Tag Archives: looting

The truth about torture, terrorism and secrecy – as told by Britain’s former spy chief

Posted on by
Reply

 

 

 

 

 

 

A year ago, the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, raised eyebrows in the darker recesses of Whitehall by telling some home truths in her BBC Reith lectures about the security and intelligence agencies.

She returns to her three key themes – torture, terrorism and secrecy – on Thursday with the publication of a short book, Securing Freedom, based on those lectures. It is a refreshing antidote to the rhetoric deployed by ministers and their acolytes who appear too frightened to come clean on any issue relating to that elusive but overarching concept of “national security”. Here are some points that MI5, MI6, the CIA and the new justice secretary Chris Grayling should note:

1. “Torture is illegal in our national law and in international law. It is wrong and never justified … Torture should be utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives … I am confident that I know the answer to the question of whether torture has made the world a safer place. It hasn’t.”

MI5 and MI6 remain embroiled in the unresolved dispute about their role in the abuse and torture of terror suspects. The government tried to push allegations under the carpet by compensating UK residents and citizens taken by the CIA to Guantánamo Bay – and no sooner had it done so than evidence emerged in Libya showing how MI6 helped arrange the abduction of Libyan dissidents to Tripoli, where they say they were tortured by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police. “There are clearly questions to be answered about … whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon,” says Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 at the time. MI6, which was ultimately accountable to then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, says the rendering of the dissidents to Libya in 2004 was authorised by ministers.

2. “Rushing to legislate in the wake of a terrorist atrocity is often a mistake,” says Manningham-Buller in a clear reference to the Blair government’s practice of drawing up more and more “counter-terrorism” laws, a practice sharply criticised by Ken Clarke, now sacked as justice secretary. “We compound the problem of terrorism if we use it to erode the freedom of us all,” she adds. To the surprise of her former colleagues in MI5, she used her maiden speech in the Lords to attack the Labour government’s proposal to detain suspected terrorists without charge for up to 42 days.

Will the reshuffled government succumb to pressure from the security and intelligence agencies and introduce more laws they hope will frighten terrorists, ignoring the root causes? Governments, including the British, talk to terrorists, and, Manningham-Buller reminds us, they have “too often preferred the stability of the devil we know to the uncertainties of democracy” – a reference to the Arab spring and Britain’s close relations with Middle Eastern autocracies.

3. “The scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies will evolve, and it is right that it should. But, given that intelligence to counter these threats will still be needed, that scrutiny will never be able to be transparent. For to secure freedom, within a democracy and within the law, some secrets have to remain.” And there’s the rub. “Overt information may be more important than secret intelligence. There are those, the sceptical observers I wish the readers of intelligence to be, who believe that governments hype threats for their own purposes to ensure legislation proceeds through parliament.”

The coalition government is determined to push through into law its “justice and security” bill designed to prevent any information from the security and intelligence agencies, domestic or foreign, from ever being disclosed in court. The very existence of such secret hearings would be secret, if the government has its way. Ironically, its fate may well end up in the hands of Manningham-Buller and others in the (unreformed) House of Lords.

Spectacle homepage
Befriend Spectacle.Docs on Facebook
Follow SpectacleMedia on Twitter

HSBC guilty but walk free, Shaker Aamer innocent but still in Guantanamo.

Posted on by
Reply

You get the justice you can afford…

According to the media, the City of London’s reputation has been severely damaged by HSBC’s money laundering scandal. What rubbish. It’s favourable services offered to the drug dealing and terrorist communities is precisely what gives the City its “competitive edge.” However, the City of London’s competitors may be a little more squeamish (or tightly regulated) to profit from such rich pickings.

So what happens to those caught red handed abetting Al Qaeda and drug dealing organisations?  They resign, say sorry and promise not to do it again.

HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA)’s head of group compliance, David Bagley, was faced with charges that HSBC gave terrorists, drug cartels and criminals access to the U.S. financial system by failing to guard against money laundering. The result; Bagley stated at a Senate hearing that he will step down. He has also been told to release a formal apology.

 

Compare this to how people like Shaker Aamer are treated. Shaker, a completely innocent man cleared for release but, even today, still stuck in  Guantanamo in a nightmare limbo. He had been  extraordinarily rendered from Afganistan, tortured and imprisoned for more than 10 years without trial or access to his family.

You can watch Spectacles new film on Shaker Aamer’s story here and sign the petition here.

