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British authorities intercepted bomb at East Midlands airport after ‘tip off’ Plastic explosives discovered on cargo planes travelling to the US
Intelligence from Saudi Arabia ‘came after torture of al-Qaeda operative’
Ex-spy chief says torture ‘does produce useful information’

Information obtained using torture was used to help foil an al-Qaeda plot to bring down two planes, it has been claimed.

British authorities intercepted a bomb at East Midlands Airport after being ‘tipped off’ by Saudi Arabian security forces, reportedly following the interrogation by torture of an al-Qaeda operative.

The claim comes as former MI5 head Sir John Sawers said torture does produce ‘useful information’ and can be ‘effective in the short term.’

Intelligence obtained via torture was reportedly used in a ‘Jack Bauer real-time operation’ to foil an al-Qaeda plot to bring down two planes and intercept a bomb at East Midlands Airport (pictured)
+5
Intelligence obtained via torture was reportedly used in a ‘Jack Bauer real-time operation’ to foil an al-Qaeda plot to bring down two planes and intercept a bomb at East Midlands Airport (pictured)

A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010. Pictured is the package found at East Midlands Airport
A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010. Pictured is the package found at East Midlands Airport

A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010.

It is believed the bombs were designed to go off mid-air and bring the huge planes down over the US.

After what was described as a ‘tip-off’ from Saudi Arabian security forces, the planes were stopped at East Midlands Airport in Leicestershire and the United Arab Emirates and the bombs uncovered.

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A group called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) later took responsibility for the plot.

Now it has been claimed the discovery at East Midlands Airport was only possible because British officials in Saudi Arabia were in communication with a team believed to have been using torture on a member of terror group al-Qaeda.

‘The people in London went back on the phone two or three times to where the interrogation was taking place in Riyadh to find out specifically where the bomb was hidden. There were two Britons there, in immediate communication with where the interrogation was taking place, and as soon as it happened, they were in touch with the UK. It was all done in real time,’ an intelligence source told Jamie Merrill, James Hanning, Mark Leftly and Nick Clark at The Independent On Sunday.

A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010. Pictured is a packaged being launched onto a police helicopter at East Midlands Airport
A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010. Pictured is a packaged being launched onto a police helicopter at East Midlands Airport

It is claimed the discovery at East Midlands Airport was only possible because British officials in Saudi Arabia were in communication with a team believed to have been using torture on a member of al-Qaeda
It is claimed the discovery at East Midlands Airport was only possible because British officials in Saudi Arabia were in communication with a team believed to have been using torture on a member of al-Qaeda

A source close to the operation said there was ‘no way’ that the information which led to the plot being exposed ‘wasn’t procured under duress’, but that the British officials would have ensured they were not present.

He added: ‘Of course we use intelligence from torture. We take it from wherever we can get it, but we are never, ever going to say “we don’t want that”. Or ask too many questions about where it has come from. It is the difference between intelligence and evidence.’

Last month, following the death of King Abdullah, Prime Minister David Cameron defended Britain’s ties with Saudi Arabia – despite the country’s record on human rights.

He also said that a piece of counter-terrorism intelligence supplied by the Arab state had ‘saved potentially hundreds of lives’ in the UK, which aides have confirmed was a reference to the bomb plot.

He added: ‘Now, you can be Prime Minister and say exactly what you think about every regime in the world and make great headlines, and give great speeches.

Former MI5 head Sir John Sawers said yesterday that torture does produce ‘useful information’ and can be ‘effective in the short term’
Former MI5 head Sir John Sawers said yesterday that torture does produce ‘useful information’ and can be ‘effective in the short term’

‘But I think my first job is to try and keep this country safe from terrorism and if that means you have to build strong relationships sometimes with regimes you don’t always agree with, that I think is part of the job and that is the way I do it. And that is the best way I can explain it.’

Former spy chief Sir John, who was head of MI6 from 2009 to 2014, yesterday hit back at claims that security services played a role in the radicalisation of British jihadist Mohammed Emwazi.

Asim Qureshi, research director of Cage, claims Emwazi, who was nicknamed Jihadi John, was interrogated by MI5 and subjected to security agency harassment before becoming a militant.

But Sir John said arguments that harassment drove Emwazi to join IS were ‘very specious’.

‘The idea that somehow being spoken to by a member of MI5 is a radicalising act, I think this is very false and very transparent,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Sir John also told presenter Mishal Husain: ‘Torture had been used for “thousands of years in order to extract useful information.

‘If you decide in 2015 that it doesn’t work at all then that would be to misunderstand the problem.’

He added: ‘The whole problem about torture and maltreatment is sadly is that it does produce intelligence. And that’s why in a civilised society like ours we have to set aside certain methods, even though they might be effective in the short term. In the longer term they are very counterproductive; they are undermining the values of our society.’

By LUCY CROSSLEY FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 14:28 GMT, 1 March 2015 | UPDATED: 14:32 GMT, 2 March 2015

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On the first anniversary since my arrest for Syria-related terrorism I explain just why the trial against me was heading for disaster
It was the early morning of 24 February 2014. The doorbell rang. My wife answered and called my name, sounding scared. I was out of bed and already half-dressed when the police walked into my room. It seemed like they had filled the house. They asked me to confirm my name and then told me I was under arrest for terrorism.

I had been on edge since police seized my passport on my return from South Africa, so I was half expecting this. The police herded all my family into one bedroom. They allowed me to hug them all and say goodbye – unlike the Americans did. I told them to be strong, not to cry and have hope in Allah. I promised I would be back soon.

After dispersing my family between four households, the police scoured every inch of my house and filled 50 large evidence boxes with literally anything they could find. I didn’t know it at the time, but my car had been bugged since September 2012 and my every conversation recorded.

I was taken to a police station and kept there for four days. This was very serious. Over 150 police officers were involved. Additionally, the Home Office, the Treasury, the intelligence services and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had gone to extraordinary lengths to refuse me bail, freeze my assets and classify me as a Category A high-risk prisoner in HMP Belmarsh, five hours away from home.

The Government must have also anticipated the damage my arrest would have done to community relations and predicted allegations that they were doing this to prevent me from exposing British complicity in torture.

And after all that effort – it cost the taxpayers over £1million – they just gave up, apparently because of a meeting I had with MI5? The police claimed that my trial collapsed because they were not aware that I had met with MI5 before I travelled to Syria, but that’s not true because the article in which I mention my meeting was served as evidence by the prosecution. Surely, if the police and CPS truly believed I was involved in terrorism how could MI5 allow me to travel abroad for the purposes of terrorism?

The truth is the case was going to collapse on its own merits and was going to set a precedent that successfully challenged Britain’s policy on Syria and the meaning of terrorism.

I first became aware of the probes during police interrogation and like most people, I was horrified at the idea of having my personal conversations recorded. My reality, however, was that I could have been facing up to 15 years in prison for providing fitness training and a generator to the Syrian rebels, if found guilty.

After arriving at prison, the task of preparing for trial began in earnest. I knew I’d committed no crime and I was ready for a fight. The CPS case, however, was served in a disjointed and inconsistent manner. My lawyers had never seen anything like it in decades of advocacy.

The prosecution tried to create a narrative that didn’t exist because they were missing the key component: mens rea – the guilty mindset. After eight months of this, the desperation of their case coupled with the inability to understand their own evidence became apparent.

One example of this was regarding a train journey home with a military historian friend of mine who’d given a presentation at the CAGE office about the contribution of Indian subjects to the British war effort in both world wars. While we were on the train, unbeknown to us, an ex-British soldier seated opposite overheard us – two Asian-looking men talking about soldiers and war. That was enough for him to secretly photograph us and report it to the police. The incident was served in evidence by the prosecution – which is how I found out.

My copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, an article explaining the difference between jihad and terrorism and my piece entitled Syria: Britain’s new war on terror explaining the UK’s confused Syria policy were all served in evidence against me. The CPS’s 183-page expert witness report by Matthew Wilkinson was scrapped before the trial because it couldn’t show a terrorist mindset.

In November 2013, UK border police were prepared to potentially facilitate my travel to Syria after making me miss my flight to Istanbul where I was to attend a conference. They had wrongly assumed my trip was for onward travel to Syria. They offered to rebook my flight despite the reason they’d stopped me.

Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) translations of my Arabic conversations were a cause of hilarity:

Me: “nusrat al-mustadhafeen (help the oppressed)”

CTU: Name of a jihadi group

Me: “Free Syrian Army Battalion 313” (number of fighters at historic 7th century Battle of Badr)

CTU: Battle in Syria, 2013, in a town called Badr

Me: “Here is the generator and some [spare] parts”

CTU: Here is the generator. It has many uses.

Me: “He’s gone to Lattakia” [Syrian city]

CTU: He’s gone through the attack list

Me: “Even if you are completely jahil (ignorant)”

CTU: Even when you do jihad

The CPS didn’t care about my beliefs, even though they had recorded them, because they needed the charges to fit their narrative and not the truth. These are just two of numerous examples:

CTU probe, 24/06/2013: “I am telling you…they [ISIS] will commit numerous atrocities in the name of jihad and mujahideen.”

CTU probe, 24/06/2013: These people are very scary…and they all do it in the name of shariah…Where is the mercy in your people? It’s all about killing…with enemies and friends

The night before my arrest I had posted on social media and called ISIS extremists after they had killed a rendition victim I’d met in Syria in 2012. I spent much time responding to one of their supporters who objected to my description. Western media was not particularly concerned with ISIS back then because they were only killing Muslims. But I was very concerned.

This is taken verbatim from my last Facebook conversation before my arrest:

“I saw people who went on to join ISIS beat and torture brothers, with ridiculous allegations. They claimed beating them was from the Sunnah, I challenged them after I heard the brother’s screams.

“I saw muhajireen (foreigners), locked in cages, by Allah worse, than my Guantanamo cell.

“They beat people to make them confess…just like the Arab regimes, there is no difference.

“I have been to many places, Bosnia, Afghan… but never seen this kind of fitnah [turmoil] and such dangerous extremism and readiness for takfeer.

“Syrians on the ground have started to hate foreigners because of them.

“ISIS have even detained and killed aid workers…brothers from UK who have taken convoys [have] been looted by ISIS, guns shoved in faces of brothers who have crossed Europe to bring aid.

“And what’s the basis of detaining the non-Muslim aid worker [Alan Henning] who came in as a guest of Muslims, under their protection? They’ve probably murdered him too, just like many Muslims they’ve done that to.

“You have no idea how dangerous these people are and I will be writing about it in detail.”

That night I changed my Facebook status: “Sometimes knowing too much can be a curse.” Perhaps now it makes sense.

– Moazzam Begg is a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and currently the director of outreach for UK-based campaigning organisation CAGE.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: Protesters demonstrate outside Westminster Magistrates Court in London, on March 1, 2014, as former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg appeared (AFP)

Moazzam Begg
Tuesday 24 February 2015 17:28 UTC

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© Middle East Eye 2014 –

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Links between MI5 and Gaddafi’s intelligence during Tony Blair’s government more extensive than previously thought, according to documents

Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of previously unknown joint operations with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government and used the information extracted from rendition victims as evidence during partially secret court proceedings in London, according to an analysis of official documents recovered in Tripoli since the Libyan revolution.

The exhaustive study of the papers from the Libyan government archives shows the links between MI5, MI6 and Gaddafi’s security agencies were far more extensive than previously thought and involved a number of joint operations in which Libyan dissidents were unlawfully detained and allegedly tortured.

At one point, Libyan intelligence agents were invited to operate on British soil, where they worked alongside MI5 and allegedly intimidated a number of Gaddafi opponents who had been granted asylum in the UK.

Previously, MI6 was known to have assisted the dictatorship with the kidnap of two Libyan opposition leaders, who were flown to Tripoli along with their families – including a six-year-old girl and a pregnant woman – in 2004.

