21 May 2007 | Uncategorized
For four months at the end of 2005, I was given access to an extraordinary series of Foreign Office documents concerning the government’s strategy to tackle the threat of radical Islam at home and abroad. Literally dozens of emails, position papers and policy discussions came my way. It became clear that someone within Whitehall was deeply disturbed about the direction of British foreign policy, especially the strategy of engagement with groups and individuals on the Islamist extreme right. At one point I was receiving so many documents that I barely had time to read their contents, let alone judge whether there was a story in them.
But stories there were. The documents showed that senior figures in the Foreign Office believed that Britain’s policy in Iraq had led to an increase in radicalism among young Muslims, something the prime minister was denying at the time. I published the story in the Observer, where I was working as home affairs editor. But that was just the beginning.
The leaks provided me with a further news story for the Observer about plans to infiltrate extremist groups, and with features for the New Statesman on CIA rendition flights, diplomatic engagement with Egypt’s banned opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the panic that had engulfed the Foreign Office as a result of the disclosures. The documents also formed the basis of a Channel 4 documentary on the government’s troubled relationship with radical Islam and an accompanying pamphlet, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, for the think tank Policy Exchange. The leaks were a journalistic goldmine. The revelations about the compact between the Foreign Office and radical Islam also went some way towards changing government policy towards the self-appointed representatives of Britain’s Muslim community, such as the Muslim Council of Britain.
It is difficult to imagine a series of documents that could have been more in the public interest to disclose. Decisions being made in the Foreign Office, with a direct effect on the British people, were taking place with little or no consultation. In particular, the Foreign Office had embarked on a detailed strategy of engagement with Islamists at home and abroad without reference to Parliament or even, it seemed, the prime minister himself.
owever, at the end of January 2006 my source was arrested under suspicion of breaching the Official Secrets Act. I have not heard from him since. The latest news is that he has been bailed until June, while investigations continue. By then, his life will have been held in suspension for 18 months: this at a time when Labour politicians complain that the ‘loans for peerages’ investigation has dragged on for a mere 12 months with no charges being brought.
If, and when, the case comes to trial it will provide a fascinating test of the secrecy laws. The documents, many of which have been collected in the Policy
Exchange pamphlet, are also available online. They provide a unique insight into government thinking on Islam between 2001 and 2006, a period that encompasses the suicide attacks on New York and the bombing of London. Reading through them again, it is difficult to imagine how national security can have been seriously compromised by the disclosures, which contributed considerably to the national debate on one of the most important issues of our time. Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly is known to have been influenced by the disclosures in making her decision to seek new grassroots Muslim partners in the battle for hearts and minds. The Policy Exchange pamphlet has also helped inform the Conservative policy group on national and international security headed by Pauline Neville-Jones, a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee who also served as political director in the Foreign Office. It would be a delicious spectacle to see Kelly and Neville-Jones called as witnesses for the defence in any
trial that results from the Foreign Office leaks.
However, it is not difficult to see what motivated the arrest. The leaks were proving intensely embarrassing and coincided with a crackdown across Whitehall against unauthorised disclosures. This had been sparked by a separate leak of a memo said to outline plans by President George W Bush to bomb the Arabic television station Al Jazeera in April 2004. Following the publication of the claims in the Mirror, Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh and parliamentary researcher Leo O’Connor were charged under the Official Secrets Act.
In opposition, the Labour Party had fought the introduction of the 1989 Official Secrets Act, arguing that a ‘public interest’ defence should be inserted
into the legislation to give protection to genuine whistleblowers. During the parliamentary debate, Shadow Home Affairs spokesman Roy Hattersley said that the definition of harm to national security ‘is so wide and so weak that it is difficult to imagine any revelation which is followed by a prosecution not
resulting in a conviction’. Frank Dobson, who went on to serve in Tony Blair’s first cabinet, added: ‘Surely we as a Parliament have not sunk so low
that we want to introduce new laws to protect official wrongdoing.’
Once in power, the Labour Party had no such qualms. The Blair government has wielded the big stick of the Official Secrets Act with alarming regularity since it came to power. In August 1997, just months after winning an election on a promise of new openness and transparency in government, the new government faced a serious predicament in the person of David Shayler, an MI5 officer whose revelations about the intelligence service were published in the Mail on Sunday.
These included details of files kept on senior Labour politicians such as Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman. More seriously, Shayler later claimed that officers from Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, had participated in a plot to assassinate Colonel Qaddafi of Libya.
Despite the fact that Shayler’s claims referred to a period before Labour came to power, the new government pursued him relentlessly, requesting his
extradition from France, where he had set up home after leaving the security service. This pursuit extended to journalists who wrote about Shayler, and in
2000 I found myself in court after publishing an article in the Observer about the Libya plot, in which I said the newspaper had been given the names of the spies allegedly involved in the plot, but had been prevented from publishing them for legal reasons. (The officers’ names, David Watson and Richard Bartlett, have since entered the public domain, but they have never been prosecuted for their
alleged crimes.)
The Observer successfully fought an order to hand over all documents relating to my dealings with David Shayler and established an important precedent in media law that has made it more difficult to seize journalistic material. But it did not help David Shayler, who returned to Britain in 2000 to face trial. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in November 2002 for breaching the
Official Secrets Act, after more than five years of fighting for his claims to be investigated by the government.
David Shayler did not succeed in his own case, but his lawyers did establish an important precedent for future whistleblowers. In 2002, the House of Lords had decided that Shayler’s lawyers could not use a public interest defence. It also decided that the 1989 OSA was compatible with human rights legislation.
However, it did establish that in certain cases a ‘defence of necessity’ could be used if a whistleblower had acted because there was an imminent threat
to human life.
