Nafeez - 7/7, Terror & Torture: Protecting the Deep State
Tony Gosling
7/7, Terror and Torture: Protecting the Deep State
Five years on from the London tube bombings, we
remain no closer to a full, complete and
impartial understanding of the terrible events of
that day. Today, the coalition government has
demonstrated that it has largely fallen in line
with the steps of its predecessor.
http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2010/07/77-terror-and-torture-protecting-deep.html
The announcement that the government will hold an
official inquiry into allegations that the secret
service was complicit in torture of 'terror
suspects' is, needless to note, welcome. But its
arrival on the anniversary of the most
devastating attack on London since WW2 is no accident.
While in opposition David Cameron and Nick Clegg
both supported the call for an independent public
inquiry into the 7/7 terrorist attacks. Yet now
that power is theirs, the duo’s coalition regime
is challenging the 7/7 inquest’s attempts to
explore the “preventability” of the attacks.
Three weeks ago, MI5 declared they were now
preparing to apply for a judicial review of that decision.
While the government’s underhandedly attempts to
quash the only independent inquiry process
currently available in the form of the inquest
proceedings, Cameron’s much-lauded declaration of
a decision to hold an inquiry into the torture
allegations has served to eclipse public
recollection of the whole 7/7 inquiry issue. Yet
the proposed torture inquiry is not designed to
involve a meaningful investigation, but has far
more to do with damage-control over the pending
lawsuits of 12 torture victims suing the
intelligence services for official complicity in
their torture. Those lawsuits pose the danger of
exposing in public hearings the systemic
misconduct of the intelligence services with
high-level Whitehall approval, through
potentially damaging and embarrassing subpoena requests and witness calls.
The official announcement of a torture inquiry
follows Cameron’s confirmation yesterday that the
government would offer large compensation sums to
the 12 claimants on condition that they drop
their lawsuits. Meanwhile, the proposed inquiry
has been emasculated before even beginning. As
the Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor reported:
“Cameron yesterday suggested, and government
officials made clear, that most of the evidence
to the inquiry will be heard in private, and as a
non-statutory inquiry, its powers will be
limited. ‘It will not establish legal liability,
nor order financial settlement,’ Cameron said in
a letter to Gibson, published yesterday.
It will not summon witnesses from foreign
countries, such as current or former CIA
officers. And it will not be able to compel any
individuals to give evidence. Last night,
Whitehall officials said that former Labour
ministers, including Tony Blair, will not be
asked to give evidence, even though the treatment
of British citizens and residents under investigation happened on their watch.”
The government has also refused to disclose the
official guidelines to intelligence officers for
handling detainees which applied during the
periods detainees were allegedly abused. Instead,
it has offered to publish new “consolidated”
guidelines, and while simultaneously showing no
inclination to properly investigate or even
acknowledge the official policy under which
British security services oversaw torture.
Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail further points out
that the 3 proposed panel members to head the
inquiry seem to have been hand-picked for their
subservience to the Whitehall establishment,
particularly the security services:
“The signs are worrying. Sir Peter is a
thoroughly acceptable figure to British spies
because he has been Commissioner of the
Intelligence Services since 2006, and was reappointed only last year.
Most of his work is carried out away from the
public eye, but I have heard no reports of Sir
Peter asking probing questions of MI5 and MI6
bosses over the past few years, despite the
publication of a mass of troubling material during that period.
A second member of the tribunal, Peter Riddell,
is a retired journalist from the Times newspaper
who, five years ago, published a book celebrating
Tony Blair’s relationship with George W. Bush and
the U.S. — by coincidence at almost exactly the
moment the worst of the alleged torture abuses were taking place.
Riddell, though a cheerful and popular figure,
has never been known for the kind of forensic
investigation and harsh scrutiny this inquiry surely requires.
Many will surmise that this is exactly why he was appointed.
Meanwhile the Times, for which Mr Riddell worked
for many years, has given only perfunctory
coverage to the numerous revelations about
British complicity over the past few years.
Though regarded with amiable fondness by senior
Whitehall and intelligence figures, Peter Riddell
has not yet demonstrated any of the toughness or
readiness to challenge the Whitehall
establishment this investigation requires.