However, the research suggests that the fruits of a series of joint clandestine operations also underpinned a significant number of court hearings in London between 2002 and 2007, during which the last Labour government unsuccessfully sought to deport Gaddafi’s opponents on the basis of information extracted from people who had been “rendered” to his jails.

Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
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UK intelligence agencies sent more 1,600 questions to be put to the two opposition leaders.
In addition, the documents show that four men were subjected to control orders in the UK – a form of curfew – on the basis of information extracted from victims of rendition who had been handed over to the Gaddafi regime.

The papers recovered from the dictatorship’s archives include secret correspondence from MI6, MI5 reports on Libyans living in the UK, a British intelligence assessment marked “UK/Libya Eyes Only – Secret” and official Libyan minutes of meetings between the two countries’ intelligence agencies.

They show that:

• UK intelligence agencies sent more than 1,600 questions to be put to the two opposition leaders, Sami al-Saadi and Abdul Hakim Belhaj, despite having reason to suspect they were being tortured.

• British government lawyers allegedly drew upon the answers to those questions when seeking the deportation of Libyans living in the UK

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• Five men were subjected to control orders in the UK, allegedly on the basis of information extracted from two rendition victims.

• Gaddafi’s agents recorded MI5 as warning in September 2006 that the two countries’ agencies should take steps to ensure that their joint operations would never be “discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”.

In fact, papers that detail the joint UK-Libyan rendition operations were discovered by the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch in September 2011, at the height of the Libyan revolution, in an abandoned government office building in Tripoli.

Since then, hundreds more documents have been discovered in government files in Tripoli. A team of London-based lawyers has assembled them into an archive that is forming the basis of a claim for damages on behalf of 12 men who were allegedly kidnapped, tortured, subject to control orders or tricked into travelling to Libya where they were detained and mistreated.

An attempt by government lawyers to have that claim struck out was rejected by the high court in London on Thursday , with the judge, Mr Justice Irwin, ruling that the allegations “are of real potential public concern” and should be heard and dealt with by the courts.

The litigation follows earlier proceedings brought on behalf of the two families who were kidnapped in the far east and flown to Tripoli. One claim was settled when the government paid £2.23m in compensation to al-Saadi and his family; the second is ongoing, despite attempts by government lawyers to have it thrown out of court, with Belhaj suing not only the British government, but also Sir Mark Allen, former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, and Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time of his kidnap.

Abdel Hakim Belhaj is suing the British government.
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Abdel Hakim Belhaj is suing the British government.
Belhaj has offered to settle for just £3, providing he and his wife also receive an unreserved apology. This is highly unlikely to happen, however, as the two rendition operations are also the subject of a three-year Scotland Yard investigation code-named Operation Lydd. Straw has been questioned by detectives: his spokesman says he was interviewed “as a witness”.

Last month, detectives passed a final file to the Crown Prosecution Service. No charges are imminent, however. The CPS said: “The police investigation has lasted almost three years and has produced a large amount of material. These are complex allegations that will require careful consideration, but we will aim to complete our decision-making as soon as is practicably possible.”

The volte-face in UK-Libyan relations was always going to be contentious: the Gaddafi regime had not only helped to arm the IRA, bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie with the loss of 270 lives in 1988, and harboured the man who murdered a London policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, four years earlier; it had been responsible for the bombing of a French airliner and a Berlin nightclub, and for several decades had been sending assassins around the world to murder its opponents.

The Tripoli archives show that the rapprochement, which began with the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1999, gathered pace within weeks of the al-Qaida attacks of 9/11. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of MI6 at the time, has said that these links were always authorised by government ministers.

The week after the attacks, British intelligence officers met with Moussa Koussa, the head of Libyan intelligence, who offered to provide intelligence from Islamists held in the regime’s jails.

Two months later, British intelligence officers held a three-day conference with their Libyan counterparts at a hotel at a European airport. German and Austrian intelligence officers also attended.

According to the Libyan minutes, the British explained that they could not arrest anyone in the UK – only the police could do that – and that there could be difficulty in obtaining authorisation for Gaddafi’s intelligence officers to operate in the UK. They also added that impending changes to UK law would give them “more leeway” in the near future.

Other documents released under the Freedom of Information Act detail the way in which diplomatic contacts between London and Tripoli developed, with a British trade minister, Mike O’Brien, visiting Tripoli in August 2002, the same month that the dictator’s son, Saif, was admitted as a post-graduate student at the London School of Economics. Blair and Gaddafi spoke by telephone for the first time, chatting for 30 minutes, and in December 2003 the dictator announced publicly that he was abandoning his programme for the development of weapons of mass destruction.

With the war in Iraq going badly, London and Washington were able to suggest that an invasion that had been justified by a need to dismantle a WMD programme that was subsequently found not to exist had at least resulted in another country’s weapons programme being dismantled.

Three months later, in March 2004, the new relationship was sealed by a meeting between Gaddafi and Blair, during which the British prime minister announced that the two countries had found common cause in the fight against terrorism, and the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110m deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.

However, the Tripoli archive shows that beneath the surface of the new alliance, the Blair government was encouraging ever-closer co-operation between the UK’s intelligence agencies and the intelligence agencies of a dictatorship which had been widely condemned for committing the most serious human rights abuses; MI5 and MI6, and the CIA, would begin to work hand-in-glove with the Libyan External Security Organisation.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 during most of the period that the UK’s intelligence agencies were working closely with the Libyan dictatorship, has defended the decision to open talks with Gaddafi on the grounds that it helped to deter him from pursuing his WMD programme. However, when delivering the 2011 Reith Lecture, she added: “There are questions to be answered about the various relationships that developed afterwards and whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon.”

The archive clearly shows that Gaddafi hoped that this intelligence co-operation would result in British assistance in his attempts to round up and imprison Libyans who were living in exile in the UK, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Mali. All of these men were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an Islamist organisation that had attempted to assassinate him three times since its foundation in the early 90s. A largely spent force since the late 90s, many of the members of the LIFG had been living peacefully in the UK for more than a decade, having arrived as refugees. Some had been granted British citizenship. Koussa’s agency asked British intelligence to investigate 79 of these men, whom they described as “Libyan heretics”.

Two weeks before Blair’s visit to Libya, Belhaj and his four-and-a-half-months pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, were kidnapped in Thailand and flown to Tripoli. Bouchar says she was taped, head to foot, to a stretcher, for the 17-hour flight.

In a follow-up letter to Koussa, Allen claimed credit for the rendition of Belhaj – referring to him as Abu Abd Allah Sadiq, the name by which he is better known in the jihadi world – saying that although “I did not pay for the air cargo”, the intelligence that led to the couple’s capture was British.

Three days after Blair’s visit, al-Saadi was rendered from Hong Kong to Tripoli, along with his wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six.

Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa was head of Libyan intelligence.
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Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa was head of Libyan intelligence.
Both men say that while being held at Tajoura prison outside Tripoli they were beaten, whipped, subjected to electric shocks, deprived of sleep and threatened.

Belhaj says he was twice interrogated at Tajoura by British intelligence officers. After gesturing that the session was being recorded, Belhaj says he made a number of gestures to show that he was being beaten and suspended by his arms. One of the British officers, a man, is said to have given a thumbs-up signal, while the second, a woman, is said to have nodded.

Belhaj alleges that following one of these encounters he agreed to sign a statement about his associates in the UK after being threatened with a form of torture called the Honda, which involved being locked in a box-like structure whose ceiling and walls could be shrunk, provoking extreme claustrophobia and fear as well as discomfort.

According to the claim being brought against the British government, the attempt to track down other leading members of the LIFG resulted in the intelligence agencies of Libya and the UK throwing their net still wider.

In late 2005, a British citizen of Somali origin and a Libyan living in Ireland were arrested in Saudi Arabia and allegedly tortured while being questioned by Saudi intelligence officers about associates who were members of the LIFG. The men say they were shackled and beaten. The British citizen says he was also interrogated by two British men who declined to identify themselves and who appeared uninterested in his complaints of mistreatment.

Many of the questions put to the two men concerned the whereabouts of Othman Saleh Khalifa, a long-standing member of the LIFG. Khalifa was detained in Mali a few months later and rendered to Libya. The Tripoli archive shows that summaries of his interrogations were sent to British intelligence, and that both MI5 and MI6 submitted questions that they wished to be put to him. A memorandum from MI6 to Koussa’s deputy, Sadegh Krema, was accompanied by questions “which you kindly agreed to pass to your interview team”.

Khalifa says that he was beaten during interrogations for around six months during the second half of 2006 and that he did not see daylight.

The Tripoli archive shows that during the same week that Khalifa was being rendered to Libya, MI5 and MI6 officers met Libyan intelligence officers in Tripoli and informed them that they were to be invited to the UK to conduct joint intelligence operations. The Libyan minutes of the meeting say that MI5 informed them that “London and Manchester are the two hottest spots” for LIFG activity in the country. The aim was to recruit informants within the Libyan community in the UK.

The Libyan minutes of the meeting also say that the British told them: “With your co-operation we should be able to target specific individuals.” The Libyans, meanwhile, said that potential recruits could be “intimidated” through threats to arrest relatives in Libya.

The following August, senior MI5 and MI6 officers and two Libyan intelligence officers met at MI5’s headquarters in London. According to the Libyan minutes, MI5 warned the Libyans that individuals could complain to the police if they believed they were being harassed by MI5, and could also expose the British-Libyan joint operations to the media.

The minutes also state that the British suggested that Libyan intelligence officers should approach potential recruits in the UK, and that if they refused to cooperate, arrangements could be made for the targets to be arrested under anti-terrorism legislation, accused of associating with those same Libyan intelligence officers, and threatened with deportation.

Sami al-Saadi has been paid £2.23m in compensation.
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Sami al-Saadi has been paid £2.23m in compensation.
One of the targets was a 32-year-old Libyan, associated with the LIFG, who had lived in the UK for 10 years and had been a British citizen for six years. The Libyan intelligence officers repeatedly telephoned him, claiming to be consular officials, and he eventually agreed to meet them at the Landmark hotel in Marylebone, London, on 2 September 2006. According to the Libyan notes of this meeting, the British insisted that two MI5 officers, one calling herself Caroline, should be present, so that the target should know that he was the subject of a joint UK-Libyan approach.

The target was told that he was to be given time to think about the approach. In Libya, meanwhile, the target’s brothers, sisters and mother say they were each detained in turn and told that they should persuade him to return to the country.

The Libyan intelligence officers also visited Manchester, calling at the home of another man targeted for recruitment. According to their notes, MI5 warned them not to enter the house but to persuade him to go with them to a public place where they could be photographed together. As he was not at home, the Libyan spies went instead to a mosque in the Didsbury district, where they told the imam that they were importing and exporting books.

On 5 September, shortly before the two Libyan intelligence officers returned home, they had another meeting with their British counterparts. Their notes show that the British warned that steps should be taken jointly to “avoid being trapped in any sort of legal problem [and] to avoid also that those joint plans be discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”. The Libyans assured MI5 and MI6: “We have effectively reassured them that we will stick by the joint plan to avoid any blame if the operation fails.”

The target says he was approached by “Caroline” and a second MI5 officer on a number of other occasions, but declined to travel to Libya and still lives in west London.

Six Libyan men, the widow of a seventh, and five British citizens of Libyan and Somali origin are bringing a number of claims, which include allegations of false imprisonment, blackmail, misfeasance in public office and conspiracy to assault.

The case is being brought against MI5 and MI6 as well as the Home Office and Foreign Office. Government departments declined to comment on the grounds that the litigation is ongoing.

When making their unsuccessful bid to have the case struck out, government lawyers admitted no liability. They argued that the five claimants who were subjected to control orders were properly considered to pose a threat to the UK’s national security, and denied that the government relied on information from prisoners held in Libya in making that assessment. They also argued that the LIFG had been a threat to the UK. They are expected to appeal Thursday’s high court decision.

