Terror/War | ukwatch.net

Civil Disobedience is a Terrorist Threat

Merrick Godhaven — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:45:43 +0000

We’re used to the right wing media lying about activists. But last Sunday the lefty Observer ran an article titled ‘Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists: Fear of deadly attack by lone maverick as officers alert major firms to danger of green extremism’.

Officers from a specialist unit dedicated to tackling domestic terrorism are monitoring an eco-movement called Earth First! which has advocates who state that cutting the Earth’s population by 80 per cent will ease pressure on other species.

Firstly, just to be clear, the unit is not about terrorism. The unit themselves say

NETCU provides the police service of England and Wales and other enforcement agencies with tactical advice and guidance on policing domestic extremism and associated criminality.

And what is ‘extremism’?

The term ‘domestic extremism’ applies to unlawful action that is part of a protest or campaign. It is most often associated with ‘single-issue’ protests, such as animal rights, anti-war, anti-globalisation and anti-GM (genetically modified) crops.

The front page of the NETCU site shows some cops standing around in front of a demonstration of people dressed as clowns.

So it’s not terrorist stuff in any real sense, it’s just protests. Already there’s exaggeration of the threat.

But what about the extremists who say ‘cutting the Earth’s population by 80 per cent will ease pressure on other species’? Given this one allegation is what the Observer hang their whole article on, it’s peculiar that there is not verbatim quote. Surely, if such a statement existed on a blog or in a newsletter somewhere, they’d be quoting it and naming the source.

But whatever, it is not an extremist position. It’s an irrefutable fact. Whether you think there should be such a reduction is another thing, but the statement itself is incontrovertible.

Even if you do think there should be population reduction, it doesn’t mean you believe there should be some sort of random cull, which – by linking it with the word terrorism and all the images that conjures in your mind – is what they’re trying to imply.

STOP THE LARDO-TERRORISTS!

By the same token, when the Conservatives say there are too many obese people it doesn’t mean they’re wanting to cull the 20% or so of Britons who are overweight.

But can we rule out that a ‘lone maverick’ in the Conservative party is not planning to carry out an act of lardo-terrorism? Should NETCU be outside Conservative party meetings taking photos and notes (as they are at Climate Camp ones)? The Conservative party is clearly a lardo-terrorist hotbed, and even though – like Earth First! – there’s no policy or any indication they want to do anything terrorist, they certainly have the ability and might be planning it at this very moment.

We’re told that Earth First!

has links to US environmental extremists which have waged a campaign of violence in America, including the firebombing of a string of 4×4 car dealerships in California in 2003 and alleged arson attacks on other property

and that

green extremists have yet to embark on an orchestrated campaign of violence in the UK

Yet the only ‘violence’ they can list from US environmentalists is damage to property. In the UK, Earth First! has been involved with similar damage to property across the country for nearly 20 years.

But if that were pointed out – a campaign of property damage that hasn’t hurt anyone – it wouldn’t seem like a new and terrorist threat.

This malleability of definitions, fudgy thinking and ignorance of fact run through the whole article. That’s because it’s not there to inform in a real sense but to establish an undefined unease, to sow in the public mind a feeling that there are terrorists in the green movement so that reasonable people who share green concerns are discouraged from joining in. Then when, at some time in future, greens are treated as terrorists nobody will complain.

In the meantime, it serves to defuse this burgeoning movement. If you make the radical end seem scary and liable to imprisonment then the more moderate activists will seek to distance themselves.

STOP THE FOETO-TERRORISTS!

Incidentally, if you want a campaign of genuine violence in the USA, try anti-abortionists. They too do major property damage, but also have a long history of murdering doctors, nurses and receptionists.

There are also anti-abortion groups in the UK, they also intimidate people and blockade places, therefore they also counts as ‘domestic extremists’. They too could harbour a ‘lone maverick’ who wants to kill. So why aren’t they a NETCU target?

Because action on ecological issues, especially climate change, has such huge public support and scientific backing that is rapidly growing and so represents a threat to government policy and corporate profit, whereas anti-abortionists do not. This repression is a measure of the environmental movement’s success and power.

MARK TOWNSEND: STOOGE OR AGENT?

It’s not the first piece of terror-threat tosh Mark Townsend has written. Last week he did a piece which opened by telling us that

suspected terrorists have attempted to infiltrate Britain’s top laboratories in order to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Yet his own second paragraph say that’s not true, only that MI5 and MI6 ‘believe’ their suspects were attempting it.

It turns out that there’s a stringent MI5 vetting scheme for students that has turned away 100 people. People the article describes as ‘potential terrorists posing as postgraduate students’.

You, dear reader, are a potential terrorist. And anything you declare yourself to be is something you are posing as. So, for example, the driver of the train I was on yesterday could be described as a potential terrorist posing as a train driver.

What is all this guff about? Surely nobody would lie about WMD to create false impression of threat and thereby have an excuse to commit extreme acts that the public wouldn’t otherwise allow, would they?

It seems as though Townsend has a hot new contact in the security services who’s taking advantage of his gullibility and feeding him this cack.

Where is he getting it from? Well, the co-author of the eco-terrorist piece is Nick Denning. Flash back a year and, as Ian Bone spotted, Townsend was an embedded reporter in Afghanistan. The British military commander showing him round was a man by the name of Nick Denning.

Two weeks running Townsend’s written vacuous scare stories of threats, plants that are seemingly straight from the spooks, taken at face value, without checking sources. He clearly hasn’t looked into EF!, or even talked to coppers who’ve actually dealt with EF!.

WHAT IS EARTH FIRST!?

Earth First! is not a shady new organisation. In fact, it is none of those three things.

It is, as is said on pretty much every publication and website under the name,

not a cohesive group or campaign, but a convenient banner for people who share similar philosophies to work under.

Earth First! has been going since the early 90s. The anti-roads and anti-GM direct action campaigns were aligned with Earth First!.

Earth First!‘s public presence in the UK is a couple of websites, a newsletter and an annual conference in the summer, open to all and attended by about 200 people. All of this is well known to the police and not news. This year’s summer gathering only got police attention in the form of a perusal to see that it was complying with its events license. Which it was.

The general principles behind Earth First! are non-hierarchical organisation and the use of direct action to confront, stop and eventually reverse the forces that are responsible for the destruction of the Earth and its inhabitants.

At a time when government and corporations have proven themselves utterly incapable of responding as science and nature so urgently demand, when figures as mainstream as Al Gore are calling for civil disobedience (which makes him, by NETCU’s definition, an extremist) such action is not only justified but essential.

Conflating terrorism, extremism and anything criminal would be risible if it didn’t raise the spectre of the state meting out the same treatment to all three activities.

Armistice day and the 'glorious war'

JamieSW — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:00:28 +0000

George Bush and Tony Blair – leading architects of a war that has killed more than a million people in Iraq – appear side by side. Bush wears a stars-and-stripes lapel badge, a symbol of belligerent nationalism and the self-declared “war on terror”. Blair wears a poppy.

The poppy is the enduring symbol of the hypocrisy of our leaders who take us to war.

It goes back, of course, to the First World War, whose end is marked every year on Remembrance Sunday. The war produced an unprecedented wave of “remembrance”.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was set up in 1917, for instance, and it now manages the graves of 1.5 million British and Commonwealth dead from 90 years of war.

The missing of the First World War were many. Some men were simply sucked into the mud and drowned. Or they were buried alive when shells caused their dugouts to collapse. Or they just disappeared altogether, blown into thousands of tiny pieces and scattered.

The missing became the focus of great battlefield monuments after the war. The 1927 Menin Gate in Ypres lists the names of 55,000, the 1932 Thiepval Memorial on the Somme a further 72,000.

Remembrance Day itself was dedicated by king George V in 1919 – it recalls the moment when the guns fell silent on the Western Front on 11 November 1918.

Later, in 1921, the Earl Haig Fund, a charity for ex-servicemen, was launched, and the sale of poppies marked the build-up to Remembrance Day. It is named after Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander responsible for the mass slaughter at the battles of the Somme and the Passchendaele.

