The Daily Star
Friday, July 10 2015.
By Michael Glackin
Insanity doesn’t just run through politics, it positively gallops. How else do you explain theBritish government’s reaction to the massacre of its citizens in Tunisia last month?
Seifeddine Rezgui, an ISIS gunman trained in Libya, slaughtered 38 innocent tourists, including 30 British nationals, on the beach in Sousse. What was the government’s response? To “consider” extending its pitifully token contribution to the U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS targets and allow British aircraft to bomb the terror group’s strongholds in Syria. It has been bombing targets in Iraq since September.
This is the sum total of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s promised “full spectrum” of responses to the Tunisian atrocity. And even this pitiful response will require a parliamentary vote, so British airstrikes against ISIS in Syria are unlikely to commence until the autumn at the earliest. It is an expedient political response that is utterly meaningless.
The United Kingdom currently has eight Tornado jets taking part in the bombing campaign on ISIS targets in Iraq. At best, extending British operations to Syria will add but a mere handful to that number. It is a token addition to an already risible effort to smash ISIS.
Don’t just take my word for it. Crispin Blunt, chairman of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said last week that only 5 percent of the anti-ISIS missions flown in the region were carried out by British aircraft. Other experts insist the figure is less than 4 percent. Blunt added that extending British strikes into Syria would make “no practical difference” to the air campaign against ISIS.
The reality is that the government’s lame response to the attack in Tunisia is part of a wider political picture. Cameron is mindful of criticism, particularly from Washington, that the U.K. is a fast-fading power that is no longer willing to pull its military weight in international affairs. During last month’s G-7summit in Germany, U.S. President Barack Obama privately pressed Cameron for guarantees he would maintain British defense spending above the NATO benchmark of 2 percent of GDP. Cameron has steadfastly refused to commit to this.
The government believes expanding the U.K.’s abysmal contribution to the anti-ISIS airstrikes in Syria will allay some of the criticism. It also provides yet another fig leaf to cover the reality that there is no overall plan for defeating ISIS, whether in London or in Washington.
Ironically, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond inadvertently indicated what the government, and indeed the West, needs to do in response to the killings in Tunisia when he said the spread of ISIS into the “ungoverned territory” of Libya had helped sow the seeds for the atrocity in Sousse.
Tunisia’s interior minister, Rafik Chelli, confirmed Rezgui visited Libya in January, traveling and training with the group of terrorists who carried out the attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis earlier this year in which 20 people were killed. Rezgui made a further visit to Libya in March, just before the Bardo murders.
You don’t have to be a critic of the rudderless foreign policies of Cameron and Obama to appreciate that the West’s “intervention lite” in Libya has come back to haunt it. The “ungovernable territory” is a direct consequence of the West’s failure to follow up its role in the ousting of Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Its conspicuous absence in post-Gadhafi Libya created the vacuum that allowed terror and lawlessness to prosper, enabling people like Rezgui to hone their deadly craft.
What Cameron should be outlining now is how he intends to address his government’s failings in Libya and what economic and security support the U.K., France, the U.S. and the Gulf nations can now provide to those struggling amid the chaos to establish democracy.
Second, the targeting of Tunisia was not an accident. Two years ago a suicide bomber thought to be linked to the same ISIS cell as Rezgui’s died at the Sousse resort after his bomb exploded prematurely.
Because Tunisia is the one nation in the region to emerge from the Arab spring with a democracy, the terrorist attack was as much about crushing all that the country has achieved in recent years as it was about killing Westerners.
Tunisia’s tourism industry accounts for around 15 percent of the country’s GDP. The Tunisian government has warned of losses totaling $500 million as Western tour companies cancelled booked trips in the wake of the attack. Such losses could have a fatal impact on an important economic sector, one that has helped underpin Tunisia’s shift to democracy.
Cameron should lead the way in getting a firm commitment from other Western powers to back Tunisia with investment and make up the shortfall it will face from those canceled holidays. However, while soft power initiatives can help in the long term, the time has also come for the West to admit its current operations against ISIS have been a failure.
Since the U.S.-led bombing campaign started last year ISIS has lost some ground, primarily in Tikrit, around Mount Sinjar, and along the Syrian border with Turkey. But it has gained elsewhere, most notably winning control of Ramadi and the area around the historic city of Palmyra.
Meanwhile, on the same day as the massacre in Tunisia, groups linked to ISIS bombed a Shiite mosque in Kuwait killing 27, and last week fought a bloody battle with the Egyptian army in the northern Sinai peninsula. Against this backdrop the West must give proper consideration to expanding its role beyond increasingly fruitless airstrikes.
Too much of the heavy lifting against ISIS has been left to a demoralized Iraqi army and (largely Iranian-controlled) Shiite militias. The time has come when the West must take a decision to face and resist terrorism with the “full spectrum” of its military means, and that must mean “boots on the ground.”
It really is a sign of insanity to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. ISIS needs to be tackled at its source.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on July 10,2015.
Friday, 17 July 2015
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
The unbearable lightness of being Blair
The Daily Star
Friday, June 5, 2015
By Michael Glackin
It perhaps says something about the importance Tony Blair attached to his role as envoy for the Middle East Quartet that when I contacted his office this week to ask what he considered his main achievement during his eight years in office, no one bothered to respond.
It’s a pity because, while the short answer is not much, the failure is attributable less to Blair than to the Quartet itself.
There is a danger in playing Devil’s advocate. Blair shares a great deal of responsibility for the murderous mayhem that has enveloped the Middle East in the last decade. But though I speak as a long-standing critic, particularly of his role as envoy, some of the criticism since he announced that he was stepping down from the position has been utterly ridiculous.
Blair was the toothless representative of a collection of global powers – the European Union, the United Nations, Russia and the United States – that failed to invest any of their considerable political capital in resolving Israel’s five-decade-old occupation of Palestinian lands. It is the wider political process that did not deliver, and, without that, Blair’s efforts, for all his grubby tardiness in remaining in a fruitless role for eight years, were always going to lead nowhere.
The Quartet members lost interest in trying to re-energize a moribund peace process that was broken long before the misery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was dwarfed by events in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. As far back as 2008, regional NGOs warned about the Quartet’s lack of progress and called on its members to “signal strong opposition to continued settlement expansion” by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Nothing happened.
More recently, in 2012, a report by the Brookings Institution said the Quartet had “little to show for its decadelong involvement in the peace process.” In the end Blair became a lightning rod for this inertia. His extremely narrow remit – to promote economic development and help improve governance in the occupied Palestinian territories – meant he was never in a position to influence political events. He was so peripheral to the decision-making process that he wasn’t even invited to the last ministerial-level meeting of the Quartet last February.
And yet, Blair was hardly on a fool’s errand. Being envoy put the diplomat cum multimillionaire businessman center stage in Middle East diplomacy, while he conducted lucrative private deals with regional governments with which he dealt on Quartet missions. Blair’s global consultancy, which offers investment and strategic advice to governments and corporations, includes among its clients PetroSaudi, an oil company with links to the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the Kuwait government, and the Abu Dhabi wealth fund Mubadala. Since being appointed envoy, Blair is estimated to have amassed between $75 million and $150 million, although he insists the figure is much lower.