Allen has declined to comment on the rendition operations, while Straw says: “At all times I was scrupulous in seeking to carry out my duties in accordance with the law, and I hope to be able to say more about this at an appropriate stage in the future.”

Thursday 22 January 2015 14.24 GMT Last modified on Saturday 7 May 2016 11.17 BST

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© 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

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‘Jihadi John’ was able to join IS for one simple reason: from Quilliam to al-Muhajiroun, Britain’s loudest extremists have been groomed by the security services
Every time there’s a terrorist attack that makes national headlines, the same talking heads seem to pop up like an obscene game of “whack-a-mole”. Often they appear one after the other across the media circuit, bobbing from celebrity television pundit to erudite newspaper outlet.

A few years ago, BBC Newsnight proudly hosted a “debate” between Maajid Nawaz, director of counter-extremism think-tank, the Quilliam Foundation, and Anjem Choudary, head of the banned Islamist group formerly known as al-Muhajiroun, which has, since its proscription, repeatedly reincarnated itself. One of its more well-known recent incarnations was “Islam4UK”.

Both Nawaz and Choudary have received huge mainstream media attention, generating press headlines, and contributing to major TV news and current affairs shows. But unbeknown to most, they have one thing in common: Britain’s security services. And believe it or not, that bizarre fact explains why the Islamic State’s (IS) celebrity beheader, former west Londoner Mohammed Emwazi – aka “Jihadi John” – got to where he is now.

A tale of two extremists

After renouncing his affiliation with the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), Maajid Nawaz co-founded the Quilliam Foundation with his fellow ex-Hizb member, Ed Husain.

The Quilliam Foundation was set-up by Husain and Nawaz in 2008 with significant British government financial support. Its establishment received a massive PR boost from the release of Ed Husain’s memoirs, The Islamist, which rapidly became an international bestseller, generating hundreds of reviews, interviews and articles.

In Ed Husain’s book – much like Maajid Nawaz’s tome Radical released more recently to similar fanfare – Husain recounts his journey from aggrieved young Muslim into Islamist activist, and eventually his total rejection of Islamist ideology.

Both accounts of their journeys of transformation offer provocative and genuine insights. But the British government has played a much more direct role in crafting those accounts than either they, or the government, officially admit.

Government ghostwriters

In late 2013, I interviewed a former senior researcher at the Home Office who revealed that Husain’s The Islamist was “effectively ghostwritten in Whitehall”.

The official told me that in 2006, he was informed by a government colleague “with close ties” to Jack Straw and Gordon Brown that “the draft was written by Ed but then ‘peppered’ by government input”. The civil servant told him “he had seen ‘at least five drafts of the book, and the last one was dramatically different from the first.’”

The draft had, the source said, been manipulated in an explicitly political, pro-government manner. The committee that had input into Ed Husain’s manuscript prior to its official publication included senior government officials from No. 10 Downing Street, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, the intelligence services, Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Home Office.

When I put the question, repeatedly, to Ed Husain as to the veracity of these allegations, he did not respond. I also asked Nawaz whether he was aware of the government’s role in “ghostwriting” Husain’s prose, and whether he underwent a similar experience in the production of Radical. He did not respond either.

While Husain was liaising with British government and intelligence officials over The Islamist from 2006 until the book’s publication in May 2007, his friend Nawaz was at first in prison in Egypt. Nawaz was eventually released in March 2006, declaring his departure from HT just a month before the publication of Husain’s book. Husain took credit for being the prime influence on Nawaz’s decision, and by November 2007, had joined with him becoming Quilliam’s director with Husain as his deputy.

Yet according to Husain, Nawaz played a role in determining parts of the text of The Islamist in the same year it was being edited by government officials. “Before publication, I discussed with my friend and brother-in-faith Maajid the passages in the book,” wrote Husain about the need to verify details of their time in HT.

This is where the chronology of Husain’s and Nawaz’s accounts begin to break down. In Radical, and repeatedly in interviews about his own deradicalisation process, Nawaz says that he firmly and decisively rejected HT’s Islamist ideology while in prison in Egypt. Yet upon his release and return to Britain, Nawaz showed no sign of having reached that decision. Instead, he did the opposite. In April 2006, Nawaz told Sarah Montague on BBC Hardtalk that his detention in Egypt had “convinced [him] even more… that there is a need to establish this Caliphate as soon as possible.” From then on, Nawaz, who was now on HT’s executive committee, participated in dozens of talks and interviews in which he vehemently promoted the Hizb.

I first met Nawaz at a conference on 2 December 2006 organised by the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) on the theme of “reclaiming our rights”. I had spoken on a panel about the findings of my book, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry, on how British state collusion with Islamist extremists had facilitated the 7/7 attacks. Nawaz had attended the event as an audience member with two other senior HT activists, and in our brief conversation, he spoke of his ongoing work with HT in glowing terms.

By January 2007, Nawaz was at the front of a HT protest at the US embassy in London, condemning US military operations in Iraq and Somalia. He delivered a rousing speech at the protest, demanding an end to “colonial intervention in the Muslim world,” and calling for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate to stand up to such imperialism and end Western support for dictators.

Yet by his own account, throughout this very public agitation on behalf of HT from mid-2006 onwards, Nawaz had in fact rejected the very ideology he was preaching so adamantly. Indeed, in the same period, he was liaising with his friend, Ed Husain – who at that time was still in Jeddah – and helping him with the text of his anti-HT manifesto, The Islamist, which was also being vetted at the highest levels of government.

The British government’s intimate, and secret, relationship with Husain in the year before the publication of his book in 2007 shows that, contrary to his official biography, the Quilliam Foundation founder was embedded in Whitehall long before he was on the public radar. How did he establish connections at this level?

MI5’s Islamist

According to Dr Noman Hanif, a lecturer in international terrorism and political Islam at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an expert on Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group’s presence in Britain likely provided many opportunities for Western intelligence to “penetrate or influence” the movement.

Dr Hanif, whose doctoral thesis was about the group, points out that Husain’s tenure inside HT by his own account occurred “under the leadership of Omar Bakri Mohammed,” the controversial cleric who left the group in 1996 to found al-Muhajiroun, a militant network which to this day has been linked to every major terrorist plot in Britain.

Bakri’s leadership of HT, said Dr Hanif, formed “the most conceptually deviant period of HT’s existence in the UK, diverting quite sharply away from its core ideas,” due to Bakri’s advocacy of violence and his focus on establishing an Islamic state in the UK, goals contrary to HT doctrines.

When Bakri left HT and set-up al-Muhajiroun in 1996, according to John Loftus, a former US Army intelligence officer and Justice Department prosecutor, Bakri was immediately recruited by MI6 to facilitate Islamist activities in the Balkans. And not just Bakri, but also Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was recently convicted in the US on terrorism charges.

When Bakri founded al-Muhajiroun in 1996 with the blessings of Britain’s security services, his co-founder was Anjem Choudary. Choudary was intimately involved in the programme to train and send Britons to fight abroad, and three years later, would boast to the Sunday Telegraph that “some of the training does involve guns and live ammunition”.

Historian Mark Curtis, in his seminal work, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, documents how under this arrangement, Bakri trained hundreds of Britons at camps in the UK and the US, and dispatched them to join al-Qaeda affiliated fighters in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya.

Shortly before the 2005 London bombings, Ron Suskind, a Wall Street Journal Pulitizer Prize winning investigative reporter, was told by a senior MI5 official that Bakri was a longtime informant for the secret service who “had helped MI5 on several of its investigations”. Bakri, Suskind adds in his book, The Way of the World, reluctantly conceded the relationship in an interview in Beirut – but Suskind gives no indication that the relationship ever ended.

A senior terrorism lawyer in London who has represented clients in several high-profile terrorism cases told me that both Bakri and Choudary had regular meetings with MI5 officers in the 1990s. The lawyer, who works for a leading firm of solicitors and has regularly liaised with MI5 in the administration of closed court hearings involving secret evidence, said: “Omar Bakri had well over 20 meetings with MI5 from around 1993 to the late 1990s. Anjem Choudary apparently participated in such meetings toward the latter part of the decade. This was actually well-known amongst several senior Islamist leaders in Britain at the time.”

According to Dr Hanif of Birkbeck College, Bakri’s relationship with the intelligence services likely began during his “six-year reign as HT leader in Britain,” which would have “provided British intelligence ample opportunity” to “widely infiltrate the group”. HT had already been a subject of MI6 surveillance abroad “because of its core level of support in Jordan and the consistent level of activity in other areas of the Middle East for over five decades.”

At least some HT members appear to have been aware of Bakri’s intelligence connections, including, it seems, Ed Husain himself. In one passage in The Islamist (p. 116), Husain recounts: “We were also concerned about Omar’s application for political asylum… I raised this with Bernie [another HT member] too. ‘Oh no’, he said, ‘On the contrary. The British are like snakes; they manoeuvre carefully. They need Omar in Britain. More likely, Omar will be the ambassador for the khilafah here or leave to reside in the Islamic state. The kuffar know that – allowing Omar to stay in Britain will give them a good start, a diplomatic advantage, when they have to deal with the Islamic state. Having Omar serves them well for the future. MI5 knows exactly what we’re doing, what we’re about, and yet they have in effect, given us the green light to operate in Britain.”

Husain left HT after Bakri in August 1997. According to Faisal Haque, a British government civil servant and former HT member who knew Ed Husain during his time in the group, Husain had a strong “personal relationship” with Bakri. He did not leave HT for “ideological reasons,” said Haque. “It was more to do with his close personal relationship with Omar Bakri (he left when Bakri was kicked out), pressure from his father and other personal reasons which I don’t want to mention.”

Husain later went on to work for the British Council in the Middle East. From 2003 to 2005, he was in Damascus. During that period, by his own admission, he informed on other British members of HT for agitating against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, resulting in them being deported by Syrian authorities back to Britain. At this time, the CIA and MI6 routinely cooperated with Assad on extraordinary rendition programmes.

Husain then worked for the British Council in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from late 2005 to the end of 2006.

Throughout that year, according to the former Home Office official I spoke to, Husain was in direct contact with senior Whitehall officials who were vetting his manuscript for The Islamist. By November, Husain posted on DeenPort, an online discussion forum, a now deleted comment referring off-hand to the work of “the secret services” inside HT: “Even within HT in Britain today, there is a huge division between modernisers and more radical elements. The secret services are hopeful that the modernisers can tame the radicals… I foresee another split. And God knows best. I have said more than I should on this subject! Henceforth, my lips are sealed!”

Shortly after, Maajid Nawaz would declare his departure from HT, and would eventually be joined at Quilliam by several others from the group, many of whom according to Nawaz had worked with him and Husain as “a team” behind the scenes at this time.

The ‘ex-jihadists’ who weren’t

Perhaps the biggest problem with Husain’s and Nawaz’s claim to expertise on terrorism was that they were never jihadists. Hizb ut-Tahrir is a non-violent movement for the establishment of a global “caliphate” through social struggle, focusing on the need for political activism in the Muslim world. Whatever the demerits of this rigid political ideology, it had no relationship to the phenomenon of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Nevertheless, Husain and Nawaz, along with their government benefactors, were convinced that those personal experiences of “radicalisation” and “deradicalisation” could by transplanted into the ongoing “war on terror” – even though, in reality neither of them had any idea about the dynamics of an actual terrorist network, and the radicalisation process leading to violent extremism. The result was an utterly misguided and evidence-devoid obsession with rejecting non-violent extremist ideologies as the primary means to prevent terrorism.

Through the Quilliam Foundation, Husain’s and Nawaz’s fundamentalist ideas about non-violent extremism went on to heavily influence official counter-terrorism discourses across the Western world. This was thanks to its million pounds worth of government seed-funding, intensive media coverage, as well as the government pushing Quilliam’s directors and staff to provide “deradicalisation training” to government and security officials in the US and Europe.

