Drowned out by all the kerfuffle over the chaos caused to flight plans across the world, the motive for the abortive attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has received little attention. The issues over tighter airport security, the detection of the colourless crystals of PETN (pentaerythritol trinitrate), the US procedures for moving suspects from a general watchlist of half a million people to a no-fly status, and the failure of the US authorities to react even when alerted by his father to his son’s extremist behaviour are all understandably being pursued in depth. But the most important question remains why the privileged son of a wealthy banker who is one of Nigeria’s most respected businessmen should want to kill 278 people along with himself. It is not enough to write it off as crazed indoctrination by Al Qaeda madmen. While what he sought to do is absolutely horrendous, he himself made clear he was driven by seething anger over the occupation and killings in Afghanistan, and while that continues, there will certainly be no let-up in attacks such as this one, especially against planes.
Yesterday’s acquittal of 3 men from Bangladesh and Pakistan on charges of being involved in the 7July 2005 bombings in London will have two dramatic consequences. It will allow the publication next month of a devastating report by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) which reveals how MI5 and the West Yorkshire police failed to follow up leads which could probably have prevented the suicide bombings. It shows that, contrary to the line put out initially by MI5 that these were ‘clean skins’ about whom nothing was previously known, in fact the security services knew a great deal about two of the bombers, whom they had extensively photographed and bugged. They also knew that these two bombers had attended training camps in Pakistan, but dropped them from surveillance when they returned to the UK. The report also shows the extraordinary incompetence of MI5 when its Director-General, Manningham-Buller, actually assured MPs only 24 hours before the bombings that there was no imminent threat to London. And even the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Met has openly recognised that a public explanation needs to be given why MI5 monitoring of the bombers was dropped when it could well have prevented the killing of 52 innocent victims. But there are still other critical revelations which should now be opened up.
It is ironic that on the very day that the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, launched the Government’s long-awaited new counter-terrorism strategy urging engagement and dialogue with the Muslim community, the Communities Secretary, one Hazel Blears, chose that very moment to break off relations with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). MCB is an umbrella body representing hundreds of mosques and community organisations which was set up in the late 1990s by the then Home Secretary with the support of the Conservatives. The net effect of the two juxtaposed announcements makes it yet again appear to Muslims that the Government may be beaming one message, but its actions indicate a very different message. But even leaving that aside, that is still not the main problem with the new policy.
The growing evidence that MI5 was involved in the torture of British citizens in the Middle East and elsewhere raises several disturbing issues. It isn’t just the relevations of the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, abhorrent though they are, it’s the light cast on the murky interface between the security services and the British Establishment and, even more broadly, on the power structure that prevails and the morality of the society in Britain today.
Gordon Brown wants to reassure Bush at the Mansion House tonight that the ‘special relationship’ still lies at the heart of UK foreign policy. After a teeny-weeny bit of independence in beginning to withdraw British troops from Iraq, we have to genuflect again. The real question we should be asking is: are we seeking a closer relationship because we believe that US policies are broadly right or simply because that is where the power is?
There is of course no special relationship, almost by definition, since the essential tenet of the neo-con philosophy is unilateralism, Might is Right, and self-interest overrides everything whatever their ‘friends’ may say. We are no more likely to carry influence if we play the deferential courtier than if we play the critical friend. As we found out painfully throughout the Blair years, playing to the American tune unremittingly on every occasion gained not a singly demonstrable concession.
So are American policies right? Of course there is a considerable US-European consensus across a broad spectrum of policy which nobody seriously doubts. But there are some very important areas of discord where we have a responsibility to make our voice heard.
Iraq is a prime example, though far from the only one. It is becoming clear that the US intend a permanent military presence in Iraq as long as Saudi, Iraqi and Iranian oil lasts, amounting in total to more than half global oil reserves. For this purpose the US is strong-arming an oil law through the Iraqi Government which is virtually expropriating all future Iraqi oil revenues which on some official US estimates could reach the stupendous level of £30 trillions, 12 times the UK GNP! The Americans are now building five colossal military bases across Iraq to enforce their will. We should be telling them this is a recipe for an endless insurgency which is not only flagrantly illegal, but an unwinnable quagmire which can only erode the West’s position to the benefit of Iran, China and Russia.