This inevitably led to accusations of conflicts of interest. It has also tarnished Blair’s few small successes as envoy. He succeeded in getting the Israeli government to release radio frequencies which enabled cell phone company Wataniya Mobile to operate in the West Bank, allowing competition with larger rival Jawwal. He also lobbied Israel to allow the British energy firm BG Group and Palestinian officials to establish Gaza Marine, a long stalled $1 billion offshore drilling project.
But both Wataniya Mobile and BG Group were clients of U.S. investment giant JP Morgan at the time – the bank that also pays Blair around $3 million a year to act as its consultant. Oddly enough, I suspect this creative multitasking doesn’t overly concern many in the region. However, it is the fig-leaf nature of Blair’s former office, that it was established to provide a shroud to cover the absence of progress to resolve Israel’s long occupation of Palestinian territories, that rankles with many, and his willingness to play along with it for so long.
Blair’s other minor successes included his part in opening up the Allenby crossing, which enabled Palestinian businessmen easier access to Jordan. But that success, and a handful of others like it, must be set against the more than 500 other Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks that remain in place.
The economies of the West Bank and Gaza are in a dire state, and private investment continues to be well below standard levels in other small developing countries. A World Bank report last month reiterated that the primary factor strangling growth in Gaza and the West Bank is Israeli restrictions.
While one can argue that Ramallah is reasonably prosperous, thanks to foreign aid, Israel retains control over 60 percent of the West Bank. That means prospects for any real investment and the expansion of the private sector are extremely limited.
Even before last summer’s Gaza war, one in six Palestinians in the West Bank was jobless and one out of two in Gaza.
But the central problem, and the one Blair faced from the outset, is that there isn’t anything that resembles a workable and effective political framework to improve the plight of the Palestinians. His remit, to start building a Palestinian state “from the bottom up while it is being negotiated from the top down,” was laughable. There were no meaningful “top down” negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel at any point during his time as envoy.
King Abdullah II of Jordan succinctly summed up the attitude of the Israeli government in 2011 with his pithy remark: “Israel is not really interested in a two-state solution, and what is the other option?” Add in the infighting within the Palestinian leadership, the death knell for any hope of reform after the sacking of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2013, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansion of illegal settlements, and you have to wonder why anyone thought Blair, even without the baggage of his record in the region, could make a difference.
Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on June 05, 2015, on page 7.
Friday, June 5, 2015
By Michael Glackin
It perhaps says something about the importance Tony Blair attached to his role as envoy for the Middle East Quartet that when I contacted his office this week to ask what he considered his main achievement during his eight years in office, no one bothered to respond.
It’s a pity because, while the short answer is not much, the failure is attributable less to Blair than to the Quartet itself.
There is a danger in playing Devil’s advocate. Blair shares a great deal of responsibility for the murderous mayhem that has enveloped the Middle East in the last decade. But though I speak as a long-standing critic, particularly of his role as envoy, some of the criticism since he announced that he was stepping down from the position has been utterly ridiculous.
Blair was the toothless representative of a collection of global powers – the European Union, the United Nations, Russia and the United States – that failed to invest any of their considerable political capital in resolving Israel’s five-decade-old occupation of Palestinian lands. It is the wider political process that did not deliver, and, without that, Blair’s efforts, for all his grubby tardiness in remaining in a fruitless role for eight years, were always going to lead nowhere.
The Quartet members lost interest in trying to re-energize a moribund peace process that was broken long before the misery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was dwarfed by events in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. As far back as 2008, regional NGOs warned about the Quartet’s lack of progress and called on its members to “signal strong opposition to continued settlement expansion” by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Nothing happened.
More recently, in 2012, a report by the Brookings Institution said the Quartet had “little to show for its decadelong involvement in the peace process.” In the end Blair became a lightning rod for this inertia. His extremely narrow remit – to promote economic development and help improve governance in the occupied Palestinian territories – meant he was never in a position to influence political events. He was so peripheral to the decision-making process that he wasn’t even invited to the last ministerial-level meeting of the Quartet last February.
And yet, Blair was hardly on a fool’s errand. Being envoy put the diplomat cum multimillionaire businessman center stage in Middle East diplomacy, while he conducted lucrative private deals with regional governments with which he dealt on Quartet missions. Blair’s global consultancy, which offers investment and strategic advice to governments and corporations, includes among its clients PetroSaudi, an oil company with links to the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the Kuwait government, and the Abu Dhabi wealth fund Mubadala. Since being appointed envoy, Blair is estimated to have amassed between $75 million and $150 million, although he insists the figure is much lower.
This inevitably led to accusations of conflicts of interest. It has also tarnished Blair’s few small successes as envoy. He succeeded in getting the Israeli government to release radio frequencies which enabled cell phone company Wataniya Mobile to operate in the West Bank, allowing competition with larger rival Jawwal. He also lobbied Israel to allow the British energy firm BG Group and Palestinian officials to establish Gaza Marine, a long stalled $1 billion offshore drilling project.
But both Wataniya Mobile and BG Group were clients of U.S. investment giant JP Morgan at the time – the bank that also pays Blair around $3 million a year to act as its consultant. Oddly enough, I suspect this creative multitasking doesn’t overly concern many in the region. However, it is the fig-leaf nature of Blair’s former office, that it was established to provide a shroud to cover the absence of progress to resolve Israel’s long occupation of Palestinian territories, that rankles with many, and his willingness to play along with it for so long.
Blair’s other minor successes included his part in opening up the Allenby crossing, which enabled Palestinian businessmen easier access to Jordan. But that success, and a handful of others like it, must be set against the more than 500 other Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks that remain in place.
The economies of the West Bank and Gaza are in a dire state, and private investment continues to be well below standard levels in other small developing countries. A World Bank report last month reiterated that the primary factor strangling growth in Gaza and the West Bank is Israeli restrictions.
While one can argue that Ramallah is reasonably prosperous, thanks to foreign aid, Israel retains control over 60 percent of the West Bank. That means prospects for any real investment and the expansion of the private sector are extremely limited.
Even before last summer’s Gaza war, one in six Palestinians in the West Bank was jobless and one out of two in Gaza.
But the central problem, and the one Blair faced from the outset, is that there isn’t anything that resembles a workable and effective political framework to improve the plight of the Palestinians. His remit, to start building a Palestinian state “from the bottom up while it is being negotiated from the top down,” was laughable. There were no meaningful “top down” negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel at any point during his time as envoy.
King Abdullah II of Jordan succinctly summed up the attitude of the Israeli government in 2011 with his pithy remark: “Israel is not really interested in a two-state solution, and what is the other option?” Add in the infighting within the Palestinian leadership, the death knell for any hope of reform after the sacking of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2013, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansion of illegal settlements, and you have to wonder why anyone thought Blair, even without the baggage of his record in the region, could make a difference.
Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on June 05, 2015, on page 7.
Tuesday, 19 May 2015
A Lawrence of Arabia Cameron won’t be
The Daily Star
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
By Michael Glackin
The headline in London’s Financial Times neatly captured how important British Prime Minister David Cameron’s election victory will be for the Middle East. According to the newspaper, Cameron’s surprise outright win, ending his need for a coalition with the smaller Liberal Democrats, “reignited London’s property market.” Middle East buyers were leading the charge to purchase multimillion-dollar homes within hours of the results.
