Shaphan

Worrying about Harry

I wish Prince Harry wasn't going to Iraq.  It's not just that it'll be a bit like having a distant relative out there in harm's way, although it will.  It's that he's the spare, and a rather good one - I thought he came across really well in an admittedly PR-savvy documentary about his AIDS work in Lesotho.  If anything happened to Prince William before he sires an heir - and William does have a thing about high-performance motorbikes, which is a somewhat risky hobby - I'd rather have Harry ascend to the throne than the Yorkies - Andrew, Fergie and the girls - who are next in line. 

If, God forbid, William did have a fatal motorbike accident, and if Harry doesn't get killed in Iraq, then our future monarch would have been implicated in what, some would argue, is an unjust and illegal war, entirely of his own choosing.  Such a monarch might find it difficult to act as a unifying figure for the people he would be supposed to represent. 

If, on the other hand, Harry lost his life in Iraq, it might create a horrible, Blair-associated symmetry with his mother's death.  Diana was killed four months after Tony Blair became PM - in some ways, her death made his premiership.  It would be unfortunate if, as a result of Blair's decision to allow America's invasion of Iraq, Harry were to be killed at the end of his premiership.

"More primitive than torture"

David Hicks, who has been imprisoned without trial at Guantánamo Bay for over five years, is was a British citizen, until Home Secretary John Reid revoked his citizenship last July. 

... Mr Hicks is an Australian national whose government has refused to press the Bush administration for his release. He fought a long legal battle in the UK courts which ended with senior judges ordering the home secretary to grant Mr Hicks citizenship.  His mother was born in the UK and his grandfather fought for the British during the second world war.

On July 7, Mr Reid granted Mr Hicks British citizenship, only to use special powers to take it away just a couple of hours later.  Mr Reid's decision came despite criticism from the government, from the prime minister down, of Guantánamo and demands for its closure...

... In his letter to Mr Hicks, Mr Reid wrote that he "poses a threat to the national security of the United Kingdom and that to deprive you of your British citizenship is conducive to the public good". [Guardian]

Given that Hicks would probably, if freed, live in Australia, it's difficult to see what threat to national security he could possibly pose, except perhaps as a source of friction between London and Washington.  I'm reminded of the Trop vs. Dulles (1958) case in American law.  The majority opinion of the Supreme Court was that depriving someone of their citizenship was against the eighth amendment, which bans 'cruel and unusual' punishments.

We believe ... that use of denationalization as a punishment is barred by the Eighth Amendment.  There may be involved no physical mistreatment, no primitive torture.  There is, instead, the total destruction of the individual's status in organized society.  It is a form of punishment more primitive than torture, for it destroys for the individual the political existence that was centuries in the development.  The punishment strips the citizen of his status in the national and international political community. [Trop v. Dulles]

Hicks does still have his Australian citizenship.  But given the Howard government's refusal to help their citizen, given the UK's alleged influence over the Americans, and given that the other British citizens have been returned, Blair and Reid, for once, could have done the right thing.  Instead they've overridden the courts and washed their hands of him, but the stain remains. 

I sometimes, but not often enough, think of Hicks, stuck in that prison without hope of release, abandoned by his mother countries.  And I wonder whether him being of Anglo-Saxon stock somehow makes him more dangerous in the eyes of his captors - if his name had been Aziz Abdul, would he still be there, five years on?

Anyway, I'm disgusted by our government's primitiveness and I hope that the tin man, John Howard, may be given a heart by some wizard in Oz and gets David Hicks home soon.

Collision or Collusion?

[Revised: 2007.01.08]

To stage an accident to murder the occupants of the car would, in my opinion, require careful, meticulous and co-ordinated planning.  The [Operation Paget] team carried out a detailed and thorough investigation of the events leading up to the collusion.

- Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, speaking at the press conference to launch the Operation Paget Report, getting his collisions and collusions mixed up. [BBC video player: 15m 05s]

The John Stevens-Operation Paget report [link] on the allegations surrounding the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul has been published.  I wish I could join the chorus praising its thoroughness but, having read most of it, I cannot.  If its purpose was to portray Diana POW, Mohamed al-Fayed and ex-MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson as unreliable cranks, it's been largely successful.  But there are such gaps in the evidence presented that are unexplained, and other claims that are mentioned but not addressed, that the overall impression I have is of a police inquiry that was either incompetent or worse.  When the crash first happened, on the 31st August, 1997, I, like most people, assumed it was an accident, and it has only been as events have unfolded since that I have reluctantly come to suspect otherwise.  The Paget Report just about seals it for me.

At the time of the incident, I worked for an NGO that had loose links to the Met. Police.  Much of my time away from the office was spent, by choice, online, scouring the internet and Usenet for information that could help me do the day-job better.  Several weeks after the crash (September or early October '97), I came across a document that purported to be sourced to the CIA in Paris, was dated '17 June 1997' and which reported that MI6 was actively planning the demise of Dodi in a car crash, at the behest of the Duke of Edinburgh.  In its original format, of which I've since lost the original, it was an image of a computer-readout that resembled a fax or telex.  [The wording of that document is copied below the fold.]  I remember - and memory is a fallible tool - that points seven and eight appeared to have been written by a different keyboard than points one to six. 

Not long after I'd seen that document and had copied it to my hard-disk, our contacts in Special Branch dropped by to see us/me.  The NGO I worked for was, among other things, a repository of information about its chosen subject, and SB officers occasionally checked with us to see if we had any knowledge or information that could help them.  Normally they were quite friendly and laidback, but this time I sensed that they were under extraordinary pressure from above.  The officers knew that I spent time online and they asked/ordered me to watch out for and report anything unusual written about Diana's death, including any suggestion that British intelligence was responsible.  This was in October or November 1997.  Although it was outside of my own and my work's interests I nevertheless agreed, as one does; however, I did not tell them about the 'CIA telex' I had recently copied to my computer, because if its contents were accurate then I wasn't prepared to help SB help the security service (MI5) cover it up. 

Things took an odd turn in April 1998.  The 'CIA telex' on my hard-disk was among several papers that a former CIA officer Oswald LeWinter was caught trying to pass on to M. Al-Fayed in return for a $20million reward.  He had contacted the House of Fayed in about Feb/March '98, who then reported him to the US authorities.  The FBI, CIA and US Attorney's Office devised a sting, using Fayed's chief of security John McNamara, and LeWinter was arrested in a hotel in Vienna, Austria.  He was tried and sentenced to four years for attempted fraud, and was released after thirty months. LeWinter recalls:

The case about which I can tell you a little was an off-the shelf "company" operation.  At my trial, Al Fayed's security chief testified that my arrest was planned in D.C. by CIA and FBI a month before I was taken into custody in Vienna.  At the time of my arrest, I was shown documents which were found in my hotel room.  I had not seen them until then, since another member of the team in Vienna had given them to me the night before.  (The police found no fingerprints of mine on the papers.)  I had a choice at my arrest to identify the documents as genuine or as fakes.  If I said genuine I would face charges in the U.S. of high treason.  I said they were forgeries and was arrested for fraud, tried and found guilty despite the evidence of entrapment.  The other team members, one a high ranking "suit" in the agency, all escaped. [link] [my emph.]

Thus the 'CIA telex', which I'd had for months prior to LeWinter's arrest, became officially a forgery that the now-convicted swindler LeWinter had tried to sell to Fayed.  LeWinter believes he was set up and I tend to agree with him.  He clearly didn't write it himself or he wouldn't have published it on the web months previously.  He has an interesting enough history to conclude that he didn't simply download it from the web in the hope of conning Fayed out of $20m.  I think he was set up to fail, so that the 'CIA telex' could be written off as a forgery.  But why would CIA do that unless the 'CIA telex' was authentic?

The Paget Report never mentions Oswald LeWinter.  Yet it was the 'CIA telex' in his possession at the time of his arrest that was, as I understand it, the origin of Al-Fayed's belief that Edinburgh had tasked MI6 to solve the Dodi problem.  Stevens mentions Al-Fayed's allegation about Edinburgh, saying it's a very grave one, but he never explains the origin of it.  Diana POW's paranoid suspicions about Edinburgh are aired, but the far stronger evidence of the CIA telex is excluded. 