Second, the US won the Cold War in 1989, but then blew it by passing up a priceless opportunity to win over Russia as a long-term ally. Russia let the Berlin Wall be torn down, pulled the Red Army back inside its border, removed the Communist Party from absolute control, and embraced American-style capitalism. Putin went out of his way to aid American forces after 9/11 and did not use his Security Council veto to block the US invasion of Iraq. What has been his reward? The US, exploiting Russian weakness at every turn, moved NATO into Eastern Europe and then into the former Soviet republics. The US bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 despite Russian protests, and is now placing a missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic as well as unilaterally abrogating the ABM Treaty which has produced stability for 30 years. Is it any surprise that Putin is now so suspicious and uncooperative towards the West? This is fundamentally the wrong policy, and we should be saying that loud and clear to the US before we alienate yet further one of the great powers that should be our ally.
Third, instead of continually fudging his options over Iran, Gordon Brown should be making clear that whilst we support economic and diplomatic pressures to deter an Iranian nuclear bomb, we do not and will not support a military attack on Iran. It would have catastrophic consequences – setting the whole Middle East alight, provoking intensified Iranian intervention in Iraq, seriously disrupting the world oil supply a quarter of which passes daily through the straits of Hormuz, unleashing murderous retaliation maybe as far as Western capitals, All without being able ultimately to prevent an Iranian bomb, and indeed generating a national unity behind the mullahs when otherwise an unpopular regime might steadily unravel because of economic failure.
It is our duty to make clear to the Americans now our strong opposition to their perverse and counter-productive military threats towards Iran. Otherwise, the Cold War will be succeeded by another long term geo-political conflict, only conducted at much higher temperature.
Graphic: Project Gutenberg
It’s a pity Gordon Brown has tarnished his escutcheon by trying to show he is tough on terror through doubling the pre-charge detention period from 28 to 56 days – particularly since he is also ignoring the second half of the couplet: tough on the causes of terror.
There are several strong reasons why 56 days (or anything over 28) would be ill-advised and counter-productive. Above all, the case for it has simply not been made out. Even John Reid when Home Secretary admitted that the police had not produced any evidence to warrant it. On 11 June I put down a PQ asking “on how many occasions since 25 July 2006 (when the 28-day period was introduced) have the police been obliged by the 28-day pre-charge detention period to release terrorist suspects whom they still wished to detain beyond that period; and what the date and circumstances were of each case? In answer the Home Secretary said: “The police do not centrally hold information on the circumstances of each terrorist case where a suspect is not charged within the 28 day pre-charge detention period”. A blatantly evasive reply. I therefore put down a further PQ on 12 July asking if the Home Secretary will seek the information requested from each police force. It was answered on 23 July as follows: “As part of the consultation on forthcoming counter-terrorism legislation, we are looking, in conjunction with the police, at how the existing maximum period of pre-charge detention has operated in practice and whether there are any lessons to be learnt from that”. It could not say it more clearly: we don’t know, and have no intention of finding out because we fear there is no such evidence.
That is the really essential point: it is wrong to introduce any punitive legislation when there is no evidence-based case to warrant it – and when there is a strong case against it. Internment has never worked, in Northern Ireland or anywhere else, and since the flow of intelligence from the Muslim community to the police is far and away the most most effective means of countering terrorist activity, to shut it down (which detaining people for nearly 2 months without trial is very likely to do in its impact on Muslim opinion) is utterly counter-productive.
But there are other arguments too. 28 days already exceeds the pre-charge detention period in most other democracies, so why do we need twice that period here? And why aren’t other anti-terrorist measures now proposed – particularly post-charge questioning and the use of intelligence intercepts in court – perfectly adequate for the purpose without gratuitously undermining Habeas Corpus even further?