You could also compare it to how ‘rioters’ were treated following the London riots in August 2011. Mother-of-two Ursula Nevin,  was jailed for five months for receiving a pair of shorts that had been looted from a city centre store, and Nicholas Robinson was jailed for six months for stealing a case of water worth £3.50.

So when the media talk about restoring the “City’s reputation” what they mean is restoring the cosy myth of decent trustworthy pinstripped chaps simply being better at “invisible exports” than their counterparts in Paris, Amsterdam, New York or Frankfurt. The big mistake, as was the case for Ursula Nevin and Nicolas Robinson, was being caught. The real loss of reputation is among the drug cartels and terrorists. Can they really trust the City of London to keep their operational secrets?

One wonders what the reaction might be if the bank and bankers in question were Islamic, or from say Iran or Gaddaffi’s Libya. Would it be a completely different story…?

Spectacle has made a short film about Shaker Aamer to mark the 10th anniversary of his incarceration. Watch Spectacle’s new video on Shaker Aamer and please sign the petition @ www.freeshaker.com. Get him out of Guantanamo!

Order Spectacle’s DVD Outside The Law: Stories from Guantánamo

Click Guantánamo for more blogs
Or visit our Guantánamo project pages for more information and videos.

Spectacle homepage
Befriend Spectacle.Docs on Facebook
Follow SpectacleMedia on Twitter

 

Olympics, Advertising and the Riot Panel’s call to curb Aggressive Marketing

Posted on by
1

The imminent Olympics will take place in a city still recovering from the riots. Seven months ago we were shocked by the images that dominated our television screens. The riots, in which around 15,000 people took part, were characterized by the looting of designer stores, such as Footlocker, JD Sports, Orange, O2 and Adidas. Roughly 50 per cent of the recorded offences from the riots were acquisitive in nature. The Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, established by the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and the Leader of the Official Opposition, this week published a report documenting the panel’s findings and recommendations to help prevent future riots. Rampant materialism is considered an underlying cause of last year’s lawlessness. In addition to the lack of economic opportunities, a breakdown of community ties and the loss of trust in the police and public sector, the panel considered aggressive advertising of designer brands a key cause of last year’s rioting. Aggressive marketing and enforcement of branding creates a demand for objects that low-income sectors of the society simply cannot afford. Big businesses, targeting children and young adults, have created a damaging consumerist culture in some of the most deprived parts of the country. In fact, the panel’s Neighbourhood Survey found that 85 per cent of people feel advertising puts pressure on young people to own the latest products and two-thirds of people feel materialism among young people is a problem within their local area.
Yet, aggressive advertising is a big feature of the Olympics (the LOGOC* have their very own report entitled Brand Protection) and ambush marketing (the association and consequent capitalization on a particular event without paying sponsorship fees) is one of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games’s major concerns. In addition to the concentration of world-famous sporting personalities, the Olympics has now become an effective publicity platform for the advertisement of a plethora of objects, many of which are completely unrelated to sports. In an attempt to keep up with a world rebuilt in a corporate image, the Games have secured sponsorship deals domestic and abroad, ironically culminating in a £20m-plus sponsorship deal with Cadbury. In light of the UK’s childhood obesity problem, some argue that a sweet brand should not promote a sporting event.
The Games now embody changes in our society that are incredibly remote from their notional or founding ideals. Increasingly obsessed with the global gaze and the prestige that hosting the Olympics will achieve within the media, the games are keen to promote big brands, and discourage (if necessary by using force) smaller brands that challenge the hegemony of prime corporate sponsors (including MacDonald’s, Visa and Dow Chemical). This will undoubtedly translate into hours of sponsor-related TV ads plaguing our television screens during the summer months and the city of London being literally branded by these bigger brands. In a city agitated by record levels of unemployment and rising social protests, the continual bombardment on the TV screen by designer brands of over-priced products, which will now be rendered all the more desirable and unaffordable by the Olympics logo stamped on the side, is surely not a good thing. The Riots, Communities and Victims Panel’s recommendation that steps need to be taken to reduce the amount of excessive and aggressive advertising aimed at young people should perhaps, in the essence of social responsibility, be listened to sooner, rather than later.

 

Click London Olympics for more blogs
See our Olympics project pages for more information and videos.
Or visit PlanA our general blog on urbanism, planning and architecture.

Spectacle homepage
Befriend Spectacle.Docs on Facebook
Follow SpectacleMedia on Twitter