Annie Machon

Frontline Club/New Statesman (FCNS) whistleblower debate with Julian Assange

"This house believes whistleblowers make the world a safer place."

I was honoured to be asked to say a few words at the recent debate about the value of whistleblowers in London on 9th April 2011.

The Frontline Club and the left-wing New Statesman magazine jointly hosted the event, which starred Julian Assange, editor in chief of Wikileaks.  Here is the debate in full:

   

Needless to say, the opposition had an uphill battle arguing not only against logic, the fair application of law, and the meaning of a vibrant and informed democracy, but also against the new realities in the worlds of journalism and technology. 

The first more diplomatically-minded oppositionist adopted a policy of appeasement towards the audience, but the last two had to fall back on the stale and puerile tactics of name-calling and ad hominem attacks.  So good to see that expensive educations are never a waste....

The proposition was supported enthusiatically by the sell-out crowd, a resounding vote of confidence in the democratic notions of accountability and transparency.

Here's a snippet of my (brief) contribution to a fantastic afternoon:

 

The spies and Libya - time to dust off their conscience

As I've mentioned before, the former heads of UK intelligence agencies have a charming habit of speaking out in support of the rule of law, civil liberties, proportionality and plain common sense - but usually only after they have retired. 

Perhaps at their leaving parties their consciences are extracted from the security safe, dusted off and given back  - along with the gold watch?

Even then, post-retirement, they might try to thrice-deny potentially world-changing information, as Sir Richard Dearlove did when questioned by the fearless and fearsomely bright Silkie Carlo about the leaked Downing Street Memo at his recent speech at the Cambridge Union.  (The links are in two parts, as the film had to be mirrored on Youtube - Dearlove claimed copyright on the orginal Love Police film and had it taken down.)

And "out of context", my left foot - he could potentially have saved millions of lives in the Middle East if he'd gone public with his considered professional opinion about the intelligence facts being fitted around a preconceived war policy in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Wouldn't it be lovely if these esteemed servants of the state, replete with respect, status and honours, could actually take a stand while they are still in a position to influence world events?

My former boss, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, has been unusually vociferous since her retirement in 2007 and elevation to the peerage.  She used her maiden speech to the House of Lords to object to the proposed plans to increase police detention of terrorist suspects without charge from 28 to 42 days; she recently suggested that the "war on terror" is unwinnable and that we should, if possible, negotiate with "Al Qaeda" (well, it worked with the Provisional IRA); and that the "war on drugs" had been lost and the UK should treat recreational drug use as a health rather than a criminal issue. She steals all my best lines....

But credit where credit is due.  Despite the fact that she used the full power of the British state to pursue terrorist suspects up until 2007 and investigate drug barons in the 1990s, she did apparently try to make a stand while en poste in the run-up to the Iraq War.  Last year she gave evidence to the Chilcot Enquiry, stating that she had officially briefed the government that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat to the UK.

So it's obvious that once a UK Prime Minister has come over all Churchillian he tends to ignore the counsel of his chief spooks, as we've seen with both the Downing Street Memo the Chilcot Enquiry. 

With that in mind, I've read with interest the recent press reports that the UK authorities apparently knew about Colonel Gaddafi retaining stockpiles of mustard gas and sarin (despite the fact that the world was assured in 2004 that it was his renunciation of WMDs that allowed him back into the international diplomatic fold) . 

So the key question is surely: is this another erroneous "45 minutes from attack" moment, with Gaddafi's alleged stockpiles of WMD a perfect scaremongering pretext to push for a full-on regime change in Libya; or is this genuine, and we were all lied to about Gaddafi's destruction of his WMD stockpiles for economic advantage and fat, juicy oil contracts?

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article quoting the concern of "government insiders" about Gaddafi's potential future terrorism threat against the West, up to and including WMDs, should he cling on to power.  Well, yes, it would hardly be surprising if he were now to be as mad as a wasp with his ex-new best buddies.  Despite the sordid rapprochement in the last decade, he has been for much of his life an inveterate enemy of the West and sponsor of worldwide terrorism.

Rather than waiting for his "K" and his retirement, would it not be wonderful if the current head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, could extract his conscience from that dusty security safe and make a useful and informed statement to shed some light on the mess that the Libyan war is rapidly becoming?  He could potentially change the course of world history and save untold lives.

UK spies continue to lie about torture

What a difference a year makes in the mayfly minds of the old media. 

In February 2010 The Guardian's resident spook watcher, Richard Norton-Taylor, reported that the serving head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, had been forced in 2008 to confess to the credulous and compliant Intelligence and Security Committee in Parliament that the spies had lied, yet again, about their complicity in torture.

This confession came shortly after the ISC had released its "authoritative" report about rendition and torture, asserting that there had been no such complicity.  How did the ISC get this so utterly wrong?

It turns out that in 2006 Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, Evans's predecessor in the MI5 hot-seat, had misled the ISC about MI5's awareness of the use of torture against terrorist suspects, particularly the hapless Binyam Mohamed, whose case was wending its way through the British courts.  Bullying-Manner (as she is known in the corridors of power) appears to have been covering up for her predecessor, Sir Stephen Lander, who was quoted in The Telegraph in March 2001 as saying "I blanche at some of the things I declined to tell the committee [ISC] early on".....

But Evans had to come clean to the ISC because of the Mohamed court case, and Norton-Taylor wrote, by the Grauny's standards, his fairly hard-hitting article last year. 

Yesterday, however, he seems to be back-tracking frantically.  Following an interview by the BBC with former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf appearing to confirm that MI5 did indeed turn a blind eye to the use of torture, Richard Norton-Taylor and other members of our esteemed Fourth Estate are once again quoting Baroness Manningham-Buller's dicredited li(n)es to the ISC as gospel truth, and forgeting both the serving head of MI5's unavoidable confession and the evidence from the Mohamed court case itself.