In the UK, Quilliam’s approach was taken up by various centre-right and right-wing think-tanks, such as the Centre for Social Cohesion (CCS) and Policy Exchange, all of which played a big role in influencing the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism programme (Prevent).

Exactly how bankrupt this approach is, however, can be determined from Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to express his understanding of the risk from non-violent extremism, a major feature of the coalition government’s Orwellian new Counter-Terrorism and Security Act. The latter establishes unprecedented powers of electronic surveillance and the basis for the “Prevent duty,” which calls for all public sector institutions to develop “risk-assessment” profiles of individuals deemed to be “at-risk” of being drawn into non-violent extremism.

In his speech at the UN last year, Cameron explained that counter-terrorism measures must target people who may not “encourage violence, but whose worldview can be used as a justification for it.” As examples of dangerous ideas at the “root cause” of terrorism, Cameron pinpointed “conspiracy theories,” and most outrageously, “The idea that Muslims are persecuted all over the world as a deliberate act of Western policy.”

In other words, if you believe, for instance, that US and British forces have deliberately conducted brutal military operations across the Muslim world resulting in the foreseeable deaths of countless innocent civilians, you are a non-violent extremist.

In an eye-opening academic paper published last year, French terrorism expert and Interior Ministry policy officer Dr Claire Arenes, noted that: “By definition, one may know if radicalisation has been violent only once the point of violence has been reached, at the end of the process. Therefore, since the end-term of radicalisation cannot be determined in advance, a policy intended to fight violent radicalisation entails a structural tendency to fight any form of radicalisation.”

It is precisely this moronic obsession with trying to detect and stop “any form of radicalisation,” however non-violent, that is hampering police and security investigations and overloading them with nonsense “risks”.

Double game

At this point, the memorable vision of Nawaz and Choudary facing off on BBC Newsnight appears not just farcical, but emblematic of how today’s national security crisis has been fuelled and exploited by the bowels of the British secret state.

Over the last decade or so – the very same period that the British state was grooming the “former jihadists who weren’t” so they could be paraded around the media-security-industrial complex bigging up the non-threat of “non-violent extremism” – the CIA and MI6 were coordinating Saudi-led funding to al-Qaeda affiliated extremists across the Middle East and Central Asia to counter Iranian Shiite influence.

From 2005 onwards, US and British intelligence services encouraged a range of covert operations to support Islamist opposition groups, including militants linked to al-Qaeda, to undermine regional Iranian and Syrian influence. By 2009, the focus of these operations shifted to Syria.

As I documented in written evidence to a UK Parliamentary inquiry into Prevent in 2010, one of the recipients of such funding was none other than Omar Bakri, who at the time told one journalist: “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organise their jihad against the Shiites… Al-Qaeda in Lebanon… are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.” Simultaneously, Bakri was regularly in touch with his deputy, Anjem Choudary, over the internet and even delivered online speeches to his followers in Britain instructing them to join IS and murder civilians. He has now been detained and charged by Lebanese authorities for establishing terror cells in the country.

Bakri was also deeply involved “with training the mujahideen [fighters] in camps on the Syrian borders and also on the Palestine side.” The trainees included four British Islamists “with professional backgrounds” who would go on to join the war in Syria. Bakri also claimed to have trained “many fighters,” including people from Germany and France, since arriving in Lebanon. Was Mohammed Emwazi among them? Last year, Bakri disciple Mizanur Rahman confirmed that at least five European Muslims who had died fighting under IS in Syria had been Bakri acolytes.

Nevertheless in 2013, it was David Cameron who lifted the arms embargo to support Syria’s rebels. We now know that most of our military aid went to al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists, many with links to extremists at home. The British government itself acknowledged that a “substantial number” of Britons were fighting in Syria, who “will seek to carry out attacks against Western interests… or in Western states”.

Yet according to former British counterterrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge, despite this risk, authorities “turned a blind eye to the travelling of its own jihadists to Syria, notwithstanding ample video etc. evidence of their crimes there,” because it “suited the US and UK’s anti-Assad foreign policy”.

This terror-funnel is what enabled people like Emwazi to travel to Syria and join up with IS – despite being on an MI5 terror watch-list. He had been blocked by the security services from traveling to Kuwait in 2010: why not Syria? Shoebridge, who was a British Army officer before joining the Metropolitan Police, told me that although such overseas terrorism has been illegal in the UK since 2006, “it’s notable that only towards the end of 2013 when IS turned against the West’s preferred rebels, and perhaps also when the tipping point between foreign policy usefulness and MI5 fears of domestic terrorist blowback was reached, did the UK authorities begin to take serious steps to tackle the flow of UK jihadists.”

The US-UK direct and tacit support for jihadists, Shoebridge said, had made Syria the safest place for regional terrorists fearing drone strikes “for more than two years”. Syria was “the only place British jihadists could fight without fear of US drones or arrest back home… likely because, unlike if similar numbers of UK jihadists had been travelling to for example Yemen or Afghanistan, this suited the anti-Assad policy.”

Having watched its own self-fulfilling prophecy unfold with horrifying precision in a string of IS-linked terrorist atrocities against Western hostages and targets, the government now exploits the resulting mayhem to vindicate its bankrupt “counter-extremism” narrative, promoted by hand-picked state-groomed “experts” like Husain and Nawaz.

Their prescription, predictably, is to expand the powers of the police state to identify and “deradicalise” anyone who thinks British foreign policy in the Muslim world is callous, self-serving and indifferent to civilian deaths. Government sources confirm that Nawaz’s input played a key role in David Cameron’s thinking on non-violent extremism, and the latest incarnation of the Prevent strategy; while last year, Husain was, ironically, appointed to the Foreign Office advisory group on freedom of religion or belief.

Meanwhile, Bakri’s deputy Choudary continues to inexplicably run around as Britain’s resident “terror cleric” media darling. His passport belatedly confiscated after a recent pointless police arrest that avoided charging him, he remains free to radicalise thick-headed British Muslims into joining IS, in the comfort that his hate speech will be broadcast widely, no doubt fueling widespread generic suspicion of British Muslims.

If only we could round up the Quilliam and al-Muhajiroun fanatics together, shove them onto a boat, and send them all off cruising to the middle of nowhere, they could have all the fun they want “radicalising” and “deradicalising” each other to their hearts content. And we might get a little peace. And perhaps we could send their handlers with them, too.

– Nafeez Ahmed PhD, is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the ‘crisis of civilization.’ He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Friday 27 February 2015 14:35 UTC

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The case against Begg ‘was going to set a precedent that successfully challenged Britain’s policy on Syria and the meaning of terrorism’

A series of what appears to be translation mistakes and failure to grasp common sense by intelligence services have cost the British government over £1 million and could have landed an innocent man in jail, revealed former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg.

In an opinion column published in the Middle East Eye on Tuesday, Begg, who is currently the director of outreach for UK-based campaigning organisation CAGE, detailed what appears to be unprofessional methods of investigation by the Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU).

“I could have been facing up to 15 years in prison for providing fitness training and a generator to the Syrian rebels, if found guilty,” he wrote.

Begg was further astonished to learn how serious were the accusations levelled against him, given what seemed to be a lack of credible evidence.

“Over 150 police officers were involved. Additionally, the Home Office, the Treasury, the intelligence services and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had gone to extraordinary lengths to refuse me bail, freeze my assets and classify me as a Category A high-risk prisoner in HMP Belmarsh, five hours away from home,” he wrote.

It remains unclear why the authorities went to so much trouble when Begg posed no threat, nor was he involved in any wrongdoing. But he did hint in the article the reason for his release.

“The truth is the case was going to collapse on its own merits and was going to set a precedent that successfully challenged Britain’s policy on Syria and the meaning of terrorism,” he wrote.

“The CPS didn’t care about my beliefs, even though they had recorded them, because they needed the charges to fit their narrative and not the truth,” he added.

Tuesday 24 February 2015 19:46 UTC
Last update: Wednesday 25 February 2015 9:17 UTC

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The use of torture is “wrong and never justified”, the former head of the security service MI5 has insisted.
Eliza Manningham-Buller said it should be “utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives”.
Giving the second of her BBC Radio Reith lectures, she acknowledged recent disclosures about alleged British intelligence operations in Libya would “raise widespread concerns”.
“No-one could justify what went on under Gaddafi’s regime,” she added.
Baroness Manningham-Buller’s lectures examine the issues of terrorism and security on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
She said that the use of torture had not made the world a safer place, adding that the use of water-boarding by the United States was a “profound mistake” and as a result America lost its “moral authority”.
Allegations have recently emerged that the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was involved in the rendition of Libyan terror suspects, following the discovery of papers suggesting close ties between MI6, the CIA and the Gaddafi regime.
Find out more

The second of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s Reith Lectures will be broadcast on Tuesday 13 September 2011 at 09:00 BST on BBC Radio 4.
Listen via the Radio 4 website
Download the Reith Lectures podcast
Explore the Reith Lectures archive
Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was director-general of the security service MI5 between 2002 and 2007, stated that she “would like to say more” on the recent allegations.
However, her position made it difficult to do so as she anticipates being called to give evidence to the Gibson Inquiry which will investigate the subject.
Sir Peter Gibson is chair of the ongoing detainee inquiry, which was set up last year by Prime Minister David Cameron to investigate the alleged involvement in torture by UK security agencies.
A statement issued by the inquiry said it would also be considering the new allegations of UK involvement in rendition to Libya. Some of the inquiry will be held in secret to protect intelligence sources and methods.
Following the lecture, which was held in Leeds City Museum, Lady Manningham-Buller answered questions posed by members of the audience.
The Conservative MP, David Davis, asked the former MI5 head if she thought Britain’s resistance to the use of telephone intercept evidence in court had hindered the conviction rate of terrorists in the UK.
Baroness Manningham-Buller replied that MI5 had first suggested the use of intercept evidence in 1988, and she would “still like to see that happen” – but successive British governments have found the idea “procedurally difficult”.
The second of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s Reith Lectures, which is entitled Security, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, 13 September.

8 September 2011

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Last week, The Intercept published the most in-depth look at the U.S. drone assassination program to date. “The Drone Papers” exposed the inner workings of how the drone war is waged, from how targets are identified to who decides to kill. They reveal a number of flaws, including that strikes have resulted in large part from electronic communications data, or “signals intelligence,” that officials acknowledge is unreliable. We are joined by Clive Stafford Smith, founder and director of the international legal charity Reprieve, who says the British government also has a secret kill list in Afghanistan.

TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Last week, The Intercept published this in-depth look at the U.S. drone assassination program, called “The Drone Papers,” exposing the inner workings of how the drone war is waged, from how targets are identified to who decides to kill. They reveal a number of flaws, including that strikes have resulted in large part from electronic communications data, or “signals intelligence,” that officials acknowledge is unreliable. We spoke to Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, one of the lead reporters on the series.

JEREMY SCAHILL: One of the most significant findings of this—and my colleague, Cora Currier, really dug deep into this—is we published for the first time the kill chain, what the bureaucracy of assassination looks like. And what you see is that all of these officials, including people like the treasury secretary, are part of signing off on all of this, where they have these secret meetings and they discuss who’s going to live and die around the world. And at the end of that process, it is the president of the United States who signs what amounts to a death warrant for whoever they’ve decided should die.

AMY GOODMAN: The kill list is what Jeremy Scahill is talking about. Clive Stafford Smith, as we wrap up, your response?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Well, it’s something that just horrifies me, that, you know, I voted for President Obama, twice, and yet every Tuesday they have “Terror Tuesday,” where there’s a PowerPoint display in the White House, and they decide, much like Nero did back in the Colosseum in Rome, whether to give the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down for human beings who we’re just going to murder around the world. And, you know, it begins with terrorism, but it will move on. The British, horrifyingly, have already got a list of people on their list in Afghanistan, where they’re saying they’re going to kill pedophiles, for goodness’ sake. I mean, where does this end, that we just murder people worldwide? I mean, we plan to do a lot to publicize that in the upcoming months.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: When did you learn that Britain has a kill list, to begin with?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: It was only a couple of weeks ago. Frankly, I’m very pleased, because when both the Brits and the Americans are doing it, we can illustrate the folly of both instead of just picking on the U.S.