Official

Why did the British ruling class create this official industry of remembrance? The First World War was different in scale from anything that had happened before. It plunged the world into an abyss of barbarism, industrialised killing and destruction, waste, suffering, and grief beyond imagination.

The result was a tidal wave of revolt against world rulers. Poppies, cemeteries, and remembrance rituals were the official response to popular anti-war bitterness.

In 1914, men had marched to war with a chocolate box image of what it would be like. Heads were filled with dizzy notions of empire, nation, and glory. Enemies were demonised as militarists and baby-killers.

Many saw the war as a great adventure and an escape from lives of drudgery and poverty at home. Nothing prepared them for what was to come.

It was not that their leaders lied about the realities of modern war. They did not know either and were equally unprepared.

They imagined a quick campaign, a decisive battle, a rapid descent on the enemy capital. The Germans expected to capture Paris within six weeks of the start of the war.

What made it so different was that the First World War was a war of global empires and industrial mass production – a distinctive type of war characteristic of capitalist imperialism.

For 20 years, the global economy had been growing fast. At the time, people thought the great boom would go on forever. But beneath the surface of events, the mole of history was at work.

Under capitalism, growth meant intensified competition as the giant corporations of the global economy clashed in a struggle for markets, contracts, and profits.

Behind them stood the great powers – imperialist nation states whose armies and navies had been used to carve the world into rival empires in the interests of their own capitalists.

By the early 20th century, with most of the world divided up, the great powers increasingly confronted one another head-to-head.

Tension mounted, defensive alliances hardened into hostile blocs, and a competitive arms race took off.

The British Empire feared the growing industrial and military power of imperial Germany. The war that erupted in 1914 was a war to redivide the world.

But the First World War was not only an imperialist war on a global scale. It was also a war of modern industry.

Capitalism had created the corporations and empires whose collision caused the war – and also the mass industries that were to make modern war so violent and destructive.

Modern economies were able to equip, supply and transport conscript armies of millions. In 1870, the Prussians had defeated France with an army of 300,000.

In 1914, they invaded with an army of 1.5 million.

New technology transformed the killing power of weapons. Machine guns and heavy artillery dominated battlefields, creating a “storm of steel”.

The cost in lives exceeded all expectations. Between ten and 20 million people were killed. Millions more were maimed forever, returning home with bits blown off or minds deranged by horror and fear.

Millions of others wept for lost fathers, husbands, and sons.

The survivors faced a bleak world. The post-war economy collapsed, and the reward for many returning “heroes” was the poverty and hopelessness of unemployment.

Popular revulsion against the carnage fused with class anger against exploitation and privation at home. A wave of revolution swept across Europe.

This potential had flashed intermittently through the early years of conflict. Opposing soldiers had fraternised in no man’s land during Christmas 1914. Many soldiers had practised “live and let live” – tacit agreements not to fire on one another.

At home, as blockades and shortages cut into living standards while war profiteers pocketed millions, strikes and street protests erupted.

Mutinied

In 1917 it broke through into mass struggle. The French army mutinied on the Western Front in the spring. The Italian army broke and headed for home in the autumn. Both revolts were limited.

But in Russia, revolt turned into revolution and an end to war.

It started with mass strikes and protests in Petrograd and other industrial centres, but it quickly spread into the army. Soldiers refused to attack.

Gung-ho officers were shot.

Russians fraternised with Germans and Austrians across the line. Soon, following the example of the workers, the soldiers were forming democratic councils and taking control of the army from below.

The ferment of revolt culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and an end to the war on the Eastern Front early the following year.

As the “contagion” of revolution spread westwards, Germany’s war leaders launched a final desperate offensive on the Western Front. But they failed to break through – leaving the German army facing defeat while the German working class was in revolt at home.

The armistice of 1918 was a product of incipient revolution – Germany’s rulers surrendered for fear their army would mutiny and the state collapse.

Even the winners were scared. Britain, France, and Italy all experienced mass strikes, giant demonstrations, and a huge growth of the left.

Legacy

Because of this political upsurge, the legacy of the war was bitterly contested. Official remembrance rituals are one of the results.

Official remembrance looks two ways. It mourns the dead and regrets their loss. But at the same time it glorifies their “necessary sacrifice”. The war was terrible, the argument goes, but the price was worth paying. That is why Blair can wear a poppy.

We, too, mourn the dead. But our mourning is mixed with bitter anger against the rulers and the system that create such carnage.

The poppy is tainted by the hypocrisy of warmongers and imperialists. It is better to wear an anti-war badge, representing a struggle to end war by challenging the rulers and the system that cause it.

There is reason for hope. The First World War created modern industrialised war, with its murderous firepower, its aerial bombing, its starvation and ethnic cleansing.

But it also spawned a universal hatred of war and mass movements to end it. The anti-war movement of recent years has revived that tradition. And now the crisis of capitalism has reopened the argument for a socialist world that could abolish war forever.

Neil Faulkner is an archeologist and historian based at Bristol university.

Lest We Forget

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:00:16 +0000

Like most people of my generation, I grew up with a mystery. I felt I understood the Second World War. The attempt to dominate and destroy, to eliminate the people of other races – though raised to unprecedented levels by the Nazis – is a familiar historical theme. The need to stop Hitler was absolute, and the dreadful sacrifices of the Second World War were unavoidable.

But the First World War, which ended 90 years ago today, seemed incomprehensible. The class interests of the men sent to kill each other were the same. While Germany was clearly the aggressor, the outlook of the opposing powers – seeking to expand their colonies and to dominate European trade – was not wildly different. Ugly as the German state was, no one could characterise the war at its outbreak – with Tsarist Russia on the side of the Entente Powers – as a simple struggle between democracy and dictatorship. Neither did this resemble the current war in Iraq, in which legislators send the children of another class to die. The chances of being killed were at least five times higher for men who had been students at Oxford or Cambridge in 1914 than they were for manual workers.1 The First World War was an act of social cannibalism, in which statesmen and generals on both sides murdered their own offspring. How could it have happened?

On July 1st 1999, consumed by the urge to understand the war before the century was over, I visited Thiepval on the Somme. This was the anniversary of the first great attack on the German salients, which caused devastating losses for British and Irish troops. Men carrying flutes and dressed in orange sashes – commemorating the Ulster Division – paced about. Beneath the arches of the Lutyens memorial a circle of evangelical Christians hugged and screamed and ululated, while a little boy dressed in combat gear played around their legs with a plastic machine-gun. I goggled at the names on the monument – the 73,000 commemorate only the British and South Africans who fell on the Somme and whose bodies were not recovered – but I couldn’t grasp the scale of what I saw.

Dizzied by these conflicting sights, unable to connect, I wandered behind the old German lines and into a field of sugar beet. Walking between the rows, trying to clear my head, I noticed a spherical pebble. I picked it up. It was strangely heavy. Then I looked around and saw that the field was covered with the same odd little balls. Almost every stone was in fact metal. Within a minute I picked up more grapeshot than I could hold. I found shell casings, twisted bullets, fragments of barbed wire, chips of armour plating. I stopped, overwhelmed by shock and recognition. It was a field of lead and steel; and every piece had been manufactured to kill someone.

There are plenty of words to describe the horrors of World War Two. But there were none, as far as I could discover, that captured the character of the First World War. So I constructed one from the Greek word ephebos, a young man of fighting age. Ephebicide is the wanton mass slaughter of the young by the old. But how did it happen, and why?

In his fascinating book The Last Great War, published a fortnight ago, Adrian Gregory shows that the notion that Britain was carried to war on a wave of patriotic enthusiasm is false.2 The crowds that gathered around Buckingham Palace and in Downing Street when war was declared seem to have been more curious than excited. Most people appear to have greeted the war with resignation or dismay. Nor does voluntary enlistment provide clear evidence of enthusiasm. It is true that some wanted to fight, and others saw war as a more exciting prospect that working in a dead-end office job.3 But Gregory shows that voluntarism wasn’t all that it seemed. For many men fighting was the only employment on offer. The largest numbers volunteered not at the very beginning of war, but after the disaster at Mons on August 24th, when it became clear that there was a genuine threat to national defence.4

The speed with which the war began and Britain joined made effective resistance impossible to organise. By the time the anti-war meetings had been called, it was too late. And by then there was a genuine need to stop Germany. It was as rational to seek to curtail German expansionism in August 1914 as it was in September 1939.