The ISC was put in place following the 1994 Intelligence Services Act as a democratic fig-leaf: it is not a fully-functioning, independent oversight committee, as it is only able to report on matters of spy policy, finance and administration.  It has no powers to investigate properly allegations of crime, torture or operational incompetence, is unable to demand documents or interview witnesses under oath, and is appointed by and answerable only to the Prime Minister.  It has been lied to by the spies and senior police time and time again - the very people it notionally oversees.  As I have written before, the ISC has since its inception failed to address many key intelligence matters of the day, instead spending its time nitpicking over details.

In the face of this utter lack of intelligence accountability and transparency, is it any wonder that sites like Wikileaks have caught the public's imagination?  Wikileaks is an obvious and necessary reaction to the endemic secrecy, governmental back-scratching and cover-ups that are not only wrong in principle in a notional democracy, but have also resulted directly in illegal wars, torture and the erosion of our traditional freedoms.

My article in The Guardian, 24 January 2011

Here's a link to my article in The Guardian today, exploring the confused roles of modern British spies, and looking at some ways to sort out the mess. 

Both the police and the spooks seem to be having a bit of an identity crisis at the moment...

The Ghost of Daniel Ellsberg

This is an excellent article from a European technology strategist and futurist.  It succinctly sums up all that is wrong with the old media's coverage of the Wikileaks story over the last year, where people obsess about the technology, the website and the personal life of Julian Assange.

As the article says, we should be focusing on the core issues: illegal wars, war crimes, murder, torture, corporate and political corruption, and diplomatic duplicity.

Let's address the message, not attack the messenger, and certainly not the medium.

 

 

Secrecy laws come out of the closet

Finally the true intentions behind the draconian British law, the Official Secrets Act, and similar espionage-related laws in other countries such as the USA, have been laid bare.  All is revealed - these laws apparently have nothing whatsoever to do with protecting national security and countering espionage - their primary purpose is to stifle dissent and legitimate criticism of the state.

How can I tell?  Well, look at the reaction to the ongoing Wikileaks revelations, as opposed to today's UK spy scandal involving the parliamentary assistant of a hitherto unremarkable MP. 

The now-notorious Wikileaks site has been going since 2007 and, in this brief time, has shone a bright light on such nasties as Trafigura, the BNP, Scientology, Climategate, Guantanamo, the Australian internet blacklist, Sarah Palin, and much more.

The site achieved world-wide notoriety this year with four big stories - starting with the harrowing film "Collateral Murder", which demonstrated clearly that the Pentagon had been lying to the distraught families of the victims of this video-game nasty for years. 

Since then Wikileaks has cleverly worked with selected media oulets such as The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel in Germany to give us the Afghan War logs and Iraq war files, which exposed endemic brutality, torture and war crimes (all in the name of spreading democracy, of course), and culminating over the last week with the ongoing Cablegate expose.

The response?  Well the majority of the old media, particularly those that didn't share in the juicy scoops, has been in attack mode: condemning whistleblowing; vilifying the character of Wikileaks spokesperson, Julian Assange; and gleefully reporting the widespread cyberspace crackdown (Amazon pulling the site, Paypal stopping contributions, the ongoing hack attacks). 

But this is just so much hot air - what about the real substance of the disclosures?  The violent horror, war crimes, and government lies?  Why is our so-called Fourth Estate not demanding a response to all this terrible evidence?

However, it is the reaction of the US political class that is most gob-smackingly shocking.  The half-wits call for Assange's prosecution under the US Espionage Act (even though he's an Australian); to have him executed, assassinated by drone attack, or unlawfully disappeared as an "unlawful combatant"; and make hysterical calls for Wikileaks to be placed on the US list of proscribed foreign terrorist organisations.  Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, fears for Assange's life.

Well, you can always tell how effective a whistleblower is by the response you engender when telling truth to power, and this is a pretty striking vindication.

Of course, Julian Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower per se.  He is the next generation - a highly-capable, high-tech conduit, using his "hackivist" skills to out-pace and out-smart those who seek to conceal vital information.

As he said during a TED.com interview last summer, he strives to live by the ideal that to be a man is to be "capable and generous, not to create victims, but to nurture them...".  And this is indeed the protection Wikileaks offers, an avenue of secure disclosure for people of conscience on the inside, without their having to go public to establish the bona fides of what they are saying, with the resulting victimisation, loss of career, liberty, and possibly life.

Still, politicians seem unable to make the distinction - they are solely focused on loss of face, embarrassment, and shoring up the wall of secrecy that allows them to get away with lies, torture and war crimes.  I hope that common sense will prevail and Assange will not become another sacrificial victim on the altar of "national security".

So why did I say at the start that the secrecy laws have come out of the closet?  Well, in the wake of all this recent media and political hysteria about Wikileaks, this little espionage gem appeared in the UK media today.   Essentially, the UK Home Secretary is booting out an alleged Russian spy, Ms Katia Zatuliveter who, despite getting through security vetting (MI5, anyone?), was really an SVR agent  working as the Parliamentary assistant to Mike Hancock MP - a man who happens to have a special interest in Russia and who serves on the UK's Parliamentary Defence Select Committee.

Now, in the old days such alleged activity would mean an automatic arrest and probable prosecution for espionage under the Official Secrets Acts (1911 and 1989). If we go with what the old media has reported, this would seem to be a clear-cut case.  During the Cold War foreign spies working under diplomatic cover could be discreetly PNGed (the jargon for declaring a diplomat persona non grata).  However, this young woman was working in Parliament, therefore can have no such diplomatic cover.  But deportation and the avoidance of embarrassment seems to be the order of the day - as we saw also with the explusion of the Russian spy ring from the US last summer).

Which demonstrates with a startling clarity the real intentions behind the British OSA and the American Espionage Act.  The full force of these laws will automatically be brought to bear against those exposing crime in high and secret places, pour enourager les autres,  but will rarely be used against real spies. 

Proof positive, I would suggest, that these laws were drafted to prevent criticism, dissent and whistleblowing, as I've written before, but not meaningfully to protect our national security.  One can but hope that the Wikileaks debacle acts as the long-overdue final nail in the OSA coffin.

Would it not be wonderful if our "esteemed" legislators could learn from recent events, draw a collective deep breath, and finally get to grips with those who pose a real threat to our nations - the people who lie to take us into illegal wars, and intelligence officers involved in torture, assassination and espionage?