And that, I would suggest, will be the extent of this election’s impact on the Middle East. Since Cameron’s humiliation in the disastrous House of Commons vote in 2013, when Parliament vetoed his attempt to launch a limited missile strike against President Bashar Assad’s regime, he has avoided foreign affairs.
In the face of Russian revanchism and the increasing mayhem spreading across the Middle East, Cameron has been invisible. None of this will change under his new government.
It’s a far cry from Cameron’s tub thumping appearances in Egypt, just days after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and months later in Libya, after Moammar Gadhafi was toppled. Today, Cameron’s determination to stand aloof from the shambles that Libya has become is most clearly seen in his new government’s attitude to the North African and Middle Eastern migrants dying in their thousands in the Mediterranean, most of whom are victims of Libya-based people-trafficking gangs.
Within days of the election, Home Secretary Theresa May firmly ruled out British participation in a European Union quota scheme to resettle the migrants – most of whom landed in Italy or Greece – among the bloc’s 28 member states. She insisted that the plan would only “encourage” more migrants to try to reach Europe and called on the EU to send them back to the shores of Libya from whence they came.
It’s an improvement on the previous policy of allowing the migrants to drown in the Mediterranean.
But considering the United Kingdom’s responsibility for the current mayhem in Libya, not to mention Syria, from where many of the migrants have traveled, it is shameful. In fact only 143 of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees have been resettled in the U.K. Based on May’s comments that number is extremely unlikely to increase under the new government.
On the wider regional front, Cameron will continue to avoid getting involved in a strategy to tackle problems arising from the so-called “failed-state wars” in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, or the increasing extremism and sectarian violence they have unleashed. The U.K. will also remain a marginal contributor to the air campaign against ISIS.
The new government will however introduce tougher anti-terrorism laws at home, including the “snoopers’ charter,” which will dramatically increase the security services’ already extensive surveillance powers.
The British government will, of course, be involved in negotiating the final terms of a potential nuclear accord with Iran as part of the P5+1 group of powers. If a deal with Tehran is finalized, it is likely to result in wider negotiations on regional security. This will have far-reaching consequences for the West’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, as well as Iran and its proxies, in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. But it is, frankly, laughable to talk of a regional security deal that would see the U.K. becoming one of the guarantors of a U.S.-led security system for the Gulf states, with the Western powers pledging to respond to any military attack against its Gulf allies.
Based on the recent actions of both London and Washington, and even allowing for Saudi Arabia being the U.K.’s most lucrative arms market, such a guarantee would be token at best, and most likely worthless. After all, the U.K. (along with the United States and Russia) is a guarantor of Ukrainian sovereignty through the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, and that has offered scant comfort to Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
Meanwhile, Cameron will continue to refuse to support tougher measures to hold Israel accountable for illegal West Bank settlement building. His bizarre and contradictory position of supporting a two-state solution while insisting a Palestine state should not be recognized until it is “most useful to the peace process” will not change.
Ultimately, Cameron’s priorities will be keeping the U.K. together in the face of the huge surge in support for the Scottish Nationalist Party, which wants Scotland to be independent. Oddly enough, the SNP, now the U.K.’s third largest party, is the only mainstream political group that supports the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state and has called on the government to upgrade the political representation of Palestine in the U.K. to a fully functioning embassy.
However, while the SNP won almost all the Scottish seats in the British Parliament, and controls the separate Scottish Parliament, it has absolutely no influence over British foreign policy.
Membership of the EU will be the other defining issue of British politics, ahead of a referendum on the matter, which Cameron has committed to hold by 2017. The prime minister, who will campaign for the U.K. to remain in the EU, will have to devote all his energies to renegotiating the terms of Britain’s membership to convince voters to back his position.
Meanwhile, as the Middle East continues to unravel, the well-heeled at least can look forward to purchasing an up-market London bolt hole. The rest, particularly those refugees scattered across Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq, will have to learn to live with Britain’s Middle East inertia.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based daily newspaper THE DAILY STAR.A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on May 19, 2015, on page 7.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
By Michael Glackin
The headline in London’s Financial Times neatly captured how important British Prime Minister David Cameron’s election victory will be for the Middle East. According to the newspaper, Cameron’s surprise outright win, ending his need for a coalition with the smaller Liberal Democrats, “reignited London’s property market.” Middle East buyers were leading the charge to purchase multimillion-dollar homes within hours of the results.
And that, I would suggest, will be the extent of this election’s impact on the Middle East. Since Cameron’s humiliation in the disastrous House of Commons vote in 2013, when Parliament vetoed his attempt to launch a limited missile strike against President Bashar Assad’s regime, he has avoided foreign affairs.
In the face of Russian revanchism and the increasing mayhem spreading across the Middle East, Cameron has been invisible. None of this will change under his new government.
It’s a far cry from Cameron’s tub thumping appearances in Egypt, just days after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and months later in Libya, after Moammar Gadhafi was toppled. Today, Cameron’s determination to stand aloof from the shambles that Libya has become is most clearly seen in his new government’s attitude to the North African and Middle Eastern migrants dying in their thousands in the Mediterranean, most of whom are victims of Libya-based people-trafficking gangs.
Within days of the election, Home Secretary Theresa May firmly ruled out British participation in a European Union quota scheme to resettle the migrants – most of whom landed in Italy or Greece – among the bloc’s 28 member states. She insisted that the plan would only “encourage” more migrants to try to reach Europe and called on the EU to send them back to the shores of Libya from whence they came.
It’s an improvement on the previous policy of allowing the migrants to drown in the Mediterranean.
But considering the United Kingdom’s responsibility for the current mayhem in Libya, not to mention Syria, from where many of the migrants have traveled, it is shameful. In fact only 143 of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees have been resettled in the U.K. Based on May’s comments that number is extremely unlikely to increase under the new government.
On the wider regional front, Cameron will continue to avoid getting involved in a strategy to tackle problems arising from the so-called “failed-state wars” in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, or the increasing extremism and sectarian violence they have unleashed. The U.K. will also remain a marginal contributor to the air campaign against ISIS.
The new government will however introduce tougher anti-terrorism laws at home, including the “snoopers’ charter,” which will dramatically increase the security services’ already extensive surveillance powers.
The British government will, of course, be involved in negotiating the final terms of a potential nuclear accord with Iran as part of the P5+1 group of powers. If a deal with Tehran is finalized, it is likely to result in wider negotiations on regional security. This will have far-reaching consequences for the West’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, as well as Iran and its proxies, in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. But it is, frankly, laughable to talk of a regional security deal that would see the U.K. becoming one of the guarantors of a U.S.-led security system for the Gulf states, with the Western powers pledging to respond to any military attack against its Gulf allies.
Based on the recent actions of both London and Washington, and even allowing for Saudi Arabia being the U.K.’s most lucrative arms market, such a guarantee would be token at best, and most likely worthless. After all, the U.K. (along with the United States and Russia) is a guarantor of Ukrainian sovereignty through the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, and that has offered scant comfort to Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
Meanwhile, Cameron will continue to refuse to support tougher measures to hold Israel accountable for illegal West Bank settlement building. His bizarre and contradictory position of supporting a two-state solution while insisting a Palestine state should not be recognized until it is “most useful to the peace process” will not change.