AMY GOODMAN: Clive Stafford Smith, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Clive Stafford Smith has been Shaker Aamer’s attorney for 10 years at Guantánamo. He’s a human rights lawyer, founder and director of the international legal charity called Reprieve.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’re going to talk about Benghazi. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to testify today for up to 10 hours in Congress. We’re going to be talking about the four men who died—the ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three of the other Americans who died. We’ll be speaking with their friends. Stay with us.

OCTOBER 22, 2015STORY

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It seems like a generation ago now, but it was only in late August 2013 that Britain’s House of Commons narrowly rejected launching airstrikes on Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in response to his military’s use of chemical weapons. While the U.S. and France noted their resolve to continue to push for military action in the wake of the vote, it is undeniable that this event had a significant impact in halting the rush to war. With accusations of a war-weary Parliament and fear for what the UK’s refusal to intervene would do to the Anglo-American “Special Relationship,” the vote has been the most high-profile and public foreign policy blow of David Cameron’s premiership.

There is no straightforward reason behind why MPs rejected the measure. Certainly, a degree of war-weariness was palpable in the context of Iraq and the imminent (and rather ignominious) withdrawal from Afghanistan. Parallels to Iraq were all too clear when the Government was attempting to press for action before a group of UN weapons inspectors reported their findings on the chemical attack; the idea that the British Military would become involved in another Middle East quagmire with no clear exit strategy was a bit too much for many MPs to stomach. In addition, the Syrian rebel groups Western powers supported were a large question mark; it was uncertain as to what they were about and, if supplied with weapons, would they go on to lose them to extremist groups, such as the al-Nusra Front? There was simply too much uncertainty surrounding an intervention – its legality, its exit strategy and its “allies” in Syria.

The Commons defeat two years ago has haunted Cameron’s foreign policy, with there being a distinct unwillingness for his Government’s to stick its neck out unless Parliamentary support is guaranteed. But the situation in Syria has changed dramatically over the past two years, as the self-styled Islamic State has overrun much of Syria and neighbouring Iraq, and inspired and aided in terrorist attacks around the Middle East and wider world.

While in 2013 the justification to intervene was primarily the responsibility to protect Syrian citizens from a dictator – and topple the regime in the process – in 2015 the justification also involves restoring stability to the Middle East and ensuring the wider world’s security from terrorist attacks. Despite this, Cameron’s Government has been constrained by the Commons defeat to only strike ISIS in Iraq (unless RAF pilots are embedded in allied air forces striking Syria). But, in a veritable Gulf of Tonkin moment – the killing of dozens British holidaymakers in Tunisia by a man with connections to ISIS – Cameron has been handed an opportunity to expand the RAF’s mandate to strike ISIS in Syria. It only took a few days before feelers to that effect were put out by the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon. With the opposition Labour Party in the middle of a leadership election, a repeat Commons vote is likely to be on hold until at least mid-September when a new leader is officially elected. Despite this uncertainty, it is expected that Labour will support the Government (unless the Party lurches to the left and elects Jeremy Corbyn – a prominent member of the Stop the War Coalition – as leader).

Despite the lack of a comprehensive solution to Syria’s problems, bombing when in doubt and having nothing else to do is not a viable solution. It may be enough to win the war, but it definitely will not be enough to win the lasting peace.

From what has been said, it would appear fairly reasonable to pass such a motion and bomb Syria – ISIS pose a more substantial threat to the region and national security than Assad did and Britain’s allies are already doing so. The only reason the RAF is not over Syria already is the legacy of the 2013 vote, before ISIS was even on the scene. But this is working under the assumption that bombing an entity into submission will bring about peace. To take a step back, bombing ISIS in Syria would appear to make no strategic sense; it will not resolve the conflict satisfactorily or the overt justification for the proposed intervention.

The Strategic Deficit

The doubts surrounding bombing Syria in 2013 are actually more acute today (on the whole). The issues surrounding the legality of bombing Syria have now largely been resolved. Coalition aircraft only strike ISIS forces and while Assad may preach Syria’s sovereignty, he is in desperate need of any sort of aid when fighting ISIS, the al-Nusra Front, moderate rebel groups and the Kurds. Despite this, the moderate Syrian opposition is in a much weaker position today than it was in 2013, primarily due to the advance of ISIS. The increasingly assertive Saudis are even said to be more willing to back the al-Nusra Front and other extremists instead of the moderate rebels to ensure the pro-Iranian and Shiite Assad does not regain control of Syria. While Turkey’s commitment to aid the rebels may yield some results, this is yet to be seen. If they were to succeed in taking control of Syria, there are a plethora of groups over as many fault lines to contend for power. The only question is whether the international coalition leaves these various factions to fight for power immediately, as in Libya, or wait nearly a decade, as in Iraq.

In reality, a clear international consensus needs to be reached at the UN and be fully implemented for stability to return to Syria, Iraq and the wider Middle East. While it may sound defeatist, this will not be reached due to various competing geopolitical interests and the desire to avoid intervention becoming a norm. Despite the lack of a comprehensive solution to Syria’s problems, bombing when in doubt and having nothing else to do is not a viable solution. It may be enough to win the war, but it definitely will not be enough to win the lasting peace. At least there is an Iraqi government in place to establish control when ISIS is defeated in Iraq (so long as it resolves its sectarian issues). In contrast, the people of Syria would be starting from scratch with a highly uncertain amount of international assistance. If the self-interest of nations in the conflict so far is anything to go by, international support would be minimal.

The reason why ISIS is a legitimate threat to British national security is twofold. First, the territory it controls can be used as a safe haven for planning terrorist attacks; second, its existence and prominence inspires and cultivates home-grown terrorists. In addition to the doubts surrounding the bombing of ISIS in Syria, neither of these issues would be resolved in the process.

One of the reasons behind the British Government calling for airstrikes on Syria is because it is suspected that the Tunisia beach attack was planned and coordinated from ISIS-controlled areas of Syria. Even if this is the case, one look at the simplicity of the attack highlights how it could be planned and executed anywhere – there were no specialist explosives or weaponry, there was no intricate set of demands and there was little originality. A man went onto a tourist beach, opened fire with a Kalashnikov rifle and left. It was a striking example of hit-and-run urban terrorism which has become all too familiar in recent years with the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the Charlie Hebdo shootings earlier this year. Whereas security forces are used to facing a long (stationary) standoff with terrorists, the game has changed. Simply killing as many indiscriminate targets as possible is the end goal of these shootings, not securing demands through a complex hostage-taking.

More than just unleashing terrorists on the world, with ISIS having such a high profile in the media and many foreign Muslims coming to Iraq and Syria to fight for them (including hundreds of Brits), the group has the potential to inspire Muslims in distant lands to commit terrorist attacks. But, again, simply bombing ISIS in Syria does not resolve the issue. The root of the matter is that there are disaffected young Muslims in Western states who have not been effectively integrated into society. It is known that ISIS do not look to recruit foreign Muslims with strong religious backgrounds as they cannot be moulded easily; instead, recruiters go after young, disenfranchised and vaguely religious Muslims who see ISIS as an escape from a world they do not understand. Attacking ISIS for this reason would be attacking a symptom of successive British governments’ failure to integrate young Muslims into British society.

Why Intervene?

In Syria, the UK has no horse in the race. The opposition is too weak and, like the international community, divided. Intervention will not lead to a lasting peace in Syria and the region, protect Syrian civilians or resolve the threat ISIS pose to national security. The only reason for the UK to intervene in Syria is to sure up the “Special Relationship” and prove that Britain will not shy away from a fight, reversing the damage done from the 2013 vote.

For many, while they may not say so in public, this will be enough, and why not? Fewer than 5% of coalition airstrikes in Iraq are made by the RAF’s ageing Tornado fleet, so expanding the mission to Syria would only be a token gesture of solidarity with little impact. It could also open up British bases in Cyprus to be used by other coalition partners (but Turkey recently allowing the U.S. to use some of its bases has largely resolved the issue of U.S. planes having to fly from outrageous distances to strike ISIS in Syria). It would mean Britain could do its part in this aspect of the war against ISIS, even if it does not win the peace and Syria’s chaos simply morphs into a new shape.

Bearing all of this in mind, here is something to consider. About fifty years ago, Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused to let British troops get entangled in the jungles of Vietnam, much to President Johnson’s anger and dismay. While the “Special Relationship” took a hit, British interests ultimately were not in a far off war with no clear exit strategy. In hindsight, Wilson wisely ensured that Britain avoided the South-East Asian quagmire and Britain’s relationship with the U.S. certainly rebounded. Later this year, British law-makers are likely to decide whether or not to intervene in Syria. Although it is tempting to blindly follow an ally into war, let us hope that they think carefully of where Britain’s interests truly lie in this conflict.

August 17, 2015 at 6:00 am
BY PETER STOREY

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A MI6 spy who was discovered dead in a holdall at his apartment in 2010 had hacked into sensitive information about former US President Bill Clinton, it has been claimed. The spy had obtained Clinton’s diary for an event and passed it to a friend.
Gareth Williams, 31, hacked into the event’s guest list as it was to be attended by President Clinton, passing it to his friend who was also to be a guest at the party, according to sources speaking on condition of anonymity to the Sun on Sunday.
“The Clinton diary hack came at a time when Williams’s work with America was of the most sensitive nature,” one source said. “It was a diplomatic nightmare for Sir John Sawers, the new director of MI6 at the time.”
The death of Williams remains an unsolved case after five years. A three-year investigation by the Metropolitan Police ended in 2013, deciding that no one else was involved in Williams’ death and his being locked inside the bag, which was found in his bath. A coroner’s report following his death judged that he was killed unlawfully, however.
Another inside source told the newspaper that before his death, living with a new identity has been taking its toll on Williams. “Williams’s state of mind in the months before his death was worrying those closest to him,” the source told the paper. “He found the training so stressful and his mood blackened even talking about it.”
“Typically he’d be asked to learn a new identity then report to a country hotel to meet an interrogation team. There he would be grilled about his new ID for 48 hours without sleep, the source added. “His wrist was broken once after he was handcuffed to a metal bar inside a van that was driven around the country for several hours while he faced a barrage of questions.”
Last week, it was reported that spies may have broken into Williams’ flat in Pimlico, central London, through a skylight, re-entering the residence in order to destroy evidence while the property was under armed guard after the spy’s death. An anonymous source told the Mirror that forensic officers realised that equipment in the flat had been moved in their absence. Williams was a keen cyclist from Anglesey in North Wales and before his death had attended a hacking conference in the US and also a drag show by himself two days before his death.

International Business TimesBy Jack Moore | International Business Times – Sun, Aug 30, 2015

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Defector Boris Karpichkov claims Russia had a secret agent in GCHQ and Williams knew who it was

A Russian defector has claimed that the MI6 spy who was found dead in a padlocked holdall in his bath in Pimlico was “exterminated” by Russian intelligence agents because he refused to become a double agent and knew the identity of a Kremlin spy working inside GCHQ.

Codebreaker Gareth Williams was found dead at his home in 2010. He had been a cipher expert at GCHQ but was on secondment to MI6 when he died.

MI6 spy in a bag case: Gareth Williams ‘probably’ locked himself in
Scotland Yard boss Horgan-Howe warns MI6 over spy Gareth Williams
Spy Gareth Williams was probably the victim of a ‘criminally mediated’
Coroner criticises MI6 investigation into spy Gareth Williams’ death
MI6 spy Gareth Williams ‘poisoned or suffocated’
MI6 spy Gareth Williams tied himself to bed, says landlady
According to the coroner at the subsequent inquest, his death was likely a “criminally mediated” unlawful killing, though it was “unlikely” to be satisfactorily explained. Police investigating Williams’ death suggested he had died as the result of a sex game gone wrong.