Sir John Sawers, head of MI6, makes historic public appearance

For the first time in 100 years "C", the head of the UK foreign intelligence service SIS (commonly known as MI6) has gone public.

Former career diplomat Sir John Sawers (he of Speedo fame) yesterday made a speech to the UK Society of Editors in what appeared to be a professionally diplomatic rear-guard action in response to a number of hot media topics at the moment.

Choosing both his audience wisely and his words carefully, he hit on three key areas:

Torture: Legal cases are currently going through UK courts on behalf of British victims of torture, in which MI5 and MI6 intelligence officers are alleged to have been complicit.  The Metropolitan Police are currently investigating a number of cases.  Over the last week, a British military training manual on "enhanced" interrogation techniques has also been made public. However, Sawers unblushingly states that MI6 abides by UK and international law and would never get involved, even tangentially, in torture cases.  In fact, he goes on to assert that the UK intelligence agencies are training the rest of the world in human rights in this regard.

   

Whistleblowing: In the week following the latest Wikileaks coup - the Iraq War Diaries, comprising nearly 400,000 documents detailing the everyday horror of life in occupied Iraq, including war crimes such as murder, rape and torture committed by both US and UK forces - Sawers states that secrecy is not a dirty word: the intelligence agencies need to have the confidence that whistleblowers will not emerge to in order to guard agent and staff identities, as well as maintaining the confidence of their international intelligence partners that their (dirty?) secrets will remain, um, secret.  One presumes he is advocating against the exposure of war crimes and justice for the victims.

This, one also presumes, is the justification for US politicians who propose cyber-attacks against Wikileaks and the declaration by some US political insiders that Julian Assange, spokesman of the organisation, should be treated as an unlawfully designated "unlawful combatant", subject to the full rigour of extra-judicial US power, up to and including assassination. 

Spurious media claims of unverified "damage" are the hoary old chestnuts always dragged out in whistleblower cases.  After Wikileaks released its Afghan War Blog in July, government and intelligence commentators made apocalyptic predictions that the leak had put military and agent lives at risk.  US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has since gone on the record to admit that this was simply not true. 

During the Shayler whistleblowing case a decade ago, the government repeatedly tried to assert that agent lives had been put at risk, and yet the formal judgement at the end of his trial stated that this was absolutely not the case.  And again, with the recent Wikileaks Iraq War Blog, government sources are using the same old mantra.  When will they realise that they can only cry wolf so many times and get away with it?  And when will the journalists regurgitating this spin wake up to the fact they are being played?

Accountability:  Sawers goes on to describe the mechanisms of accountability, such as they are.  He accurately states, as I have previously described ad nauseam, that under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, he is notionally responsible to his political "master", the Foreign Secretary, who has to clear in advance any legally dubious foreign operations (up to and including murder – the fabled “licence to kill” is not fiction, as you can see here).

The 1994 ISA also established the Prime Minister's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) in Parliament, which many commentators seem to believe offers meaningful oversight of the spies.  However, as I have detailed before, this is a mere fig leaf to real accountability: the ISC can only investigate issues of policy, finance and administration of the spy agencies.  Disclosures relating to crime, operational incompetence or involvement in torture fall outside its remit.

But what happens if intelligence officers decide to operate beyond this framework? How would ministers or the ISC ever know?  Other spy masters have successfully lied to their political masters in the past, after all.

Sir John has the gall to say that, if an operation is not cleared by the Foreign Secretary, it does not proceed.  But what about the Gadaffi Plot way back in 1996, when MI6 was sponsoring a group of Islamic extremist terrorists in Libya to try to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi without, it has been asserted, the prior written approval of the then-Foreign secretary, Tory politician Malcom Rifkind?  This was reported extensively, including in this article by Mark Thomas in the New Statesman. What happens if rogue MI6 officers blithely side-step this notional accountability - because they can, because they know they will get away with it - because they have in the past?

In the interests of justice, UK and international law, and accountability, perhaps a new Conservative/Coalition government should now reassess its approach to intelligence whistleblowers generally, and re-examine this specific disclosure about Libya, which has been backed up by international intelligence sources, both US and French, in order to achieve some sort of closure for the innocent victims in Libya of this MI6-funded terrorist attack? And it is finally time to hold the perpetrators to account - PT16, Richard Bartlett, and PT16B, David Watson, who were the senior officers in MI6 responsible for the murder plot.

As civilised countries, we need to rethink our approach to the issue of whistleblowing. Lies, spin,  prosecutions and thuggish threats of assassination are beneath us as societies that notionally adhere to the principles of democracy.  If we can only realistically hope that the actions of our governments, military forces, and intelligence agencies are transparent and accountable via whistleblowers, then we need to ensure that these people are legally protected and that their voices are heard clearly.

 

Gestapo Past and Present

So last week I was on holiday with my lovely Dutchman in Cologne on the Rhine in Germany, a city steeped in history and now chiefly famous for its Gothic cathedral, widely reputed to be pretty much the last building left standing in the city at the end of WW2.  Easily resisting both this religious hotspot and, with slightly more difficulty, the  siren calls of the brauerei, we decided on a bit of culture, some museums and a stroll along the river. 

However, it turns out that not one but two buildings had survived WW2 in their entirety.  Tucked away on a backstreet, we found the second survivor: the Gestapo HQ, which had been preserved as it was found at the end of the war to serve as a ghastly warning to history.  

Well, as someone who regularly speaks at conferences across the world about human rights, totalitarianism and encroaching police states, I felt I had to have a look.  The building is a nondescript office block that looks perfectly innocent from the outside.  Three floors are open to the public.  On the first is the museum, with the history of the rise to power of the Nazis.  It was hideously fascinating to read how freedoms and rights were incrementally eroded as the state slipped ever more from democracy.  The majority of the German people went sleep-walking into national socialism.  As soon as Hitler had any sort of political power his attack-dogs, the SS, used disproportionate, sudden, and shocking violence against Germany's own citizens to crush any nascent resistance.  So from 1933 onwards the population was terrorised, as "undesirables" were routinely snatched from their homes for questioning, torture and imprisonment. 

