Richard Norton-Taylor | ukwatch.net

Arms and the Man

Ellie Keen — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:12:54 +0000

The British government was desperate to sell a batch of Eurofighter/Typhoon warplanes to bolster its special relationship with Saudi Arabia – a relationship built on fantastically lucrative arms deals. To justify dropping the investigation into Britain’s biggest arms company and a prominent Saudi prince over allegations of bribery and corruption, Tony Blair cited “national security”, the last refuge of an arrogant, frustrated executive.

Yesterday, Lord Justice Moses, a judge who has more experience than most of Whitehall deception, saw through it. One may have some sympathy with Robert Wardle, the hapless director of the Serious Fraud Office, for surrendering to Blair and Lord Goldsmith, his attorney general, who passed on the extraordinary claims from Downing Street.

These claims were that the heads of MI5 and MI6 feared Saudi Arabia would deprive them of vital intelligence that could save the lives of scores of people on London’s streets if the investigation into BAE Systems and Prince Bandar, went ahead. Indeed, we were told, the Saudis had already privately threatened to do so.

Riyadh has consistently exaggerated the significance of the intelligence it has on terrorist groups. But let us just imagine that it did come up with genuine and credible information about a planned terrorist plot in Britain. Would it really withhold that information? Would any foreign regime, however brutal, do that?

In a devastating passage in their long judgment, Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan, say:

“No one suggested to those uttering the threat that it was futile, that the United Kingdom’s system of democracy forbad presure being exerted on an independent prosecutor whether by the domestic executive or by anyone else; no-one even hinted that the courts would strive to protect the rule of law…

“If, as we are asked to accept, the Saudis would not be interested in our internal domestic constitutional arrangements, it is plausible they would understand the enormity of the interference with the United Kingdom’s sovereignty, when a foreign power seeks to interfere with the iternal adminstration of the criminal law”.

Driving the point home, they continue: “It is not difficult to imagine what they would think if we attempted to interfere with their criminal justice system”. There is no fear of that. The British government did not interfere when its citizens were tortured when wrongly accused of bomb attacks. The furthest the UK government goes is to allude in annual Foreign Office human rights reports to Saudi practices of torture and beheadings.

With characterstic wit and irony, Moses concludes the judgment by referring to Blair’s claim when the then-PM announced that the Serious Fraud Office had dropped the investigation. The judges note that Blair had said “this was the clearest intervention in the public interest he had seen”. They add: “We agree”.

Blair set the pattern, and ministers have since demonstrated they are prepared to play fast and loose with torture, whether it is colluding with the US practice of rendition or deporting suspects to such places as Jordan and Libya. On Wednesday, the courts stopped the deportation of the Jordanian, Abu Qatada, and two Libyans, regarded as threats to Britain’s national security.

This case has all the exotic ingredients – arms deals, alleged corruption, and claims that our national security is at stake. Ministers are now hatching a plot to introduce a law whereby the courts will not be able to intervene whenever the attorney general hoists the flag of “national security”. I wonder what Moses and his peers will think of that.

Misplaced Trust

Tim Holmes — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 20:49:33 +0000

On the eve of the parliamentary recess, Downing Street released a report in which parliament’s intelligence and security committee delivered a stinging attack on MI5 and MI6 for being “slow to appreciate” the CIA’s treatment of those it suspected had some connection with al-Qaida and terrorism.

Paul Murphy, the former Northern Ireland secretary and the committee’s chairman, sent the report on rendition – the US practice of secretly flying suspects to places where they were likely to be tortured – to Downing Street on June 28. It was released almost a month later, on July 25, a day when Gordon Brown announced new counter-terrorism initiatives amid a host of other measures, including the government’s agreement to a US request for the American eavesdropping base and satellite ground station at Menwith Hill in north Yorkshire to be used as part of the Pentagon’s missile defence project.

You can see why the government might have wanted to slip out the committee’s report in the hope that no one would notice.