Apart from the missing 'CIA telex', other things in the Paget Report seemed to me unsatisfactory.  For example:

• Langley message.  In the Summer of 2004 the Daily Mail received "an intriguing note" which it passed on to Scotland Yard.  The nine-line message was written in a blue felt-tip pen on a torn piece of A4.   "If you are brave enough, dig deeper to learn about X and Y," says the note.  "Both MI6.  Both were involved at the highest level in the murder of the Princess."  It is signed off with the words:  "Good Luck."   The address at the top of the piece of paper is simply 'Langley', the headquarters of the CIA, America's intelligence agency, in Virginia, USA.  The Stevens Report makes no mention of it.  (X and Y referred to Messrs. Langman and Spearman.) 
• Adnan Khashoggi.  Not named by Stevens.  But he turns up, I think, in the evidence of Richard Tomlinson [p.827].  In 1992 I was working on an operation to recover high-tech weapons from the former Soviet Union.  This operation was being conducted in collaboration with a very powerful arms dealer whose exact identity I did not know.  When I read the file I discovered that this arms dealer was in very frequent contact with Mr Mohamed Al Fayed.  I saw that the MI6 informant supplying this information had a code beginning with P, followed by several numbers.  As this source was mentioned several times I tried to find out who it was.  It was a Frenchman who was head of security at the Ritz Hotel.  Stevens discounts the part about the P source in the Ritz but doesn't address or dispute the claim about the "very powerful" arms dealer whom Al-Fayed saw 'very frequently'.  Al-Fayed's first wife Samira, the mother of Dodi Fayed, was Adnan Khashoggi's sister.  According to the Paget Report, Dodi had bought a £130k engagement ring for Diana that afternoon and intended proposing imminently.  The Daily Express newspaper [caveat lector] cites an author who alleges that Dodi spoke with his Uncle Adnan (by phone?) on the evening of his death - i.e. they were close.  The possibility that princes William and Harry would be spending their adolescent summers in Adnan Khashoggi's mansion in Monaco would have been motive enough for Edinburgh, Blair and MI6 to act to prevent it, for justifiable reasons of national security.
• Dominic Lawson/Rosa Monckton.  (Background - Husband and wife.  Dominic Lawson has been accused of working for MI6 [Indie].  Rosa Monckton's younger brother, Anthony, is an MI6 officer [Cryptome].  By strange coincidence, the SIS's training HQ is at Fort Monckton, Hants. [FAS])  This duo gets off lightly in Stevens' book, in my book.  Mohamed Al Fayed wrote to Operation Paget and made this claim [p.661]: 3. 'Trevor Rees-Jones' book, 'The Bodyguard's Story' is clear evidence of how he, Kes Wingfield and Ben Murrell were turned against me.  The book, which was not written by him but by the security services, is a tissue of lies and deceit designed to denigrate me and to support the British authorities' account that the deaths of my son and Princess Diana were the result of a simple traffic accident.  4. 'The Bodyguard's Story' was written with the co-operation of such people as Martyn Gregory and Dominic Lawson.  Paget does not explain that Richard Tomlinson has alleged/revealed that Lawson was, and thus is, an MI6 agent.  Later it reports an allegation by MAF that: Dominic Lawson's wife is Rosa Monckton and her brother is a serving senior MI6 agent (a statement which is almost accurate, except that Anthony Monckton is an SIS officer, not an agent) - anyhow, the Paget Report never followed that claim up either, nor considered its ramifications.  Lawson's wife Rosa Monckton met and got close to Diana immediately after the separation from Charles.  She was introduced to her by another friend of Diana, Lucia Flecha de Lima, who would later order Paul Burrell to incinerate Diana's clothes, the ones she had worn the night she died.  MAF believes Monckton was used by MI6 to watch over and try to influence Diana; I do too.  Stevens says there "is no evidence" to support this claim (a phrase that is repeated 87 times in the report.  (BTW, 'no evidence' alone appears 204 times; Khashoggi, never; LeWinter, you kidding?)  After Diana PoW's first visit to the Fayeds' yacht in St. Tropez and before the fateful weekend in Paris, Rosa Monckton took her on a private cruise of the Aegean.  Given her family connections, I presume that Rosa was seeking to prise Diana away from Dodi, apparently without success. 
• Nevertheless, several things seem to have been confirmed or revealed by Operation Paget.  Dodi was about to propose to Diana.  The Mercedes was blocked from taking its normal route and was forced to go by the Alma underpass.  None of its occupants, not even the bodyguard, was wearing a seat-belt.  When Operation Paget inspected the Mercedes, it found that the seat-belt of the right-rear seat, Diana's place, was "jammed in the retracted position" [437] - however, it concluded that it had been damaged by the crash itself.  It doesn't reveal whether the seat-belts were manually or electronically operated - could the Mercedes have been electronically tampered with so as to prevent the seat-belts from being used?  PC Paget doesn't ask that question.

