Annie Machon

TrebleThink: the new American hypocrisy

George Orwell is just so old-world, retro and quaintly British.  Gone are the days of simple DoubleThink.  The Americans inevitably had to supersize the concept.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was last week speaking at the George Washington University about political activism and freedom of expression:

 

Now we appear to have entered the realm of TrebleThink.

At the meeting Ray McGovern, army veteran, long-term CIA analyst, and now internationally-renowned peace activist chose to exercise his right to freedom of expression by standing up and silently turning his back on Clinton during her speech.

For his pains 71-year-old McGovern sustained painfully injuries while being forcibly removed by nameless "security personnel", before ending up in a tiny police cell.  On his eventual release he had to take a taxi to hospital for treatment.

Hillary Clinton did not even stumble over her words during McGovern's arrest.

The startling hypocrisy of Clinton's speech is clear on three different fronts:

1) She is defending the rights of activists in the Middle East to speak out against corrupt governments, while ignoring the brutalisation of a fellow citizen for silently using those very rights in America.

2) She's doing so while speaking out about the vital role of internet freedoms - indeed standing behind a podium with the words "Internet Freedom" written on it - in informing citizens and spreading democracy.  Yet at the same time a secretly-convened US Grand Jury is frantically scrabbling around for any pretext whatsoever to prosecute Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks.  And yet another is investigating attacks against the collaborating US corporations that pulled the plug on Wikileaks support last year.  Ironically, on the same day as Clinton's speech, Twitter was in court fighting US government attempts to obtain personal information of alleged Wikileaks supporters.  No doubt Clinton would condemn the former Egyptian government if it had done the same thing.

3) And let's not forget that the USA is hosting the UNESCO World Press Freedom Day this year too.  This was announced on the very day Julian Assange was arrested in the UK.

The hypocrisy is flagrant. As I said, welcome to the world of TrebleThink.  You read it here first....

 

Durham Union Society Talk, 16 February 2011

It's a busy couple of months for talks, and I have the pleasure of speaking at the Durham Union Society tomorrow night (16th February).

My talk will be focusing on the modern role of intelligence agencies, the war on terror, what it's like to be recruited to work as a spook, whistleblowing, Wikileaks, police states and civil liberties.  An eclectic mix.

The talk is open to all students, not just members of the Union, so if you're in the area and have the time, do come along!

Cambridge Union Society, 28th January 2011

Well I had a fab time revisiting the old place last week to do a talk at the Union Society - somewhere I spent many happy hours, oh, aeons ago!

Many thanks to Rebecca and the rest of the team for organising and hosting the event, and to Silkie for setting the whole ball rolling.

It was a busy weekend.  The Friday evening began with an all-too-brief appearance at the first meeting of a new group, MI7 - can I say that, or is it a state secret? - organised by Silkie and Charlie Veitch of the Love Police. 

It was strange to go back to the Union as a speaker after so long and so many unusual experiences.  The audience seemed to stay wide awake for my hour-long talk, and the questions afterwards were interesting, lively and varied.  I was also encouraged to see that ideas deemed to be "radical" only a few years ago are now going mainstream.

The next day was taken up with interviews for The Cambridge Student and Varsity student newspapers, Sky 203 Channel,  and a photo shoot with QH Photography for a gallery exhibition in London later this year.

The Cambridge Student journalists gamely allowed the interview to be film by Sky 203 - not the easiest of scenarios.

"Varsity" newspaper did a colourful and intelligent interview - thanks Olivia! - which was rapidly followed on the newspaper website today with this puff piece about MI6. 

I can only assume that this is merely balanced news reporting, especially as the Master of Pembroke College, Chair of the Trustee Board of the Union Society, and former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, will be speaking at the Union in a couple of weeks..... 

Certainly an interesting juxtaposition!

The photo shoot was fun, and the results will be appearing in London at the end of this year.  As you can see from the photo on the left, Huy takes a mean picture.

I also ran into Ryan J-W Smith, who is in the process of completing his intriguing film, 2Plus2Makes4.  Limited private and festival screenings are expected this summer.

The film synopsis asks some fundamental questions:

"How close are we to sliding into Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, ‘1984’? Controversial, shocking, powerful and honest - starring Tony Benn, Gore Vidal, former MI5, CIA, FBI agents, Senators, Presidential Nominees, etc.  A ‘Must-See’ feature documentary from award-winning filmmaker, Ryan J-W Smith. Smith’s previous films have received 16 International Film Festival Selections, 5 ‘Best Film’ Nominations, and 4 ‘Best Film’ wins."

