicised. National security in Britain, as in all nations, goes beyond today or tomorrow’s government.[8]

Social Affairs Unit

Murray joined the Social Affairs Unit as a regular contributor in 2004.[9] In 2005, the Unit published his book, Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, which argued for the introduction of neoconservative ideas into British politics.

In October that year, he outlined his philosophy in a talk to the Manhattan Institute

The practice of equivalence in our national politics leads governments not to listen to, but to fear minority opinion, concerned lest anyone get the impression that the government knows what’s right for the majority who have elected it. Not only does it make politics a glorified (though not glorious) pursuit of the personal – it makes the notion of fixed or natural right a nonsense. Because of course if everything is equal then everything is right: which means nothing is good or true.[10]

This ambiguous approach to equality may owe something to the authoritarian philosopher Leo Strauss, of whom Murray is a professed admirer.[11] Strauss’s critics argue that his idea of ‘natural right’ meant the right of the superior to dominate the inferior.[12]

Murray went on to present a picture of Europe on the verge of being outbred by Muslims, a common neoconservative trope reminiscent of the fears of early Twentieth Century eugenicists.

Europe has used up its peace dividend. The holiday from reality it had for half a century during which it spent money on welfare whilst America protected its security, is now over – comprehensively so. Europe not only has unsustainable demographic issues which – if un-addressed – will eradicate the continent as we know it within three or four generations. It also has security issues, not least those associated with its unameliorated populations and its increasingly inefficient armies.

Murray developed this idea further in a February 2006 speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam, which embraced Baat Ye’or’s concept of Dhimmitude:

It is late in the day, but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic time-bomb which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It has to. All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. In the case of a further genocide such as that in the Balkans, sanctuary would be given on a strictly temporary basis. This should also be enacted retrospectively… Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board: Europe must look like a less attractive proposition.[13]

The Hague speech also revisited Straussian themes:

Our enemies are aware of these weaknesses in our set-up – weaknesses which Leo Strauss, like Tocqueville would have pointed out as among the innate flaws of liberal democracy on which we must keep a concerned and wary eye… We must remind the malignant that this war and this era will be dictated on our terms – on the terms of the strong and the right, not the weak and the wrong.

Murray returned to these twin themes, suspicion of democracy and fear of Muslim population growth, when he and Daniel Pipes debated Ken Livingstone in January 2007:

just a few months ago, the Justice Minister of the Netherlands Piet Hein Donner announced that, when a majority of people wanted it, he was willing to institute Sharia law across the Netherlands. Now, on current demographics, that majority isn’t too far away. What will the Netherlands look like when that happens?[14]

Centre for Social Cohesion

Murray was appointed director the Centre for Social Cohesion when it was founded by the conservative think-tank Civitas in 2007. [15] The centre shares a Westminster building with Policy Exchange, the think-tank accused by the BBC of using fabricated evidence in a report on extremism in British mosques.[16] The author of that report, Denis MacEoin, is a member of the centre’s advisory council.[17]

Like Policy Exchange, the Centre for Social Cohesion has claimed success in influencing British Government policy towards Muslims. If anything, its focus has been even more single-minded.

In July 2007, the Centre issued its first published work, an A-Z of Muslim Organisations in Britain, which claimed to be the fullest analysis yet published of the major Muslim organisations in Britain.[18]

In August 2007 Murray and James Brandon co-authored the Centre’s first pamphlet, Hate on the State, How British Libraries Encourage Islamic Extremism.[19] The Centre later claimed credit when the Prime Minister announced that the “Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport is working with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to agree a common approach to deal with the inflammatory and extremist material that some seek to distribute through public libraries, while also of course protecting freedom of speech.”[20]

Murray has been a frequent guest on BBC current affairs programmes such as Hardtalk, Question Time and Newsnight.[21]

NATO

Murray ‘assisted in the writing process’ for the 2007 pamphlet Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership.[22] Written by five former NATO generals, the paper clearly owed much to Murray’s distinctive philosophy:

In every country, and at all times, we like to rely on certainty. Certainty about the past, the present and even the future. Yet certainty is based not on inevitability, but rather on social and intellectual needs. We seek to uphold a common and stable experience, shunning the arbitrary in favour of closure in debate.