I've written this, my first blog-entry for weeks, because nobody else seems to have critiqued the Paget Report in any detail that I've seen.  If anyone can point me towards such a thing, please do.  Despite what people might have read widely in the press, John Stevens' report, while exhausting to read, is far from exhaustive in its treatment of the evidence, such as there is, that might support the theory that there was an SIS-centred conspiracy to dispose of Dodi Fayed and that, whether deliberately or not, Diana, PoW was killed in its execution.

Brownian motion

The BBC's website described Gordon Brown's statement today as "G.B. publicly gives Mr Blair his support".  That's not how I heard it.  These were the substantive parts of his statement [my transcription and emphases]:

I want to make it absolutely, er, clear today that, when I met the prime minister yesterday, I said to him, as I've said on many occasions to him and I repeat today, er, that it is for him to make the decision.  I said also to him, and I make clear again today, that I will support him in the decisions he makes; that this cannot, and should not, be about private arrangements, but what is in the best interests of our party and, most of all, the best interests of our country; and I will support him in doing exactly that. (..)

And I am determined that in the months and years to come, we continue to do our duty, er, by the people of, er, Britain - and it is my determination, and his, to do that, that will influence everything that happens in the times to come. 

Translation: provided the decisions Blair makes exactly accord with the best interests of the party and the country, Brown will support those decisions.  If not, there will be an unstoppable rebellion.  And obviously, in Brown's eyes, it's in the party's and the nation's interest that he become the next leader.  That's deeply conditional support. 

My expectation that Brown will never be PM is being challenged by this week's events.  He looked confident today, as well he might - he's as close to it now as he's ever been.   But I wonder whether it's as close as he'll ever get. 

A good crisis for John Reid

Sometimes, the timings of terrorist plots and contemporaneous political events appear to be more than just coincidental, even when they might not be.  For example, when 9/11 happened, one of my first thoughts, like many other people,  was, "F--k, this gives Cheney and Rumsfeld (et al.) everything that they wanted", and that thought became, rightly or wrongly, a reason to question the version of events presented by the US government, because the attacks coincided with the aims of the recently elected US government.  London's July 7 bombings became in my mind 'the G8 bombings', for they appeared to be timed to coincide with the start of the UK-hosted G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland.

And now there's this alleged Bojinka-type plot to blow up multiple airliners over the Atlantic.  It's a good crisis for John Reid (who seems to have again dropped the 'Dr').  This blogger has been suggesting for a while that John Reid was the one whom Tony Blair and the security and intel services wanted to be the next prime minister.  The events of the past couple of days have not modified that opinion.  But that would be to suggest that the timing of this high-profile, counter-terrorist operation was, to some extent, manoeuvred by MI5, in part to promote John Reid as a capable leader in troubled times, which might be symptomatic of paranoid conspiracitis. 

The newspapers have given Reidy glowing reviews for his performance.  The Times, for example, wrote:

Mr Reid has evinced a presidential air in his public appearances.  Although Gordon Brown is the overwhelming candidate to succeed Mr Blair, Mr Reid is the only other real contender, and his performance this week has strengthened his position.  While few believe that he would defeat Mr Brown, he may well have made it harder for the Chancellor, when he takes over, to dispense with Mr Reid’s services.