Cambridge Union Society Talk, 28th January 2011

I shall be returning to my alma mater next week to do a talk at the Cambridge Union Society on 28th January.  I'll be discussing spies, civil liberites, whistleblowers, Wikileaks and much more.....

The murder of Pat Finucane

Moving swiftly past the prurient, thigh-rubbing glee that most of the old media seems to be exhibiting over the alleged details of Julian Assange's love life, let's re-focus on the heart of the Wikileaks disclosures, and most importantly the aims underpinning them: transparency, justice, and an informed citizenry living within fully-functioning democracies.  Such quaint notions.

In the media maelstrom of the Cablegate disclosures, and the resulting infantile and thuggish threats of the American political class, is easy to lose sight of the fact that many of the leaked documents refer to scandals, corruption and cover-ups in a range of countries, not just the good old US of A.

One document that recently caught my attention related to the notorious murder twenty-one years ago of civil rights activist, Pat Finucane, in Northern Ireland.  Finucane was a well-known lawyer who was shot and killed in front of his wife and three small children.  There has long been speculation that he was targeted by Protestant terrorist groups, in collusion with the NI secret police, the army's notorious and now-disbanded Forces Research Unit (FRU), and/or MI5.

Well, over a decade ago former top plod, Lord (John) Stevens, began an inquiry that did indeed establish such state collusion, despite having his inquiry offices burnt out in the process by person/s allegedly unknown half-way through the investigation.  Stevens fought on, producing a damning report in 2003 confirming the notion of state collusion with Irish Loyalist terrorist activities, but never did clarify exactly what had happened to poor Pat Finucane.

However, Finucane's traumatised family has never stopped demanding justice.  The recent disclosure shines a light on some of the back-room deals around this scandal, and for that I'm sure many people thank Wikileaks.

The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland - such a quintessentially British understatement, in any other country it would have been called a civil war - were deceptive, murky and vicious on both sides.  "Collusion" is an elastic word that stretches beyond the strict notion of the state.  It is well-known that the US organistion, NORAID, supported by many Americans claiming Irish ancestry, was a major fundraising channel for, um, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, from the 1970s onwards. 

Such networks provided even more support than Colonel Gaddafi of Libya with his arms shipments, and the cash well only dried up post-9/11.  As you can see in this recent article in the The Telegraph, even the incoming Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, New York Congressman Peter King (who ironically called for the designation of Wkileaks as a "foreign terrorist organisation") appears to have been a life long supporter of Sinn Fein.

With this in the back of our minds, it appears that Dublin and Washington kept pushing for a full inquiry into Finucane's murder - and in 2005 it looked like MI5 would finally co-operate. 

However, the devil was in the detail. Coincidentally, 2005 was the year that the UK government rushed through a new law, the Inquiries Act, which scandalously allowed any department under investigation (in this case MI5) to dictate the terms and scope of the inquiry. 

Collusion by any state in the unlawful arrest, torture, and extrajudicial murder of people - whether its own citizens or others - is state terrorism.  Let's not mince our words here.  Amnesty International provides a clear definition of this concept.

As the The Guardian  article about Finucane so succintly puts it:

"When a state sanctions the killing of citizens, in particular citizens who are lawyers, it puts the rule of law and democracy in jeopardy. And when a state enlists auxiliary assassins, it cedes its monopoly over state secrets: it may feel omnipotent, but it is also vulnerable to disclosure."

Indeed.  Northern Ireland was like a Petri dish of human rights abuses: torture, Diplock courts (aka military tribunals), kidnappings, curfews, shoot-to-kill, informers, and state collusion in assassinations.

The infection has now spread.  These are precisely the tactics currently used by the US, the UK and their "auxiliary assassins" across great swathes of the Middle East.  Perhaps this explains why our nation states have been outflanked and have ceded their monopoly over secrets.

Will justice ever be done?  In the past I would have said, sadly, that would be highly unlikely.  However,  courageous organisations like Wikileaks and its ilk are improving the odds.

Blitz Spirit?

The most senior police officer in the UK, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Stephenson no less, is saying that the British citizens are not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough.  "Al Qaeda" could strike at any minute, the enemy is within etc, etc....