And if the hard-line Right, in whichever party, are still not satisfied, maybe they should take a lesson from Winston Churchill who said in 1943 at the height of the Second World War: “The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law…is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government”.
And while we’re on our quotes from Conservative grandees, this (surprising) one deserves to be noted: “The failure of Messrs Bush and Blair and tghe neo-cons to understand Arab grievances has been translated into a ‘clash of civilizations’ and a threat to Western values ‘by people determined to destroy our way of life’, as the Prime Minister put it. But there is no clash of civilizations unless we are determined to create one. We are not going to live under a universal caliphate. Osama bin Laden and his gangsters have not the faintest chance of destroying our way of life, unless we do so ourselves….The misconceived ‘war on terror’ has made the world a much more dangerous place…America and Britain should leave Iraq as soon as possible. There are no other options…it is the American occupation of Iraq, like the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, that hs become the magnet for the international jihadis”. Who said that? No other than Norman Lamont, former Tory Chancellor, in the Daily Telegraph on 10 November 2006. Gordon Brown, please note.
How far is this attack on civil liberties going to go? It is still proposed, in the current consultation before new anti-terrorism legislation in the autumn, to keep open the option of extending the 28-day limit on detention without charge to 90 days, even though there is no evidence of a single case where the police wished to detain suspects beyond the pre-charge detention period already permitted. And behind this latest proposal lies a long list of previous draconian measures.
Already under the special advocate procedure foreign nationals suspected of terrorist offences are not even allowed to be told what is alleged against them so that they have a chance to refute it. Information obtained under torture is now admissible in the special tribunals created to legitimise the holding of foreign nationals. When the judges declared that these procedures discriminated against foreigners, the government responded by widening their powers so that British citizens can also be tried by specially appointed courts staffed by judges and lawyers “vetted” and approved by the government.
Now, to preserve the precedent set by Belmarsh high security prison and by control orders in the community, it is proposed to opt out altogether from the right against arbitrary detention contained in article 5 of the convention on human rights. Britain is the only country in Europe to do this.
There are 2 lessons to be learnt from the absconding of the 3 men held under control orders. One is simply that as a form of detention without trial, it is simply not working. The second, in the light of the first, is that the whole concept of control orders should be re-opened and significantly altered. Current procedure is that after the initial hearing in open court, when the public facts alleged the suspects are disclosed, the case then proceeds to closed session, where the full evidence against the suspect is made know to a Special Advocate who acts for the suspect. But this Special Advocate is not allowed to communicate this to the suspect in order to check whether the suspect has an alibi or can refute the allegations.
In order to move away from the whole control order debacle, we should now implement different rules.
At present, it is the Security Services and the Home Secretary who determine that a suspect cannot be given a normal trial and that the Special Advocate procedure should be used instead. In effect, this makes them judge and jury in the same case. What we should now be doing is operating new rules which require that all the evidence is normally made available to the suspect, so that he has a chance to refute it unless a senior judge sitting in camera to whom the case is referred is convinced, on the basis of advice from the Security Services and the Home Secretary, that certain evidence cannot safely, on the grounds of national security, be made available to the suspect.
This would almost certainly reduce the applicability of the Special Advocate procedure and the use of control orders to a very small number of cases. And even where the judge is not persuaded, it would not prevent the Home Secretary, if they did not then wish to proceed, from withdrawing the application for the control order until at least more evidence was available and in the meantime to rely instead on the considerable range of surveillance techniques already available.
This would not only provide the fairest reconciliation of the need for national security with the rights of the individual. It would also minimise the fiasco which the use of control orders is in danger of descending into.
Today’s Guardian splash seems to be another step on the path of softening up public opinion for a potential attack on Iran. I can understand why American defence officials would want to see their allegations splashed across the front of the war sceptical Guardian. But this is essentially a rehash of a story that has been properly discredited already, when the Pentagon trotted it out last, in February.