But the narratives, like Gregory’s, which suggest that World War One was inevitable begin late in the sequence of events.5 Another anniversary, almost forgotten in this country, falls tomorrow. On November 12th 1924, Edmund Dene Morel died. Morel had been a shipping clerk, based in Liverpool and Antwerp, who had noticed, in the late 1890s, that while ships belonging to King Leopold were returning from the Congo to Belgium full of ivory, rubber and other goods, they were departing with nothing but soldiers and ammunition. He realised that Leopold’s colony must be a slave state, and launched an astonishing and ultimately successful effort to break the king’s grip.6 For a while he became a national hero. A few years later he became a national villain.

During his Congo campaign, Morel had become extremely suspicious of the secret diplomacy pursued by the British foreign office. In 1911, he showed how a secret understanding between Britain and France over the control of Morocco, followed by a campaign in the British press based on misleading foreign office briefings, had stitched up Germany and very nearly caused a European war. 7 In February 1912 he warned that “no greater disaster could befall both peoples [Britain and Germany], and all that is most worthy of preservation in modern civilization, than a war between them.”8 Convinced that Britain had struck a second secret agreement with France, that would drag us into any war which involved Russia, he campaigned for such treaties to be made public; for recognition that Germany had been hoodwinked over Morocco and for the British government to seek to broker a reconciliation between France and Germany.

In response British ministers lied. The prime minister and the foreign secretary repeatedly denied that there was any secret agreement with France.9 Only on the day before war was declared did the foreign secretary admit that a treaty had been in place since 1906. It ensured that Britain would have to fight from the moment Russia mobilised. Morel continued to oppose the war and became, until his dramatic rehabilitation after 1918, one of the most reviled men in Britain.

Could the Great War have been averted if, in 1911, the British government had done as Morel suggested? No one knows, as no such attempt was made. Far from seeking to broker a European peace, Britain, pursuing its self-interested diplomatic intrigues, helped to make war more likely. Germany was the aggressor; but the image of affronted virtue cultivated by Britain was a false one. Faced, earlier in the century, with the possibilities of peace, the old men of Europe had decided that they would rather kill their children than change their policies.

1. Adrian Gregory, 2008. The Last Great War: British society and the First World War, p.290. Cambridge University Press.
2. ibid, pp9-17; 24-30.
3. ibid, p31.
4. ibid, p32.
5. Another example is Gary Sheffield, November 2008. The Origins of World War One. BBC Online. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/origins_01.shtml
6. See Adam Hochschild, 1999. King Leopold’s Ghost. Pan Macmillan, London.
7. F. Seymour Cocks, 1920. E. D. Morel: the man and his work. George Allen & Unwin, London. The text of this book is available at:
http://ia331337.us.archive.org/3/items/edmorelmanhiswor00cockuoft/edmorelmanhiswor00cockuoft_djvu.txt
8. ED Morel, 1912. Morocco in Diplomacy. Quoted by F. Seymour Cocks, ibid.
9. Asquith denied it on March 10th 1913 and March 24th 1913. Grey denied it on April 28th 1914 and June 11th 1914.

Humanitarianism went to war

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:49:41 +0000

Conor Foley’s new book, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, comes highly recommended. The author has been obliged to debate the oleaginous Oliver Kamm in the course of promoting his book, so I am doing my part to reduce the necessity of such an indignity. Foley does a number of things fairly effectively: first, he debunks ‘humanitarian intervention’ as an ideology from its origins in the Biafran War (there is some useful detail covering Bernard Kouchner’s early ascent here, though he is much more generous to Kouchner than I would be); secondly, he demonstrates conclusively that key examples of such ‘intervention’ were far from humanitarian in effect (he leaves the question of intent or strategy largely unexamined), for example the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; thirdly, he shows how the regnant discourse of a ‘Responsibility To Protect’ that emerged principally during the Balkans Wars provided much of the legal and moral cover for the invasion of Iraq – indeed, a consistent theme is just how much of the present barbarity was prepared in the decade of vicarious militarism that was the 1990s.

One of the strongest chapters in the book is the discussion of the Kosovo war. Foley takes the time to examine the context in which the KLA emerged, outlines some of their provocative conduct, shows with the help of some personal experience how they were active in ethnically cleansing Serb and Roma in the immediate aftermath of the war, and how their successors have been engaged in murdering members of both groups for years afterward. He nicely dissects Clare Short’s post-hoc rationalising scheme for the war, and shows – with the assistance of the Campbell diaries – that even Blair, the most belligerent of the warmongers, was himself doubtful about what the bombing was supposed to achieve. Those doubts were obviously suppressed by the time Blair made his Chicago speech, adumbrating a new doctrine of interventionism, which explicitly bracketed Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as the main threats to global peace. Rigorously citing figures and context, he debunks the claim that the war prevented a genocide, showing that what was actually exacerbated by the intervention was an insurgency by an extremely dubious gang of ‘Greater Albanian’ nationalists, and a counterinsurgency by the Serbian military. The chapter closes with a quote from Tony Blair in 2001, bragging about the success of an intervention that had made a humanitarian crisis into a catastrophe, savouring the prospect of “one of the great dictators of the last century” ending up on trial, and citing it as a precedent for future action.

The overarching story of Foley’s is a part-biographical one in which he observes up close how humanitarian organisations, traditionally committed to the politically neutral delivery of aid, end up as often unwitting auxiliaries to war-making states. One of the recurring themes is the way in which human rights and humanitarianism merged, particularly as left-wing politics subsided, into what he calls ‘political humanitarianism’. He notes, for example, that Amnesty International today has over a million members, far higher than the Labour Party. Its advocacy on any particular issue can galvanise substantial constituencies and, even where it does not call for military action, it can provide the moral and intellectual case for such action with an authority that governments compromised by their own bloody actions cannot. Rony Brauman, the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, makes the argument in my book (you know the one I mean) that this merger of the two trends is a dangerous one. The reason is that when supposedly neutral humanitarian agencies delivering relief end up calling for the enforcement of human rights standards, and then in turn become dependent on those making war, they become co-belligerents. The trust that they require from all sides in order to be able to deliver aid is ruined if they are seen as accessory to one party in a conflict. Further, in order to elicit support, they can all too often end up disseminating misleading or exaggerated information about a given conflict, which can feed into the propaganda for war or produce calls for solutions that are at best counterproductive. In this connection, Foley has been particularly scathing about the calls for military intervention into Darfur from advocacy groups like Save Darfur.

The trouble that ‘political humanitarians’ faced was that their criticisms of various governments were always blunted to the extent that they refused to take a clear position themselves on what might be done in a given circumstance. So, MSF can demand action on Kosovo, but without saying what that might entail, they exposed their urgent appeals to ridicule. And so, in a way that Alex de Waal and others have related previously, ‘political humanitarians’ – quietly at first, but with increasing openness – began to mandate military action as a necessary supplement to their own campaigns. The obvious question that occurs to an outsider is this: why should humanitarians, even those with a commitment to basic human rights standards, have the answers to the world’s problems? How do they come to be the arbiters of just political action? Foley provides a very good sense from the inside of how it felt to be trying to bring about humanitarian outcomes, and how compelling the appeal to military force is when relief workers are trying to deliver people from terrifying physical danger and feel compromised by the bureaucratic structures, legalism and neutralism under which they are obliged to work. But he also shows how arguments for war on humanitarian bases came to be alibis for obvious, outright aggression – as when the Blairite inner circle appealled to international humanitarian norms to justify the invasion of Iraq. Behind all the moral and political arguments foregrounded by this discussion, of course, are immense historical, political and geographical facts which intersect in the fate of the 20th Century Left. (More on which can be found in my own book – you know the one I mean).