The pamphlet proposed a new UN/EU/NATO directorate to ‘co-ordinate all co-operation in the transatlantic sphere of interest.’ It suggested that if this prescription were followed ”we might, in the medium to long term, thus be capable of restoring certainty –something which we see as the most important prerequisite for functioning societies.”

The plan was reportedly a topic for discussion at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008.[23] However, according to one senior NATO figure the paper’s call for the alliance to develop a first-strike nuclear capability had ‘no traction whatsoever.’[24]

Notes

[1] Amazon.com: Bosie: The Man, The Poet, The Lover of Oscar Wilde: Douglas Murray: Books, accessed 24 March 2008.

[2] Knitting Circle Alfred Douglas, accessed 21 March 2008.

[3] Neoconservatism: why we need it – a talk to the Manhattan Institute by Douglas Murray, Social Affairs Unit, 26 October 2005

[4] An Unholy Alliance, by Douglas Murray, openDemocracy, 22 October 2002.

[5] Marching to hell, by Douglas Murray, openDemocracy 20 February 2003.

[6] Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (Hardcover), Amazon.co.uk, accessed 21 March 2008

[7] Bloody Sunday, or the theatre of moral corruption,by Douglas Murray, openDemocracy, 11 May 2005.

[8] Hutton – the wrong inquiry, by Douglas Murray, openDemocracy, 29 January 2004..

[9] Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (Hardcover), Amazon.co.uk, accessed 21 March 2008.

[10] Neoconservatism: why we need it – a talk to the Manhattan Institute by Douglas Murray, Social Affairs Unit, 26 October 2005

[11] Profound insights of Leo Strauss, Douglas Murray, The Guardian, 30 December 2005.

[12] Leo Strauss’ Philosophy of Deception, by Jim Lobe, Alternet, 19 May 2003.

[13] What are we to do about Islam? A speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam, by Douglas Murray, Social Affairs Unit, 3 March 2006.

[14] Douglas Murray’s speech, Conference: A World Civilization or a Clash of Civilisations, Greater London Authority, 20 January 2007.

[15] Centre for Social Cohesion: Press Release, accessed 22 March 2008.

[16] Clutha House, 10 Storey’s Gate, Westminster, London, SW1, Keningtons Chartered Surveyors, accessed 5 April 2008. BBC News, Talk about Newsnight, BBC Response to Policy Exchange statement, 14 December 2007.

[17] The Centre for Social Cohesion, About Us, accessed 5 April 2008.

[18] Centre for Social Cohesion: Press Release, 1 July 2007, accessed 22 March 2008.

[19] Hate on the State, How British Libraries Encourage Islamic Extremism, Centre for Social Cohesion, August 2007, accessed 22 March 2008

[20] PM uses Centre’s ‘Hate on the State’ report to tackle stocking of pro-jihadist books by libraries, Blog, The Centre for Social Cohesion, 28 November 2007.

[21] BBC search results for “Douglas Murray”, accessed 6 April 2008.

[22] Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership, Noaber Foundation, 2007

[23] Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option NATO told, by Ian Traynor, The Guardian, 22 January 2008.

[24] Russia’s problems nudge Afghanistan off the map, by Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail, 2 April 2008.

American Comintern: Six decades of covert operations in Britain

tim — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:50:28 +0000

Is the Cold War the best guide to how Britain should deal with Islam? That is what Charles Moore (pictured) suggested in a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies last month:

Think of the long debate about how best to deal with trade union militancy and with its relationship to Communist infiltration during the Cold War. It was not, in fact, the Conservatives who first tried to tackle this. It began as a conflict within the Labour movement in which a few brave souls, like Frank Chapple of the Electricians, would not bow to the extremist tactics.