Ultimately, Cameron’s priorities will be keeping the U.K. together in the face of the huge surge in support for the Scottish Nationalist Party, which wants Scotland to be independent. Oddly enough, the SNP, now the U.K.’s third largest party, is the only mainstream political group that supports the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state and has called on the government to upgrade the political representation of Palestine in the U.K. to a fully functioning embassy.
However, while the SNP won almost all the Scottish seats in the British Parliament, and controls the separate Scottish Parliament, it has absolutely no influence over British foreign policy.
Membership of the EU will be the other defining issue of British politics, ahead of a referendum on the matter, which Cameron has committed to hold by 2017. The prime minister, who will campaign for the U.K. to remain in the EU, will have to devote all his energies to renegotiating the terms of Britain’s membership to convince voters to back his position.
Meanwhile, as the Middle East continues to unravel, the well-heeled at least can look forward to purchasing an up-market London bolt hole. The rest, particularly those refugees scattered across Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq, will have to learn to live with Britain’s Middle East inertia.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based daily newspaper THE DAILY STAR.A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on May 19, 2015, on page 7.
Wednesday, 29 April 2015
In fighting terrorism, Britain is abandoning its liberal values
The Daily Star
Friday, April 17, 2015
By Michael Glackin
It says something about the world we now live in that we know more about Mullah Omar’s terror plans, despite the fact he has been in hiding for the last decade, than about someone who has undergone the scrutiny of two criminal trials at London’s Old Bailey, arguably the world’s most famous courthouse.
Thanks to the Afghan Taliban’s publication of Mullah Omar’s bizarre biography on April 6, we know about his love of grenade launchers, particularly the RPG-7, his “preferred weapon of choice,” and his future plans for Afghanistan.
If only we knew as much about the plans of the man whom British security and intelligence agencies believe poses such a grave risk to the national security of the United Kingdom that details of his arrest, terrorist plots and trials must be kept secret.
You may recall the case of Erol Incedal, a British national, who has twice stood trial on terrorism charges since being arrested at gunpoint in 2013. In an unprecedented move, the British government had attempted to hold both trials in secret, in the interests of “national security.” Following a legal challenge by media groups a compromise was arranged in which the trial was divided into three parts: public, in other words open to media and members of the public; private, with 10 “accredited journalists” allowed to attend but banned from reporting what they saw or heard; and closed, meaning completely secret, with just the accused, lawyers and the jury present.
Last year Incedal was convicted of possessing a bomb-making document on a mobile phone memory card. But the jury failed to reach a verdict on the more serious charge of planning a terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS. This included allegedly targeting former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and plotting a “Mumbai-style” attack in London.
After a second trial, even more of which was held in secret and which ended last month, a jury finally acquitted Incedal of that charge. This came after police and security agencies admitted that they had no idea what his alleged terror target was.
Following his acquittal Incedal was jailed on April 1 for three and a half years on the earlier charge of possessing the bomb-making document, a shorter sentence than the average house burglar receives. His friend, Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, who last year pleaded guilty to being in possession of an identical document, was jailed for three years. Having already spent 17 months on remand both men are likely to be free within months. The situation is beyond farce. What on earth was all this secrecy about?
Sentencing the two men, the judge, Mr. Justice Nicol, actually told them that they were not terrorists, but added that parliament had made possessing instructions for homemade bombs an offense because of the danger of their being in circulation.
So we can’t even call this a secret terror trial anymore. It’s just a sordid secret trial where the entire weight of the government has been used to ride roughshod over the principle of open justice, for no apparent reason. Considering that what the jury heard convinced them that Incedal was not plotting terror attacks, and bearing in mind the lengths to which the government went to keep this trial a secret, it must surely be in the national interest to know why Incedal has been cleared of being a terrorist.
This is the crux of the matter because we have no idea what really lay at the heart of Incedal’s prosecution in the first place, let alone the reason for all the secrecy that surrounded his case. Here is a man who has been found guilty of possessing a bomb-making manual, but whom two separate juries, who saw all the evidence, failed to convict of planning terror attacks.
It even emerged that Incedal had been in contact with a British extremist known as “Ahmed,” whom he had met on the border between Turkey and Syria. And yet the jury still cleared him. Why? We don’t know.
Amid all these questions we are faced with a government that has developed a worrying obsession with secrecy and the control of information – one that treats its laughingly inept security and intelligence services with mad devotion. The government appears to be in awe of the security services, and will do anything they ask without question.
We have seen this in the abject failure of parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee to criticize myriad intelligence failures or the acknowledged illegal activities of the service. The Incedal trial represents yet another erosion of freedom of expression in the U.K., from the pervasive snooping of the security services into our emails, to the government attacks on the media, which has seen more journalists put on trial than terrorists in recent years.
The final bizarre twist in this sorry affair came when Mr. Justice Nicol rejected a post-trial application brought by media to make the case details public now that the trial was over and there no longer was a need for secrecy.
Predictably, Nicol handed down two judgments, one open, and one secret. His open judgment ruled that prosecutors could be dissuaded from bringing such a case in the future if reporting restrictions were lifted. Why? The reason was detailed in the accompanying secret judgment, which of course, we cannot read.
This is a pathetic way to defend the values of freedom and democracy. Former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
It is sound advice, because the greatest threat to British values and freedoms just now is from hysteria, not terrorists.
Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on April 17, 2015, on page 7.
Friday, April 17, 2015
By Michael Glackin
It says something about the world we now live in that we know more about Mullah Omar’s terror plans, despite the fact he has been in hiding for the last decade, than about someone who has undergone the scrutiny of two criminal trials at London’s Old Bailey, arguably the world’s most famous courthouse.
Thanks to the Afghan Taliban’s publication of Mullah Omar’s bizarre biography on April 6, we know about his love of grenade launchers, particularly the RPG-7, his “preferred weapon of choice,” and his future plans for Afghanistan.
If only we knew as much about the plans of the man whom British security and intelligence agencies believe poses such a grave risk to the national security of the United Kingdom that details of his arrest, terrorist plots and trials must be kept secret.
You may recall the case of Erol Incedal, a British national, who has twice stood trial on terrorism charges since being arrested at gunpoint in 2013. In an unprecedented move, the British government had attempted to hold both trials in secret, in the interests of “national security.” Following a legal challenge by media groups a compromise was arranged in which the trial was divided into three parts: public, in other words open to media and members of the public; private, with 10 “accredited journalists” allowed to attend but banned from reporting what they saw or heard; and closed, meaning completely secret, with just the accused, lawyers and the jury present.
Last year Incedal was convicted of possessing a bomb-making document on a mobile phone memory card. But the jury failed to reach a verdict on the more serious charge of planning a terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS. This included allegedly targeting former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and plotting a “Mumbai-style” attack in London.
After a second trial, even more of which was held in secret and which ended last month, a jury finally acquitted Incedal of that charge. This came after police and security agencies admitted that they had no idea what his alleged terror target was.