Foley is by no means a radical anti-imperialist. He is himself a humanitarian worker with extensive background experience in various ‘theatres’ from northern Iraq to Afghanistan. Nor is he necessarily opposed to all such ventures – he is just far more sceptical about the arguments supporting them than most of his liberal cohorts have been. And if a solution emerges from this book clearly, it is that the UN must be strengthened and reformed, and that multilateral policies should be engaged instead of unilateral ones. Foley doesn’t take seriously the criticism that this refulgent Victorian humanitarianism is implicated in a renascent imperialism – in fact, it has to be said that his handling of these arguments is embarrassingly slight. While Foley is expertly equipped to deal with legalistic arguments about war, there is a basic failure to engage with theory on other levels: those of geopolitics and geoeconomics. To that extent, he seems to grapple with the arguments at their weakest – for example, he dismisses the idea that the invasion of Afghanistan was for the purpose of securing an oil pipeline dominated by Western energy concerns, as if this exhausted the anti-imperialist critique of that invasion. In general, it seems that unless there is some direct economic kickback, then there is no strategic interest involved – although we have just been through a dangerous Georgian spectacle in which the strategic ramifications of US action in Yugoslavia and southern Asia came increasingly to the fore. Similarly, he offers some shockingly blase justifications for the most controversial components of the failed Rambouillet Accords. Of the notorious clause admitting NATO personnel uninhibited access throughout the whole FRY, he dismissively refers to this as a normal part of UN peacekeeping: if this was so, why was it insisted on in the early negotiations phase and dropped in the final Ahtisaari-Chyrnomirdin-negotiated agreement that concluded the war? If it was so essential, why drop it? If inessential, why allow the negotiations to fail partially on account of it? Of the ‘free market’ clause, he says that Kosovo was going through a process of privatization and some stipulation had to be made about future property arrangements. One would not know that privatization in the former Yugoslavia was a deeply controversial matter, and that the process was itself implicated in the break-up of the country. A reading of Susan Woodward’s Balkan Tragedy would have helped here. (More on this in my own book – you know the one I mean). I could go on in this vein, but it would seem to be beside the point, as well unduly diluting the force of my earlier recommendation. Foley is trying to get to grips with how humanitarianism has in different ways been usurped, side-tracked, co-opted and diverted into the blind alley of Western militarism. To that extent, you are unlikely to get a more honest appraisal of how utterly mendacious our governments have been in casting their recent interventions as humanitarian.

Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Quest for Justice

Tim Holmes — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:55:43 +0000

The case of Binyam Mohamed just gets weirder and weirder. For the last six months, the British resident and Guantánamo prisoner, who was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, has been engaged in a transatlantic struggle to secure evidence relating to his “extraordinary rendition” and torture, by or on behalf of the CIA, which involved his disappearance from July 2002 until his arrival at the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan in May 2004. Since September 2004, Mohamed has been held at Guantánamo, and in conversation with his lawyers has explained that he was sent to Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months, and then spent another four months in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” near Kabul.

In June, a judicial review was triggered after the Treasury Solicitors turned down a request from Mohamed’s lawyers to release documents in the British government’s possession regarding his illegal detention in Pakistan and his subsequent disappearance. The lawyers pointed out that Mohamed was about to be put forward for a trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo (the system of “terror trials” conceived by the US administration in November 2001, and derided by Lord Steyn as a “kangaroo court”), and stated that the information was essential to his defence for two reasons: firstly, because the US government had refused to provide any information whatsoever about his whereabouts from July 2002 to May 2004; and secondly, because Mohamed claimed that the charges against him — primarily in connection with an alleged plot to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a US city — had been extracted, during this period, through the use of torture.

The judicial review took place in July, and Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones were clearly appalled by the behavior of the British intelligence services. When they delivered a judgment at the end of August, they criticized the intelligence services for sending agents to interrogate Mohamed in May 2002, while he was being held illegally in Pakistan, and also for providing and receiving intelligence about him from July 2002 until February 2003, when they knew that he was being held incommunicado, and should not have been involved without receiving cast-iron assurances about his welfare. In the judgment, they stated explicitly that, “by seeking to interview BM [Mohamed] in the circumstances found and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship between the United Kingdom Government and the United States authorities went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.”

The judges also seized on an admission, made on behalf of the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, that Mohamed had “established an arguable case” that, until his transfer to Guantánamo, “he was subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by or on behalf of the United States,” and was also “subject to torture during such detention by or on behalf of the United States,” and ruled that, because the information obtained from Mohamed was “sought to be used as a confession in a trial where the charges … are very serious and may carry the death penalty,” and that it is “a long-standing principle of the common law that confessions obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment cannot be used as evidence in any trial,” the British government was required to hand over the evidence — 42 documents in total — to his lawyers.

This was a remarkable result, but celebrations on the part of Mohamed’s lawyers and human rights groups were soon muted when the government responded to the only lifeline extended by the judges — that national security concerns might override the necessity for disclosure — by filing a Public Interest Immunity certificate which stated, in so many words, that the need to preserve the “special relationship” between the American and British intelligence services trumped the right of a man rendered to torture by one country — and with the complicity, to some extent at least, of the other — to have access to evidence that might help in his defence.

While this led to a temporary stalemate in the UK, Mohamed’s case then came up before a District Court judge in the United States, as part of a number of long-delayed habeas corpus claims, based on the 800-year old English law preventing arbitrary imprisonment. These had first been filed after the US Supreme Court granted the prisoners statutory habeas rights in June 2004, but had been blocked after Congress passed new laws in 2005 and 2006, and it was not until June this year, when the Supreme Court ruled again on the prisoners’ rights and granted them constitutional habeas corpus rights, that the cases were allowed to proceed.

As part of Mohamed’s habeas review, the American government was finally required to make the 42 documents provided by the British government available to his lawyers, but when the day of disclosure arrived, the Justice Department released only seven of the 42 documents — apparently so heavily redacted as to be useless — and then dropped the “dirty bomb” plot claim without explanation.

This was announced on October 15, and six days later Mohamed’s proposed trial by Military Commission was also dropped, although for different reasons. His prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, had resigned in September, complaining noisily that he had gone from being a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived” by the trials, when he discovered that evidence vital to the defence had been deliberately withheld. The Pentagon was clearly terrified that he would make further disturbing revelations in Mohamed’s case, and the cases of four other men whose trials were also abandoned, although, bizarrely, Mohamed’s military lawyer, Col. Yvonne Bradley, was told that the charges would be reinstated within 30 days.

The reverberations from these developments soon spread back across the Atlantic. After another High Court hearing, the British judges delivered a judgment on October 23 in which, while still begrudgingly respecting the government’s security claims in Mohamed’s case, they were more openly critical of the US government’s behavior than they had been in August, when observers were required to read carefully between the lines.

Noting that the court “could see no rational basis for the refusal by the US government to provide the documents” to Mohamed’s lawyers, and adding that, after being given “ample time” to provide them, no explanation had been provided by the US government for its refusal to comply with an agreement reached between the High Court and the US administration, Lord Justice Thomas again refused to order disclosure, observing that “challenges made to the conduct of the United States Government and the legality of its actions should, save in the most exceptional circumstances, be determined by the judiciary of the United States,” and trusting that Judge Emmet Sullivan, the judge in Mohamed’s habeas case, was better placed to make a decision at the next habeas meeting on October 30.

However, he made it clear that, if a satisfactory conclusion was not forthcoming, the High Court would reconvene to order disclosure, and, after noting that the court regarded as significant the submission by Dinah Rose QC, one of Mohamed’s lawyers, that the US government “is deliberately seeking to avoid disclosure of the 42 documents,” he concluded, ominously, by stating, “We must record that we have found the events set out in this judgment deeply disturbing. This matter must be brought to a just conclusion as soon as possible, given the delays and unexplained changes of course which have taken place on the part of the United States Government.”

What was also noticeable, to those who were studying the case closely, was that the judges were barely able to conceal their regard for the significance of the 42 secret documents, which they had been able to scrutinize over the summer during an extraordinarily detailed cross-examination of one of the agents who had visited Mohamed while he was under US supervision in a Pakistani jail in May 2002.

The judges noted that it was the information contained in the 42 documents that persuaded them that disclosure to Mohamed’s lawyers was “essential” if Mohamed was to have his case “fairly considered” by the Susan Crawford, the “Convening Authority” overseeing the Guantánamo trials. They pointed out that they had only been able to make public some of their reasons for making this ruling — with the rest contained in a 33-page closed judgment — but that these at least made clear the “critical point” that the documents provided “the only support independent of BM in some material particulars for his general account of events that led to his confessions.”

