Security and Intelligence - new material (16)
01 January 2011
“Secret affairs: Britain’s collusion with radical Islam”, Mark Curtis. Serpent’s Tail, London, pp. 430, £ 12.99. This interesting study details the support given by Britain, either overtly through government support or covertly through activities by the secret services and Foreign Office, funding or military training, to Muslim “fundamentalist” movements. The book ranges from British colonial India to Iran under the Shah, to Egypt and the Middle East when such movements were used as “shock troops” against left-wing nationalist regimes led by Nasser in Egypt and Mussadiq in Iran, among others, through to the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviet-backed regime and, more recently, Pakistani and Saudi efforts to export their brands of “fundamentalist” Islam. Qadafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Balkans were the most noteworthy theatres for this support until the September 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the main organisations which Curtis highlights as having been nurtured by the British is the Muslim Brotherhood.
Fabricating Terrorism III. Cageprisoners 2011, pp. 64. In the Foreword to this publication human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce writes: “In January 2002, came the first shocking images of human beings, hooded and shackled in rows in aircraft transporting them across the Atlantic, just as slaves in slave ships four hundred years ago, to be displayed for the world to see, crouched in open cages in orange jumpsuits in Guantánamo Bay. It did not require an education in international humanitarian law to know that what we were seeing was unlawful; instinctive moral revulsion precisely mirrored what is the law. This was the unlawful trafficking of human beings; it was not a manifestation of the Geneva Convention at work, it was neither deportation nor extradition, far worse, it was transport from a world and to a world outside the reach of the law, and intended to remain so. Within that world the worst of crimes against humanity were being perpetrated and they are still, terrifyingly, continuing to be perpetrated.” Peirce goes on to point out that “the part played by the UK’s Intelligence Services, and Foreign Office and our Home Office, has remained in large part secret.” This report considers 20 cases of British collusion in extraordinary rendition with the USA, Pakistan, Jordan, UAE, Syria, Egypt, Kenya and Bangladesh. The report is available as a free download at the CagePrisoners website: http://www.cageprisoners.com/our-work/reports/item/1063-fabricating-terrorism-iii-british-complicity-in-rendition-and-torture
CIA officers who destroyed ‘torture’ tapes will not be charged, says US, Ewen MacAskill. The Guardian 10.11.10. The US Justice Department announced that there will be no prosecution of the CIA operatives who destroyed tapes of the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah. The men’s waterboarding took place at a secret US torture centre in Thailand, one of a string of US “back sites” spread across the globe. The tapes were ordered to be destroyed by the Bush administration. Zubaydah and al-Nashiri are still in Gunatanamo Bay, the US gulag which President Obama pledged would be closed by January 2010.
Defector who triggered war on Iraq admits: “I lied about WMD”, Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, The Guardian 16.2.11, pp 1, 4-5. This article presents an overview of the Iraq war WMD claims gleaned from the German intelligence source, “Curveball” (aka Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi). Al-Janabi’s fabricated evidence was also the key US intelligence source for Colin Powell’s UN speech to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003 that built the case for the Invasion of Iraq later that year. Powell cited anonymous “evidence” from the Iraqi defector, concluding "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." The story of Curveball’s deceit was first detailed in Bob Droggin’s 2007 book Curveball: Spies, lies and the con man who caused a war and this piece largely focuses on al-Janabi’s claims that he used the chance to fabricate evidence to topple the Saddam Husain regime.