As Moore admits, ‘the analogies between British trade unions and an ancient world religion are inexact, to put it mildly.’ Nevertheless, the anti-communist paradigm is becoming increasingly influential as a template for dealing with Islamist extremism.

Moore’s Policy Exchange colleague Dean Godson wrote in 2006:

During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence. At the moment, the extremists largely have the field to themselves.

As I have noted previously , the Information Research Department and Encounter were both covert operations, created as part of a wider effort known as the ‘Cultural Cold War.’ The CIA ran Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funded throughout the 1950s and early 1960s to carry out propaganda among European intellectuals. Some of those involved had carried out similar activities for Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s as agents of the Comintern.

One former Comintern delegate was Jay Lovestone, the one-time head of the American Communist Party and disciple of Nikolai Bukharin. His Communist Party (Opposition) faction of the 1930s became over time an anti-communist network with close links to the US Government.

Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown’s boss, [from] 1955 was run by James Jesus Angleton. Lovestone’s task was to infiltrate European trade unions, weed out dubious elements, and promote the rise of leaders acceptable to Washington. During this period, Lovestone supplied Angleton with voluminous reports on trade union affairs in Britain, compiled with the assistance of his contacts in the TUC and the Labour Party¹.

A key member of the Lovestoneite network in Britain was Dean Godson’s father, the US labour attaché, Joseph Godson. He attempted to ‘weed out’ the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, while promoting the rival Labour Party faction led by Hugh Gaitskell.

Gaitskell held a series of secret meetings at the Russell Hotel, where he planned the expulsion campaign with Sam Watson, the leader of the Durham miners. Also in attendance was the Labour Attaché at the American Embassy in London, Joe Godson. One of the most important post-war events in the Labour Party’s internal affairs was overseen by an American spook².

The fullest description of Godson’s role is in Hugh Wilford’s ‘Calling the Tune?’, an admirably nuanced account which is often sympathetic to US labour diplomacy:

His Lovestonite style – obsessively anti-communist, hectoring, conspiratorial – in time alienated even his closest allies. For example, Arthur Deakin, that most hardline of Labour anti-communists, entertained misgivings about his involvement in TUC affairs, while Gaitskell himself had similar concerns about his role in the Labour Party³.

Joe Godson retained his interest in British affairs after moving to other diplomatic posts. He helped to found the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding, a little-known organisation that came to the attention of the Guardian in the mid-1980s because it was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which had become embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal.

The committee is the labour section of the British Atlantic Committee, which lobbies for Nato among European trade unionists. It has no connection with the Labour Party but its members include figures from the Labour and trade union rightwing, including Lord Chapple, Mr Roy Mason, and Lord Stewart, former Labour foreign secretary. One of its American vice-presidents, Mr Lane Kirland, is on NED’s board of directors.

Funding of the committee, founded in 1976 by a former US embassy labour attache, Mr Joseph Godson, remained a secret until 1980, when the British government said that Nato had given £32,000 over the previous four years. Mr Godson told the Guardian that he understood the money had come from the American Youth Council. He had complained to the endowment fund for its inaccuracy, but ‘I don’t object to anything which funds a good cause⁴.’

Among those implicated in the Iran-Contra affair was Joe Godson’s elder son. In 1981, Roy Godson was appointed by Elliot Abrams to head the International Youth Year Commission, which came under Congressional investigation in 1987⁵. Although he escaped prosecution, an independent counsel’s report concluded that he had helped Oliver North channel funding to the Contras through the Heritage Foundation.
Roy Godson went onto become a leading figure in the academic study of intelligence, with a particular expertise in propaganda, disinformation, covert action and counterintelligence . As head of the National Strategy Information Center, he presided over the development of a distinctive neo-con philosophy of intelligence:

Two longtime advocates of the type of flexible intelligence operation put in motion by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith are Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, senior associates at the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) in the 1990s. The NSIC along with a half-dozen other think-tanks and committees produced reports in the mid-1990s that recommended intelligence reforms. As it turns out, the NSIC’s recommendations had the most influence in shaping the intelligence practices of the George W Bush administration.