Later in the judgment, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd-Jones revealed more about the information contained in the documents, noting that their closed judgment set out the passages that they considered “relevant to the allegation made by BM that his confessions had been the result of conduct that amounts to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” They added that they “came to the view that the documents were relevant to all the charges made” — not just the “dirty bomb” plot, but other “allegations of participating in the war in Afghanistan and associating with al-Qaeda” — and criticized the US government for only revealing seven of the documents in heavily redacted form.

Explaining that they had “considered with the assistance of counsel in closed session whether the decision to provide only seven can be explained on the basis that only seven documents provide exculpatory evidence that supports BM’s account,” they stated that they were “satisfied that that cannot be so,” and, moreover, that “all the documents need to be read in sequence to see the proper context, and they added, “As the United Kingdom Government has made clear since the time the documents were found and sent to the United States Government in June 2008, all are relevant and potentially exculpatory.”

What happened next came as a shock to everyone, but served to emphasize the significance of the allegations that CIA agents had been involved in the torture of Mohamed, and that the British intelligence services were at least partly complicit. On October 30, it was announced that the British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had officially asked the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, to investigate possible “criminal wrongdoing” by MI5 and the CIA in Mohamed’s case. The announcement came on the same day that, in another hearing about Mohamed’s habeas review, the Justice Department finally turned over the remaining 35 documents to his lawyers, in a tense session for the US administration in which Judge Sullivan pointedly “asked why, after more than six years, the government had stepped away from its claims about a dirty bomb plot,” and stated, “That raises a question as to whether or not the allegations were ever true.”

Although Andrew Warden, a Justice Department lawyer, responded to a question from Judge Sullivan as to “whether the government stood behind its assertion of a dirty bomb plot,” by stating, “The short answer is yes,” the long answer is that it has been public knowledge since June 2002 that the plot never even existed. Speaking in June 2002, shortly after Mohamed’s alleged co-conspirator Jose Padilla was seized at a US airport, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy to US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, admitted that “there was not an actual plan” to set off a “dirty bomb” in America, that Padilla had not begun trying to acquire materials, and that intelligence officials had stated that his research had not gone beyond surfing the internet.

It took another three and a half years for the allegations to be dropped against Padilla, who was held as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland, in isolation so severe that it amounted to torture, before being put tried and convicted on lesser — and largely spurious — charges of providing material support for terrorism, but Andrew Warden’s words show that, six and a half years after Wolfowitz’s admission, the Justice Department and the Pentagon are still furiously engaged in a blinkered denial of reality.

In spite of this, however, the crucial evidence establishing that Mohamed was tortured into making false confessions remains hidden to the public, awaiting either a decision by Judge Sullivan to dismiss his case, leading to his release from Guantánamo (as requested by the British government 15 months ago), or a decision by the Defense Department to reinstate his trial by Military Commission.

Unless, that is, the British judges insist that public disclosure is in the interests of justice. On November 5, in what the Daily Telegraph described as a move that is “believed to be legally unprecedented,” Lord Justice Thomas wrote to the Press Association inviting “written submissions from the media” about whether or not the court should make available a “summary of the circumstances of BM’s detention in Pakistan and the treatment accorded to him,” — consisting of “seven very short paragraphs amounting to about 25 lines” — which had been cut from the High Court’s August ruling at the government’s request.

Lord Justice Thomas noted that “the issue is one of considerable importance in the context of open justice,” referred to the Home Secretary’s decision to ask the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, to investigate possible “criminal wrongdoing” by MI5 and the CIA in Mohamed’s case, and also drew on advice provided by two Special Advocates, Thomas de la Mare and Martin Goudie, who had represented Mohamed during the court’s closed sessions, when confidential material was being discussed. In September, the judges noted that, in the opinion of the Special Advocates, the government’s Public Interest Immunity Certificate “failed to address, in the light of allegations made by BM, the abhorrence and condemnation accorded to torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” and in his request for submissions from the media, Lord Justice Thomas again referred to the Special Advocates’ advice, noting that:

The Special Advocates contended that no claim to public interest immunity could lie [i.e. be allowed] in respect of information which pointed to the commission of serious criminal offences, particularly those contrary to the rule of jus cogens in international law [fundamental principles, including a ban on the use of torture, from which no derogation is ever permitted]. The Defendant [the British government] accepted for the purposes of that argument, and subject to substantial caveats, that there was an arguable case of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Further, given the fluid boundary between cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and torture, the Defendant did not wish to contend that on the limited information available a concluded view could be reached that there was not torture. Accordingly, the Court considered this issue on the basis that the material arguably disclosed cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and torture.

Lord Justice Thomas stated that those wishing to make submissions should notify the Court of their intention to do so by no later than Friday November 14, and must provide submissions by Monday December 1. He explained that the parties and the Special Advocates would then be given two weeks to reply to the submissions, and that the Court would then consider its judgment.

Submissions should be made to: Mrs. Jean Curtin, Clerk to Lord Justice Thomas, Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London WC2 or by email to: jean.curtin@judiciary.gsi.gov.uk.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

Policing "target communities"

Simon Birritteri — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:37:57 +0000

The decision of the Court of Appeal that the state can place people under control orders (house arrest) without ever telling them what they are accused of has huge implications for civil rights.

A control order works by tagging the individual around the ankle and restricting him or her to a house or flat for a set number of hours each day. When the individual leaves the premises, they have a set area in which they are able to move. The individual has to ring the tagging company a number of times each day from a dedicated phone and may also be required to report to a police station.

The case of Ceri Bullivant underlines the dangers. A Muslim from Essex, Bullivant was put on trial before last Christmas for breaking the terms of a control order. His solicitor, Gareth Peirce, argued successfully for his acquittal and says he was cleared after it emerged that the basis for the control order was a tip-off from “a friend of Ceri’s mother who, after drinking heavily, had phoned Scotland Yard, which failed to ever contact the caller to ask for further information”.

The way in which anti-terror laws can be used for purposes other that those for which they were purportedly enacted are becoming legend. For instance, anti-terror powers were deployed against pensioner Walter Wolfgang for his protest at the 2005 Labour Party conference. He was forcibly ejected from the conference centre after observing that Jack Straw was talking “nonsense”. The ensuing publicity helped Wolfgang to get elected to Labour’s National Executive Committee.

Others to have fallen foul of the contentious legislation include arms protesters arrested outside London’s ExCeL exhibition centre. Most recently, it was used as the reason for freezing of the funds of Icelandic banks as they collapsed into bankruptcy.

All this is aside of the 1,343 times that 46 councils have used anti-terror laws under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act for offences such as rogue trading, benefit fraud and anti-social behaviour.

To find the root of this diminution of human rights, it is necessary to go back to the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974. The biggest mass murder in British history at the time claimed 21 lives and led to the passing into law of the first Prevention of Terrorism Act. Then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins introduced the PTA on November 25 1974 declaring that “the powers… are draconian. In combination, they are unprecedented in peacetime.” The Bill bringing in seven-day pre-charge detention passed in record time, clearing both Houses of Parliament by November 29.

The PTA was rewritten in 1976, 1984 and again in 1989. However, it continued to be used as emergency “temporary” powers that had to be renewed each year.

The first person arrested under the Act was Paul Hill, who was one of the innocent men subsequently convicted of the Guildford pub bombings. He served 15 years in prison before being freed by the Court of Appeal. A succession of miscarriages of justice followed over the next two decades, with the whole Irish Roman Catholic community becoming regarded as generally suspect.

It is mistake to think that the PTA was brought in solely to combat Irish terrorism. The real agenda has been the gradual erosion of human rights in the name of security. This could be clearly seen at the start of the new millennium when the Government brought forward the Terrorism Act 2000 – at a time of peace in Northern Ireland and before the events of September 11.

The Terrorism Act doubled the period of time allowed for pre-charge detention from seven days to 14. It also broadened out the definition of terrorism beyond Irish groups. Terrorism was also to include “the threat” of “serious damage to property” in ways “designed to influence government” for a “political cause” anywhere in the world. Notably, there was no pretence of the legislation being temporary and so in need of renewal each year.

