Inayat Bunglawala | ukwatch.net

Blair has no right to lecture on the rule of law

JamieSW — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:17:16 +0000

Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, has been lecturing Russia on the need to respect Ukrainian and Georgian sovereignty. He doesn’t seem to realise how incongruous this sounds to much of the world, given Britain’s own disregard of international law.

In a similar vein, our former prime minister, Tony Blair, also caused wry smiles earlier this month when he visited Malaysia to give the Universiti Malaya’s 22nd Sultan Azlan Shah lecture on Upholding the Rule of Law: A Reflection.

Blair argued that this means “rules and procedures that are transparent, and rules of evidence that make sense and are fair. These basic principles apply universally and without them, the rule of law means little or nothing.”

As you can imagine, the topic Blair sought to address was a source of both amusement and disbelief among the Malaysians.

This is what the vice-chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, had to say: “It is quite obvious from casual observation that someone who has been known to have misled others, including the country’s parliament, has lost the moral authority to preach about the rule of law and good governance … One wonders then what ‘basic principles’ Blair had in mind when he gave an almost unconditional support for the unilateral decision to invade Iraq against the wishes of the international community and without the approval of the UN … Indeed, as late as April 2006, when an eminent British former law lord attacked Guantanamo Bay as ‘a stain on American justice’, Blair reportedly refused to follow suit. According to Lord Steyn, who just retired from Britain’s highest court: ‘While our government condones Guantanamo Bay, the world is perplexed about our approach to the rule of law. You may ask: how will it help in regard to the continuing outrage at Guantanamo Bay for our government now to condemn it. The answer is that it would at last be a powerful signal to the world that Britain supports the international rule of law.’”

The former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, was characteristically blunt: “It is disgusting to see this criminal of the highest order being welcomed in Malaysia and worse still to talk on the rule of law when he broke all international laws and the laws of his own country by deliberately lying and sending young British soldiers to die in a war of aggression.”

Mahathir added that: “Saddam has been hanged, Karadzic was recently arrested, but this man goes around the world, lecturing on the rule of law.”

Roger Tan, a member of the Malaysian Bar Council, asked if, “by supporting and participating in the 2003 United States-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, I wonder whether Britain, being the world’s oldest democracy, still possesses moral authority in a comity of nations to lecture on the principle of rule of law.”

I visited the official Tony Blair website to read his own account of what had transpired in Malaysia. Unfortunately, I could find no mention made of the trip.

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?

The BBC, Mel P and Me

Alex Doherty — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 00:35:35 +0000

Pity the BBC. Our national broadcaster regularly faces stern criticism for its news coverage of the Middle East from pro-Israeli and (in a much more disorganised manner) pro-Palestinian groups, but with the latest crisis in Lebanon, the corporation finds itself under unusually heavy fire.

Some Jewish commentators, including Melanie Phillips" (“The BBC in particular has turned into the Beirut Broadcasting Corporation …The BBC has now become one of the most potent weapons of the enemies of civilisation”) and Stephen Pollard (“The BBC’s Blatant Bias”) evidently believe that the BBC is reporting the news from the Middle East unfairly.

Others, however, including the BBC’s former Middle East correspondent for 10 years Tim Llewellyn, have long argued that, on the contrary, the BBC’s news editors – along with those of other British broadcasters – have actually been cowed by pressure from partisan supporters of Israel. He wrote, in the Observer of June 20 2004:

A former news agency bureau chief, based in Jerusalem, sums it up: “[British TV] cover the day-to-day action but not the human inequities, the essential imbalances of the occupation, the humiliations of the Palestinians.” He also quotes a BBC journalist, who tells him TV centre does not want ‘explainers … it’s all bang-bang stuff’... The reasons for this tentative, unbalanced attitude to the central Middle East story are powerful. BBC news management is by turns schmoozed and pestered by the Israeli embassy. The pressure by this hyperactive, skilful mission and by Israel’s many influential and well-organised friends is unremitting and productive, especially now that accusations of anti-semitism can be so wildly deployed.

But how much of this criticism is actually justified and how does the BBC compare with other news outlets in the UK?

In their 2004 book Bad News from Israel , Professor Greg Philo and Dr Mike Berry of the Glasgow University Media Group published the findings of their independent study into the broadcast coverage of the Middle East on the main UK terrestrial channels.

According to the authors, television news is the main source of information on the Israel-Palestine conflict for about 80% of the population. Their research found that on British television, particularly on BBC1, there was a preponderance of official “Israeli perspectives”. Israelis were interviewed or reported more than twice as much as Palestinians. Many statements were also broadcast from US politicians who tended strongly to support Israel.

The most important of the omissions the authors found was the almost total lack of context and history in the reporting. Scant effort was made to provide information about the motives or rationale behind the actions of either side. The research revealed that television viewers were largely unaware of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict and were therefore confused by what they were told and what they saw in nightly reports. There were substantial gaps in knowledge, with few showing any awareness of the 1967 occupation let alone the 1948 founding of the Israeli state on Palestinian lands. Some viewers told the researchers they saw the conflict as a border dispute between two countries rather than the consequence of a modern regional superpower having dispossessed much of an indigenous population and continued to annex more Palestinian territory ever since.

According to Philo and Berry, only Channel 4 News made a consistently serious attempt to deliver the news from the Middle East in a balanced manner.

Last year, almost 12 months after the publication of Bad News from Israel, the BBC governors commissioned a distinguished independent panel to report on whether its Israel-Palestine coverage was fair or not.

Along with representatives from various Muslim and Jewish organisations, as well as others, I was invited to give evidence before the panel in January 2006. The brief written submission from the Muslim Council of Britain, which I prepared, can be read here.

The panel’s final report , published in April 2006, stated that it did not find any intentional bias at the BBC. However, it did issue a number of recommendations, the first of which – perhaps in a nod to Philo, Berry and Llewellyn, stated:

We want the BBC to provide more consistently a full and fair account, and to fill in the gaps, most obviously in respect of context and history. We say, too, that TV should look for the important stories and not be dazzled by striking, and available, pictures.

Personally, I believe the BBC’s coverage has begun to show signs of improvement, especially with the newish appointment of Jeremy Bowen as its Middle East editor. Bowen has first-hand experience of the dangers in the region. And it now seems a darn sight more balanced than the coverage I have seen to date on Sky News. (though Mel P does not seem to agree with me, saying Sky News is “far more even-handed”.)

I would welcome your thoughts on this admittedly rather emotive topic. And I haven’t even mentioned the UK print media.

Please see the original version of this article if you wish to contribute.