In a 1998 essay Shulsky and Schmitt linked this emerging theory of intelligence to the philosophy of Leo Strauss . Shulsky in particular would have the opportunity to put that theory into practice as head of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans prior to the Iraq War.

Journalist Robert Dreyfuss captured a snapshot of the situation in the run-up to the conflict in December 2002:

Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq, according to former CIA officials. Key officials of the Department of Defense are also producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war. Much of the questionable information comes from Iraqi exiles long regarded with suspicion by CIA professionals. A parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation, in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, collects the information from the exiles and scours other raw intelligence for useful tidbits to make the case for preemptive war.

These morsels sometimes go directly to the president. “Informed sources say the person in charge of the unnamed unit is Abram Shulsky, another key member of the Perle-Wolfowitz war party,” Dreyfuss noted. “Roy Godson, the head of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and a colleague of Shulsky’s for many years, has high hopes for the success of the Pentagon’s Iraq intelligence unit, despite its small size when arrayed against the CIA’s might. ‘It might turn out to be a David against Goliath,’ says Godson⁶.”

At the same time, Feith’s office was devising plans to revive covert operations in Europe, with a new focus on Islam. In December 2002, The New York Times reported that “the Defense Department is considering issuing a secret directive to the American military to conduct covert operations aimed at influencing public opinion and policy makers in friendly and neutral countries.”

Such a program, for example, could include efforts to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that have become breeding grounds for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism across the Middle East, Asia and Europe. It might even include setting up schools with secret American financing to teach a moderate Islamic position laced with sympathetic depictions of how the religion is practiced in America, officials said.

Not everyone in the Pentagon was happy about these proposals:

Some are troubled by suggestions that the military might pay journalists to write stories favorable to American policies or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of American policies.

Implementing this strategy would have required changes to the Pentagon directive governing information operations, allowing ‘adversarial decision-making’ to be targeted, rather than the more restrictive ‘adversary decision-making.’ Former US Army Colonel Sam Gardiner has claimed that a 2003 London conference was briefed about a change on exactly these lines by Captain Gerald Mauer, the Pentagon’s Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations.

Gardiner has compiled a list of misleading news stories which he believes resulted from such information operations. A notable inclusion is the April 2003 series of stories claiming that George Galloway had received payoffs from Saddam Hussein. One of the papers which ran the story was the Daily Telegraph, then under Charles Moore’s editorship. The Telegraph was ultimately ordered to pay Galloway £150,000 in damages as a result.

After leaving the Telegraph, Moore would go on to chair Policy Exchange, the think-tank which the BBC accused of fabricating evidence about British mosques.

In advocating a return to cold war covert operations, Moore and Godson do nothing to allay the fear that such episodes are the results of methods that owe more to the world of intelligence than the ethos of journalism or scholarship.

Notes:

1. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders, Granta Books 2000, pp329-30.

2. Smear! Wilson & the Secret State, by Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Fourth Estate Limited 1991, p14.

3. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War, Calling the Tune? By Hugh Wilford, Frank Cass Publishers 2003, p180.

4. Britons get cash from US ‘slush fund’ / British organisations receiving money from US sources to ‘promote democracy’, The Guardian, 9 December 1985.

5. House probes link between Contras and youth commission, by Pat O’Brien, United Press International, 23 March 1987.

6. The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA; Devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy, by Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect, 16 December 2002.

The Godson Approach to Political Warfare (3)

Tim Holmes — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:28:11 +0000

The IRD in Northern Ireland

In his June 2006 obituary for Fr Dennis Faul, Dean Godson suggested that the life of the Irish human rights campaigner ‘offers profound lessons for democracies on how to fight, and not to fight, terrorism.’