Following his acquittal Incedal was jailed on April 1 for three and a half years on the earlier charge of possessing the bomb-making document, a shorter sentence than the average house burglar receives. His friend, Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, who last year pleaded guilty to being in possession of an identical document, was jailed for three years. Having already spent 17 months on remand both men are likely to be free within months. The situation is beyond farce. What on earth was all this secrecy about?
Sentencing the two men, the judge, Mr. Justice Nicol, actually told them that they were not terrorists, but added that parliament had made possessing instructions for homemade bombs an offense because of the danger of their being in circulation.
So we can’t even call this a secret terror trial anymore. It’s just a sordid secret trial where the entire weight of the government has been used to ride roughshod over the principle of open justice, for no apparent reason. Considering that what the jury heard convinced them that Incedal was not plotting terror attacks, and bearing in mind the lengths to which the government went to keep this trial a secret, it must surely be in the national interest to know why Incedal has been cleared of being a terrorist.
This is the crux of the matter because we have no idea what really lay at the heart of Incedal’s prosecution in the first place, let alone the reason for all the secrecy that surrounded his case. Here is a man who has been found guilty of possessing a bomb-making manual, but whom two separate juries, who saw all the evidence, failed to convict of planning terror attacks.
It even emerged that Incedal had been in contact with a British extremist known as “Ahmed,” whom he had met on the border between Turkey and Syria. And yet the jury still cleared him. Why? We don’t know.
Amid all these questions we are faced with a government that has developed a worrying obsession with secrecy and the control of information – one that treats its laughingly inept security and intelligence services with mad devotion. The government appears to be in awe of the security services, and will do anything they ask without question.
We have seen this in the abject failure of parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee to criticize myriad intelligence failures or the acknowledged illegal activities of the service. The Incedal trial represents yet another erosion of freedom of expression in the U.K., from the pervasive snooping of the security services into our emails, to the government attacks on the media, which has seen more journalists put on trial than terrorists in recent years.
The final bizarre twist in this sorry affair came when Mr. Justice Nicol rejected a post-trial application brought by media to make the case details public now that the trial was over and there no longer was a need for secrecy.
Predictably, Nicol handed down two judgments, one open, and one secret. His open judgment ruled that prosecutors could be dissuaded from bringing such a case in the future if reporting restrictions were lifted. Why? The reason was detailed in the accompanying secret judgment, which of course, we cannot read.
This is a pathetic way to defend the values of freedom and democracy. Former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
It is sound advice, because the greatest threat to British values and freedoms just now is from hysteria, not terrorists.
Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on April 17, 2015, on page 7.
Saturday, 11 April 2015
Echoes of Orwell in the United Kingdom
The Daily Star
Monday, March 23, 2015
By Michael Glackin
George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece “1984,” described a world of omnipresent government surveillance of its citizens. A world in which the rulers even invented a new language, Newspeak, in order to distort the true meaning of words and suppress dissent. Orwell’s novel, published in 1949, was largely, though not entirely, based on the regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But today his nightmare vision of society has worrying parallels with the shocking extent of the British government’s intrusion into our day-to-day lives.
The British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee officially confirmed last week that the government was engaged in mass surveillance of the communications of millions of people. But in a long-awaited report into the revelations made by U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden two years ago, the ISC insisted this intrusive surveillance carried out by intelligence agencies was perfectly legal.
That’s because the intelligence services’ trawling of the emails, text messages and other online communications of law-abiding individuals isn’t actually mass surveillance. In a nod to Orwell’s Newspeak, the ISC prefers to call it “bulk interception” and “bulk collection.” As someone who has been embarrassed by the fact that I speak one language, I am now ashamed to discover I don’t even understand the language I thought I could speak.
According to the ISC, bulk interception or collection only becomes surveillance when the information is read by a human. Because most of the vast amounts of material collected by GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, are never actually read by anyone, it doesn’t qualify as mass surveillance.
But why collect information if you are not going to read it? Surely if any of the content is being stored it increases the likelihood that it will be accessed at some point? The ISC report insists that GCHQ only stores a small amount of the material it intercepts, but the exact figure is redacted so we have no idea how much is being held, or how long it is kept by the intelligence agencies.
The intelligence services insist they need to do all this, and much more, because they are searching for small needles of information about terrorists in the vast haystack of online communications. But as the record shows, and as The Guardian newspaper neatly put it, the biggest security problem appears to be the abject failure of the intelligence agencies to hold on to all the needles they pull out of haystacks.
Lest we forget, despite all its online snooping, the intelligence services failed to prevent a number of atrocities in the United Kingdom – from the London bombings of 2005 to the murder of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 – despite the fact that the perpetrators in both cases were on the radar of intelligence services. Mohammed Emwazi, better known as ISIS killer Jihadi John, would not be in Syria butchering Westerners were it not for the intelligence services allowing him to escape from the U.K. while he was under their scrutiny.
By any sane rationale, these failures make the case for a better organized intelligence service. But in the twisted Orwellian prism of the government and the ISC they add up instead to increasing the powers of the spooks to collect Internet data on the rest of us, creating more hay for them to trawl through.
The ISC has essentially given the spooks the benefit of the doubt over the legality of their surveillance. They won’t need to in future, because the government intends to formally legalize the practice, or in the committee’s Newspeak, make the process more “transparent.”
Yet while calling for more transparency, the ISC also flatly rejected demands that a judge, rather than a government minister, should be responsible for authorizing the warrants – of which there were 517,236 issued last year – allowing “intrusive surveillance.” The mantra, repeatedly trotted out by government, is that the innocent have nothing to fear from its snooping.
That’s a lie. On the same day that the ISC was busy recommending more transparency, the government was busy trying to keep secret the extent of the intelligence services’ unlawful behavior. Almost unnoticed last week, lawyers acting for GCHQ, MI5, and MI6, insisted that the agencies should not have to admit whether they intercepted legally privileged conversations between lawyers and their clients.
The demand was made during a case before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal brought by the Libyan politician Abdel-Hakim Belhadj and his family. They were seized in a British-American rendition operation in 2004 and returned to be tortured by Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Tripoli.
The IPT deals with complaints about the conduct of the intelligence services. Belhadj is currently suing the government over its role in his rendition. His lawyers believe the intelligence services eavesdropped on their confidential communications in order to give the government an unfair advantage in court.
Belhadj is not a terrorist, and his court case against the government does not threaten the lives of British people. He is simply someone the government wants to silence, and based on the ISC report, that is enough for his communications with his lawyers to be legally intercepted.
The intelligence services play a crucial role in protecting the United Kingdom. But there is no evidence that mass surveillance of our Internet activity is making us safer. On the contrary there is plenty of evidence that intelligence failures have cost lives. Giving mass surveillance a retrospective legal basis will not change this, whatever the government decides to call it.
Michael Glackin,is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on March 23, 2015, on page 7.
Monday, March 23, 2015
By Michael Glackin
George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece “1984,” described a world of omnipresent government surveillance of its citizens. A world in which the rulers even invented a new language, Newspeak, in order to distort the true meaning of words and suppress dissent. Orwell’s novel, published in 1949, was largely, though not entirely, based on the regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But today his nightmare vision of society has worrying parallels with the shocking extent of the British government’s intrusion into our day-to-day lives.