Now, for a man of his seniority, one presumes that he has served as a policeman for a fair few years - possibly in the 1970s, certainly the 80s and 90s.  Which means that he should have a memory of what it means to be under the real, daily threat of bombs exploding that aimed to maim, kill and terrorize the civilian population of London and the rest of the UK.  After all, throughout those decades the Provisional IRA, backed by the fund-raising activities of certain American citizens and Colonel Gaddafi of Libya - that erstwhile patron of freedom fighters everywhere, now a staunch ally of the West in the "war on terror" - was pretty much putting bombs down at will on UK streets.

During these years the UK has endured Lockerbie, Omagh, Bishopsgate, Canary Wharf, and Manchester, to name but a few major atrocities.  A good summary of the terrorist attacks against London alone over the last 150 years can be found here, with the first Tube bombing occurring in 1885.  A pilot, Patrick Smith, also recently wrote a great article about aircraft security and the sheer scale of the terrorist threat to the West in the 1980s - and asks a very pertinent question: just how would we collectively react to such a stream of atrocities now? 

Putting aside my professional life at the time, I have personal memories of what it was like to live and work in London in the 1990s under the shadow of terrorism.  I remember making my way to work when I was a fledging MI5 intelligence officer in 1991 and commuting through Victoria train station in London 10 minutes before a bomb, planted in a rubbish bin, exploded on the station concourse.  One person was killed, and many sustained severe injuries.  One person had their foot blown off - the image haunted me for a long time.

I also vividly remember, two years later, sitting at my desk in MI5's Mayfair office, and hearing a dull thud in the background - this turned out to be a bomb exploding outside Harrods department store in Knightsbridge.  And let's not forget the almost daily disruption to the tube and rail networks during the 90s because of security alerts.  Every Londoner was exhorted to watch out for, and report, any suspicious packages left at stations or on streets.  Yet because of the preceding couple of decades, this was already a normal way of life in the city. 

Londoners have grown used to inconvenience; they grumble a bit about the disruption and then get on with their lives - echoes of the "keep calm and carry on" mentality that evolved during the Blitz years.  In the 1990s the only noticeable change to London's diurnal rhythm was that there were fewer US tourists clogging up the streets - an early indication of the disproportionate, paranoid US reaction to a perceived terrorist threat.

Separate from the IRA, in 1994 a car bomb exploded outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington, London.  Despite initial reports that Iranian-backed groups were responsible (and, it turns out, MI5 may have dropped the ball), Palestinian activists were blamed and convicted, wrongly it turns out, as MI5 assessed that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, had pulled a dirty trick.

Terrorism on the streets of London was nothing new.  In the early 1980s my father was in London attending an investigative journalism course and narrowly missed two bombings - one in a restaurant at Marble Arch a couple of hours after he and the rest of the course members had been eating there, and another later that night close to the hotel he was staying in at Lancaster Gate. 

My Pa had another near miss in 1970 when he was a young airline pilot flying VC-10s around the world for BOAC. He was supposed to be the pilot of the VC-10 that ended up at Dawson's Field in Jordan - hijacked by members of the PFLP and eventually blown up.  He had been prevented from flying from Bahrain that day as he was suffering a bad dose of the 'flu.

To this day, his view about both these incidents is to shrug and carry on.  Yes, it was a close shave, but if you allow incidents like that to colour the rest of your life, then the concept of terrorism has already won.

The UK and its citizens have had plenty of hands-on experience of living with the reality of war, political violence and terrorism.   As a result, I'm constantly flabbergasted by the global security crackdown since 9/11 and particularly in the UK after 7th July 2005.  It was ghastly, and my heart bleeds for the victims, families, and survivors, but major terrorist atrocities are hardly new to the UK. 

The UK government seems now to have forgotten hard-learned lessons from the 1970s and 80s in the war in Northern Ireland: that draconian measures - torture, shoot to kill, internment, military-style tribunals -  not only don't work, but also are counter-productive and act as recruiting grounds for terrorist groups.  The flagrant miscarriages of justice around cases like the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six reinforced this perspective.  

And the UK has not been alone in Europe when it comes to living with the daily reality of terrorism: the Spanish have endured Basque separatist attacks for four decades, as have the French - in addition to those perpetrated in Paris with devastating results by Algerian Islamic groups in the 1990s.  Germany successfully dealt with the Baader-Meinhof Gang (Red Army Faction), and other European countries, such as Belgium and Italy, have endured Operation Gladio style terrorist attacks over recent decades.