The next step was the British Government’s response to the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11. This included the reintroduction of internment with the Anti-Terror Crime and Security Act. This allowed for foreign nationals who cannot be deported or removed for fear of torture abroad to be detained indefinitely without trial on the basis of secret intelligence that neither they nor their lawyers could view.

After September 11, 12 men were taken almost immediately into custody in Belmarsh prison. They were then detained for three years until the House of Lords ruling the ATCSA unlawful under the Human Rights Act.

This led to the next Prevention of Terrorism Act in March 2005 which introduced the concept of control orders. Those who had been held in Belmarsh were put under control orders. They still were not told of what they were accused.

Bruce Kent, who has visited several men put under control orders since 2005, describes the system as “callously cruel”. The veteran peace campaigner recalls a man under the conditions of his control order in north London not being allowed to visit Finsbury Park, which was 100 yards away from where he was living. However, he was permitted to go Clissold Park, which was three quarters of a mile away.

Says Kent: “At the same time, in the two hours that he was allowed out at lunchtime, he had to report to a police station in the opposite direction,”

He describes another case in which “a man under a control order was checking into the police station every day as required. On one occasion, he was just grabbed by the police and sent to Long Lartin prison.”

In other cases, suspects were allowed to go to the mosque, but parts of the bus route they wanted to take were ruled outside the area of movement. This meant it was impossible to get there in time for prayers.

At the time that control orders were first imposed, there was also an attempt under the PTA 2005 to increase the pre-charge detention period from 14 days to 90. However, in one of those rare victories for civil liberties, this was rejected in favour of 28 days. This still constituted a doubling of the previous limit and a quadrupling of Roy Jenkins’ previous “draconian” measure.

More recently, Gordon Brown Government’s attempted to demonstrate its anti-terror credentials with an introducing 42 days’ detention with charge. This was overwhelmingly defeated in the House of Lords, but it is unlikely that the House of Commons will let the issue lie indefinitely.

Bruce Kent’s view is: “The problem is that, with control orders, we have had indefinite detention for years. There is a tendency among some campaigners to focus on headline-grabbing issues like 42-day pre-charge detention, while ignoring the iniquity of control orders. It’s a bit like ignoring the elephant in the room.”

The project that began back in November 1974 has come a long way and it is still a work in progress. First, it was the Irish who were the suspect community; now it is the Muslims. In the future, it could be another group and ultimately anyone who dissents. As Gareth Peirce warns: “The continuing experiment is dangerous and insidious in more than one way. It has become very clear that, when one challenge is overcome, the goalposts are moved and a new system comes in.”

The Court of Appeal’s recent decision to uphold the right to impose control orders without the subject knowing what they are charged with is another dangerous step.

De Menezes Murder: Lies Begin to Unravel

eddie — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:31:25 +0000

Explosive testimony has been presented to the inquest into
the police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, suggesting that
he was shot even though he was known to be unarmed.

Evidence was given that the innocent Brazilian was killed despite
his not being clearly identified as a suspected terrorist. In
addition, officers involved have said that they were prepared
to kill de Menezes even without authorisation from commanding
officer Cressida Dick.

Jean Charles was fatally shot two weeks after the July 7 bombings
in London, which killed 56 people and one day after an apparent
failed second attempt to detonate devices. He was reportedly mistaken
for Hussain Osman, one of the failed July 21, 2005, bombers. Anti-terror
officers pinned him to the floor of a London underground train
and pumped seven bullets into his head at point-blank range.

Last week, a Special Branch officer revealed that he altered
his notes because they indicated that police shot dead Jean Charles
as he boarded a train at Stockwell tube station on July 22, 2005,
even though he was known to be unarmed. The officer, referred
to as “Owen,” was giving evidence on October 8.

Owen was deputy surveillance coordinator in the Scotland Yard
control room during the surveillance operation that resulted in
the young electrician’s death and had made notes about the
day’s events on his computer. After he had given his evidence
at the inquest, Owen was asked for all his notes relating to the
shooting.

He claims he logged onto his computer to change the names of
officers into the codenames given by the court to protect their
identities, but then deleted a paragraph in which Dick, who is
now deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,
had told officers to allow Jean Charles to continue his journey
because he was “not carrying anything.”

The full paragraph reads, “Management discussion. CD [Cressida
Dick]: Can run on to tube as not carrying anything. Persuaded
by unidentified male amongst management.”

It flatly contradicts Dick’s own evidence at the inquest
on October 7, the previous day, in which she claimed that she
ordered her officers to “stop” Jean Charles because
he was a “terrorist threat.”

Owen says he deleted the paragraph because it was “misleading.”
He claimed he couldn’t remember if it was Dick talking although
he said it was probably her when questioned further.

“I believe it was the commander but when I reflected I
couldn’t be sure, or whether she was saying this is what
we are going to do or this is one of the options. It was a woman’s
voice.”

When asked if he realised he had committed a serious offence,
Owen said, “I have removed a line I believed was wrong and
gave a totally false impression.” He told the inquest he
had deleted more than he had intended because he was rushing to
an appointment. When asked if “management” had asked
him to make the changes, Owen replied, “No. I am sure of
that, sir.”

Owen also made the startling revelation that he did not submit
the crucial paragraph to the Independent Police Complaints Commission
(IPCC) inquiry in 2006 or the health and safety trial last year
into the shooting, at which he gave evidence, “because he
wasn’t asked to.”

Commander Dick also claimed she was informed “they think
it’s him” when Jean Charles left a building linked to
Hussain Osman and made his way to Stockwell station. Chief Inspector
Vince Esposito, a counter-terrorism expert advising Dick on the
day of the shooting, said he believed, “without a shadow
of doubt,” that Jean Charles was failed bomber Hussain Osman
and that a “critical shot” to the head was only administered
if a suspect was identified and was carrying a device.

However, speaking at the inquest on October 10, “Pat,”
who acted as contact between Scotland Yard and the surveillance
team, reported he had said only that Mr. de Menezes was “possibly
identifiable with” the suspect. “I was always under
the impression that the subject had been unidentified,” he
stated.

Another senior officer, Detective Inspector Merrick Rose, revealed
that he could not “recall” whether images of the real
suspect, Osman, were discussed at a dawn briefing before Jean
Charles’s death—begging the question, was a comparison
between the two men ever made?

Dick denies that her instruction to “stop” Jean Charles
was an order to shoot to kill and that she did not say “at
all costs.”

Mark Lewindon, now retired, was a detective chief inspector
in Special Branch at the time. He had told the inquest he had
overheard the order from Dick when she was speaking in the operations
room at New Scotland Yard. “It was said he shouldn’t
be allowed to get on the train and I think the words she used
were ‘at all costs,’ ” he said.

Dick responded in her defence that “I would need to be
absolutely satisfied that this person posed a dreadful imminent
threat to members of the public before I would order a critical
shot.”

“I was asking for what you might call a conventional—albeit
aware of all the risks—challenge from the firearms officers.”

Subsequent evidence demonstrated that, whether or not Dick
was calling to make operational a shoot-to-kill policy, the police
involved had already been instructed to do just that.

A tactical adviser and senior firearms advisor known as Trojan
84 made the extraordinary admission to the inquest that police
were prepared to take a “critical” shot without

orders from their superiors.

The inspector had been in charge of briefing the marksmen who
shot dead Jean Charles. Giving evidence in open court for the
first time, Trojan 84 said: “We felt that for any DSO [designated
senior officer] to make a decision about a critical shot was a
hugely difficult decision to make and maybe career-threatening.

“In relation to the critical shot, the instruction would
come direct from the DSO but what I also mentioned was that if
we were able to challenge, but the subject was not compliant,
then a shot may be taken.”

When Trojan 84 was asked if officers were prepared to take
the critical shot without authorisation, he replied, “Yes.”

“It was my job to tell the team they would be supported
whatever decision they took because of the structures that were
in place.”

Trojan 84 could only have conceivably issued such instructions
if they had been already laid down at the highest possible level—much
higher than the DSO Cressida Dick.