We have known, and frequently reported, how MI5 passed information to the Americans on two British residents – Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi, and Jamil el-Banna, from Jordan – as they flew to the Gambia in 2002. They were both seized by the US. Mr Rawi was released from Guantánamo in March, after evidence emerged in a British court that he helped MI5 monitor Abu Qatada, the radical cleric. Mr Banna is still held in the US base on Cuba. Even though the US has said he can leave, the British government now appears to regard him as a security risk.

The intelligence and security committee said MI5 was “indirectly and inadvertently” involved in the rendition of the two men by passing on the information, which included claims about their Islamist sympathies. The case showed a “lack of regard on the part of the US for UK concerns – despite strong protests – and that has serious implications for the intelligence relationship,” the committee said. The committee also revealed that ministers approved a plan by MI6 to pass intelligence to the CIA, enabling it to snatch Osama bin Laden in 1998 and again in 1999.

MI6 believed they were close to finding the al-Qaida leader in his hiding place in Afghanistan in 1998, and again the following year. The plan was for MI6 to hand the CIA vital information about Bin Laden. Ministers, including Robin Cook, then foreign secretary, approved the plan – but only on condition that the CIA promised he would be treated humanely.

In the event, the CIA never gave the assurances. They were never asked for them, because MI6 did not come up with intelligence that was good enough for the Americans to act on.

But what is startling about the committee’s revelation is that Britain’s security and intelligence agencies knew that ministers were concerned about US treatment of detainees, even under President Clinton. Though this was in 1998 and 1999 – before the September 11 attacks on the US – Bin Laden had already issued a declaration urging Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world and was suspected of being the attacks on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

Yet, according to the committee’s report, when President Bush had succeeded Clinton and made it quite clear that terrorist suspects would be liable to even harsher treatment – treatment that would be illegal in Britain – these same agencies did not appreciate what the CIA might do to Mr Rawi and Mr Banna when they passed on information on the two British residents which was open to wild misinterpretation. A gift, indeed, for the CIA, then in no mood to ask any questions.

Memo to Mendacity

Alex Doherty — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:29:00 +0000

The full extent of Tony Blair’s mendacity over the invasion of Iraq has been emphatically revealed in classified Downing Street documents leaked since the invasion. They make up a devastating indictment of the way we were led into an adventure with the US whose bloody consequences show no sign of relenting.

One of the crucial documents is known as the Downing Street Memo. It consists of the minutes of a meeting chaired by Blair on July 23 2002, when ministers were being warned by their officials and the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, that an invasion to topple Saddam would be unlawful. The minutes reveal that Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, reporting on his talks in Washington, warned that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”. In a phrase with added resonance in the light of yesterday’s bloodshed in Baghdad, he said: “There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” The minutes also reveal that Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, warned that the case for military action against Iraq was “thin”.

This document saw the light of day only because it was leaked. Lord Butler told the Guardian yesterday that it was seen by his committee, set up to investigate the use and abuse of intelligence in the build-up to the invasion. He said his report did not refer to its explosive contents on the grounds that they related to US use of intelligence, which was outside his terms of reference. The explanation exposes as a sham Blair’s citing of Butler as a reason why there is no need for any further investigation into the war.

Other leaked documents, which we can assume were also seen by the Butler committee, include a letter in March 2002 from David Manning, then Blair’s foreign policy adviser. He told Blair that he said to Condoleezza Rice: “You would not budge in your support for regime change [an objective Blair was advised was unlawful] but you had to manage a press, a parliament, and a public opinion which is very different than anything in the States”. A few days later, Sir Christopher Meyer, our ambassador in Washington at the time, told Manning of the need to “wrongfoot Saddam on the [UN] inspectors”. The documents are used as a vehicle in my new play, Called to Account, which tests the evidence of the grounds for an indictment of Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq.

One of the witnesses is Michael Mates, veteran Conservative MP and member of the Butler committee, who neatly sidesteps the issues when questioned as a witness. Sir Michael Quinlan, a former top Ministry of Defence official who was also questioned for the play, provided a clue. He said Butler’s committee was of “diverse composition, including someone who had been a member of Mr Blair’s cabinet” – a reference to Ann Taylor, former leader of the Commons. “There might indeed have been members of the committee who would have liked to have said some things more strongly.”