But in all those years, none of our countries gave up on the concept of basic values and freedoms - indeed they seemed to learn useful lessons from the repressive, failed experiment in Northern Ireland.  So why are we now falling in line, unthinkingly, with the hysterical and brutal US response post 9/11? 

In the UK we are effectively living under a Big Brother surveillance state, as I have previously and extensively written.  Other Northern European countries are constantly pressured to fall in line with the US "war on terror" fear mentality.  To its credit Germany is reacting cautiously, even in the face of the current, hyped-up terror threat.  But then we Europeans know the lessons of history - we've lived them, and Germany more than most.  The ghosts of the Gestapo and the Stasi still create a frisson of fear in the collective Germanic memory.

But returning to that doughty crime fighter, Sir Paul Stephenson.  The day after he ticked off the UK public for not taking terrorism seriously enough, he is once again in the media, predicting an era of growing civil unrest in the wake of the student riots in London, and chillingly stating that the rules of the game had changed.  Forget about trying to negotiate with campaigners - now the only way to deal with them is to spy on them, as The Guardian reported:

"We have been going through a period where we have not seen that sort of violent disorder," Stephenson said. "We had dealt with student organisers before and I think we based it too much on history. If we follow an intelligence-based model that stops you doing that. Obviously you realise the game has changed. Regrettably, the game has changed and we must act."

Last year the same newspaper revealed that ACPO, the senior police officers' private association, was running an illegal unit to spy on "domestic extremists" (read politically active citizens).  In response to the public outcry, the head of ACPO, Sir Hugh Orde, promised to stop this Stasi-like practice.  In the wake of the student protests, Sir Paul will probably see a renewed need for the unit, no doubt under another name.  Big Brother grows apace - because, of course, we all know that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia......

Spy drones coming soon to a place near you.

For a long time now I have been giving speaking out at conferences and in interviews around the world about the encroaching nature of our surveillance states. 

One aspect of this, the endemic CCTV coverage in the UK, is notorious internationally. Not only the estimated 4 million+ public CCTV cameras on British streets, but also all the traffic cameras and private security cameras that sneak a peak onto our public spaces too.  As if that were not enough, earlier this year it was also reported that local councils are investing in mobile CCTV smart spy cars too.

Additionally, of course, we had the issue of Google Street View invading our privacy, and the camera cars also just happened to coincidentally hoover up the private internet traffic of those too trusting to lock their wireless internet access.  Unlike the UK, the Germans have thankfully said a robust "nein" to Google's plan.

All this, as I've previously noted, despite the fact that the head of the Metropolitan Police department responsible for processing all this surveillance information went on the record to say that CCTV evidence is useless in helping to solve all but 3% of crimes, and those merely minor.  In fact, since CCTV has been rolled out nationally, violent crime on the streets of Britain has not noticeably reduced.

But, hey, who cares about facts when security is Big Business?  Someone, somewhere, is getting very rich by rolling out ever more Orwellian surveillance technology. 

On the streets of Britain, it is getting progressively worse.  Audiences across Europe and North America have responded with shocked laughter when I have mentioned that police trials had been conducted in the UK using talking CCTV cameras that barked orders at apparent transgressors.

In 2007 Middlesbrough, a town in the north east of the UK with a zero-tolerance policy, began a trial using these talking cameras.  In line with a government review of civil liberties this year, it was reported over the summer that the use of these cameras might be phased out.  Needless to say, the council is fighting a fierce rearguard action against the removal of talking CCTV - an obvious example of the inherent difficulty of trying to wrest established power from the authorities.

Then earlier this year it emerged that various British police forces and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA),  have ordered military-style drones to spy on the citizenry from the skies.  One drone manufacturer said that there had been enquiries about the potential for militarisation of these drones: thankfully, his response was reported as follows in The Guardian:

"Mark Lawrence, director of Air Robot UK, said: "UAVs will, to an extent, replace helicopters. Our air robots cost £30,000 compared with £10m for a fully equipped modern helicopter. We have even been asked to put weapons on them but I'm not interested in getting involved in that."

However, Wired has reported that "non-lethal" weapons could be installed, to facilitate crowd control.

There is also the other side of the security coin to consider, of course.  If these drones are implemented in the skies of Britain, how soon before some enterprising young "Al Qaeda" cadre cottons on to the idea that this could be an effective way to launch an attack?  So much for all our wonderfully effective airport security measures.

Plus, these little airborne pests will prove to be a real hazard for other aircraft, as has already been noted.

Despite all this, no widespread indignation has been voiced by the UK population.  When will the tipping point be reached about this incipient Orwellian nightmare?