The British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee officially confirmed last week that the government was engaged in mass surveillance of the communications of millions of people. But in a long-awaited report into the revelations made by U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden two years ago, the ISC insisted this intrusive surveillance carried out by intelligence agencies was perfectly legal.
That’s because the intelligence services’ trawling of the emails, text messages and other online communications of law-abiding individuals isn’t actually mass surveillance. In a nod to Orwell’s Newspeak, the ISC prefers to call it “bulk interception” and “bulk collection.” As someone who has been embarrassed by the fact that I speak one language, I am now ashamed to discover I don’t even understand the language I thought I could speak.
According to the ISC, bulk interception or collection only becomes surveillance when the information is read by a human. Because most of the vast amounts of material collected by GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, are never actually read by anyone, it doesn’t qualify as mass surveillance.
But why collect information if you are not going to read it? Surely if any of the content is being stored it increases the likelihood that it will be accessed at some point? The ISC report insists that GCHQ only stores a small amount of the material it intercepts, but the exact figure is redacted so we have no idea how much is being held, or how long it is kept by the intelligence agencies.
The intelligence services insist they need to do all this, and much more, because they are searching for small needles of information about terrorists in the vast haystack of online communications. But as the record shows, and as The Guardian newspaper neatly put it, the biggest security problem appears to be the abject failure of the intelligence agencies to hold on to all the needles they pull out of haystacks.
Lest we forget, despite all its online snooping, the intelligence services failed to prevent a number of atrocities in the United Kingdom – from the London bombings of 2005 to the murder of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 – despite the fact that the perpetrators in both cases were on the radar of intelligence services. Mohammed Emwazi, better known as ISIS killer Jihadi John, would not be in Syria butchering Westerners were it not for the intelligence services allowing him to escape from the U.K. while he was under their scrutiny.
By any sane rationale, these failures make the case for a better organized intelligence service. But in the twisted Orwellian prism of the government and the ISC they add up instead to increasing the powers of the spooks to collect Internet data on the rest of us, creating more hay for them to trawl through.
The ISC has essentially given the spooks the benefit of the doubt over the legality of their surveillance. They won’t need to in future, because the government intends to formally legalize the practice, or in the committee’s Newspeak, make the process more “transparent.”
Yet while calling for more transparency, the ISC also flatly rejected demands that a judge, rather than a government minister, should be responsible for authorizing the warrants – of which there were 517,236 issued last year – allowing “intrusive surveillance.” The mantra, repeatedly trotted out by government, is that the innocent have nothing to fear from its snooping.
That’s a lie. On the same day that the ISC was busy recommending more transparency, the government was busy trying to keep secret the extent of the intelligence services’ unlawful behavior. Almost unnoticed last week, lawyers acting for GCHQ, MI5, and MI6, insisted that the agencies should not have to admit whether they intercepted legally privileged conversations between lawyers and their clients.
The demand was made during a case before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal brought by the Libyan politician Abdel-Hakim Belhadj and his family. They were seized in a British-American rendition operation in 2004 and returned to be tortured by Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Tripoli.
The IPT deals with complaints about the conduct of the intelligence services. Belhadj is currently suing the government over its role in his rendition. His lawyers believe the intelligence services eavesdropped on their confidential communications in order to give the government an unfair advantage in court.
Belhadj is not a terrorist, and his court case against the government does not threaten the lives of British people. He is simply someone the government wants to silence, and based on the ISC report, that is enough for his communications with his lawyers to be legally intercepted.
The intelligence services play a crucial role in protecting the United Kingdom. But there is no evidence that mass surveillance of our Internet activity is making us safer. On the contrary there is plenty of evidence that intelligence failures have cost lives. Giving mass surveillance a retrospective legal basis will not change this, whatever the government decides to call it.
Michael Glackin,is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on March 23, 2015, on page 7.
Wednesday, 4 March 2015
Britain’s intelligence net needs repairs
The Daily Star
Monday, March 2, 2015
By Michael Glackin
It is hard not to fear for the defense of the realm these days. When the head of the government body charged with overseeing the British intelligence services is daft enough to be duped by reporters pretending to be directors of a fictitious Chinese company you really are in trouble.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the powerful chairman of Parliament’s Intelligence Services Committee, along with a former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, one of the loudest cheerleaders for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, both offered to “use their influence” as senior politicians to help the fictitious company in return for payments of at least $7,500 per day.
Rifkind, who was forced to resign as chair of the ISC following the revelations, told the undercover reporters he could arrange “useful access” to every British ambassador in the world. He said he could meet “any ambassador that I wish to see” in London. “They’ll all see me personally.”
Luckily it was a bunch of reporters exposing his sordid avarice rather than a terrorist group posing as a fictitious company. The headlines could have been very different.
With someone like this in charge of overseeing intelligence and security, it is unsurprising that the services themselves are facing criticism for being inept. The intelligence and security services consistently warn that the greatest threat to national security comes from British jihadis who become radicalized fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and who then return home bringing the violence they have learned to the streets of Britain.
Yet intelligence and security services appear incapable of stopping not just British nationals going to Syria and Iraq in the first place, but even known terror suspects.
The ISIS executioner known as “Jihadi John,” who was finally publicly named by the Washington Post last week as Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, is a case in point. Emwazi, a 27-year-old from west London, was able to escape to Syria despite being on an MI5 terror watch list which prohibited him from leaving the United Kingdom. In fact, Emwazi was so well-known to intelligence services and detained so often by MI5 that he actually filed a formal complaint against them with the Police Complaints Commission in 2010.
Yet the former University of Westminster computer student, who MI5 had linked to a number of Islamist terror groups including Al-Shabab, managed to slip out of the United Kingdom unnoticed in 2012 to join ISIS. He is the best known of an estimated 2,000 Britons thought to be fighting alongside Islamist extremists and butchering innocents in Syria and Iraq.
The latest recruits appear to be three runaway schoolgirls from London. Clearly the intelligence services cannot monitor everyone, and, unlike Emwazi, the schoolgirls had no record of terrorism. However, one of the schoolgirls is believed to have been recruited through Twitter by Aqsa Mahmood, a so-called “jihadi bride” who fled Glasgow for Syria two years ago.
Mahmood’s social media have been monitored by intelligence agencies ever since she disappeared. This is not lost on her family, who said the security services had “serious questions to answer” over her alleged contact with the missing schoolgirls.
It gets worse. It is understood that the schoolgirls were also in contact via social media with a school friend who ran away to Syria in December. The government, not slow to see an opportunity, insisted that the case reinforced its argument to grant greater powers to the intelligence services so they could intercept social media and digital messages. Prime Minister David Cameron wants encrypted communication services such as WhatsApp and Snapchat to be opened up to the security services.
But Steve Hewitt, an expert on security intelligence and counterterrorism at the University of Birmingham, recently told me that mass eavesdropping programs such as Tempora, through which GCHQ secretly gained access to millions of private communications, could actually be hampering intelligence work.
“One of the issues raised by the Snowden disclosures is the vast amount of information the intelligence agencies take in. Frankly it is way too much, and they simply cannot process it all. They need to prioritize more,” Hewitt remarked.