Butler hinted at his continuing concerns in a largely unremarked debate in the Lords in February. Blair, he said, “had a problem. He had the clearest legal advice that military intervention solely for the purpose of regime change could not be justified in international law. The only justification for military intervention was to enforce the security council resolutions at the end of the first Gulf war prohibiting Iraq’s possession or acquisition of weapons of mass destruction … [But] neither the UK nor the US had the intelligence that proved conclusively that Iraq had those weapons. The prime minister was disingenuous about that.”

Blair, and his closest ministers and advisers, still have a lot to answer for. “There are further lessons to be learned from our experience of the war,” Butler told the Lords. He should know.

Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian’s security affairs editor and the editor of Called to Account, which opens at the Tricyle Theatre in London today.

richard.norton-taylor@guardian.co.uk

For Their Eyes Only

Tim Holmes — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 22:33:39 +0000

Two men are to be tried behind closed doors in an Old Bailey courtroom in a move that will stop the public finding out whether George Bush proposed what would have been a war crime and how Tony Blair reacted. The evidence the government does not want us to hear is in an official record of a meeting in Washington in April 2004, when the situation in Iraq was deteriorating fast. The memo, it has been reported, refers to Bush’s alleged proposal to bomb the Arabic TV channel al-Jazeera, and is said to reveal how far Blair went in criticising US military tactics in Iraq at a time when troops were bombarding Falluja.

David Keogh, a former civil servant, is charged with unlawfully disclosing the memo. Leo O’Connor, a former Labour researcher, is charged with disclosing a classified document. The way the government went about demanding a private trial, and the arguments used by the judge to allow it, are deeply disturbing.

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Blair’s foreign-policy adviser, who was present at the Washington meeting, told government lawyers that the disclosure of the memo “could have a serious impact upon the international relations” of the UK, and was likely to have damaged the “promotion or protection” of British interests, including those of British citizens in Iraq.

Sheinwald signed a certificate necessary to persuade the judge that the trial should be held in secret before Keogh and O’Connor were charged at the end of last year. We now know that, soon after the men were charged, government prosecutors requested an adjournment of the pre-trial hearings until April 2006. They said they needed a certificate from the foreign secretary. Two weeks later Margaret Beckett replaced Jack Straw. In June she signed the required certificate. The government has not explained why Straw failed to sign one when he was foreign secretary.

Beckett claims that the disclosure of the memo would be as harmful now as when it was first drawn up: disclosure would have a “serious negative impact on UK/US diplomatic relations. The ultimate consequence … would be a substantial risk of harm to national security.” Beckett continues: “My assessment is that this risk is of such magnitude to outweigh the interest of open public justice.”

In his little-noticed ruling the judge, Mr Justice Aikens, elaborates on these claims. The contents of the memo would be read “throughout the world”, he warns – a prospect, it seems, too awful to contemplate. There would be “different views on the implications of what was stated” in the memo. “It is reasonable to conclude,” he warns, that some individuals, parts of the media, and “even some states”, might react “very unfavourably” to the memo’s contents. This might be “for no other reason than the topic under discussion was US/UK policy concerning the state of Iraq at a delicate time”. And he comes with a trump card. He says: “It is also legitimate, in my view, for the court to bear in mind the ever-present threat to national safety which is posed by the possibility of terrorist acts by extremists in the UK.”

Not content with hoisting the flag of the terror threat, the judge says that, had he not agreed to a private trial, the government might have dropped the case and in future would be reluctant to prosecute at all in “this type of case”.

At a time when David Blunkett makes money by revealing cabinet discussions, we are prevented from hearing evidence against defendants in a criminal trial simply, say some who have read the memo, to protect ministers from embarrassment. It is a genuine scandal. It is even more so given Blunkett’s suggestion on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme last night that the US bombing of al-Jazeera would have been justified at the time of the invasion in 2003.

· Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian’s security affairs editor.

richard.norton-taylor@guardian.co.uk

Use and Abuse of Intelligence

Alex Doherty — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 10:44:03 +0000

If ministers and MPs cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that the invasion of Iraq has increased the threat from terrorism, then let others do so. We can begin with senior officials responsible for protecting our national security and Britain’s interests abroad.
On February 10 2003, a month before the onslaught on Iraq, Whitehall’s joint intelligence committee told Tony Blair that “al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq”. It added that the collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare agents or technology finding their way into the hands of terrorists.

Yesterday the Royal Institute of International Affairs published a paper co-written by Paul Wilkinson, a professor at the University of St Andrews. He is no radical polemicist, rather an epitome of conventional wisdom.
“The UK is at particular risk,” warns the paper, “because it is the closest ally of the United States” and joined US-led military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. It says a key problem facing the government is that it “has been conducting counter- terrorism policy ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the US, not in the sense of being an equal decision-maker, but rather as a pillion passenger compelled to leave the steering to the ally in the driving seat”.

Iraq has imposed particular difficulties for Britain, the authors continue, since “it gave a boost to the al-Qaida network’s propaganda, recruitment and fundraising, caused a major split in the coalition, provided an ideal targeting and training area for al-Qaida-linked terrorists, and deflected resources and assistance that could have been deployed to assist the Karzai government and to bring Bin Laden to justice”.

Al-Qaida is now as much of a concept as an organisation or network. It blossomed in Afghanistan, and the US soon became a target, partly because of its military presence in the Middle East. Al-Qaida would have continued out there anyway, on videos and websites. But Iraq has helped to spread its influence and encourage young Muslims. MI5 is already concerned about the number who might come, or return, to Britain armed with new bomb-making skills.

In what sounds like a perverse justification of the invasion, Blair and Bush say Iraq has become a magnet for terrorists. Britain and the US must ensure the insurgents and foreign fighters are defeated and not allowed a victory in the “war on terror” – a phrase that makes security and intelligence agencies and military commanders cringe, for it suggests that the fight against terrorism can be won by force of arms. It is the causes, they say, that matter. And these include the government’s foreign policy.

The security and intelligence agencies, along with most among the senior ranks of Whitehall, opposed the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it could not be justified. They knew the Bush administration was not telling the truth when it claimed there was a link between al-Qaida and Baghdad. Officials who expressed concern about the claims were slapped down by Foreign Office diplomats – though they also, privately, opposed the war – because of the damage such honesty might do to US-UK relations.

If Whitehall opposed the war, it was horrified at Washington’s failure to consider the consequences and its dismissal of British suggestions.

The security and intelligence agencies had their own specific concerns: Britain’s alliance with the US did not help their attempts to recruit agents or informants where they most needed them, in the mosques and the souks. They were angry at the way the Pentagon paraded pictures of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

“Intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, told a meeting chaired by Blair on July 23 2002, the minutes of which were leaked to the Sunday Times and are now making waves on websites in the US (but not here).

At the meeting, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, described the case for military action as “thin”, and the attorney general warned that the “desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action”.

Another secret Whitehall memo, also leaked, was drawn up for ministers on July 21 2002, eight months before the invasion. It urged them to prepare the “conditions”, not for the reconstruction of a post-Saddam Iraq or to prevent an unsurgency, but to con the British people.

The memo spoke of the need to “create the conditions necessary to justify military action”. It noted that when Blair discussed Iraq with Bush at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, the previous April, “he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion … “

The memo emphasised: “It is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action … Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein”.

The Iraqi weapons dossier was the result. MI6, responsible for gathering secret intelligence, has still not recovered from Blair’s disastrous handling of that exercise. There are many in Whitehall who believe that the public will forever treat “intelligence” with dangerous cynicism. They are telling ministers to read the first chapter of Lord Butler’s report on the use of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programme. Intelligence, it says, “can be a dangerous tool if its limitations are not recognised by those who seek to use it … “

The limitations of intelligence were amply demonstrated in London on July 7. The security and intelligence agencies have said they will learn lessons. Is it too much to hope that Blair and his foreign policy makers will too?