Godson may well be right, but for reasons other than those he intended. As he acknowledges, Faul was labelled a ‘Provo priest’ by his critics. The irony is that this smear originated in precisely the kind of ‘political warfare’ that Godson advocates.

“During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals,” Godson wrote in an earlier Times article from April 2006. “For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence. At the moment, the extremists largely have the field to themselves.”

The Information Research Department (IRD) was founded in the early days of the Cold War by Christopher Mayhew, a junior Labour Minister and veteran of the wartime Special Operations Executive.

One of the first people Mayhew hired for the new organization was the KGB spy Guy Burgess. The Soviets were therefore aware of the IRD’s activities from the beginning, although the British public were to remain in the dark for many years.

In his history of MI6, Stephen Dorril concludes that disinformation was a routine part of the IRD’s activities: “Although IRD apologists have always denied it, ‘black’ material such as forgeries, lies and fabrications was disseminated for use by its own outlets and by MI6-funded radio stations and news agencies. By the organisation’s engagement in these ‘cowboy’ operations, however, the more worthwhile task became tainted.”

This pattern was replicated when Edward Heath’s government brought the IRD into the propaganda war against the IRA in the early 1970s. The first IRD officer to arrive in Northern Ireland was Hugh Mooney in June 1971. He was followed a month later by Clifford Hill, who compiled a report on information requirements that was circulated in September 1971.

Hill called for the appointment of a press liason officer, who would “ensure close liaison between the information agencies in Northern Ireland, London and overseas, to plan a systematic campaign of propaganda, and to cultivate visiting journalists. He will be concerned with all information activities.”

Hill’s report noted that “a senior Army officer is joining the HQ staff (temporarily) and will be made available for contact work ‘downtown’ in close contact with the Press Liason Office” This was Col Maurice Tugwell who was seconded to the IRD by the Chief of the General Staff, Lord Carver.

The report were accepted by the Prime Minister and Hill himself was appointed to the press liason post. On 15 October, Downing Street Press Secretary Sir Donald Maitland invited the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence to join a liason committee to oversee Hill’s work .

In a 2002 statement to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, Sir Donald claimed he had little involvement with the IRD. However, in a letter to the Prime Minister on 4 November 1971, he stated: “The liaison group, consisting of representatives of No. 10, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, met under my chairmanship with Clifford Hill this morning. We agreed on Hill’s tasks and objectives.”

“Parallel with this committee, Sir Dick White, Norman Reddaway and I have decided on the machinery for placing anti I.R.A. propaganda in the British press and media. This machinery is already in operation. Its first major task will be to produce articles which will counteract the effect of the Compton Report.”

It is interesting that the notion of countering IRA propaganda should have extended to countering a report on internment by a British civil servant which found that the sensory deprivation techniques used on internees did not amount to torture.

The targets of the British state’s information operations machinery in Belfast would later be extended far beyond the IRA and even Ireland. The tasks set out for Clifford Hill presaged the way this would be justified. The brief sent to the Prime Minister by Maitland concluded: “The IRA’s connections with other urban guerrilla organizations should be emphasised in order to show that the hard core Provisionals have ambitions quite unconnected with the status of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland or indeed with partition.”

This is an absurd statement given that only two years before, the Provisionals had split from the Official IRA precisely because the latter’s Marxist priorities had led it to take a relatively passive stance at the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969.