And the propaganda in the media that was on display.....  Shall I just say, even more unsubtle than that which is used against us today.  I suppose these dark arts have developed over the intervening years.

But it was the lower floors that packed the strongest punch.  The basement, just below street level, held the cells - tiny, dank spaces where as many as 30 people had been herded together.  And the walls are covered in graffiti in all the languages of Europe - sad, desperate messages to the future from people who were "disappeared". They seemed to want to leave a record of the fact simply that they had existed: they had loved, they missed their families, they were trying to hold their heads high despite the agonies inflicted daily, they were innocent, they were about to die......

There was one more level - the reinforced rat hole deep underground, which served both as the air-raid shelter for the Gestapo officers (the prisoners were left upstairs in their cells during the raids), and as the torture rooms.  Considerately, the Gestapo carried out their most brutal interrogations underground, so that the screams could not be heard at street level.

As we emerged, somewhat silent, from this museum, I noticed that we, and many other visitors, all turned to stare at this building: it looked so bland and innocuous from the outside.  But then people would inspect the basement windows that hid the cells.  The smokers in the group all sparked up as soon as they were outside, dragging hard on their cigarettes.  Others just stood silently. 

So the museum does its job.  It is a powerful warning from the grave.  Homo homini lupus: man is wolf to man, ever has been and ever will be, absent adequate legal restraint.  This is why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put in place in 1948, to prevent such atrocities from happening again.

Yet, at the risk of sounding sententious, such abuse is going on around the world right now, particularly in the cause of the endless, nebulous "war on terror".  We have been lazy, blind and foolish, letting our basic rights slide away.  People are disappeared, extraordinarily rendered, to foreign prisons and tortured for years.  Assassination lists have been drawn up by US intelligence agencies; suspects face kangaroo, military-style courtrooms, where they face the death penalty but are not allowed to know the full case against them; our governments aggressively, illegally, invade other countries, and yet the politicians who lie to take us into these wars, thereby causing the needless death, poisoning, maiming and displacement of millions of people, are not called to account for their crimes, as they should be under the Nuremberg Principles, the Rome Statute, and the International Criminal Court.

We, the citizens of still just-about-functioning democracies, should be ashamed.  We need to re-remember our history and take a stand - before it's too late.

US Intelligence targets Wikileaks

 

The US government has apparently been getting its knickers in a twist about the excellent Wikileaks website.  A report written in 2008 by US army counter-intelligence analysing the threat posed by this haven for whistleblowers has been leaked to, you've guessed it, the very subject of the report.

Wikileaks was set up three years ago to provide a secure space for principled whistleblowers around the world to expose corruption and crimes committed by our governments, intelligence agencies and mega-corporations.  The site takes great care to verify the information it publishes, adheres to the principle of exposing information very much in the public interest, and vigorously protects the identify of its sources.

By doing so, Wikileaks plays a vital part in informing citizens of what is being done (often illegally) in their name.  This free flow of information is vital in a democracy. 

Well, no government likes a clued-up and critical citizenry, nor does it like to have transparency and accountability imposed on it.  Which led to the report in question.

As I have written before ad nauseam, whistleblowers provide an essential function to the healthy working of a democracy.  The simplistic approach would be to say that if governments, spies and big corporations obeyed the law, there would be no need for whistleblowers.  However, back in the real, post-9/11 world, with its endless, nebulous "war on terror", illegal wars, torture, extraordinary rendition and Big Brother surveillance, we have never had greater need of them.

Rather than ensuring the highest standards of legality and probity in public life, it is far simpler for the powers that be to demonise the whistleblower - a figure who is now (according to the Executive Summary of the report) apparently seen as the "insider threat".  We are looking at a nascent McCarthyism here.  It echoes the increasing use by our governments of the term "domestic extremists" when they are talking about activists and protesters.

There are laws to protect whistleblowers in most areas of work now.  In the UK we have the Public Interest Disclosure Act (1998).  However, government, military, and especially intelligence professionals are denied this protection, despite the fact that they are most often the very people to witness the most heinous state abuses, crimes and corruption.  If they try to do something about this, they are also the people most likely to be prosecuted and persecuted for following their consciences, as I described in a talk at the CCC in Berlin a couple of years ago.

Ideally, such whistleblowers need a protected legal channel through which to report crimes, with the confidence that these will be properly investigated and the perpetrators held to account.  Failing that, sites like Wikileaks offer an invaluable resource.  As I said last summer at the Hacking at Random festival in NL, when I had the pleasure of sharing a stage with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, I just wish that the organisation had existed a decade earlier to help with my own whistleblowing exploits.

The Official Secrets Act (1989) in the UK, is drafted to stifle whistleblowers rather than protect real secrets.  Such laws are routinely used to cover up the mistakes, embarrassment and crimes of spies and governments, rather than to protect national security.  After all, even the spooks acknowledge that there are only three categories of intelligence that absolutely require protection: sensitive operational techniques, agent identities and ongoing operations.

This US counter-intelligence report is already 2 years old, and its strategy for discrediting Wikileaks (by exposing one of their sources pour encourager les autres) has, to date, manifestly failed. Credit is due to the Wikileaks team in out-thinking and technologically outpacing the intelligence community, and is a ringing endorsement for the whole open source philosophy.

I've said this before, and I shall say it again: as our countries evolve ever more into surveillance societies, with big brother databases, CCTV, biometric data, police drones, voting computers et al, geeks may be our best (and last?) defence against emerging Big Brother states.

FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds

I strongly recommend you take the time to watch this film about FBI whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds. 

"Kill the Messenger"  joins some interesting dots, not just about what might have been going on round Sibel's case, but also adds a different perspective to the notorious outing of CIA officer, Valerie Plame.

Of course, a film that investigates how the might of the state can be used to stifle the legitimate dissent of a whistleblower will always resonate with me. 

Same message, different country.

 

Vers la Verite, Paris, October 2009

So the Vers la Verite events in Paris earlier this month were a great success.  I've organised a few international tours and events in my time, but this was one of the most concentrated series of different happenings I've been involved in.  Thanks go to Debora Blake for all her work in situ in Paris, and also to the ReOpen posse, who offered a lot of practical support and were major sponsors of the weekend.