But hope may be at hand.  A somewhat frivolous article appeared today, stating that small spy drones will become the new paparazzi: Version 2.0, no doubt.

Perhaps, finally, we shall now see some meaningful opposition to this encroaching Big Brother state. 

Once Bono, Sting, Saint Bob and the assembled celeb corps get on their high horses about their enshrined, fundamental right to privacy, it might finally become fashionable to discuss the very basic principles underpinning our civilisation.....

....you remember, those fuddy-duddy ideas like the right to life, not to be tortured, not to be unlawfully imprisoned or kidnapped, free speech, fair trials, free conscience etc ..... oh, and privacy of course!

Remember, remember the 5th of November....

November 5th has long had many levels of resonance for me: Bonfire Night of course, when I was a child - fireworks in the garden and burnt baked potatoes from the fire; since the age of seven, celebrating the birthday of my oldest friend; and, since 2002, the memory of having to stand up in the witness stand in an Old Bailey court room in London to give a mitigation plea at the trial of my former partner, seeing his sentence reduced from the expected thirteen months to a "mere" six, and then having to deal for weeks with the media fall-out.  A strange mix of memories.

David Shayler endured a "Kafkaesque trial" in 2002 in the sense that he was not allowed to make a defence due to government-imposed gagging orders, despite all the relevant material already having been widely pubished in the media.  The issues were summed up well in this New Statesman article from that time. 

But the current debate about control orders used against so-called terrorist suspects - my emphasis - adds a whole new dimension to the notorious phrase.

This recent, excellent article in The Guardian by lawyer Matthew Ryder about control orders sums it up.  How can you defend a client if you are not even allowed access to the information that has led to the original accusation?

The Liberal Democrats, in the run-up to the General Election earlier this year, pledged to do away with control orders, as they are an affront to the British model of justice.  However, MI5 is putting up a strong defence for their retention, but then they would, wouldn't they? 

Much of the "secret" evidence that leads to a control order appears to come from telephone intercept, but why on earth can this evidence not be revealed in a court of law?  It's not like the notion of telephone bugging is a state secret these days, as I argued in The Guardian way back in 2005.

Bearing all of the above in mind, do have a read of this interview with Paddy Hill, one of the victims of the notorious wrongful convictions for the IRA Birmingham pub bombings in 1974.  After being arrested, threatened, tortured and traumatised, he was forced to confess to a terrible crime he had not committed. 

As a result, he had to endure sixteen years in prison before his innocence was confirmed.  He is still suffering the consequences, despite having found the strength to set up the "Miscarriages of Justice Organisation" to help other victims.

And then have a think about whether we should blindly trust the word of the security forces and the police when they state that we have to give away yet more of our hard-won freedoms and rights in the name of the ever-shifting, ever-nebulous "war on terror". 

Do we really need to hold terrorist suspects in police cells for 28 days without charge?  Will we really continue to allow the head of MI6 to get away with blithely asserting, unchallenged, that British intelligence does its very best not to "benefit" from information extracted via unthinkable torture, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray so graphically described in his blog on 29th October?

I've said it before, and I shall say it again: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put in place for a reason in 1948.  Let's all draw a breath, and remember, remember.....

 

Pastor Martin Niemoeller Updated

First they came for the Irish in the 1980s,

But I was not Irish so I did not speak up.

Then they came for the Muslims after 9/11,

But I was not a Muslim, so I did not speak up.

Then they came for the "domestic extremists",

But I was not an activist, so I did not speak up.

Then they came for me;

and there was nobody left to speak up for me.

 

And here's the original.

Boiling Frogs

This Saturday, October 2, I'll be speaking at the Southwark Playhouse in London, in between the matinee and evening performances of an excellent new play by Steven Bloomer called "Boiling Frogs".  The play looks at the erosion of civil liberties in the UK, in the name of protecting us from the "war on terror", and is being performed by The Factory, an innovative theatre troupe.

My talk will be called "Are We There Yet?", and will assess how far down the road the UK has moved towards being a de facto police state: what do we mean by this, and what are the indicators we should watch out for?

Bits of Freedom - Amsterdam Talk, 16 September 2010

It's going to be a busy month for talks - I'll be in Amsterdam with the Dutch (digital) civil rights organisation, Bits of Freedom, on 16th September.  I use the brackets consciously, as I don't personally see a distinction between rights in the physical or digital world - the underlying principles are the same.