The same apparent lack of understanding was evident in an appraisal of IRA propaganda produced by Col Tugwell on 9 November:

IRA Propaganda Organisation
7. IRA propaganda has its base in Dublin where both factions run their own information centres, both with the title “Irish Republican Publicity Bureau.” Each has a full time staff and has subordinate directors in Belfast, Londonderry and elsewhere. The campaign is pushed by numerous front organisations and by Republican sympathisers who, having themselves been taken in by the propaganda, are willing to spread the word. These organisations include:
a. The Association for Legal Justice (which has been the principal agency for co-ordinating the campaign alleging brutality during internment and interrogation).
b. Republican Clubs (which have always been fronts for the Sinn Fein political party and which now help to disseminate the propaganda of whichever faction they have chosen to support).
c. The Belfast Central Citizens Defence Committee (once given a cloak of respectability as representative of the Catholic population of the city, but now heavily involved in promoting IRA interests).
d. The Irish News (a newspaper that has long represented Republican opinion in Ulster and is now an organ for printing IRA propaganda).
e. Catholic Ex-Servicemans Association (is becoming increasingly involved with the IRA as a front organisation).
f. NICRA (Directed by Kevin McCorry)
g. Various Relief and Action Committees in Catholic Areas.
h. Minority Rights Association.
j. Various regional Citizens Defence Committees working to the CCDC.
k. SDLP.
l. PD and other “New Left” organisations.
m. Vigilante or street committees, who organise allegations and fake damage, etc.
n. University groups and teachers.
o. RTE and newspapers in the Republic to varying degrees, with the Irish Press particularly active.
p. Committee for Truth (Fr Denis Faul – brutality allegations vehicle).
q. Association of Irish Priests (Ulster Branch) (Secretary Terrance O’Keefe, Coleraine University)).
r. A number of RC priests, but Frs Brady, Faul and Egan are prominent.

This remarkable document reads as if it were written on the assumption that any organisation criticizing British policy in Ireland must be an IRA front. This definition was wide enough to draw in not only human rights activists like Fr Faul, but the Irish state broadcaster, establishment newspapers and the main constitutional nationalist party in the North.

Col Tugwell’s view of ordinary nationalists was equally jaundiced:

So long as it appears to the majority of Catholics that the British Army is a threat to their community by acting as an “instrument of Stormont” and is believed by many as being an obstacle to their political aspirations they can be expected to believe most of IRA statements; and as long as they believe they repeat. The indigenous Irish, once convinced that their cause is just, possess a breath-taking ability to lie with absolute conviction, not just in support of something they believe to be true, but to put across a story they know very well is untrue. In this way, convincing witnesses can invariably be produced at a moment’s notice to sell whatever line the IRA consider to be to their advantage. Members of the IRA and their supporting propaganda agencies have good contacts in high places in the various media newspapers, radio and television, who can guide them over publicity at short notice. The Irish are also remarkably adept at picking up and repeating propaganda points they hear being expounded by their leaders, both political and IRA, on the radio and television.

Even though it was intended for internal consumption, it is difficult to know whether this document was the product of calculated disinformation, genuine paranoia or a confused mixture of the two.

Col Tugwell told the Bloody Sunday Inquiry that his staff branch, Information Policy, did not engage in psychological warfare. However, his evidence was contradicted by Colin Wallace, an army press officer who worked with the unit.
“The Psy Ops or Information Policy Unit as it was known, comprised (in addition to myself) one Colonel, one Lieutenant Colonel, plus representatives of the Foreign Office Information Research Department (IRD), support by a team of Army NCO’s who handled the unit’s archives and photographic facilities,” Wallace told the Inquiry.

“Senior Intelligence officers from London came to Northern Ireland and ‘saw’ communist figures involved in various civil rights and protest groups. This in turn gave credence to the theory of a world-wide terrorist conspiracy. There were a number of organisations in Britain that were sympathetic to the IRA without really understanding what the IRA was about. The paranoia took on a level of importance which it did not merit, but nonetheless, it existed.”

Wallace presumably did not know that playing up this theory was part of the IRD’s brief from the Whitehall Liason Committee chaired by Sir Donald Maitland. Ironically, the focus of Information Policy’s propaganda would eventually be turned back on Downing Street itself with the Clockwork Orange operation, which Wallace described in his second statement to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.