They sure do. Emwazi is merely the latest terror suspect of whom the intelligence services have lost sight, only to see him return to haunt them.
Despite extensive so-called “intrusive” surveillance of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and murdered an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013. Like Adebolajo, Emwazi has also claimed MI5 tried to recruit him.
The leaders of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net. After the attack, MI5 insisted two of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were just “petty fraudsters.” However, at least one surveillance transcript of the pair later emerged which contained eight pages detailing plans to train for and take part in terrorist attacks.
These are systematic failings. Hewitt adds: “It’s inevitable that some suspects could slip through their net, and that the occasional lone attacker may not stay on their radar and then later emerge to attack someone. But ultimately that is preferable to hundreds being killed in a single incident, and the security services have successfully prevented those sort of terror attacks.”
Maybe so, but as the old adage goes, the terrorists only have to get lucky once, and the more of them that are allowed to slip through the net, the luckier they are likely to be.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on March 2, 2015, on page 7.
Monday, March 2, 2015
By Michael Glackin
It is hard not to fear for the defense of the realm these days. When the head of the government body charged with overseeing the British intelligence services is daft enough to be duped by reporters pretending to be directors of a fictitious Chinese company you really are in trouble.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the powerful chairman of Parliament’s Intelligence Services Committee, along with a former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, one of the loudest cheerleaders for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, both offered to “use their influence” as senior politicians to help the fictitious company in return for payments of at least $7,500 per day.
Rifkind, who was forced to resign as chair of the ISC following the revelations, told the undercover reporters he could arrange “useful access” to every British ambassador in the world. He said he could meet “any ambassador that I wish to see” in London. “They’ll all see me personally.”
Luckily it was a bunch of reporters exposing his sordid avarice rather than a terrorist group posing as a fictitious company. The headlines could have been very different.
With someone like this in charge of overseeing intelligence and security, it is unsurprising that the services themselves are facing criticism for being inept. The intelligence and security services consistently warn that the greatest threat to national security comes from British jihadis who become radicalized fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and who then return home bringing the violence they have learned to the streets of Britain.
Yet intelligence and security services appear incapable of stopping not just British nationals going to Syria and Iraq in the first place, but even known terror suspects.
The ISIS executioner known as “Jihadi John,” who was finally publicly named by the Washington Post last week as Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, is a case in point. Emwazi, a 27-year-old from west London, was able to escape to Syria despite being on an MI5 terror watch list which prohibited him from leaving the United Kingdom. In fact, Emwazi was so well-known to intelligence services and detained so often by MI5 that he actually filed a formal complaint against them with the Police Complaints Commission in 2010.
Yet the former University of Westminster computer student, who MI5 had linked to a number of Islamist terror groups including Al-Shabab, managed to slip out of the United Kingdom unnoticed in 2012 to join ISIS. He is the best known of an estimated 2,000 Britons thought to be fighting alongside Islamist extremists and butchering innocents in Syria and Iraq.
The latest recruits appear to be three runaway schoolgirls from London. Clearly the intelligence services cannot monitor everyone, and, unlike Emwazi, the schoolgirls had no record of terrorism. However, one of the schoolgirls is believed to have been recruited through Twitter by Aqsa Mahmood, a so-called “jihadi bride” who fled Glasgow for Syria two years ago.
Mahmood’s social media have been monitored by intelligence agencies ever since she disappeared. This is not lost on her family, who said the security services had “serious questions to answer” over her alleged contact with the missing schoolgirls.
It gets worse. It is understood that the schoolgirls were also in contact via social media with a school friend who ran away to Syria in December. The government, not slow to see an opportunity, insisted that the case reinforced its argument to grant greater powers to the intelligence services so they could intercept social media and digital messages. Prime Minister David Cameron wants encrypted communication services such as WhatsApp and Snapchat to be opened up to the security services.
But Steve Hewitt, an expert on security intelligence and counterterrorism at the University of Birmingham, recently told me that mass eavesdropping programs such as Tempora, through which GCHQ secretly gained access to millions of private communications, could actually be hampering intelligence work.
“One of the issues raised by the Snowden disclosures is the vast amount of information the intelligence agencies take in. Frankly it is way too much, and they simply cannot process it all. They need to prioritize more,” Hewitt remarked.
They sure do. Emwazi is merely the latest terror suspect of whom the intelligence services have lost sight, only to see him return to haunt them.
Despite extensive so-called “intrusive” surveillance of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and murdered an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013. Like Adebolajo, Emwazi has also claimed MI5 tried to recruit him.
The leaders of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net. After the attack, MI5 insisted two of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were just “petty fraudsters.” However, at least one surveillance transcript of the pair later emerged which contained eight pages detailing plans to train for and take part in terrorist attacks.
These are systematic failings. Hewitt adds: “It’s inevitable that some suspects could slip through their net, and that the occasional lone attacker may not stay on their radar and then later emerge to attack someone. But ultimately that is preferable to hundreds being killed in a single incident, and the security services have successfully prevented those sort of terror attacks.”
Maybe so, but as the old adage goes, the terrorists only have to get lucky once, and the more of them that are allowed to slip through the net, the luckier they are likely to be.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on March 2, 2015, on page 7.
Thursday, 19 February 2015
A British inquiry descends into farce
The Daily Star
Friday, February 13 2015
By Michael Glackin
The long-running, some would say never-ending, government inquiry into why the United Kingdom went to war in Iraq in 2003 officially descended into farce last week.
The man in charge of the inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, faced a parliamentary committee to explain why he has still not published his report into a war that took place more than a decade ago. Chilcot, a former civil servant who heads the five-member committee of inquiry that began its work in 2009, originally expected his $1,200 a day job to last two years at most. However, six years and $14 million later, there is no sign of him publishing even an interim report, or any hint that he might soon have to give up his well remunerated post.
In truth the Chilcot inquiry was always a pointless exercise. The entire country blames former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s bizarre desperation to ingratiate himself with U.S. President George W. Bush for the U.K.’s joining a war that has cast a dark shadow across the entire Middle East.
But few public inquiries in the U.K. achieve anything, and two previous inquiries into the Iraq war were widely seen as exercises in concealing the truth. Based on last week’s 70-minute performance by Chilcot in front of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, his inquiry will be no different.
In a moment that could have come from a Marx Brothers film, the man who had to explain to Parliament why it was taking so long to publish his report, took so long to explain it that he had to be told to stop in order for parliamentarians to ask questions.
Rumor has it Chilcot’s report so far runs to a million words, and, judging by his responses to the committee, it may well be impenetrable. For instance, when he told the committee that he still didn’t know when he would be ready to publish, he said: “The risk of either arousing false hopes or false expectations either way outweighs for me the powerful appetite, for all sorts of often good reasons, to know when the report is likely to become available.”
A joke that’s been doing the rounds for years is that Chilcot is delaying the report until the main players are all dead. Ironically, his first words to the committee informed them that one of the members of his inquiry panel, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, had indeed died the previous night.
You couldn’t make it up.