These are eerily familiar claims that suit the political agenda of the US more than they suit the facts. Sources speaking on condition of anonymity last time have become “senior US officials.” The apparent threat now is against Bradley armoured vehicles rather than the more heavily protected Abrams tank. But the other claims, particularly about weapons and their sources are the same and were conveniently repeated by Tory defence spokesperson Patrick Mercer in a BBC R4 interview on the Today programme this morning- introduced by a summary of the Guardian article.
Just in case Iran is not bug bear enough, we are treated to claims of a link with al-Qaeda link up across the Sunni-Shiite divide and even more incredulously, that the shelling of the Shiite dominated Iraqi parliament was the work of Shiite militias closely allied to Iraqi Shiite political parties and indeed trained by them. Professor Juan Cole of Michigan University has more on this in his Informed Comment blog.
There is, however, a grain of truth in the report, where it says “General Petraeus’s report to the White House in early September will be pivotal and a decision to being troop withdrawal or continue the surge policy will hinge on the outcome.”
That explains why the story is being peddled by unnamed US sources, but not why the Guardian should choose to believe them.
Michael Meacher urges Left to unite behind John McDonnell as candidate for Labour leadership
Michael Meacher has stood down in favour of John McDonnell in the contest for the Labour leadership.
Meacher and McDonnell met today in a bid to ensure there will be a challenge to Gordon Brown. After discussions it was decided that McDonnell had the greater number of nominations.
Meacher will stand down and give his support to McDonnell and is urging all his supporters to get behind the sole left candidate.
Meacher said:
“The left is standing on a clear platform in this leadership election. We must tackle the growing inequality between rich and poor; we need a major programme of building social housing; we must deal with poverty in retirement; we need an independent foreign policy; we should reverse privatisation in public services; and we have to restore British democracy and end the presidential style of government. Most importantly we simply have to tackle the single greatest threat facing mankind – climate change. That’s the agreed position for the left, it’s what John and I have been campaigning on for months and it’s the platform on which we stand united.
“John McDonnell has won more of the nominations. I am therefore happy to stand down on his behalf and I will be strongly urging my supporters to back the united left candidate.
“The really good news is that together the numbers of nominations are sufficient to get a candidate onto the ballot paper.
“John and I have both said there should be a debate and a contest, not a coronation. That is what the party and the public want and I encourage as many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party as possible to get behind John to ensure this happens.”
From today’s Times:
Politics is in a curiously disorientated state in Britain today. On one side, old-style Toryism was voted out in 1997, and has now been replaced by a soft veneer of environmentalism and family-centredness that contrasts sharply with the excesses of private equity capitalism. On the other, the persistent shifting to the right under new Labour has now blown itself out, as the polls indicate, leaving a large segment of political space occupied by mainstream Labour opinion and probably a majority of the electorate as a whole largely disenfranchised.
This key part of the spectrum urgently needs representation to give it fresh direction — not old Labour either, but a modern progressive politics addressing the big issues now being ducked and championing key groups now being marginalised.
First, we need a change of direction to heal the divisions that are increasingly straining the fabric of our society. The Government has made some progress in reducing poverty, but not nearly enough. Inequalities are actually increasing. The average pay of the chief executives of the top FTSE 100 companies is now £46,150 a week, 250 times the minimum wage and 500 times the state pension, while at the same time there are still 12.5 million people, including more than 2 million children, living in households below the Government’s poverty line. This matters because reducing inequality leads to less violence, better health, longer life expectancy, lower teenage birth rates and higher educational attainment.
We need a new approach to cutting crime if we genuinely believe in being as tough on the causes of crime as on crime itself. It’s not sensible to go on banging people up even faster than we can build new prisons without tackling much harder the causes of criminality, and putting much more emphasis on reducing recidivism. Despite unprecedented increase in the use of custody, reconviction rates have soared. The hardline policy isn’t working.
We must drastically reduce the prison population, confining it to violent and dangerous offenders. We should provide instead secure units in the community where lesser offenders are required to attend compulsory courses on anger control, money management and parenting, and also to receive education and skills training and treatment for drug addiction and mental health needs, and are made to do unpaid work to repay the community.