But a defector, Boris Karpichkov, claims intelligence sources in Russia have admitted the MI6 spy was killed by the SVR, the current incarnation of the country’s espionage agency which was formerly known as the KGB.

Speaking to the Daily Mirror, Karpichkov claimed the SVR attempted to recruit Williams as a double agent, allegedly using details from the British cypher’s private life as leverage.

Police disclosed at the time of Williams’ death that he owned £15,000 worth of women’s designer clothing, a wig and make up. It had been suggested that Williams dressed as a woman outside of work, though a forensics expert has since said they believe the spy likely worked undercover as a woman.

Spy Gareth Williams was probably the victim of a ‘criminally mediated’ unlawful killing

Karpichkov, who is ex-KGB, claims the SVR threatened to reveal the Briton was a transvestite, before Williams in turn revealed he knew the identity of the person who had “tipped the Russians off” about him.

“The SVR then had no alternative but to exterminate him in order to protect their agent inside GCHQ,” he alleges.

Karpichkov, who also lives in the Pimlico area, said he had seen Russian diplomatic cars in the area around the time of Williams’ death but had believed they had been sent to monitor himself. He claims to have not seen the cars since Williams died.

Karpichkov has also claimed that Williams was killed by an untraceable poison which was pushed into his ear using a needleless syringe.

At the time of the inquiry the coroner said that the involvement of intelligence services in Williams’ death remained a “legitimate line of inquiry” but stressed “there was no evidence to support that he died at the hands” of a government agency.

Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith Monday 28 September 2015 12:55 BST1 comment

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Three-year investigation by Scotland Yard concludes Gareth Williams probably died as a result of a tragic accident

Gareth Williams: last year a coroner concluded that the spy was probably unlawfully killed and his death the result of a criminal act.

The MI6 spy found dead in a bag three years ago probably locked himself in the holdall and died as a result of a tragic accident, Scotland Yard has said.

Outlining the results of a three-year investigation on Wednesday, the Metropolitan police said Gareth Williams most likely died alone in his flat.

But Detective Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt said the police could not “fundamentally and beyond doubt” rule out the possibility that a third party was involved in his death.

Williams’s naked body was found in the padlocked bag, with the keys discovered under his body, in the otherwise empty bath in his flat in Pimlico, central London, in August 2010.

Last year, a coroner concluded that Williams was probably unlawfully killed and his death the result of a criminal act. Following an eight-day inquest, the Westminster coroner, Dr Fiona Wilcox, said he was probably either suffocated or poisoned, before a third party locked and placed the bag in the bath.

But Hewitt said Scotland Yard’s three-year inquiry had come to a different conclusion and that Williams was “most probably” alone when he died.

“Despite all of this considerable effort, it is still the case that there is insufficient evidence to be definitive on the circumstances that led to Gareth’s death,” he said.

“Rather, what we are left with is either individual pieces of evidence, or a lack of such evidence, that can logically support one of a number of hypotheses.”

Hewitt added that the investigation had added “some clarity and detail” to the case, but that “no evidence has been identified to establish the full circumstances of Gareth’s death beyond all reasonable doubt”.

A forensic examination of Williams’s flat, a security service safe house, has concluded that there was no sign of forced entry or DNA that pointed to a third party present at the time of the spy’s death.

Scotland Yard’s inquiry also found no evidence of Williams’s fingerprints on the padlock of the bag or the rim of the bath, which the coroner last year said supported her assertion of “third-party involvement” in the death. Hewitt said it was theoretically possible for Williams to lower himself into the holdall without touching the rim of the bath.

Winding down the lengthy investigation, which has drawn interviews and statements from 27 of Williams’s colleagues in MI6 and GCHQ, Hewitt said the death remained a tragedy that would be kept under review by detectives.

In a statement, Williams’s family said they were disappointed with the police findings and that they agreed with the coroner’s conclusions that he was most likely killed unlawfully.”We are naturally disappointed that it is still not possible to state with certainty how Gareth died and the fact that the circumstances of his death are still unknown adds to our grief,” the family said.

“We note that the investigation has been conducted with further interviews upon some of the witnesses who gave evidence at the inquest and that the investigation team were at last able to interview directly members of GCHQ and SIS [MI6].

“We consider that on the basis of the facts at present known the coroner’s verdict accurately reflects the circumstances of Gareth’s death.”

In a press briefing at Scotland Yard, Hewitt admitted it was “a cause of some regret” that the police were not able to definitively explain the circumstances surrounding the 31-year-old’s death.

He rejected suggestions that the security services had “pulled the wool” over his eyes, following concerns over how MI6 and counter-terrorism officers had handled some evidence during the initial investigation. It emerged on Wednesday that police only gained access to Williams’s spy agency personnel and vetting files after the coroner’s inquest ended last May.

Williams, a maths prodigy and fitness enthusiast originally from Anglesey, was a private person with few other close friends aside from his family, police said. In interviews, MI6 and GCHQ colleagues described him as a “conscientious and decent man” and detectives were unable to identify anyone with any animosity towards him or a motive for causing him harm.

As part of the fresh investigation, a forensic sweep of Williams’s flat discovered 10 to 15 unidentified traces of DNA, which are being kept under examination, but none on the North Face holdall or around the bath area of the en suite bathroom of the flat’s main bedroom. There was also no evidence of a “deep clean” of the flat to wipe all trace of DNA.

Hewitt said: “There are really three hypotheses that you can use here. One is that Gareth, for whatever reason, got himself into that bag and then was unable to get himself out and died as a result of that.

“One is that Gareth, with someone else, got into the bag consensually, then something went wrong and he died as a result of that. The third is that someone murdered Gareth by putting him in that bag. I would argue that any physical absence [of evidence of] a third party being present tends to make the hypotheses that there is a third party present less likely.”

He added: “The coroner drew an inference. I am now drawing a different inference.”

At the coroner’s inquest, two experts tried 400 times to lock themselves into the 32in by 19in holdall without success, with one remarking that even Harry Houdini “would have struggled” to squeeze himself inside. But days after the inquest, footage emerged of a retired army sergeant climbing into the bag and locking it from the inside.

Hewitt said it was now established that it was theoretically possible for a person to climb into the bag and that it was “more probable” that Williams did this before suffocating as a result of the accident. It emerged during the inquest that Williams had an interest in escapology, but the police said it would be speculation to link his death to a failed attempt to escape from the locked holdall.

Josh Halliday
Wednesday 13 November 2013 14.44 GMT Last modified on Thursday 22 May 2014 09.11 BST

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Coroner criticises intelligence agency for failing to report missing MI6 officer and rules he was probably killed unlawfully

The coroner in the Gareth Williams case delivered a damning verdict that was highly critical of the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism branch and MI6 as she ruled that the officer had probably been killed unlawfully.

The cause of death of Williams, 31, who was found padlocked in a holdall in the bath at his flat in Pimlico, central London, was “unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated”, said Dr Fiona Wilcox.

Passing a narrative verdict, she said she was satisfied that “a third party placed the bag in the bath and on the balance of probabilities locked the bag”.

She was, therefore, “satisfied that on the balance of probabilities that Gareth was killed unlawfully”.

Wilcox levelled devastating criticism at Williams’s employers at MI6 who failed to report him missing for seven days when he did not turn up for work. The explanation from his line manager lacked credibility, she said, and she could “only speculate as to what effect this [delay] had on the investigation”.

The lawyer for the Secret Intelligence Service, Andrew O’Connor, delivered deep regrets and an unprecedented apology to the family from Sir John Sawers, chief of the SIS, who recognised that “failure to act more swiftly” when Williams was absent had contributed to their “anguish and suffering”.

Officers in the Met’s counter-terrorism branch, SO15, whose role was to interview SIS witnesses, were also strongly criticised. SO15 failed to inform DCI Jackie Sebire, senior investigating officer, of the existence of nine memory sticks and a black holdall found at Williams’ MI6 office until two days before the inquest ended, the coroner said. On discovering this, Wilcox said she had seriously questioned whether she should adjourn the inquest at that point.

No formal statements were taken by S015 officers who interviewed Williams’ colleagues, “and I find this did affect the quality of evidence heard in this court,” she said.

She also criticised the handling of an iPhone belonging to Williams and found in his work locker, which contained deleted images of him naked in a pair of boots. The officer involved kept it in his possession before handing it to homicide detectives the following day, “demonstrating disregard for the rules governing continuity of evidence”, she said.

Many agencies “fell short of the ideal”, she said, including LGC Forensics in relation to DNA contamination, and the coroner’s office for failing to inform police officers of a second postmortem.

Williams, a fitness fanatic from Anglesey, north Wales, was probably alive when put in the bag but probably suffocated very soon afterwards either from CO2 poisoning, hypercapnia, or the effects of a short-acting poison, she said.

Scotland Yard has always treated the death as suspicious and unexplained, but held back from describing it as murder or manslaughter. Recording her verdict, Wilcox stated her belief that a criminal hand was involved, although police said afterwards that there was no evidence of this. The Guardian understands police inquiries have focused on the theory that Williams died accidentally in a private sexual liaison that went wrong.

The coroner, however, ruled out bondage or auto-erotic activity as explanations.

The dead man’s family said in a statement that their grief had been exacerbated by the failure of his employers at MI6 to make “even the most basic inquiries of his whereabouts and welfare” when he was absent from work for seven days.

They were “extremely disappointed at the failure and reluctance of MI6” to provide relevant information and called on the Metropolitan police commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, to conduct a review of how the investigation would proceed “in the light of the total inadequacy of S015’s investigations into MI6”.

Wilcox said there was no evidence to suggest that any SIS colleague had been involved, but it remained a legitimate line of inquiry given Williams socialised with so few people, and never let anyone he didn’t know into his flat. So any third party would be “someone he knew or someone there without invitation”.

An SIS spokesman said: “We fully co-operated with the police and will continue to do so during the ongoing investigation. We gave all the evidence to the police when they wanted it; at no time did we withhold any evidence.”

An iPhone found in his living room had recently been wiped and restored to factory settings, and it could not be ruled out that contact with a third party had been made via the internet on that phone, she said.

Wilcox was “sure that a third party moved the bag containing Gareth into the bath”. There were two possibilities: either he entered the bag outside the bathroom and it was carried in by a third party, or he was locked in the bag by a third party and lifted into the bath.

She dismissed an interest in bondage, and female clothing, as being irrelevant, condemning leaks to the media about him cross-dressing as a possible attempt “by some third party to manipulate a section of the evidence”.

She said: “Gareth was naked in a bag, not cross-dressed, not in high-heeled shoes.” If his interest was bondage, she would have expected much more internet activity on such websites, when his visits made up a tiny percentage of his browsing. His interest was in fashion, she said. Dismissing any auto-erotic activity, she said he was a “scrupulous risk assessor” and if he had locked himself into the bag would have taken a knife in with him to escape.

She said that despite a 21-month police inquiry: “Most of the fundamental questions in relation to how Gareth died remained unanswered.”

Detectives believe scientific tests on a crumpled green hand towel found in his flat may yet yield crucial DNA evidence, as the Metropolitan police launched a review into the case.

The towel was originally in the bathroom, and moved to the kitchen, police believe, by the “third party”. More tests are being conducted on the bag. The memory sticks, which have now been examined by police, are said not to have produced any significant evidence, but will be examined more closely.

Martin Hewitt, deputy assistant commissioner of the Met, said the circumstances of the death were particularly complex and continued to be the subject of a thorough investigation.

He added: “We have listened to the detailed ruling by the coroner and the concerns raised by Gareth’s family. We are giving both very careful consideration.”