Chilcot said the long delay was initially due to “very long and difficult and challenging discussions” with the U.K’s top civil servant over the release of secret government documents. These include the all-important 25 letters Blair sent to Bush, along with the transcripts of 130 telephone calls between the two men, in the run-up to the invasion. The cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, who was also Blair’s principal private secretary at the time of the invasion, refused to declassify the correspondence on national-security grounds.
It’s ironic that a government that insists on the need to pry into millions of its citizens’ private emails and Skype conversations is so reluctant to allow its citizens a reciprocal right. Although a deal struck between Heywood and Chilcot now allows for the release of “selected extracts,” the reality is that the full details of these important public documents will remain secret.
So, even if Chilcot does publish his report before we all die, we are unlikely to learn whether Blair really did write to Bush in July 2002: “You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I’m with you.” The letter, written a year before Parliament voted on whether Britain would join the invasion, was quoted in well-connected political journalist Andrew Rawnsley’s book “The End of the Party,” based on his interviews with David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser at the time, and Sir Christopher Meyer, then the British ambassador to the U.S.
The tussle between Chilcot and the cabinet office over these documents meant the process by which those criticized in the report are given the right to respond before publication, known as “Maxwellization,” did not begin until the end of last year.
This now appears to be the main obstacle to the report’s publication as speculation is rife that Blair, along with the former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, and senior defense chiefs are attempting to water down criticism of their roles by challenging details and demanding changes.
This covert bartering is an affront to the very principles of democracy and open government that the invasion of Iraq was supposed to uphold. The Maxwellization process defeats the purpose of any inquiry, which must surely be about finding out what happened without fear or favor. Granting key figures in the decision to go to war a right of reply means the Chilcot inquiry is now rightly tainted by the same suspicion of cover-up as the war itself.
The Chilcot Inquiry was always going to be a waste of time and money. The inquiry panel was made up of establishment figures that supported Blair. Chilcot was a key member of an earlier Iraq war investigation, the Butler Inquiry, which exonerated the Blair government of the charge that it had “sexed up” the case for war after the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – the original raison d’être for attacking Iraq.
The late Sir Martin Gilbert supported the invasion and even claimed Bush and Blair would one day “join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Another member of the inquiry team, the academic Sir Lawrence Freedman, was a foreign policy adviser to Blair. He is also author of the five tests for military intervention used by Blair in a famous 1999 Chicago speech.
The Iraq war and its chaotic, bloody aftermath cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilized the Middle East. It provided fertile ground for the growth of ISIS, poisoned the well of humanitarian intervention, and has destroyed the willingness of the U.K., and indeed the West, to deal with the conflict in Syria. And yet, a decade after the event that unleashed this maelstrom, there has been no proper scrutiny of the decision-making process that led to it. I suspect there never will be.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on February 13, 2015, on page 7.
Friday, February 13 2015
By Michael Glackin
The long-running, some would say never-ending, government inquiry into why the United Kingdom went to war in Iraq in 2003 officially descended into farce last week.
The man in charge of the inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, faced a parliamentary committee to explain why he has still not published his report into a war that took place more than a decade ago. Chilcot, a former civil servant who heads the five-member committee of inquiry that began its work in 2009, originally expected his $1,200 a day job to last two years at most. However, six years and $14 million later, there is no sign of him publishing even an interim report, or any hint that he might soon have to give up his well remunerated post.
In truth the Chilcot inquiry was always a pointless exercise. The entire country blames former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s bizarre desperation to ingratiate himself with U.S. President George W. Bush for the U.K.’s joining a war that has cast a dark shadow across the entire Middle East.
But few public inquiries in the U.K. achieve anything, and two previous inquiries into the Iraq war were widely seen as exercises in concealing the truth. Based on last week’s 70-minute performance by Chilcot in front of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, his inquiry will be no different.
In a moment that could have come from a Marx Brothers film, the man who had to explain to Parliament why it was taking so long to publish his report, took so long to explain it that he had to be told to stop in order for parliamentarians to ask questions.
Rumor has it Chilcot’s report so far runs to a million words, and, judging by his responses to the committee, it may well be impenetrable. For instance, when he told the committee that he still didn’t know when he would be ready to publish, he said: “The risk of either arousing false hopes or false expectations either way outweighs for me the powerful appetite, for all sorts of often good reasons, to know when the report is likely to become available.”
A joke that’s been doing the rounds for years is that Chilcot is delaying the report until the main players are all dead. Ironically, his first words to the committee informed them that one of the members of his inquiry panel, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, had indeed died the previous night.
You couldn’t make it up.
Chilcot said the long delay was initially due to “very long and difficult and challenging discussions” with the U.K’s top civil servant over the release of secret government documents. These include the all-important 25 letters Blair sent to Bush, along with the transcripts of 130 telephone calls between the two men, in the run-up to the invasion. The cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, who was also Blair’s principal private secretary at the time of the invasion, refused to declassify the correspondence on national-security grounds.
It’s ironic that a government that insists on the need to pry into millions of its citizens’ private emails and Skype conversations is so reluctant to allow its citizens a reciprocal right. Although a deal struck between Heywood and Chilcot now allows for the release of “selected extracts,” the reality is that the full details of these important public documents will remain secret.
So, even if Chilcot does publish his report before we all die, we are unlikely to learn whether Blair really did write to Bush in July 2002: “You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I’m with you.” The letter, written a year before Parliament voted on whether Britain would join the invasion, was quoted in well-connected political journalist Andrew Rawnsley’s book “The End of the Party,” based on his interviews with David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser at the time, and Sir Christopher Meyer, then the British ambassador to the U.S.
The tussle between Chilcot and the cabinet office over these documents meant the process by which those criticized in the report are given the right to respond before publication, known as “Maxwellization,” did not begin until the end of last year.
This now appears to be the main obstacle to the report’s publication as speculation is rife that Blair, along with the former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, and senior defense chiefs are attempting to water down criticism of their roles by challenging details and demanding changes.
This covert bartering is an affront to the very principles of democracy and open government that the invasion of Iraq was supposed to uphold. The Maxwellization process defeats the purpose of any inquiry, which must surely be about finding out what happened without fear or favor. Granting key figures in the decision to go to war a right of reply means the Chilcot inquiry is now rightly tainted by the same suspicion of cover-up as the war itself.
The Chilcot Inquiry was always going to be a waste of time and money. The inquiry panel was made up of establishment figures that supported Blair. Chilcot was a key member of an earlier Iraq war investigation, the Butler Inquiry, which exonerated the Blair government of the charge that it had “sexed up” the case for war after the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – the original raison d’être for attacking Iraq.
The late Sir Martin Gilbert supported the invasion and even claimed Bush and Blair would one day “join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Another member of the inquiry team, the academic Sir Lawrence Freedman, was a foreign policy adviser to Blair. He is also author of the five tests for military intervention used by Blair in a famous 1999 Chicago speech.
The Iraq war and its chaotic, bloody aftermath cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilized the Middle East. It provided fertile ground for the growth of ISIS, poisoned the well of humanitarian intervention, and has destroyed the willingness of the U.K., and indeed the West, to deal with the conflict in Syria. And yet, a decade after the event that unleashed this maelstrom, there has been no proper scrutiny of the decision-making process that led to it. I suspect there never will be.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on February 13, 2015, on page 7.
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