MI5 | 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.

The shame of British complicity

Ellie Keen — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:32:18 +0000

The judgment given by the high court yesterday in the case of Binyam Mohamed opens up the real prospect that the international law and rule of law transgressions of the “war on terror” will unravel in British courts. Never before has so much been disclosed of the real extent of the British government’s complicity even though much of the hearing was in closed sessions using special advocates and the only judgment we have access to is the “open” one.

Binyam Mohamed is the only British resident left in Guantánamo Bay. Although all the other residents have been returned the US has refused to bring him back to the UK on the grounds that he is to be put on trial before a military commission which could impose the death penalty.

Clive Stafford Smith, Binyam’s lawyer asked the UK government to disclose information in its possession which could help prove that he had been the subject of extraordinary rendition to Pakistan and then Morocco and had been tortured at the behest of the US on the basis that this might then persuade the US convening authority in charge of the military commissions to withdraw the charges against him. The court found that such information should be disclosed but has given the foreign secretary, David Milliband, further time to consider the security implications.

The information in British possession came about because of the involvement of the British security services in Binyam’s murky story. They were involved in the questioning of Binyam in Pakistan when he was detained unlawfully incommunicado and without access to a lawyer from May to September 2002. Witness B from the security services who gave evidence in secret at the hearing and at one point refused to answer questions because of possible self-incrimination of war crimes not only worked with the US on the questioning but told Binyam that he would not help him unless he cooperated fully with the US.

In the event the help he promised did not materialise and after September 2002, when Binyam reports being rendered to Morocco, the British security services continued to “facilitate interviews by the United States authorities … when also they knew BM was still incommunicado and when they must also have appreciated that he was not in a United States facility and that the facility in which he was being detained and questioned was that of a foreign government.”

Binyam alleges that his torture in Morocco included his penis being cut with a scalpel. Although the judgment makes no finding on this it contains pointed observations about the failure of the US to respond to the torture allegations calling its position “untenable”

The judgment makes a clear finding of complicity:

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

It is this which now really puts the cat among the pigeons. During the war on terror both MI5 and MI6 have flown around the world giving assistance to the US by providing information and conducting interviews with detainees known to them. They are known to have questioned people detained by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay and are believed to have assisted in renditions such as that of Jamil el Banna and Bisher Al-Rawi from the Gambia to Afghanistan and then Guantánamo.

The full extent of British “facilitation” has not yet come out but this action could be the tip of an iceberg. Did the British allow Diego Garcia to be used as a secret prison? Does our government or security services know of other secret prisons or arrangements with foreign governments? My firm is among others in bringing claims for damages and crucially a demand for a public inquiry by ex-Guantánamo detainees against the British government and security services for British collusion in the human rights abuses they suffered.

But really we should not now have to wait for the courts to pronounce on these matters. The last time we heard the words “ethical foreign policy” was years ago in the time of the late Robin Cook but they could have reappeared in the recent article by David Miliband.

Instead of waiting for more shaming disclosures of the same kind as in this judgment the government could make a real break with the moral equivalence of the Blair government by setting up a public inquiry and devising a new code for the security services to ensure they never “facilitate” torture and abuse again. If they do not do so it is increasingly clear that the UK courts will stand up to the executive on such fundamental government wrongdoing.

Louise Christian of Christian Khan solicitors acted for some of the detainees released from Guantánamo Bay

The end of the world is nigh. Maybe…

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:12:09 +0000

As speculation mounts as to whether the Israelis will be given the green light to bomb Iran later this year, so too do the number of articles warning of how the cunning Iranians are just playing for time and are running rings round the clueless European powers.

Now I have no idea whether the Iranians are being entirely candid when they say their nuclear programme is for civilian purposes only or whether they in fact intend to follow in the footsteps of the Israelis who are the possessors of the only actual nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I would have thought it would be in everyone’s interest for the whole of the Middle East (and indeed, the whole world) to be a nuclear weapon-free zone. The one thing I do know, however, is that over the years a number of our UK-based newspapers have been more than willing to play up the threat of alleged Iranian weapons while downplaying the danger of the very real Israeli ones.

One journalist who writes regularly on the theme of Iran’s presumed quest for nuclear weapons is Con Coughlin, a senior executive in the Telegraph group. Just last week he wrote a piece for the Daily Telegraph headlined Iran has resumed A-bomb project, says west.

A look at the sources he listed in his story and many of his other similar stories about Iran only turned up assorted unnamed “officials” and western “defence experts”.

In September 2003, in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion and just a few months after Bush’s “mission accomplished”, speech, a news story by the very same Con Coughlin was telling us:

Iran is not only working hard to develop an atom bomb, but, left to its own devices, could achieve its stated goal of acquiring a nuclear arsenal within two years.

Get that? “Within two years”. And acquiring nuclear weapons was a “stated goal” of the Iranians. That was in 2003. Again, the sources were listed as “weapons experts” and once again they were unnamed.

Just over a year later, another alarming story from Coughlin was headlined Five N-bombs within Iran’s grasp as West prevaricates.

How long “within grasp” actually meant in real terms was this time left unsaid, but presumably it must have been very, very close indeed if Coughlin’s previous story from 2003 was correct. The implication was clearly that the west should stop pussyfooting around and … well, I think you can work the rest out yourselves.

In January 2006, Coughlin informed us of a revised timescale. Now we were told that Iran “Could go nuclear within three years“. This is what his sources had to say:

Intelligence sources say Iran will begin feeding converted uranium into 164 centrifuges at Natanz this week. That could enable it to create enriched uranium of sufficient quality for nuclear weapons production within three years. Previous estimates of the minimum time required had ranged from five to 10 years.