BoF is doing great work, so anyone within striking distance of Amstie please come along, not only for the talk, but for what also promises to be a great social evening!

If you can't make that night, I seriously recommend coming along to a BoF dinner on 24th September, where the guest of honour is acclaimed journalist, blogger and author, Cory Doctorow.  I had the pleasure of meeting up with him a couple of years ago in London - an extremely switched on man.

I really, really enjoyed his digital activists' handbook - sorry, novel - "Little Brother", ostensibly aimed at the young adult market.  But, hey, we're all young at heart, and this book is spot on!

Watch out, Big Brother.....

Upcoming New York Conference: how the world changed after 9/11

Looking forward to speaking at this conference next weekend!

A timely and necessary debate about the vital, but increasingly fragile, state of our democracy and basic civil rights.

And what a great line up - well done to the organisers! 

Some of the other speakers are old friends I've worked with before, some I look forward to meeting for the first time.

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.

New Film by Ryan JW Smith

I had the pleasure recently of working with a talented film maker called Ryan JW Smith, and his partner/producer, Brianna. 

Brianna is an artist by training, and also a mean hand at producing. Ryan seems a bit of a renaissance man - film maker, poet, writer, actor.  In fact, he wrote a play called "New World Order" in, I believe, iambic pentameter, and performed it to packed audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe a couple of years ago, and recently had a short film called  "Army Strong" screened at a Polish film festival.

Anyway, they are in the middle of making a feature-length film about the post-apocalyptic, post-9/11 world we all share - the lies of intelligence and government, the illegal wars, the erosion of our democratic rights.  Just the sort of light material that I like to work with - and certainly what I think is of vital importance. 

I'm working on helping to promote the film later this year, and organise some screening tours for them across Europe and North America.

I think it's going to be a very powerful wake-up call to us all.  Watch this space for more news.

Here's a trailer Ryan and Brianna cut from my interviews with them called "Using Her Intelligence".  I like:

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.

MI5 looking for a Needle in the Haystack

The Xmas Day "Al Qaeda" terror attack on a transatlantic flight bound for Detroit is an interesting one.  Awful for those on the flight, of course, and my heart goes out to them for the fear they must have experienced.

But which are the governments most staunch in their prosecution of the war on terror?  Let's call them the "Axis of Good".....

The USA, the UK, and the Netherlands.

So it must be just nuts to them that the immediately identifiable Al Qaeda terrorist is reported to be a Nigerian-born UK engineering student who is flying via Schiphol airport in NL to the USA.  Even better, he acquired his "bomb" in Yemen - interestingly, a country that is under increasing assault by the US military at the moment. 

This ticks a number of useful national security boxes, reminding us what a threat our nations face. 

The alleged terrorist is reported to have been on the watch list of the US security apparatus, but not on the "no fly" list - which is unverifiable anyway, but reportedly contains the names of over a million people. So yet another break-down in this unwieldy security system.

We already have a situation where all citizens of the US, UK and NL are effectively treated like criminals every time they take a plane, as well as everyone else attempting to fly into these countries.  However, this incident has demonstrated that the security around flying is not just a slow irritant - a "Big Brother Lite" with its stupid restrictions around liquids, maquillage, shoes, belts and laptops - it has been dramatically shown not to work.

Identifying potential terrorists is like looking for a needle in a haystack.  This has become an establishment cliche these days: the terrorists have to be lucky only once, and the security services have to be constantly lucky to stop an attack.  The odds are acknowledged to be impossible. 

What used to be agreed within British and other European spook circles is the view that the best intelligence comes from tricky-to-run human sources.  They may have their flaws, but they can occasionally provide precise and lifesaving intelligence. The US approach has long been diametrically opposed to this approach - instead they sit back and hoover up every scrap of information via data mining and hope to sieve something out of it.  They then tend to respond with whizz-bang, hands-off gadgetry, much like a deadly video game.

So, that said, let's make two guesses how this new attack will be interpreted and used by our governments and security forces:

1) They admit that they need to reassess their approach to the "war on terror".

2) Focus on ever more draconian data mining measures at the point of travel - whether they work or not, whether they slide us ever nearer a police-state or not - until we are effectively prisoners in our own countries. 

A difficult prediction for 2010. 

The final annoyance will, at least from a personal perspective, be that they now ban the carrying of powders as well as liquids on board a flight.  If they stop me travelling with my Max Factor, that's it.  Trains only in the future.

Happy New Year!

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".