Probably the best crime reduction value for money comes from parenting programmes and youth inclusion panels, bringing together local services to focus support on 8 to 13-year-olds at highest risk. Of course there are increased costs involved in intensive rehabilitation, but if prison places and reoffending costs can be significantly reduced, there should be a substantial net saving in public expenditure.
We need too to arrest the overcentralisation of power in this country. Key decisions, such as the replacement of Trident and the restoration of nuclear energy, should not be taken without consultation of the Cabinet, Parliament and public opinion.
Indeed, the most direct way to win back public trust and reconnect with the electorate is for the Government to be seen as genuinely accountable, listening and being prepared to adjust in the face of strong public demand.
It also means Parliament reasserting its authority by taking the right to ratify (or not) nominations to the Cabinet made by the Prime Minister, by appointing committees of inquiry where the Government refuses to do so (as over rendition flights), by ending the Royal Prerogative whereby the Prime Minister can unilaterally declare war and authorise military action, and through its select committees tabling its own motions for debate and voting on the floor of the Commons. Giving the public the right to initiate legislation through referendums is another issue to explore.
We also need much more vigorously to tackle the greatest threat facing the world today: climate change. It must permeate every policy area of Government — not just energy, but transport, industry, building, agriculture, public expenditure and taxation, and foreign policy. It is not enough merely to talk of the end of oil dependence when our electricity generation from renewable energy is, at just 4 per cent, by far the lowest in Europe.
We need an overall plan to meet the scientists’ target of reducing carbon emissions by at least 60 per cent by 2050. It is a colossal challenge, but a win-win-win-win scenario. It will increase energy efficiency hugely, create large savings for industry and some of our poorest households, protect our economy against sudden destabilising external shocks and safeguard us from climate catastrophe.
Finally, we must stop being subservient to the US. We can’t go on being America’s glove puppet, as we have been over Iraq and Lebanon, and, most worryingly, Iran. We need a foreign policy that robustly reasserts our own essential British interests and our commitment to the UN. The first demonstration of that should be strong opposition to any potential US or Israeli attack on Iran, and insistence that the nuclear impasse must be resolved by negotiation or by UN sanctions, not by violence.
We should take the advice not of the US but of British military commanders on the spot in speeding up our troop withdrawal from Iraq. And we should push for a wider international peace conference for a joint settlement of interconnected Middle East issues that cannot be solved one by one. The latest reports of a US change of heart about talking to Iran and Syria make this now a serious possibility.
It is because I believe that radical new policies of this kind would reenergise politics in this country that I am standing for the leadership of the Labour Party. www.michaelmeacher.info
From
The recent cabinet agreement in Baghdad on the new draft oil law was hailed as a landmark deal bringing together the warring factions in the allocation of the country’s oil wealth. What was concealed was that this is being forced through by relentless pressure from the US and will sow the seeds of intense future conflict, with serious knock-on impacts on the world economy.
The draft law, now before the Iraqi parliament, sets up “production sharing partnerships” to allow the US and British oil majors to extract Iraqi oil for up to 30 years. While Iraq would retain legal ownership of its oil, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP that invest in the infrastructure and refineries would get a large share of the profits.
No other Middle Eastern oil producer has ever offered such a hugely lucrative concession to the big oil companies, since Opec has always run its oil business through tightly-controlled state companies. Only Iraq in its present dire condition, dependent on US troops for the survival of the government, lacks the bargaining capacity to resist.
This is not a new plan. According to documents obtained from the US State Department by BBC Newsnight under the US Freedom of Information Act, the US oil industry plan drafted early in 2001 for takeover of the Iraqi oilfields (after the removal of Saddam) was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, calling for the sell-off of all of Iraq’s oilfields.
This secret plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq’s oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. However, Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who took control of Iraq’s oil production for the US government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. As Ariel Cohen of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation later told Newsnight, an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq’s oilfields.