Personally, I think Brown hasn't a hope in hell of succeeding Blair, and he should look for a job outside of politics.   Air crashes happen to US, not British, politicians but I wouldn't want to share a flight to Scotland with the chancellor for a while.  When powerful elements within the permanent government strongly favour one candidate, and oppose another, for the leadership of a political party in parliament and, from there, of the elected government, only the naive, the brave or the foolish would stand in their way. 

PS  According to the US's Cox News Service,

WASHINGTON - When Vice President Cheney went out of his way Wednesday to blast Democrats as weak on terrorism, he knew something that few Americans knew: Another stark reminder of the dangers of terrorism was about to hit the headlines.  The White House confirmed Thursday that senior administration officials have been aware since at least last weekend that British authorities were moving toward arrests in an alleged terrorism plot. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

'Since at least last weekend'.  What a coincidence - TB jets off to Barbados, and John Reid gets the platform to appear prime-ministerly, with at least several days notice to prepare. 

I reckon it's quite possible that, if TB hadn't delayed his holiday to work on the UN resolution on Lebanon, Thursday's operation would have happened earlier in the week or last weekend.  Which means that, by Thursday, the plot would have been slightly more advanced than they had anticipated.

UPDATE [2006.08.15]:  Recent reports have suggested that the British authorities wanted to wait longer until the plot was more advanced before moving, that it was the Americans who dictated the timing.  Whatever the truth of it is, it occurs to me that John Reid would be the Bush administration's choice to succeed Tony Blair.  The wee one has powerful friends indeed.

Remembering Robin Cook

Robin Cook lost his life a year ago today.  Anniversaries of people's deaths aren't newsworthy per se, although often the media will use them to, for example, look back at that person's life.  But considering the current state of the world, and of the Labour government, I did expect a bit more coverage than there's been.

Yesterday in the Guardian, Cook's former adviser David Clark wrote a political appreciation, and today Margaret Cook, his first wife, has written a warm tribute to the fallible-but-brilliant man that he was, for readers in Scotland.

Elsewhere, a lane has been named after him in his old constituency, and a commemorative bench opened at the Southside Community Centre, Edinburgh. 

And, tomorrow, the day after  the anniversary, the second Mrs Cook...

... will return with Mr Cook's two sons on the first anniversary [sic] of his death to lay a plaque in his memory near the spot on August 7.

A friend said:  "Gaynor will go to Ben Stack to a lay a plaque in Robin's memory.  She has found it all very difficult and is only now beginning to come to terms with her loss.

"The first anniversary will be a very emotional day for Gaynor and all of Robin's family."

Since Mr Cook's death, aged 49, Gaynor has been living in England with friends as she deals with her loss.  [Sunday Mail, last week]

And that's it.  Long-suffering readers of this blog know that I harbour serious suspicions about Robin Cook's death [here].  I've nothing to add to, or subtract from, what I've written previously.  I intended not to write about it again.   But I can't help thinking that, if Cook had lived, his reputation among his backbench colleagues would now be soaring,  Would Cook still be angling for a job under Gordon Brown, or might the anti-Blair, anti-war shift in the party have re-opened the possiblility of him seeking the top job for himself?

AP stokes the flames

The headline and lede say one thing; the rest of the copy says otherwise.  Associated Press reports:

Iran President: Mideast Solution Is To Destroy Israel - Reports

TEHRAN (AP)--Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday the solution to the Middle East crisis was to destroy Israel, state media reported.

In a speech during an emergency meeting of Muslim leaders in Malaysia, Ahmadinejad also called for an immediate ceasefire to end the fighting between Israel and the Iranian-back group Hezbollah.

"Although the main solution is for the elimination of the Zionist regime, at this stage an immediate ceasefire must be implemented," Ahmadinejad said, according to state-run television in a report posted on its Web site.