“Clockwork Orange was designed to target sectarian assassination groups by psychological means to reduce their effectiveness,” Wallace testified. “After the first general election in 1974 the targets changed to focus more on left wing groups and Labour politicians. “
An example of this black propaganda is attached to Wallace’s statement as appendix five.

Supposedly written by an IRA defector, it includes a reference to Wilson’s meeting with the IRA in March 1972.

“I believe that the pieces relating to Harold Wilson were included by the Security Service to demonstrate that the Labour Government’s policies in Northern Ireland were helpful to or approved by the IRA,” Wallace testified.

In late 1974, Wallace refused to have anything further to do with Clockwork Orange. He was suspended a few months later, ostensibly for passing documents to the journalist Robert Fisk.

Although the Security Service, MI5, denies it to this day, there is ample evidence that some of its officers were plotting against Wilson. As well as the accounts of Wallace and of Peter Wright, there is the testimony of Wilson himself. In August 1975, Wilson called in the head of MI6, Maurice Oldfield, who admitted that elements of MI5 were unreliable. Oldfield was the source for accounts of this meeting by former MI6 agent Anthony Cavendish and journalist Chapman Pincher. Wilson recounted his version to BBC journalists Barry Penrose and Roger Courtiour.

Wilson told both Pincher and Penrose that he had then called in the head of MI5, Michael Hanley, who also admitted the existence of the plot.

Last year, a BBC documentary broadcast a recording of Wilson asking Penrose and Courtiour to investigate the affair. One of his suggestions was that they interview Colin Wallace.

Wallace’s knowledge of Clockwork Orange may have had fateful consequences for him. When an acquaintance of his, Jonathan Lewis, was found dead in 1980, Wallace was convicted of his manslaughter and served six years in prison. His case was taken up the investigative journalist Paul Foot, who suggested he had been framed by the secret state.

In 1990, the British Government admitted for the first time to the existence of Clockwork Orange and Wallace’s role in it, although it continued to deny the operation had targeted British politicians. His murder conviction was not overturned until 1996.

By this time the IRD had long since ceased to exist. It was abolished by Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977, amid concerns about its relationship to right-wing journalists.

It is clear from the IRD’s record in Northern Ireland what a revival of its methods would mean.

It would signify a resort to disinformation, ostensibly for enemy consumption, that would soon find its way into intelligence analyses and the domestic media. It would mean the paranoid condemnation of all opponents as the dupes of a monolithic terrorist conspiracy. Above all it would mean the exploitation of national security concerns to justify domestic political manipulation by unaccountable elites.

Perhaps it is not surprising that this example commends itself to today’s neoconservatives.

The Godson Approach to Political Warfare (2)

Tim Holmes — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:22:11 +0000

Blocking the back-channels from Ireland to the Middle East

The claim that Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness was an MI6 agent must rank as one of the more intriguing intelligence stories of recent years, but a careful examination of the episode may reveal more about disinformation techniques than infiltration of the IRA.

The accusation was originally made in May 2006 by an ex-soldier known by the pseudonym Martin Ingram. A former member of the British Army’s Force Research Unit, Ingram had established some credibility because of his role in identifying Freddie Scappaticci as Stakeknife – a key informer within the IRA.

A little-noticed aspect of the story was the apparent corroboration provided by Dean Godson, who is best known in Ireland for a well-regarded biography of David Trimble and for his scepticism about power-sharing with republicans.

In an obituary for Fr Denis Faul, a prominent Irish priest and human rights activist, Godson wrote that Faul “would have been unsurprised by allegations that Martin McGuinness was a British agent: he had claimed as much to me more than five years ago.”

Ingram’s contention is based on an unpublished document which he claims is a record of Martin McGuinness and an MI6 handler plotting the IRA’s human bomb attack campaign of 1990. Both the Sunday Times and Ireland’s Sunday Tribune were shown transcripts of this document, but neither was permitted to see the original.