Vers la Verite was a gathering of campaigners and activists from across Europe and North America, who met to discuss "geopolitically incorrect issues" (as Debora likes to call them!), such as the illegal wars in the Middle East, media spin, intelligence manipulation, the erosion of our civil liberties in the name of the unending "war on terror" - and the need for a new, independent enquiry into the tragic events of 9/11, the nexus of so many of these issues.  It was fantastic to see so many old and new friends in Paris - what a show of commitment to making the world a safer and more equitable place.  It gave me hope.

We were also privileged to have campaigners of the calibre of the 2008 US Green Party presidential candidate Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, journalist and  recent MEP Giulietto Chiesa, Professor Niels Harrit of Copenhagen University, and French actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz at the events. 

The weekend started with a press conference on Friday 9th October at the Mairie of the 2nd arrondissement in Paris, kindly hosted by the Mayor, himself a Green Party politician.

In the evening, while the activists met up at the all-night watering hole, Cafe L'Etincelle on the Rue de Rivoli, Cynthia was the guest of honour at a sponsors' dinner at the famous Le Procope brasserie.  This is the oldest restaurant in Paris, and has hosted Benjamin Franklin (who reputedly worked on the draft of the American Constitution there), as well as Voltaire.

The Saturday was the main day of events, starting with a light lunch for  international activists at Les Halles des Oliviers at La Bellevilloise, with impromptu music from Dr Jazzz.  In the afternoon we convened for a planning session, followed in the evening by a public meeting.  Debora ably hosted the event with Cynthia McKinney, Giulietto Chiesa and Niels Harrit and myself as the speakers, discussing different aspects of government cover-ups and lack of accountability, all drawn from our own experiences.  The film "Zero", directed by Giulietto Chiesa, was screened, as well as excerpts from "American Blackout" featuring Cynthia, and the work of wonderful French comedian and campaigner, Jean Marie Bigard.

A surprise and very welcome attendee was Mathieu Kassovitz, who successfully bid in the auction for the collector's edition of the excellent "Global Outlook" research publication, signed by Cynthia.

The weekend wrapped up with a demo on Sunday morning, marching from Place de la Republique to Place Bastille - two resonant locations - before an informal farewell Parisian lunch.

It was fantastic to meet so many inspiring people, who are committed to changing the world for the better. Thank you all for taking the time and trouble to get to Paris for the weekend  - it was great to see so many old and new friends!

And thanks once again to Debora, AtMoh, Marc, Jean Marc, Christophe (x2!), Arno and the rest of the Paris posse. Also to Cynthia, Giulietto and Niels for their professionalism, dedication and sheer joy, all in the face of adversity. 

Alan Johnson's MI5 File?

I wonder what information, if any, MI5 has on file about new-ish UK Home Secretary, Alan Johnson?  Or, more pertinently, what HE thinks the spies might have......

How else explain his recent comments in The Daily Torygraph? He said that he will be the voice of those who cannot defend themselves - ie those poor, anonymous intelligence officers in MI5.  He even drags out the hoary old chestnut that a criminal investigation into prima facie evidence that the spooks have been involved in serious crime - the torture of another human being - would damage national security. 

I'm surprised he managed to bite back Tony Blair's infamous line, that an investigation into possible spy incompetence and crime would be a "ludicrous diversion"

Ever since Labour came to power in 1997, we have had a series of Home Secretaries straining to avoid doing their job vis a vis the spooks in Thames House: the job being that of political master of MI5, thereby providing a modicum of democratic oversight to an extremely powerful and secretive organisation, holding it to account and ensuring it obeys the law. 

The role of Home Secretary is not to be the champion of unaccountable spies who are protected from investigation and oversight by a whole raft of secrecy legislation.

More and more evidence is emerging that MI5 assisted the USA's extraordinary rendition plan, that it  was complicit in torture, and that its officers have lied to cover their tracks.  Under this avalanche of scandal, some MPs have finally woken up to the fact that the Home Secretary should be ensuring MI5 obeys the law.  Some are even daringly suggesting that there should be proper Parliamentary oversight of the spies, rather than the fig leaf that is the Intelligence and Security Committee - hand-picked by and only answerable to the Prime Minister, and powerless to question intelligence officers under oath, demand papers, or look at anything more serious than policy, finance or administration.

The Metropolitan Police have even begun a criminal investigation into MI5's complicity in torture.  While I doubt any case that could, ahem,  "damage national security" will ever come to court,  a few junior officers may be asked to do the decent thing and quietly walk the plank. 

But the real issue - the closed, self-perpetuating group-think culture, where officers should just follow orders and not rock the boat - will continue unchallenged, resulting inevitably in yet more scandals.

It is time we had a Home Secretary who is up to the job and who has the backbone to initiate some meaningful reform of MI5. 

Spy Chiefs attack UK Police State

Sir Richard Dearlove, ex-head of MI6 and current Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, has been much in the news recently after gracing the Hay on Wye book festival, where he gave a speech.  In this, he is reported to have spoken out, in strong terms, against the endemic and all-pervasive surveillance society developing in the UK. 

Ex-spy chiefs in the UK have a charming habit of using all these surveillance measures to the nth degree while in the shadows, and then having a Damascene conversion into civil liberties campaigners once they retire.  Eliza Manningham-Buller, the ex-head of MI5, used her maiden speech in the House of Lords to argue against the extension of the time limit the police could hold a terrorist suspect without charge, and even Stella Rimington (also ex-MI5) has recently thrown her hat in the ring.  They nick all my best lines these days.

Wouldn't it be great if one of them, one day, could argue in favour of human rights, proportionality and the adherence to the law while they were still in a position to influence affairs?

Dearlove himself could have changed the course of world history if he had found the courage to speak out earlier about the fact that the intelligence case for the Iraq war was being fixed around pre-determined policy.  As it is, we only know that he objected to this because of the notorious, leaked Downing Street Memo.