Ahmadinejad called on all Muslim states to cut their "cut their open and secret political and economic ties with the fake and outlawed Zionist regime" in response to its attacks against Lebanon.

He also urged Muslim states to "isolate" the U.S. and the U.K. for supporting Israel's military attacks against Lebanon. ... [Nasdaq]

My dictionary gives eight definitions for 'eliminate' - only one of them, obliterate, is synonymous with destroy.  The others signify the idea of excretion, expulsion, removal, getting rid of, etc.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is only saying what he's said before, which isn't that the land occupied by Israel and its inhabitants should be destroyed, only that the migrants from Europe and America should return home, for peace's sake.  I think he would view it like this:  just as Iran has many religious and ethnic groups, including Jews, so would the new Palestine be home for many Arab Jews, Christians, etc.  Really, the only nations keen to use violence to achieve their aims in the Middle East are the US and Israel, supported by Britain.

Tony Blair, in today's unreal press conference, kept referring to Ahmadinejad's statement, and his spin was that 'eliminate the Zionist regime' meant 'destroy Israel'.  He lied about Saddam then; he lies about Ahmadinejad now.   But note two things Ahmadinejad called for:  a immediate ceasefire, which Blair, our leader, refuses to do; and that Muslim states should isolate the UK and US.  By our behaviour, Muslim nations would be justified in treating us as enemies - it's a diplomatic disaster for Britain.  Blair has led us into our own arc of extremism - the UK, US, and Israel, at war with reason and humanity. 

We have values, they have an ideology

Will someone please tell Tony Blair to stop mispronouncing the word 'ideology'?  He uses it a lot but seems to believe that the proper pronunciation, or at least the British RP one, is with a short 'i', as in idiot.  But ideology has a long 'i', as in idol.  How come Blair's advisers fail to tell him that, every time he mispronounces the word in international press conferences, he is bringing Britain's educational system into disrepute?  Whatever happened to 'education, education, education'?

Very good news?

Christians proclaim the gospel, the 'good news', about their lord and saviour.  For a Christian, 'very good news' should mean something like the Second Coming was imminent.  But, for our leader, Tony Blair, 'very good news' refers to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and some of his colleagues, plus any women, children and bystanders who happened to be in the vicinity at the time.  Will Blair never learn that killing people ("thou shalt not..") always makes things worse and is forever-and-ever 'bad news'?

PS (2006.06.09)  The Guardian reports today that, "Zarqawi died alongside Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, his "spiritual adviser", two other unidentified men, and a woman and a child...".

PPS  It's easy for me to say 'thou shalt not..', but hearing it from Michael Berg, the Jewish father of Nick Berg, in this CNN phone interview, is something else.

The right not to be killed by terrorists

No such right exists, but the Blair government often cites it to justify the expanding powers of the police and security services.  The prime minister first [?] used it in his first monthly press conference following the G8 bombings (the one in which he said, "the rules of the game are changing") and he and his ministers have been using it ever since.

[Blair]  ... I don't think we should allow ourselves to be backed into an argument where we say when you are protecting national security you are interfering with civil rights or civil liberties.  Article 2 of the European Convention is the Right to Life.  The European Convention specifically recognises that you have got to be able to protect your citizens and their right to be free from attack, or free from terrorism.

So I think it is not so much a question, in fact, of saying we put national security above civil liberties, on the contrary it is more a question of saying, what is the right balance between the rights of people to say what they want, or do certain things, and the rights of other people to be free from attack, or free from fear, and that is the balance that has to be struck in any situation where you are debating rights.

The right to life in Article 2 is the right not to be killed by one's own government, not the right not to be killed by terrorists.  Contrary to what Blair says, the European Convention does not mention any right to be "free of attack" or to be "free of terrorism" or, even worse, the right to be "free of fear".  And he seems to believe, or would have us believe, that the Convention confers rights on governments vis à vis their people, whereas exactly the reverse is the case.

Previous Home Secretaries David Blunkett and Charles Clarke also used this fallacious argument to justify empowering the police and reducing civil liberties. If and when the more academically minded Dr John Reid does the same, we'll know we're in big trouble.