Now the plan is being revisited, or as much of it as can be salvaged after the fading of American power on the battlefield made enforced sell-off impossible. This revision of the original plan has been drafted by BearingPoint, a US consultancy firm, at the request of the US government. Significantly, it was checked first with Big Oil and the IMF and is only now being presented to the Iraqi parliament. But if accepted by the Iraqis under intense pressure, it will lock the country into weakness and dependence for decades. The neo-cons may have lost the war, but they are still manipulating to win the most substantial chunk of the peace when and if it ever comes.
It isn’t difficult to see why. The super-giant oilfields of south-eastern Iraq, particularly the Majnoon and West Qurna, together with the East Baghdad field, are the largest concentration to be found anywhere in the world. Oil exploration costs are among the cheapest globally, with the current cost estimated at around 50c per barrel compared with the current retail price of about $60 a barrel. Petroleum geologists have discovered 73 major fields and identified some 239 as having a high degree of certainty. Yet only 30 fields have been partially developed and only 12 are actually on stream. Undrilled structures and undeveloped fields could represent the largest untapped hydrocarbon resource anywhere in the world. While most other Middle East countries are fully exploiting their reserves, large parts of Iraq are still virgin.
This prize is cast in even greater relief by recent assessments of the looming imminence of global peak oil production. The International Energy Agency now estimates that world production outside Opec has already peaked and that world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020. Optimists who project large reserves remaining of over 1 trillion barrels base their figures on three illusory premises – inclusion of heavy oil and tar sands whose exploitation would entail colossal economic and environmental costs, exaggeration by Opec countries lobbying for higher production quotas within the cartel, or new drilling technologies which may accelerate production but are unlikely to expand reserves. In contrast, the pessimists are steadily gaining ground, and against this background Iraq remains potentially the last remaining major breakthrough.
Nevertheless, on every count the latest US plan to get control of Iraqi oil at almost any cost is profoundly misconceived. Even from the point of view of America’s own self-interest, its security is imperilled more by the failure to develop alternative energy options than by the lack of capabilities of its weapons systems. Yet the US government continues to spend about 20 times more R&D money on the latter problem than on the former. It is still the case that funding the import of oil represents about 40% of the current US trade deficit, yet no vigorous programme in renewable technologies is being supported.
As Senator Richard Lugar and James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, said prophetically in 1999 about growing US dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil, “our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonisingly through developing nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change – or through all of them”.
Secondly, in neo-conservative eyes Iraq was also required as an alternative to Saudi Arabia to provide a military base for the US to police the whole of Gulf oil. It was no longer possible for the US to maintain troops in Saudi Arabia for that purpose without risking the collapse of the dictatorial Saudi regime and its giant oil assets falling into the hands of Islamic extremists. The removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia was the principal demand contained in Osama bin Laden’s fatwa of 1996. This was why, shortly after invading Iraq, the US announced that it was pulling its combat troops out of Saudi Arabia, thereby meeting Bin Laden’s principal pre-9/11 political demand. But unfortunately for the US, al-Qaida is now seeking the removal of US troops from Iraq as well.
Above all, the policy is flawed by its extreme short-sightedness. Even if the US were to win its war in Iraq, which now looks virtually impossible, its incremental gain before the oil runs out would be short-term, while its exposure to intensified and unending insurgency because of perceived US seizure of Iraqi oil rights, especially if extended to Iran, would be disproportionately enormous both in the Middle East and maybe also at home. It is diametrically the opposite of the policy to which the whole world will be forced ineluctably by the accelerating onset of climate change. Perhaps the single greatest gain of the west learning this lesson of weaning itself off its oil addiction is that it would end this interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries simply because they happen to have oil – the central cause of world conflict today.
The consultation on Trident has been a sham. By fixing a vote in the House of Commons for next Wednesday, No 10 is bouncing us into a momentous decision years before expert opinion says it is necessary.
As leader, I would re-open this decision. I would arrange a full and proper consultation lasting at least six months, embracing all the relevant options and making sure public opinion is properly heard, followed by at least a two day debate in Parliament, ending with a fresh and much more authoritative vote.