The Guardian newspaper reported that Dearlove even touched on the reality of obtaining ministerial permission before breaking the law.  Which, of course, is the ultimate point of the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, and does indeed enshrine the fabled "licence to kill".  It states that MI6 officers can break the law abroad with impunity from prosecution if, and only if, they obtain prior written permission from their political master - in this case the Foreign Secretary.

However, according to The Guardian, he seems to have misunderstood the spirit of the law, if not the letter:

He said that the intelligence community was "sometimes asked to act in difficult circumstances. When it does, it asks for legal opinion and ministerial approval … It's about political cover". 

Momentarily putting aside the not unimportant debate about whether the spies and the government should even be allowed technically to side-step international laws against crimes up to, and including, murder, I am still naively surprised by the shamelessness of this statement:  the notion of ministerial oversight was put in place to ensure some kind of democratic oversight and accountability for the work of the spies - not to provide political cover, a fig leaf.

I think he's rather given the game away here about how the spies really view the role of  their "political masters".

Amuse Bouche

A debate is currently under way in the (ex) Land of the Free about how much protection intelligence whistleblowers should be accorded under the law.

Yes, the country that has brought the world the "war on terror", Guantanamo Bay, and the Patriot Act, is having a moral spasm about how to best protect those who witness high crimes and misdemeanors inside the charmed circle of secrecy and intelligence. 

And about time too, following the mess of revelations about spy complicity in torture currently emerging on both sides of the pond.

Interestingly, intelligence officials in the US already have a smidgeon more leeway than their UK counterparts.  In the US, if you witness a crime committed by spies, you have to take your concerns to the head of the agency, and then you can go to Congress.  In the UK, the only person you can legally report crime to is the head of the agency involved, so guess how many successful complaints are made?  Even taking your proven and legitimate concerns to your elected UK representatives is a crime under the OSA.

Spooks in the UK now have access to an "ethical counsellor", who has reportedly been visited a grand total of 12 times by intelligence officers since 2006.  But this person has no power to investigate allegations of crime, and a visit guarantees a career-blocking black mark on your record of service: ie if you are the sort of person to worry your head with quaint ideas like ethics and morality you are, at best, not a team player and, worse, a possible security risk. 

This is surely culturally unsustainable in a community of people who generally sign up to protect the citizens of the country and want to make a positive difference by working within the law?  Those who have concerns will resign, at the very least, and those who like to "just follow orders" will float to the top.  As one of the leading proponents for greater whistleblower protection in the USA states in the linked article:

"The code of loyalty to the chain of command is the primary value at those institutions, and they set the standard for intensity of retaliation."

Some enlightened US politicians appear to be aware that intelligence whistleblowers require protection just as all other employees receive under the law:  perhaps more so, as the nature of their work may well expose them to the most heinous crimes imaginable.  There is also an argument for putting proper channels in place to ensure that whistleblowers don't feel their only option is to risk going to the press.  Effective channels for blowing the whistle and investigating crime can actually protect national security rather than compromise it.

The nay-sayers, of course, want to keep everything secret - after all, the status quo is currently working so well in upholding democratic values across the globe.  Critics of the new legislation talk of "disgruntled employees .... gleefully" spilling the beans.  Why is this hoary old line always dragged out in this type of discussion?  Why are whistleblowers always described in this way, rather than called principled, brave or ethical?

Blanket secrecy works against the real interests of our countries.  Mistakes can be covered up, group-think ensures that crimes continue, and anyone offering constructive criticism is labelled as a risky troublemaker - no doubt a "disgruntled" one at that.

Of course, certain areas of intelligence work need to be protected: current operational details (as ex-Met Assistant Commissioner, Bob Quick has discovered), agent identities, and sensitive techniques.  But the life blood of a healthy democracy depends on open debate, ventilation of problems, and agreed solutions.  Informed and participatory citizens need to know what is being done in their name.

Gareth Peirce on Torture, Secrecy and the British State

Leading UK human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, has written a powerful and eloquent article in the London Review of Books about the British state's involvement in torture. 

She also broadens out the argument to look at the fundamental societal problems - lack of accountability, secrecy, the use and abuse of the concept of "national security"  - that created a culture that facilitates and condones torture.

Gareth has fought for victims of injustice for four decades, focusing primarily on terrorism and intelligence issues. 

A long piece, but stick with.  It's worth it!

Agent Names Lost

So the good times keep on rolling for the spook community in the UK.  An officer of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) apparently lost top secret information such as the names of undercover agents while travelling in Ecuador.

SOCA is a relatively new agency set up in 2004 to police organised crime, particularly that revolving around the illegal drug trade.  The agency has the misfortune to have as Chairman Stephen Lander, erstwhile boss of MI5; a man whose management style was known as "Stalinesque". 

Even before this latest blunder, concerns had been raised by SOCA staff about ineffective and top-heavy management (shades of MI5 in the 1990s)and recent questions have been asked about whether the agency was producing meaningful results, as the price of illicit drugs has plummeted on UK streets, indicating a glut of recent imports. 

This latest blunder will hardly have reassured ministers.  Reportedly, the hapless SOCA officer lost a USB stick containing the names of undercover agents involved in the drug war in Ecuador, as well as information relating to 5 years' worth of investigations.   The blunder has reportedly jeopardised operations that have cost in the region of £100 million.

Agent identities are, rightly, the most protected of secret information.  This is an unforgivable gaff, and yet the officer is apparently only facing "disciplinary charges". 

So, if you are a whistleblower exposing heinous spy crimes, you are put on trial and sent to prison, even if the trial judge acknowledges that no lives were ever put at risk through your disclosures.  However, if you carelessly leave top secret agent information lying around in hostile territory, you don't even get the sack, let alone face prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

I would suggest that the next intelligence whistleblower to emerge from the shadows should simply claim to have dropped a USB stick outside the offices of a national newspaper.  A rap over the knuckles will then be the worst that they face! 

MPs object to police state

An interesting political row has erupted this week in the UK about the arrest of the opposition Tory MP, Damien Green, who is also the Shadow Minister for Immigration.  He was arrested on Thursday for alleged breaches of an obscure common law  "aiding and abetting misconduct in public office".