Detectives were “currently undertaking actions in order to develop existing DNA profiles, to trace unidentified individuals who may have information about Gareth’s death, and to further develop analysis of telephone communications”.

Caroline Davies and Sandra Laville
Wednesday 2 May 2012 20.31 BST Last modified on Wednesday 21 May 2014 02.01 BST

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Diego Garcia has been mythologized by American pop culture. Its true story is stranger (and bleaker) than fiction
“24’s” phony history exposed: The dark history of a CIA “black site”
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
First, they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they burned the dogs’ carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder their own fate.
The truth about the U.S. military base on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia is often hard to believe. It would be easy enough to confuse the real story with fictional accounts of the island found in the Transformers movies, on the television series 24, and in Internet conspiracy theories about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
While the grim saga of Diego Garcia frequently reads like fiction, it has proven all too real for the people involved. It’s the story of a U.S. military base built on a series of real-life fictions told by U.S. and British officials over more than half a century. The central fiction is that the U.S. built its base on an “uninhabited” island. That was “true” only because the indigenous people were secretly exiled from the Chagos Archipelago when the base was built. Although their ancestors had lived there since the time of the American Revolution, Anglo-American officials decided, as one wrote, to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos [were] not a permanent or semi-permanent population,” but just “transient contract workers.” The same official summed up the situation bluntly: “We are able to make up the rules as we go along.”
And so they did: between 1968 and 1973, American officials conspired with their British colleagues to remove the Chagossians, carefully hiding their expulsion from Congress, Parliament, the U.N., and the media. During the deportations, British agents and members of a U.S. Navy construction battalion rounded up and killed all those pet dogs. Their owners were then deported to the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1,200 miles from their homeland, where they received no resettlement assistance. More than 40 years after their expulsion, Chagossians generally remain the poorest of the poor in their adopted lands, struggling to survive in places that outsiders know as exotic tourist destinations.
During the same period, Diego Garcia became a multi-billion-dollar Navy and Air Force base and a central node in U.S. military efforts to control the Greater Middle East and its oil and natural gas supplies. The base, which few Americans are aware of, is more important strategically and more secretive than the U.S. naval base-cum-prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Unlike Guantánamo, no journalist has gotten more than a glimpse of Diego Garcia in more than 30 years. And yet, it has played a key role in waging the Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, and the current bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Following years of reports that the base was a secret CIA “black site” for holding terrorist suspects and years of denials by U.S. and British officials, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic finally fessed up in 2008. “Contrary to earlier explicit assurances,” said Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs David Miliband, Diego Garcia had indeed played at least some role in the CIA’s secret “rendition” program.
Last year, British officials claimed that flight log records, which might have shed light on those rendition operations, were “incomplete due to water damage” thanks to “extremely heavy weather in June 2014.” A week later, they suddenly reversed themselves, saying that the “previously wet paper records have been dried out.” Two months later, they insisted the logs had not dried out at all and were “damaged to the point of no longer being useful.” Except that the British government’s own weather data indicates that June 2014 was an unusually dry month on Diego Garcia. A legal rights advocate said British officials “could hardly be less credible if they simply said ‘the dog ate my homework.’”
And these are just a few of the fictions underlying the base that occupies the Chagossians’ former home and that the U.S. military has nicknamed the “Footprint of Freedom.” After more than four decades of exile, however, with a Chagossian movement to return to their homeland growing, the fictions of Diego Garcia may finally be crumbling.
No “Tarzans”
The story of Diego Garcia begins in the late eighteenth century. At that time, enslaved peoples from Africa, brought to work on Franco-Mauritian coconut plantations, became the first settlers in the Chagos Archipelago. Following emancipation and the arrival of indentured laborers from India, a diverse mixture of peoples created a new society with its own language, Chagos Kreol. They called themselves the Ilois — the Islanders.
While still a plantation society, the archipelago, by then under British colonial control, provided a secure life featuring universal employment and numerous social benefits on islands described by many as idyllic. “That beautiful atoll of Diego Garcia, right in the middle of the ocean,” is how Stuart Barber described it in the late 1950s. A civilian working for the U.S. Navy, Barber would become the architect of one of the most powerful U.S. military bases overseas.
Amid Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, Barber and other officials were concerned that there was almost no U.S. military presence in and around the Indian Ocean. Barber noted that Diego Garcia’s isolation — halfway between Africa and Indonesia and 1,000 miles south of India — ensured that it would be safe from attack, yet was still within striking distance of territory from southern Africa and the Middle East to South and Southeast Asia.
Guided by Barber’s idea, the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson convinced the British government to detach the Chagos Archipelago from colonial Mauritius and create a new colony, which they called the British Indian Ocean Territory. Its sole purpose would be to house U.S. military facilities.
During secret negotiations with their British counterparts, Pentagon and State Department officials insisted that Chagos come under their “exclusive control (without local inhabitants),” embedding an expulsion order in a polite-looking parenthetical phrase. U.S. officials wanted the islands “swept” and “sanitized.” British officials appeared happy to oblige, removing a people one official called “Tarzans” and, in a racist reference toRobinson Crusoe, “Man Fridays.”
“Absolutely Must Go”
This plan was confirmed with an “exchange of notes” signed on December 30, 1966, by U.S. and British officials, as one of the State Department negotiators told me, “under the cover of darkness.” The notes effectively constituted a treaty but required no Congressional or Parliamentary approval, meaning that both governments could keep their plans hidden.
According to the agreement, the United States would gain use of the new colony “without charge.” This was another fiction. In confidential minutes, the United States agreed to secretly wipe out a $14 million British military debt, circumventing the need to ask Congress for funding. In exchange, the British agreed to take the “administrative measures” necessary for “resettling the inhabitants.”
Those measures meant that, after 1967, any Chagossians who left home for medical treatment or a routine vacation in Mauritius were barred from returning. Soon, British officials began restricting the flow of food and medical supplies to Chagos. As conditions deteriorated, more islanders began leaving. By 1970, the U.S. Navy had secured funding for what officials told Congress would be an “austere communications station.” They were, however, already planning to ask for additional funds to expand the facility into a much larger base. As the Navy’s Office of Communications and Cryptology explained, “The communications requirements cited as justification are fiction.” By the 1980s, Diego Garcia would become a billion-dollar garrison.
In briefing papers delivered to Congress, the Navy described Chagos’s population as “negligible,” with the islands “for all practical purposes… uninhabited.” In fact, there were around 1,000 people on Diego Garcia in the 1960s and 500 to 1,000 more on other islands in the archipelago. With Congressional funds secured, the Navy’s highest-ranking admiral, Elmo Zumwalt, summed up the Chagossians’ fate in a 1971 memo of exactly three words: “Absolutely must go.”
The authorities soon ordered the remaining Chagossians — generally allowed no more than a single box of belongings and a sleeping mat — onto overcrowded cargo ships destined for Mauritius and the Seychelles. By 1973, the last Chagossians were gone.
“Abject Poverty”
At their destinations, most of the Chagossians were literally left on the docks, homeless, jobless, and with little money. In 1975, two years after the last removals, a Washington Post reporter found them living in “abject poverty.”
Aurélie Lisette Talate was one of the last to go. “I came to Mauritius with six children and my mother,” she told me. “We got our house… but the house didn’t have a door, didn’t have running water, didn’t have electricity. And then my children and I began to suffer. All my children started getting sick.”
Within two months, two of her children were dead. The second was buried in an unmarked grave because she lacked money for a proper burial. Aurélie experienced fainting spells herself and couldn’t eat. “We were living like animals. Land? We had none… Work? We had none. Our children weren’t going to school.”
Today, most Chagossians, who now number more than 5,000, remain impoverished. In their language, their lives are ones of lamizer (impoverished misery) and sagren (profound sorrow and heartbreak over being exiled from their native lands). Many of the islanders attribute sickness and even death tosagren. “I had something that had been affecting me for a long time, since we were uprooted,” was the way Aurélie explained it to me. “This sagren, this shock, it was this same problem that killed my child. We weren’t living free like we did in our natal land.”
Struggling for Justice
From the moment they were deported, the Chagossians demanded to be returned or at least properly resettled. After years of protest, including five hunger strikes led by women like Aurélie Talate, some in Mauritius received the most modest of compensation from the British government: small concrete houses, tiny plots of land, and about $6,000 per adult. Many used the money to pay off large debts they had accrued. For most, conditions improved only marginally. Those living in the Seychelles received nothing.
The Chagossian struggle was reinvigorated in 1997 with the launching of alawsuit against the British government. In November 2000, the British High Court ruled the removal illegal. In 2001 and 2002, most Chagossians joined new lawsuits in both American and British courts demanding the right to return and proper compensation for their removal and for resettling their islands. The U.S. suit was ultimately dismissed on the grounds that the judiciary can’t, in most circumstances, overrule the executive branch on matters of military and foreign policy. In Britain, the Chagossians were more successful. In 2002, they secured the right to full U.K. citizenship. Over 1,000 Chagossians have since moved to Britain in search of better lives. Twice more, British courts ruled in the people’s favor, with judges calling the government’s behavior “repugnant” and an “abuse of power.”
On the government’s final appeal, however, Britain’s then highest court, the Law Lords in the House of Lords, upheld the exile in a 3-2 decision. The Chagossians appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to overturn the ruling.
A Green Fiction
Before the European Court could rule, the British government announced the creation of the world’s largest Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the Chagos Archipelago. The date of the announcement, April Fool’s Day 2010, should have been a clue that there was more than environmentalism behind the move. The MPA banned commercial fishing and limited other human activity in the archipelago, endangering the viability of any resettlement efforts.
And then came WikiLeaks. In December 2010, it released a State Departmentcable from the U.S. Embassy in London quoting a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office official saying that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.” U.S. officials agreed. According to the Embassy, Political Counselor Richard Mills wrote, “Establishing a marine reserve might, indeed… be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling.”
Not surprisingly, the main State Department concern was whether the MPA would affect base operations. “We are concerned,” the London Embassy noted, that some “would come to see the existence of a marine reserve as inherently inconsistent with the military use of Diego Garcia.” British officials assured the Americans there would be “no constraints on military operations.”
Although the European Court of Human Rights ultimately ruled against the Chagossians in 2013, this March, a U.N. tribunal found that the British government had violated international law in creating the Marine Protected Area. Next week, Chagossians will challenge the MPA and their expulsion before the British Supreme Court (now Britain’s highest) armed with the U.N. ruling and revelations that the government won its House of Lords decision with the help of a fiction-filled resettlement study.
Meanwhile, the European Parliament has passed a resolution calling for the Chagossians’ return, the African Union has condemned their deportation as unlawful, three Nobel laureates have spoken out on their behalf, and dozens of members of the British Parliament have joined a group supporting their struggle. In January, a British government “feasibility study” found no significant legal barriers to resettling the islands and outlined several possible resettlement plans, beginning with Diego Garcia. (Notably, Chagossians are not calling for the removal of the U.S. military base. Their opinions about it are diverse and complicated. At least some would prefer jobs on the base to lives of poverty and unemployment in exile.)
Of course, no study was needed to know that resettlement on Diego Garcia and in the rest of the archipelago is feasible. The base, which has hosted thousands of military and civilian personnel for more than 40 years, has demonstrated that well enough. In fact, Stuart Barber, its architect, came to the same conclusion in the years before his death. After he learned of the Chagossians’ fate, he wrote a series of impassioned letters to Human Rights Watch and the British Embassy in Washington, among others, imploring them to help the Chagossians return home. In a letter to Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, he said bluntly that the expulsion “wasn’t necessary militarily.”
In a 1991 letter to the Washington Post, Barber suggested that it was time “to redress the inexcusably inhuman wrongs inflicted by the British at our insistence.” He added, “Substantial additional compensation for 18-25 past years of misery for all evictees is certainly in order. Even if that were to cost $100,000 per family, we would be talking of a maximum of $40-50 million, modest compared with our base investment there.”