The shoot-to-kill policy implemented against Jean Charles is
known as “Operation Kratos,” adopted in secret two years
earlier in high-level discussions between top police officers
and the government. Under its remit, a senior police officer is
on standby 24 hours a day at Scotland Yard, the headquarters of
the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), with the authority to deploy
special armed squads to follow and, if deemed necessary, shoot
dead suspected suicide bombers.

It is now clear that, without any clear identification or indication
of an imminent threat, the police were determined that someone
would die that day in furtherance of the so-called “war on
terror.”

Moreover, even the limited safeguard of accountability to a
designated superior officer would not be allowed to interfere
with what was a political and not a security-driven decision.

As the World Socialist Web Site insisted in the immediate
aftermath of police murder, “there was a deliberate decision
to kill, rather than arrest, de Menezes, taken at the highest
level of the police force rather than by the officers immediately
involved.”

Jean Charles was shot in cold blood primarily in order “to
instill fear in the population and implement a shoot-to-kill policy
that had been secretly decided on by Prime Minister Tony Blair
and top officials two years previously.” The treatment meted
out to de Menezes sent out the clear message—first articulated
by Blair—that the “rules of the game” had changed.

Shell 'wins' Iraq gas contract

Ellie Keen — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:35:26 +0000

Oil giant Shell has recently won the Big Oil race to become the first major oil company to gain access to Iraq’s energy sector since the 1970s. With no competitive bidding process, the Dutch-British multinational has ‘won’ a $4bn contract to process and market natural gas with the South Gas Company in Basra.

The deal has been conducted in secret, leaving important information about the terms and authorship unknown. This secrecy has meant the contract was not subject to any public scrutiny or debate. Platform co-director Greg Muttitt surmised that “a country under occupation has introduced an oil policy that is favourable to western oil companies. The [US] State Department has already admitted that it has advisers working on oil policy and there is a likelihood they may have drafted the Shell contract.”

However, attempts to gain control over Iraq’s oil fields have not gone so well. As Corporate Watch reported last year (www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=2912), an oil law permitting de-facto oil privatisation was drafted under pressure from Big Oil, the US and UK governments, their consultants, and the IMF. It was presented to the Iraqi parliament in May 2007 and was expected to pass quickly. However, Iraqi and international opposition to transferring oil sovereignty to multinational oil companies has helped create a climate in which the Iraqi parliament has been able to resist the extreme pressure by US and UK governments and the has not been passed to date. So the big oil companies and governments are busy finding other avenues to the eventual prize of control over Iraq’s vast oil fields.

These avenues include discussing, preparing, and now bidding for contracts such as Risk Service Contracts (RSCs). While usually offering companies less in terms of long-term control over production and revenue than the prized Production Sharing Contracts (PSCs), they can nonetheless be written to be very similar to PSCs. The ‘devil’ is in the detail with these complex agreements, details which have not been disclosed. What is certain is that, if secured, they will represent a radical departure from traditional Iraqi – and indeed international – oil policy.

Risk Service Contracts, for instance, would still put private companies in charge of oil fields that are currently run by the public sector. Even the rejected draft Oil Law prescribed that those oil fields already producing oil would be run by the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC). But this policy was reversed in June 2008 when the government announced that oil companies would be invited to bid for RSC contracts on six fields which collectively produce over 90% of Iraq’s current oil. They also offer far more control and profit to the oil companies than in any other major oil-producing country. They grant INOC a mere 25% stake, paltry in comparison with the average 80% demanded by the Libyan State Oil Company for new exploration contracts, for example, or with Nigeria’s National Petroleum Company, which is regarded as one of OPEC’s members most friendly to western companies, with a 55% stake in onshore projects.

These PSC-lite versions represent a desperate attempt by Big Oil to combat the resistance and to get their foot in the back door to Iraq’s massive oil reserves. At the same time, the US administration is battling to ratify the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in order to maintain the occupation beyond the end of 2008, when the UN Mandate expires. Rumours are circulating in Baghdad that this agreement will also include provisions allowing for the privatisation of the oil fields. While any agreement will not have the detail or the binding force of the Oil Law, the strategy seems to be to prolong the occupation to retain the political dominance to eventually get the privatisation they have been fighting for.

Of course, these attempts need coordination. On 13 October, 2008, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani will meet with representatives of 41 international oil companies in London. This will be the formal launch of a round of bidding for some of Iraq’s largest oil fields, with the aim of signing long-term contracts in June 2009. The Iraqi Oil Ministry claims these deals will be for risk service contracts –€“ in theory, a significant improvement over PSCs. But with such secrecy, it is impossible to know what the Iraqi government is signing away. What we do know is what the US and UK government, and Big Oil want, and the force –€“ enabled by prolonging the occupation –€“ that they will use to get it.

For more details, see Greg Muttitt’s recent articles at:

www.carbonweb.org/showitem.asp?article=332&parent=39, www.niqash.org/content.php?contentTypeID=28&id=2230&lang=0 and www.carbonweb.org/showitem.asp?article=333&parent=9.

Chorus of failure grows ever louder over Afghanistan

Ellie Keen — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 22:04:26 +0000

GIVEN centuries of cross-Channel antipathy, can we believe what a Frenchman has to say on the thoughts of a Briton on progress in the war in Afghanistan? If a coded French diplomatic dispatch obtained by the respected Paris weekly Le Canard enchaine is to be believed, London’s man in Kabul thinks this war is lost.

In the ways of diplomacy, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles might be forgiven for believing his exchange early last month with Francois Fitou, the No.2 at the French Embassy, was strictly entre nous. But Fitou was so alarmed by what he heard, that he reported all its explosive detail to Paris – where it was promptly leaked to the investigative and satirical Le Canard enchaine.

Cutting across the official belief in Washington and London that the war is hard but winnable, Fitou says that Cowper-Coles told him current American strategy “is destined to fail”.

Fitou summarises the Englishman’s assessment: “The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the [Afghan] Government had lost all trust. [The insurgency], while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital.

“The presence – especially the military presence – of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime that would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis.”

Cowper-Coles apparently sees no benefit in boosting allied troops in Afghanistan – it would only increase the sense of an occupation and give the Taliban more targets, Fitou reports. Instead, the British ambassador argues that the only realistic solution is the emergence of “an acceptable dictator”, which would allow Britain to withdraw its troops within five to 10 years.

The report provoked howls in London. But stopping short of a denial, the Foreign Office declined to go into what was the thinking of the British ambassador. Resorting instead to its own sleight of hand, it denied something that Le Canard enchaine had not reported – that the thoughts attributed to Cowper-Coles were the views of the British Government.

The French report coincides with a crisis of confidence among Washington and its allies in Afghanistan, including on-the-record expressions of frustration by British officers after seven years of fighting in the country’s south.

“The perception of the threat from the Taliban continues to outstrip reality,” Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith told The Times last week. “This struggle is more down to the credibility of the Afghan Government rather than the threat from the Taliban.”

Washington has begun a raft of reviews of the conduct of the war amid conflicting assessments of what is required. The most senior levels of the American military are demanding more troops but at the same time they insist that an Iraq-style surge is not the answer.

“The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge’,” the new US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, said in Washington this week. Instead, he spoke of a “sustained commitment” over “many more years” and what ultimately would be a political, not a military solution.

But McKiernan argued that co-opting the Afghan tribes, as the US had done in Iraq after spurning their help for three years, was more a recipe for civil war than it was for peace or stability. “We’re in a very tough fight,” he told reporters. “The idea that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility.”

However, as Washington persists with fighting the war in Afghanistan on the cheap, investing just a fifth of what it spends in Iraq, unflattering comparisons are being made with past conflicts.

Zamir Kabulov, the Russian ambassador to Kabul, has lectured Washington that it is repeating the mistakes made by Moscow during its 1980s occupation of Afghanistan, when it believed that control of Kabul and the provincial centres equated with control of an essentially rural population.

Increasingly, another benchmark is Vietnam. Writing in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the US military analysts Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason started by highlighting that more Americans have died in seven years in Afghanistan than in the first nine years of the Vietnam War.