Reports indicate that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, or as the newspapers would have it the "anti-terrorism branch" was called in to investigate leaks from the Home Office about immigration policy, that Green was using these leaks to score points off the government, and the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in particular.

Naturally, MPs from both sides of the House have been frothing at the mouth:  how dare Plod embarrass an MP by arresting him without warning and by conducting co-ordinated searches of his homes and offices in both Kent and London?  Newspapers, particularly on the right of the political spectrum, have been full of headlines saying that this is proof that we are living in a police state.

While I have some sympathy for the beleaguered Mr Green, having also been hauled off by the Met Special Branch and quizzed for hours for discussing sensitive information that was very much in the public interest, as well as seeing my home ripped apart in a co-ordinated counter-terrorism style raid and seen friends arrested in co-ordinated dawn raids, I am still aghast at the hypocrisy of both the politicians' and media's reaction.

Many of us are already all to painfully aware that we live in a de facto police state.  Under the notorious Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, we can all be stopped and searched for no reason - and can even be arrested purely so that a bobby on the beat can ascertain our identity.  Notices to this effect are now helpfully pinned up outside most tube stations in London.  Thousands of people are subject to this across the UK every year on the streets of Britain.

But other points rather leap to my attention from the coverage of this case.  If MPs don't like the heavy-handed use and abuse of police powers, why did they pass these laws in the first place?  Did they not think through the implications?  Or do they think that, as MPs, they are somehow above the laws of this land?

Plus, senior MPs are arguing that the use of leaks from disgruntled civil servants is a time-honoured way for HM Opposition in Parliament to hold the government to account.  Well, that might be good for the MPs' parliamentary careers, but what of the hapless and frequently brave souls within the Civil Service who face 2 years in prison for such leaks if they are convicted of a breach of the 1989 Official Secrets Act?  And, of course, there is no legal defense under the OSA of having acted "in the public interest" - the very argument that MPs are using to justify Green's exposure of Home Office cover-ups and incompetence. 

As far as I can see, there have been no comments from either journalists or MPs about the fate of the source.    The most I could find was the following in the Daily Telegraph:

"An alleged "whistleblower", thought to be a male Home Office official was arrested 10 days ago."

Either that means that journalists and MPs couldn't give a toss about the fate of this person - after all, an MP's career is far more important - or that any reporting of the arrest of the whistleblower has been injuncted in the media to the nth degree.  This would be even more troubling, as someone can just be "disappeared" into a Kafka-esque legal nightmare. 

 

The Rise of the Mercenary

Stephen Armstrong published an interesting article in today's New Statesman magazine. Based on his new book War plc: the Rise of the New Corporate Mercenary, it examines the rise of the corporate security consultant. Or in basic English – mercenaries.

I met Stephen when I was invited by James Whale to review the book on Press TV. I was impressed with his research and depth of knowledge on this subject. It was an unusually harmonious talk show - rather than arguing, we all took a broadly similar approach to the issue of mercenaries, oversight and accountability.

The increasing privatisation of intelligence is an insidious development in the world of espionage and war. For many decades there have existed on the fringes of the official intelligence world a few private security companies; think Kroll, Blackwater, Aegis. These companies are often the last refuge of ...... former intelligence officers of the western spook organisations.

These people, often frustrated at the overly bureaucratic nature of the governmental spy organisations, resign and are gently steered towards these corporations. That, or the relocation officers get them nice juicy jobs at merchant banks, arms companies or international quangos. It's always useful to have reliable chaps in useful places, after all.

In the last decade, however, we have seen an explosion in the number of these companies. One of my former colleagues is a founder of Diligence, which is going from strength to strength. These kinds of companies specialise in corporate spying, the neutralisation of opposition and protest groups, and security. The latter usually boils down to providing military muscle in hot spots like Iraq. While I can see the attraction for soldiers leaving crack regiments and wondering what on earth they can do with their specialised expertise, and who then decide that earning £10,000 a week risking their lives in Baghdad is a good bet, this has worrying implications for the rule of law.

Leaving aside the small matter that, under international and domestic UK law, all wars of aggression are illegal, our official British military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is at least to a certain degree accountable. The most egregious war crimes have resulted in court martials. But the new mercenaries live in a legal no-man's land, and in this territory anything goes. Or can at least be covered up.

This is the same principle that has guided these unofficial spook companies over the years – plausible deniability. What little democratic oversight there is in the UK of the intelligence community still does give them limited pause for thought: what if the media hears about it? What if an MP asks an awkward question? By using former colleagues in the corporate intelligence world, MI5, MI6 et al can out source the risk.

The oversight and accountability for the official spooks and the army are bad enough. The privatisation of intelligence and military might makes a further mockery of the feeble oversight provisions in place in this country. This is a worrying development in legal and democratic terms; more importantly, it has a direct, daily impact on the rights of innocent men, women and children around the world. We need to ensure that the official and unofficial spooks and military are accountable under the law.

Fig Leaf to the Spies

The lack of any meaningful oversight of the UK’s intelligence community was highlighted again last week, when The Daily Mail reported that a crucial fax was lost in the run-up to the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005.

There has yet to be an official enquiry into the worst terrorist atrocity on the UK mainland, despite the call for one from traumatised families and survivors and the legitimate concerns of the British public. To date, we have had to make do with an “official narrative” written by a faceless bureaucrat and published in May 2006. As soon as it was published, the then Home Secretary, John Reid, had to correct egregious factual errors when presenting it to Parliament.

The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) also did a shoddy first job, when it cleared the security forces of all wrong-doing in its initial report published at the same time. It claimed a lack of resources had hampered MI5's counter-terrorism efforts.

However, following a useful leak, it emerged that MI5 had not only been aware of at least two of the alleged bombers before the attack, it had been concerned enough to send a fax up to West Yorkshire Police Special Branch asking them to investigate Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. This fax was never acted upon.

So the ISC has been forced to produce another report, this time apparently admitting that, yes, there had been intelligence failures, most notably the lost fax. West Yorkshire SB should have acted on it. But the intelligence officer in MI5 responsible for this investigation should have chased it up when no response was forthcoming.