The “intelligence sources” must obviously have overlooked reading Coughlin’s own news reports.

And in January 2007, Coughlin reported about growing cooperation between Iran and North Korea in the field of nuclear weaponry and he kindly provided us with yet another frightening timescale:

Intelligence estimates vary about how long it could take Teheran to produce a nuclear warhead. But defence officials monitoring the growing cooperation between North Korea and Iran believe the Iranians could be in a position to test-fire a low-grade device — less than half a kiloton — within 12 months.

Within 12 months. And that particular story was written 18 months ago. You do the maths.

I recall that Con Coughlin been writing these kinds of stories about Iran since at least the early 1990s – but I couldn’t find the earlier stories archived on the Telegraph’s website.

Just who are his sources and how credible are they? As ordinary readers of a newspaper we normally have no real way of knowing. But Nick Davies’ excellent book, Flat Earth News, contains a revealing passage about Coughlin and the close ties he has cultivated over the years with MI6.

Back in 2002, the Sunday Telegraph settled an action brought by Saif al-Islam Gadafy, the son of the Libyan leader, over a 1995 story in which they had accused him of being involved in a huge Middle Eastern currency sting. The Sunday Telegraph admitted that allegations they had printed about Saif al-Islam were untrue. The author of that original article was – you guessed – none other than Con Coughlin, and we are told in Flat Earth News that Coughlin had in fact obtained his story from sources in MI6.

So how can we go about holding our own spooks to account for their mischief-making? Remember the depressing example of Sir John Scarlett, who for his sins in the notorious sexed-up Iraq dossier affair was punished by being… er… promoted to become head of MI6.

Well, that’ll teach them, eh?

MI5 Accused of Colluding in Torture of Terrorist Suspects

Ellie Keen — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:42:26 +0000

Officers of the Security Service, MI5, are being accused of “outsourcing” the torture of British citizens to a notorious Pakistani intelligence agency in an attempt to obtain information about terrorist plots and to secure convictions against al-Qaida suspects.

A number of British terrorism suspects who have been arrested in Pakistan at the request of UK authorities say their interrogation by Security Service officers, shortly after brutal torture at the hands of agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), has convinced them that MI5 colluded in the mistreatment.

Those men have given detailed accounts of their alleged ordeals at the hands of the ISI over the last four years. Some of them appear to have been taken to the same secret interrogation centre in Rawalpindi, where they say they were repeatedly tortured before being questioned by MI5.

Tayab Ali, a London-based lawyer for two of the men, said: “I am left with no doubt that, at the very worst, the British Security Service instigates the illegal detention and torture of British citizens, and at the very best turns a blind eye to torture.”

One man from Manchester says that in 2006 he was beaten, whipped, deprived of sleep and had three fingernails slowly extracted by ISI agents at the Rawalpindi centre before being interrogated by two MI5 officers. A number of his alleged associates were questioned in Manchester at the same time and two were subsequently charged. This man’s lawyers say his fingernails were missing when they were eventually allowed to see him, more than a year after he was first detained. They say they have pathology reports that prove the nails were forcibly removed.

A second man, from Luton, Bedfordshire, alleges that two years earlier he was whipped, suspended by his wrists and beaten, and threatened with an electric drill, possibly at the same torture centre. His interrogation was coordinated with the questioning of several associates at Paddington Green police station, west London, and the questioning of a further suspect in Canada.

MI5 does not dispute questioning him several times during his 10 months’ detention in Pakistan. At his trial, the judge accepted he had been mistreated but said he believed the claims were exaggerated.

No attempt was made to extradite either man to be questioned by police officers in the UK, and they received no assistance from British consular officials. They were eventually arrested on arrival in Britain after being placed aboard aircraft and flown in without extradition hearings.

The accusation that MI5 is at the very least turning a blind eye to the torture of British citizens – and may have actually colluded in their torture – is to surface in a number of forthcoming court cases, including the trial of the man who lost his fingernails, an appeal lodged by the man from Luton after he was convicted of terrorism offences, and a separate civil action being pursued on his behalf.

MI5 is thought to be considering a defence based on its officers’ insistence that they had no reason to know that the ISI might have been torturing the men – a position that Pakistani lawyers and human rights activists in Pakistan and the UK say beggars belief. Even a high-ranking Scotland Yard counter-terrorism detective has conceded privately that there is little doubt that the Luton man was tortured.

The Guardian is aware of claims by a number of other British citizens that they were tortured after being detained as terrorism suspects in Pakistan.

The allegations being made by these men and their lawyers, which are detailed in today’s Guardian, are expected to be raised by human rights groups. Andrew Tyrie, Conservative MP for Chichester and a campaigner against the abuse of the human rights of terrorism suspects, is considering asking a series of questions about the matter in the Commons.

Under the Criminal Justice Act 1988 it is an offence for British officials to instigate or consent to the inflicting of “severe pain or suffering” on any person, anywhere in the world, or even to acquiesce in such treatment. Any such offence could be punished by life imprisonment.

Last week it was disclosed that eight men freed from US custody at Guantánamo Bay had issued writs against MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, alleging they were complicit in their illegal detention and subsequent abuse.

The Security Service declined to comment on the allegations, but pointed to recent reports by the all-party Intelligence and Security Committee, which said all MI5 officers receive training about possible mistreatment of detainees held by foreign intelligence agencies.

The Foreign Office said it was aware of five British citizens being detained in Pakistan over the last four years for questioning about alleged terrorism offences, but would not say how many were detained before 2004. It admitted it had attempted to seek consular access to only two of these people, but declined to say how many had been seen by other British officials.

The FO also declined to say how many had complained of mistreatment, saying: “We have a duty to respect the privacy of the individuals concerned.”

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.