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Roy Godson’s book
Both papers were skeptical about the material, which the Sunday Times described as ‘a fabrication.’ Such a forgery would be consistent with the covert action techniques described by Roy Godson in his book Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards.

“People will believe what they want to,” Godson writes. “Disinformation is unlikely to have much impact on targets not predisposed to a certain belief. Therefore the primary consideration of the forger is to identify and play to predispositions; worrying about the quality or plausibility of the disinformation comes second.”

Who would be predisposed to the belief that Martin McGuinness is an MI6 agent? One obvious answer is dissident republicans, who see the Good Friday Agreement as a betrayal.

This could be seen as consistent with Godson’s suggestion that “covert action practitioners can create dissension within the ranks of terrorists and their supporters. For instance, by planting evidence that faction A is in contact with the police, covert practitioners may convince faction B that faction A is plotting its demise.”

However, if Ingram’s allegations were to be believed, the implications would reach far beyond Irish republicanism. In many ways, the most startling element of his allegations is the suggestion that MI6 was involved in planning attacks on the British security forces.

MI6, formally the Secret Intelligence Service, has played a distinctive role in the history of Northern Ireland. It was the pre-eminent intelligence service in the North from 1970 until 1973, when it lost its position to MI5 in a bureaucratic power struggle.

“From 1971 onwards, SIS officers came to believe that the Provisional Irish Republican Army was a political organisation which could be outwitted, not merely a terrorist organisation which must be destroyed,” authors Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay report in their book, Smear: Wilson and the Secret State. “After the failure of the 1972 talks, however, this faction of the state was in retreat. During 1973, the hard-liners in HQ Northern Ireland and in London gradually gained the upper hand and took the final step of expanding the category of ‘the enemy’ to include Westminster politicians – and not just those in the Labour Party.”

This is a reference to the Clockwork Orange episode, in which Army Information Officer Colin Wallace was used to spread disinformation – by showing forged documents to selected journalists.

MI6 retained one key function from the mid-1970s onwards, providing a discreet for communication between the British Government and the IRA. This link helped to produce the IRA ceasefire of back-channel 1975, an abortive deal during the hunger strikes of the early 1980s, and ultimately provided one of the roots of the 1990s peace process.

Some of those involved in this behind-the scenes effort have since sought to apply their experience to other conflicts. MI6 officer Alistair Crooke went on to mediate in negotiations that led to a Hamas ceasefire in 2003. He is currently a director of Conflicts Forum which advocates dialogue with Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamist groups.

“The EU should heed the words of Efraim Halevy, former adviser to Ariel Sharon and a former Mossad head, “ Crooke wrote in a 2006 article for Prospect magazine. “He recently criticised Israel for insisting that Hamas first recognise the Jewish state as a precondition for any discussion. Halevy argued rather that Israel should recognise Hamas first. He predicted that in so doing, ‘we will be seeing things we have not seen before’–an apparent allusion to talks between Israel and Hamas. That would be a good start.’”

The following edition of Prospect featured an article by Dean Godson, under the revealing title ‘Gone Native’ that heavily criticised MI6 officers like Crooke and Michael Oatley, who was for many years the key figure in the back channel to the IRA.

“Crooke and Oatley are the products of late-imperial British defeatism: an era when the main issue was the terms on which to exit the colonies,” Godson argued. “That is why the self-confident liberal interventionism of the American neoconservatives poses such a stark challenge. But America, whose decline is far from assured, should tread carefully before embracing the mindset of a country at a different phase in its existence.”

The neoconservative interventionism is exemplified by figures like Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams, who has opposed moves towards a peace process with Syria, and has played a key role in isolating Hamas after its victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections. Like Roy Godson, Abrams is a veteran of the Iran/Contra affair.

The Irish example has assumed some significance in Middle East policy debates as a challenge to this counter-insurgency approach. Attempting to undermine that analogy by discrediting the Irish peace process would be quite consistent with the neoconservative penchant for covert action.

Part 3 of this series follows shortly…