This second ISC report, which has been sitting on the Prime Minister’s desk for weeks already, is said to be “devastating”. However, I’m willing to bet that if/when it sees the light of day, it will be anything but.

The ISC is at best an oversight fig leaf. It was formed in 1994, when MI6 and GCHQ were put on a statutory footing for the first time with the Intelligence Services Act. At the time the press welcomed this as a great step forward towards democratic accountability for the intelligence community. Well, it could not have been worse than the previous set-up, when MI5, MI6 and GCHQ did not officially exist. They were not required to obey the laws of the land, and no MP was allowed to ask a question in Parliament about their activities. As 1980s whistleblower Peter Wright so succinctly put it, the spies could bug and burgle their way around with impunity.

So the establishment of the ISC was a (very) limited step in the right direction. However, it is not a Parliamentary Committee. Its members are selected by the Prime Minister, and it is answerable only to the PM, who can vet its findings. The remit of the ISC only covers matters of spy policy, administration and finance. It is not empowered to investigate allegations of operational incompetence nor crimes committed by the spies. And its annual report has become a joke within the media, as there are usually more redactions than coherent sentences.

The ISC's first big test came in the 1990s following the Shayler and Tomlinson disclosures. These involved detailed allegations of illegal investigations, bungled operations and assassination attempts against foreign heads of state. It is difficult to conceive of more heinous crimes committed by our shadowy spies.

But how did the ISC react? If one reads the reports from the relevant years, the only aspect that exercised the ISC was Shayler’s information that MI5 had on many MPs and government ministers. The ISC was reassured by MI5 that would no longer be able to use these files. That’s it.

Forget about files being illegally held on hundreds of thousands of innocent UK citizens; forget about the illegal phone taps, the preventable deaths on UK streets from IRA bombs, innocent people being thrown in prison, and the assassination attempt against Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. The fearless and eternally vigilant ISC MPs were primarily concerned about receiving reassurance that their files would no longer be vetted by MI5 officers on the basis of membership to "subversive" organisations. What were they afraid of – that shameful evidence of early left-wing activity from their fiery youth might emerge? Heaven forbid under New Labour.

Barely a day goes by when newspaper headlines do not remind us of terrible threats to our national security. Only in the last week, the UK media has reported that the threat of espionage from Russia and China is at its highest since the days of the Cold War; that resurgent Republican terror groups in Northern Ireland pose a graver danger to us even than Al Qaeda; that radicalised British Muslim youth are returning from fighting with the Taliban to wage war on the streets of the UK. We have to take all this on trust, despite the intelligence community's appalling track record of bending the truth to gain more powers and resources. This is why meaningful oversight is so vitally important for the health of our democracy. The ISC is a long way from providing that.

The Media and the Spies

The UK mainstream media has made much this week of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s assertion that MI5 had not requested the government’s proposed extension of the imprisonment without charge of terrorist suspects from 28 to 42 days.

This statement has caused a furore in the UK, and there is a chance that the PM may lose the key vote in Parliament on this amendment tomorrow.

In fact, such has been the uproar that the Director General of MI5, Jonathan Evans, is reported by Reuters to have made a rare public statement:

"Since the security service is neither a prosecuting authority nor responsible for criminal investigations, we are not, and never have been, the appropriate body to advise the government on pre-charge detention time limits," he said in a statement on the MI5 website.

"We have not, therefore, sought to comment publicly or privately on the current proposals, except to say that we recognise the challenge posed for the police service by the increasingly complex and international character of some recent terrorist cases."

What particularly strikes me about this is an apparently insignificant phrase, “raised publicly or privately”.

In contrast to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, who admitted to “unintentionally misleading” the parliamentary Joint Committee charged with assessing the need to increase the detention limit, Evans had refused to give evidence about the 42 day issue. So he has certainly not raised this in a publicly accountable way.

It’s the word “private” that intrigues me. It reeks of sotto voce discussions between old school chums at the grander gentlemen’s clubs in London: of unattributable briefings between anonymous MI5 officers and chosen journalists; and of cosy lunches with Fleet Street editors in the DG’s dining room at Thames House, MI5’s London HQ.

While Evans denies using this methodology around the 42 day issue, his statement confirms that such private discussions do indeed play a part in influencing policy decisions and media perception.

I saw this approach first-hand in the 1990s during the whistleblowing years. In fact, it was then that MI5 stepped up its charm offensive with politicians and journalists. It was during one of the first of these cosy media lunches in Thames House, hosted by the then DG Stephen Lander, that the respected BBC Diplomatic Editor Mark Urban asked a fateful question about the Gaddafi Plot and was reportedly told by Lander that “he was not here to answer half-baked questions from smart-arse journalists”. So there were certain shortfalls in the charm, even if the lack of accountability held up well.

But there are other, more sinister ways for the spies to manipulate public opinion. MI6 has a sensitive section called Information Operations (I/Ops), which exists purely to set the news agenda for the spies. I/Ops manages this either by massaging the facts, spinning the tone of the story or, more worryingly, planting false stories in a quiescent press.

In the 1990s there was a famous case. Colonel Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al Islam, applied for a visa to come to Britain. I/Ops planted a completely false story in The Sunday Telegraph that he was involved in money laundering with Iran and, lo and behold, MI5 had the perfect excuse to deny him a visa. Al Islam subsequently sued the newspaper which, faced with Shayler's evidence, settled out of court.

A few months ago the ex-head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, gave a talk at the LSE about the intelligence agencies and the media. I went along to have a laugh, and was graciously allowed to ask a question. Naturally I raised the issue of I/Ops, its relationship with the media, and whether such a role was acceptable in a modern democracy.

In the context of the talk, what could have been more pertinent? However, Dearlove declined to answer. In fact, he went so far as to say that such a matter was “within the ring of secrecy”. At which point a journalist from a prestigious national newspaper who was sitting next to me, turned and said gleefully that this at last proved that I/Ops existed. Gratifying as this was, I shall reiterate my question: is the role of I/Ops acceptable in a modern democracy, where we are supposed to enjoy freedom of information, transparency and accountability from the powers-that-be?