The third member of the inquiry panel is Dame
Janet Paraskeva, the First Commissioner of the
Civil Service. She is also head of several
quangos: she is chair of the body that hands out
billions of Lottery money to Olympic causes, and
also chair of the quango which oversees the Child Support Agency.”
Indeed, Gibson has a track record of simply
overlooking inconvenient questions when it comes
to investigating the intelligence services. As
Norton-Tayler points out, under Gordon Brown’s
appointment, he investigated “how GCHQ intercept
intelligence was shared in the case of the Omagh
bombing in August 1998. His report focused on
whether the bombing could have been stopped,
after the BBC disclosed that GCHQ were monitoring
mobiles used in the bomb run. Gibson concluded it
could not have been stopped, though he did not
investigate the BBC's core allegation: why
information from the intercepts was not shared
with the CID officers trying to identity the bombers.”
Hardly inspires confidence. Unless, of course,
you’re David Cameron, or Nick Clegg, in which
case it may very well inspire a whole bucket-load of confidence.
So we have a whitewash torture inquiry in the
making and an ongoing crackdown on the integrity
of the 7/7 inquest. What is Whitehall trying to hide?
Part of the answer can be found in a brilliant
new book by well-known British dissident
historian Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: British
Collusion with Radical Islam (London: Serpent’s
Tail, 2010). The book has been out a week now –
unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to read it
yet – but given Curtis’ previous efforts, this is
likely to be yet another tour de force exposing
Anglo-American skulduggery. Whereas Curtis’
previous work focused on perusing the
declassified official files to explore Britain’s
role as “junior partner” in US imperial ambitions
to crush nationalist and anti-colonialist
resistance movements to the expansion of the
emerging 'liberal' order, his latest work focuses
squarely on the menace of our times – Islamist
terrorism. The gist of his argument, which
dovetails with my own work on this issue, is
summarised in the opening passage of his Guardian piece published two days ago:
“When the London bombers struck five years ago,
many people blamed the invasion of Iraq for
inspiring them. But the connection between 7/7
and British foreign policy goes much deeper. The
terrorist threat to Britain is partly ‘blowback’,
resulting from a web of British covert operations
with militant Islamist groups stretching back
decades. And while terrorism is held up as the
country's biggest security challenge, Whitehall's
collusion with radical Islam is continuing...
dependence on militant Islamists to achieve
foreign policy objectives is an echo of the past,
when such collusion was aimed at controlling oil
resources and overthrowing nationalist governments.”
Curtis reveals how in the 1950s, Britain flirted
with Islamist militants in Iran to facilitate the
overthrow of democratically elected Mossadeq,
when he challenged Anglo-American corporate
hegemony over the country’s oil resources, and
covertly financed the rise of the Muslim
Brotherhood from the 40s through to the 70s to
roll-back Egyptian President Nasser’s dangerous
brand of pan-Arab nationalism. He also points out
more recent episodes – the covert British
financing in 1999 of the al-Qaeda-affiliated KLA,
complete with one elite KLA unit being
commandeered by the brother of bin Laden’s
deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri; tacit approval of
Shi’ite death squads in Iraq; the continuing
contradictory alliance with Pakistan despite its
being the primary state-sponsor of the Taliban
insurgency in Afghanistan. He adds a highly revealing tidbit:
“Militants may be serving other useful functions.
The then Foreign Office minister Kim Howells told
a parliamentary inquiry in March 2007: ‘At
dinners at embassies around the world I have
suddenly discovered that somebody happens to be
sitting next to me who is from the respectable
end of a death squad from somewhere. The
ambassador has, with the best will in the world,
invited that person along because he thinks that,
under the new democracy, they will become the new government.’”
The attitude is, in other words, commonplace –
and standard diplomatic practice: Identify
potential useful idiots, whether they be
militants or terrorists is of no consequence, as
long as they might play a role in facilitating
British social engineering projects to enforce
‘democracies’ in regions that just happen to be
of key strategic significance in terms of geopolitics, resources, and so on.
What we’re seeing today is not the emergence of
accountability, as the coalition government had
promised, but a return to the age-old imperatives
of damage-control, secrecy and the protection of
the capacity of the deep state to continue to
operate outside the rule of law, in the name of national security.
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