“More and more the American effort in Afghanistan resembles the Vietnam War – with its emphasis on body counts and air strikes, its cross-border sanctuaries, and its daily tactical victories that never affect the slow and eventual decisive erosion of rural support for the counterinsurgency,” they write.

They, too, see a parallel with Moscow’s Afghanistan adventure. “That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centres. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now.”

They argue America is failing because of its “endemic failure” to engage and protect rural villages and to immunise them against the insurgency.

The cornerstone of the policy – to extend the reach of the Karzai Government – was precisely the wrong strategy in a country and society in which the most important level of governance was local. But allied military contact with remote villagers was rare, typically brief and nearly always limited to daylight hours.

“Re-empowering the village councils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to recreate the traditional check against a powerful political network of rural mullahs, who have been radicalised by the Taliban,” they write. “But the elders will not commit to opposing the Taliban if they and their families are vulnerable to Taliban torture and murder.”

The analysts suggest the deployment of 200 development and security teams in the south and east of the country. Each would have 60 to 70 NATO troops, 30 to 40 Afghan National Army troops and an equal number of logistics and development staff.

The current system of international reconstruction teams was spread far too thinly. Confined to the regional centres, their ratio to the local population was one team per 1 million people and they visited districts only once a month.

The teams proposed by Johnson and Mason would be a permanent international presence at the district level. “State Department and USAID personnel, along with medics, veterinarians, engineers, agricultural experts, hydrologists and so on could live on the local compounds and work in their districts daily, building trust and confidence,” they say.

“As long as the compounds are discretely sited, house Afghan soldiers to provide the most visible security presence and fly the Afghan flag, they need not exacerbate fears of foreign occupation. Instead, they would reinforce the country’s most important, most neglected political units; strengthen the tribal elders; win local support; and reverse the slow slide into strategic failure.”

The Afghanistan debate has always been about balancing the need to fight the Taliban and the other insurgency groups, and to defend the population so they might get on with their lives.

The latter means a radical change in a military-heavy strategy in a part of the world where killing one enemy creates 10 more.

It also requires greater recognition of the warning from General David Richards, who headed NATO forces in Afghanistan until February last year: “If NATO doesn’t succeed in bringing substantial economic development to Afghanistan soon, some 70 per cent of Afghans will shift their loyalty to the Taliban.”

Richards’s warning had less drama than the words attributed to Cowper-Coles – but both men seem to be singing from the same song sheet.

It’s a song about failure.

The Whistleblower who Tried to Prevent the Iraq War

Ellie Keen — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Of course Katharine Gun was free to have a conscience, as long as it didn’t interfere with her work at a British intelligence agency. To the authorities, practically speaking, a conscience was apt to be less tangible than a pixel on a computer screen. But suddenly — one routine morning, while she was scrolling through e-mail at her desk — conscience struck. It changed Katharine Gun’s life, and it changed history.

Despite the nationality of this young Englishwoman, her story is profoundly American — all the more so because it has remained largely hidden from the public in the United States. When Katharine Gun chose, at great personal risk, to reveal an illicit spying operation at the United Nations in which the U.S. government was the senior partner, she brought out of the transatlantic shadows a special relationship that could not stand the light of day.

By then, in early 2003, the president of the United States — with dogged assists from the British prime minister following close behind — had long since become transparently determined to launch an invasion of Iraq. Gun’s moral concerns were not unusual; she shared, with countless other Brits and Americans, strong opposition to the impending launch of war. Yet, thanks to a simple and intricate twist of fate, she abruptly found herself in a rare position to throw a roadblock in the way of the political march to war from Washington and London. Far more extraordinary, though, was her decision to put herself in serious jeopardy on behalf of revealing salient truths to the world.

We might envy such an opportunity, and admire such courage on behalf of principle. But there are good, or at least understandable, reasons why so few whistleblowers emerge from institutions that need conformity and silence to lay flagstones on the path to war. Those reasons have to do with matters of personal safety, financial security, legal jeopardy, social cohesion and default positions of obedience. They help to explain why and how people go along to get along with the warfare state even when it flagrantly rests on foundations of falsehoods.

The e-mailed memorandum from the U.S. National Security Agency that jarred Katharine Gun that fateful morning was dated less than two months before the invasion of Iraq that was to result in thousands of deaths among the occupying troops and hundreds of thousands more among Iraqi people. We’re told that this is a cynical era, but there was nothing cynical about Katharine Gun’s response to the memo that appeared without warning on her desktop. Reasons to shrug it off were plentiful, in keeping with bottomless rationales for prudent inaction. The basis for moral engagement and commensurate action was singular.

The import of the NSA memo was such that it shook the government of Tony Blair and caused uproars on several continents. But for the media in the United States, it was a minor story. For the New York Times, it was no story at all.

At last, a new book tells this story. “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War” packs a powerful wallop. To understand in personal, political and historic terms — what Katharine Gun did, how the British and American governments responded, and what the U.S. news media did and did not report — is to gain a clear-eyed picture of a military-industrial-media complex that plunged ahead with the invasion of Iraq shortly after her brave action of conscience. That complex continues to promote what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.”

In a time when political players and widely esteemed journalists are pleased to posture with affects of great sophistication, Katharine Gun’s response was disarmingly simple. She activated her conscience when clear evidence came into her hands that war — not diplomacy seeking to prevent it — headed the priorities list of top leaders at both 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 10 Downing Street. “At the time,” she has recalled, “all I could think about was that I knew they were trying really hard to legitimize an invasion, and they were willing to use this new intelligence to twist arms, perhaps blackmail delegates, so they could tell the world they had achieved a consensus for war.”

She and her colleagues at the Government Communications Headquarters were, as she later put it, “being asked to participate in an illegal process with the ultimate aim of achieving an invasion in violation of international law.”

The authors of “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War,” Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, describe the scenario this way: “Twisting the arms of the recalcitrant [U.N. Security Council] representatives in order to win approval for a new resolution could supply the universally acceptable rationale.” After Katharine Gun discovered what was afoot, “she attempted to stop a war by destroying its potential trigger mechanism, the required second resolution that would make war legal.”

Instead of mere accusation, the NSA memo provided substantiation. That fact explains why U.S. intelligence agencies firmly stonewalled in response to media inquiries — and it may also help to explain why the U.S. news media gave the story notably short shrift. To a significant degree, the scoop did not reverberate inside the American media echo chamber because it was too sharply telling to blend into the dominant orchestrated themes.

While supplying the ostensible first draft of history, U.S. media filtered out vital information that could refute the claims of Washington’s exalted war planners. “Journalists, too many of them — some quite explicitly — have said that they see their mission as helping the war effort,” an American media critic warned during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. “And if you define your mission that way, you’ll end up suppressing news that might be important, accurate, but maybe isn’t helpful to the war effort.”

Jeff Cohen (a friend and colleague of mine) spoke those words before the story uncorked by Katharine Gun’s leak splashed across British front pages and then scarcely dribbled into American media. He uttered them on the MSNBC television program hosted by Phil Donahue, where he worked as a producer and occasional on-air analyst. Donahue’s prime-time show was cancelled by NBC management three weeks before the invasion — as it happened, on almost the same day that the revelation of the NSA memo became such a big media story in the United Kingdom and such a carefully bypassed one in the United States.

Soon a leaked NBC memo confirmed suspicions that the network had pulled the plug on Donahue’s show in order to obstruct views and information that would go against the rush to war. The network memo said that the Donahue program would present a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” And: “He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” Cancellation of the show averted the danger that it could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Overall, to the editors of American mass media, the actions and revelations of Katharine Gun merited little or no reporting — especially when they mattered most. My search of the comprehensive LexisNexis database found that for nearly three months after her name was first reported in the British media, U.S. news stories mentioning her scarcely existed.

When the prosecution of Katharine Gun finally concluded its journey through the British court system, the authors note, a surge of American news reports on the closing case “had people wondering why they hadn’t heard about the NSA spy operation at the beginning.” This book includes an account of journalistic evasion that is a grim counterpoint to the story of conscience and courage that just might inspire us to activate more of our own.

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This article was adapted from Norman Solomon’s foreword to the new book by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion.”