Almost a quarter-century later, nothing has yet been done. In 2016, the initial 50-year agreement for Diego Garcia will expire. While it is subject to an automatic 20-year renewal, it provides for a two-year renegotiation period, which commenced in late 2014. With momentum building in support of the Chagossians, they are optimistic that the two governments will finally correct this historic injustice. That U.S. officials allowed the British feasibility study to consider resettlement plans for Diego Garcia is a hopeful sign that Anglo-American policy may finally be shifting to right a great wrong in the Indian Ocean.
Unfortunately, Aurélie Talate will never see the day when her people go home. Like others among the rapidly dwindling number of Chagossians born in the archipelago, Aurélie died in 2012 at age 70, succumbing to the heartbreak that is sagren.
DAVID VINE, TOMDISPATCH.COM
TUESDAY, JUN 16, 2015 10:45 AM +0200
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The UK Foreign Office (FCO) has further delayed publication of flight records for Diego Garcia, following disclosures by a senior Bush administration official that interrogations took place at a CIA black site on the British island.
FCO officials are “still assessing the suitability of the full flight records for publication”, nine months after they were first requested from the government by human rights NGO Reprieve.
Campaigners believe that the logs — written records of all flights landing on and leaving the atoll — could provide crucial, previously undisclosed details of flights involved in the intelligence agency’s post-9/11 rendition and torture program.
‘It is now over seven years since the UK government was forced to admit that CIA torture flights were allowed to use the British territory of Diego Garcia, yet we still seem no closer to the publication of flight records which could provide crucial evidence of what went on.’
However, the UK government has so far declined to publish the logs, and has dismissed the new claims made by a former senior Bush administration official — published by VICE News — that the CIA did in fact detain prisoners on Diego Garcia, despite years of assurances from British ministers to the contrary.
“We have responded publicly in recent years to previous claims,” wrote Hugo Swire, the FCO minister of state, in a letter to Reprieve. “However, Colonel Wilkerson has not presented any new evidence to support his allegation that detainees were held on Diego Garcia.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told VICE News in January that the island was home to “a transit site where people were temporarily housed, let us say, and interrogated from time to time.” His information came from four well-placed CIA and intelligence sources, he said.
Related: Exclusive: CIA interrogations took place on British territory of Diego Garcia, Senior Bush administration official says. Read more here
Swire said that the British government “seeks regular reassurance from the US government” on renditions, in the letter dated March 3.
“All previous assurances on transfer of detainees provided by the US government since 2008 remain valid and correct,” Swire wrote.
“Whilst I am not able to make public the details of diplomatic correspondence, I can confirm that the most recent assurances were received this month.”
Swire did not explain whether the FCO contacted the US in direct response to Wilkerson’s disclosures, but did say that the most recent assurances were made “after Colonel Wilkerson’s claims were made.”
Donald Campbell of Reprieve said the publication of the flight logs was necessary to reassure the public that Britain is not involved in a cover-up of torture evidence.
“It is now over seven years since the UK government was forced to admit that CIA torture flights were allowed to use the British territory of Diego Garcia,” he said, “yet we still seem no closer to the publication of flight records which could provide crucial evidence of what went on.
“Last summer, after the records reportedly suffered ‘accidental’ water damage, ministers promised that they were ‘assessing their suitability for publication.’ Eight months later, they say they are still ‘assessing.’ It is hard to see how such a long delay could be justified.”
It is far from the first time that Diego Garcia’s role in the CIA’s post-9/11 rendition and torture program has been disputed.
The tiny atoll in the Indian Ocean, which has been leased to the US for use as a military base since 1966, has been the subject of CIA torture program claims and counter-claims stretching back more than a decade. The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report in December confirmed that the CIA did operate a post-9/11 global rendition and torture program, with secret prisons all over the world — but the heavily redacted document did not reveal whether Diego Garcia was a part of the CIA’s international network of black sites.
The UK’s changing position on Diego Garcia’s unpublished flight records
The British government says it has received repeated assurances from the US that no CIA rendition flights landed on Diego Garcia — bar two rendition planes which stopped briefly to refuel in 2002.
The government has been slow to release flight logs for the atoll, however, and the position of the Foreign Office in relation to the records has shifted as pressure for them to be released has grown.
February 21 2008: The UK admits that two rendition flights stopped over on Diego Garcia to refuel.
David Miliband, then the foreign secretary, tells parliament he is “very sorry indeed” to report that contrary to earlier assurances, two rendition flights carrying a single detainee each did, in fact, land on Diego Garcia.
July 2008: … but the UK claims that records on these two flights — and for the whole of 2002 — are no longer held.
Miliband tells the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) that records “are unfortunately no longer held for the period when the two cases of rendition occurred [2002],” because they are generally only held for up to five years.
June 26 2014: NGO Reprieve asks the foreign secretary whether flight records from 2002 onwards are held…
Reprieve writes to William Hague, who has by then taken over as foreign secretary, asking: “Can you confirm whether the government holds monthly statistics of flights through D[iego] G[arcia] from January 2002 onwards; daily logs from October 2002 onwards; and general aviation reports from January 2004 onwards? And can you confirm that all planes and flights recorded in all these logs and statistics have been investigated, and discounted as being possible rendition flights?”
July 8 2014: …and the Foreign Office says they are held, but 2002 flight records are incomplete due to ‘water damage.’
Mark Simmonds, a Foreign Office minister, tells members of parliament (MPs) that “though there are some limited records from 2002, I understand they are incomplete due to water damage.”
July 14 2014: … but then the foreign secretary says he believes that there’s actually a complete set of flight logs for 2002.
Hague replies to Reprieve’s letter saying that actually only a small number of flight records have been irretrievably damaged: “I am satisfied that for the period you are asking about, we have a complete set of information about types of aircraft, passenger and crew numbers landing and departing Diego Garcia.”
July 15 2014: The Foreign Office confirms that the water damaged 2002 flight records have not been lost after all — because they’ve “dried out.”
Foreign Office Minister Mark Simmonds tells MPs that water-damaged records have “dried out”: “Since my answer of 8 July, BIOT [British Indian Ocean Territory] immigration officials have conducted a fuller inspection, and previously wet paper records have been dried out. They report that no flight records have been lost as a result of the water damage.”
He says that “a small number of immigration arrival cards from 2004” have been damaged, however.
August 19 2014: The Foreign Office says that not all flight records from 2002 onwards are complete, but they should be able to get a full set anyway.
Responding to a letter from Reprieve asking for clarification on which flight records are damaged, Philip Hammond, now foreign secretary, writes: “The Administration of the British Indian Ocean Territory holds several different types of record about flights entering the territory, though not all of these are complete for the period you are referring to. By combining different types of records, we are confident we can establish what types of aircraft landed on a particular day, and passenger and crew numbers on these aircraft, for the period since 2002.”
September 4 2014: It turns out the heavy weather that damaged the records wasn’t so heavy after all…
VICE News obtains the government’s own records which show that the so-called “extremely heavy weather” in June 2002 amounted to 3.25 inches of rainfall — considerably less than the average for that month.
“I don’t think it’s very helpful for us to have a discussion about how much rain is a lot of rain,” a FCO spokesperson told VICE.
By Ben Bryant
April 8, 2015 | 1:15 pm
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Lawrence Wilkerson is the latest of a number of US officials to say British territory was used in CIA rendition programme
The UK government is facing renewed pressure to make a full disclosure of its involvement in the CIA’s post-9/11 kidnap and torture programme after another leading Bush-era US official said suspects were held and interrogated on the British territory of Diego Garcia.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Colin Powell at the US state department, said the Indian Ocean atoll was used by the CIA as “a transit site where people were temporarily housed, let us say, and interrogated from time to time”.
In an interview with Vice News, Wilkerson said three US intelligence sources had informed him that the CIA used Diego Garcia for what he described as “nefarious activities”, with prisoners being held for weeks at a time.
“What I heard was more along the lines of using it as a transit location when perhaps other places were full or other places were deemed too dangerous or insecure, or unavailable at the moment,” said Wilkerson, who served under Powell from 2002 to 2005.
“So you might have a case where you simply go in and use a facility at Diego Garcia for a month or two weeks or whatever and you do your nefarious activities there.”
Donald Campbell, spokesman for the legal rights group Reprieve, said: “We already know Diego Garcia was used for CIA renditions, yet over a decade on the British government has yet to own up to the full part the island played in the CIA’s torture programme.
“Ministers have consistently claimed that no CIA detainees were held on the island, but Col Wilkerson’s account suggests that either they are lying or they have been lied to. It is high time the British government came clean over the part UK territory played in the CIA’s shameful torture programme.”
Diego Garcia’s population was removed during the late 1960s and early 70s and forced to settle on the Seychelles and Mauritius. Since then the atoll has been leased by the UK to the US for use as a military base.
Wilkerson is the latest of a number of well-placed officials who have said that after 9/11 the atoll was also used in the CIA rendition programme.
Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star American general, has twice spoken publicly about the use of Diego Garcia to detain suspects.
Manfred Nowak, a former United Nations special rapporteur on torture, has said he has heard from reliable sources that the US held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean.
Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who led a Council of Europe investigation into the CIA’s use of European territory and air space, said he received confirmation of the use of the atoll. He later said he received the assistance of some CIA officers during his investigation.
There also is a wealth of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Diego Garcia was used in the so-called rendition programme.
There have been reports that an al-Qaida terrorist known as Hambali, who was suspected of involvement in the 2002 Bali bombing in which 202 people died, was taken to Diego Garcia to be interrogated following his capture in August 2003. A report in Time magazine quoted a regional intelligence official as saying he was being interrogated there two months after his detention.
An American detention facility of some sort is known to exist on Diego Garcia. In 1984 a review by the US government’s general accounting office of construction work on the atoll reported that a detention facility had been completed the previous December.
According to answers given to parliamentary questions, British military officials – who are nominally in command of the atoll – re-designated another building as a prison three months after the September 11 attacks.
In the past, Tony Blair, as prime minister, and Jack Straw, as foreign secretary, both denied the use of the atoll during the rendition programme, but these denials were contradicted by David Miliband, one of Straw’s successors, who told parliament in February 2008 that information had “just come to light” to show that two rendition flights stopped there to refuel.
That statement was made after human rights organisations obtained flight data showing that two aircraft closely involved in the CIA’s rendition programme had flown into and out of Diego Garcia.
A number of sources in the US have said there were a number of references to the CIA’s use of Diego Garcia in the report on the agency’s use of torture that was published last month by the US Senate intelligence committee.
Since then the UK Foreign Office has evaded a series of media inquiries about Diego Garcia and about the report, and has instead responded with a stock response.
Asked about Wilkerson’s comments, a spokesperson issued the same statement: “The US government has assured us that apart from the two cases in 2002 there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the UK, our overseas territories, or the crown dependencies with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”
The Foreign Office has also performed a number of twists and turns when asked questions about the fate of flight and immigration records relating to Diego Garcia.
Last July the Foreign Office minister Mark Simmonds told Andrew Tyrie, the Tory MP who has been investigating the UK’s involvement in the rendition programme for almost a decade, that daily records were “incomplete” due to water damage.
The following day, however, a Foreign Office official was photographed in Whitehall carrying a batch of emails that showed that Scotland Yard detectives had taken possession of “monthly log showing flight details” and “daily records [obscured] month of alleged rendition”.
A few days later, Simmonds told MPs that “previously wet paper records have been dried out”, and that “no flight records have been lost as a result of the water damage”.
Two months after that, the Foreign Office told the Commons foreign affairs committee that a number of immigration records relating to civilians landing on Diego Garcia “have been damaged to the point of no longer being useful”.
Ian Cobain
Friday 30 January 2015 17.11 GMT Last modified on Saturday 31 January 2015 00.08 GMT
Find this story at 30 January 2015
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