Less than six months later an opportunity arose to test the legislation. In March
2003 as the military preparations for war in Iraq gathered pace, a young woman in her late 20s walked into her boss’s office at GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, and admitted to leaking a document of the highest possible classification of secrecy. Katharine Gun, a junior Mandarin Chinese translator, knew her career was at an end and that she could face a long prison sentence. But she believed the contents of an email she had received in the course of her work could stop the war. She believed her action could save lives.
The email, dated 31 January 2003, was from Frank Koza, head of regional targets at the National Security Agency in the United States, and asked for British help in spying on the United Nations, which was immersed in an intense debate about whether to authorise an attack on Iraq. Britain was arguing for a second UN resolution to specifically sanction the invasion, without which many thought the war would be illegal.
Key to any vote were the so called ‘swing’ nations, Chile, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Guinea and Angola, temporary members of the Security Council,
whose votes were essential in gaining legal cover for the war. Koza was demanding a ‘surge’ in spying activities to give the US an ‘edge’ in the negotiations.
He was desperate to know the voting intentions of the ‘swing six’, but also hinted that private information about individual diplomats should be amassed in case blackmail was necessary.
I ran the story about the leaked email in the Observer on 4 March 2003, three weeks before the outbreak of war. It had taken nearly a month from leaking the document to its appearance in the press and Gun was in a state of almost unbearable tension. She immediately owned up to being the source of the leak and was arrested by the police for a suspected breach of the Official Secrets Act. Gun believed that when the UN discovered what was going on, they
would never allow the war to go ahead. What she didn’t realise at the time Katharine Gun after charges against her were dropped, London February 2004
was that George W Bush had already decided on regime change in Baghdad, with or without the United Nations.
However, when the case finally came to trial in February 2004, the prosecution failed to present any evidence and the case was dropped before it had begun. At the time, speculation suggested that the government had decided to drop the case because it would have led to the publication of the attorney general’s legal advice on the legality of the war, which was initially equivocal. But the Crown Prosecution Service always said that the reason was far more banal: that it had become clear that it would be impossible to fight Gun’s defence that she had acted
to save lives.
Although it is impossible to know precisely why the government dropped the Gun case, it is probably fair to say that the ‘defence of necessity’, established by David Shayler, helped save Katharine Gun from prison. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the government has indicated its intention to close down the defence in future cases. Last July, The Times reported the intention of the new Home Secretary, John Reid, to remove the necessity defence and suggested that he would present the necessary legislation in last autumn’s Queen’s Speech. This did not materialise, due to a lack of parliamentary time. But the Home Office has confirmed that it is keeping the OSA under review and will revisit the defence of
necessity as soon as it can.
Campaigners still believe an amendment to the 1989 Act is imminent. Julie-Ann Davies, who was arrested in connection with the Shayler case in 2000, has
spent the past seven years researching Britain’s secrecy laws and is currently studying for a PhD at Glasgow University. She said: ‘I have no doubt the government intends to act. Whenever a window of public interest opens up, they close it.’ Former senior BBC journalist Nick Jones is now chair of Reform the Official Secrets Act (Rosa), which campaigns for a public interest defence for whistleblowers in national security cases. He said the Al Jazeera trial marked an intensification in the drive for government secrecy: ‘There does seem to be a new push, triggered by the war on terror, to restrain journalists who want to write in this area. Meanwhile, all talk of protecting whistleblowers has disappeared in a puff of
smoke.’
The paradox is that in the present circumstances the more serious the disclosure, the more chance of running a successful defence. My source, for example, who could only be accused of leaking ‘confidential’ rather than ‘secret’ documents, would not have recourse to the necessity defence. He would have to fall back on a defence that said he had acted in the public interest, something of which Labour seems to have lost sight after ten long years in government.
Martin Bright is political editor of the New Statesman
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17 May 2007 | Comment
It is unlikely that the contents of the memo leaked by David Keogh and Leo O’Connor, for which the two men were jailed last week, will ever be disclosed. The British government has a long tradition of covering up its Middle East embarrassments. O’Connor’s barrister remarked during the trial that the war in Iraq was the most controversial foreign affairs involvement of this country since Suez, but more than 50 years since Anthony Eden invaded Egypt, there are still documents which Whitehall refuses to release.
While working last year on a BBC series about the Suez crisis, I applied to the Cabinet Office under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of all withheld documents. It was a bit of a fishing expedition (just the sort of journalistic abuse of FoI that Lord Falconer despises) but well worth doing. I hoped that the Cabinet Office might consider the 50th anniversary of Suez an important enough occasion for putting all documents in the public domain. Some documents were released, after a six-month wait, but nothing revelatory. I was also told that a number of documents would not be disclosed as they related to “security matters” or would “prejudice” international relations.
“We acknowledge that release of information relating to the Suez crisis may add to the understanding and knowledge of this subject,” wrote the Cabinet Office’s Histories, Openness and Records Unit. “However, in favour of withholding this information we consider that, in this case, the effective conduct of the UK’s international relations, and its ability to protect and promote its interests abroad, would be compromised if we released the information … it is strongly against the public interest to damage our international relations in this way.” It appears the same mixture of imperious and Alice-in-Wonderland logic which led the judge to censor reporting of the trial last week is also at work in the Cabinet Office.
It took years before the full truth of Suez emerged, and decades before the document revealing the secret agreement between France, Israel and Britain to invade Egypt was disclosed – and that was only because the Israelis still had a copy. But it seems remarkable that there could be documents whose content is so inflammatory that it could still damage international relations. Suez, clearly, cannot yet be consigned to history. It’s still live – at least as long as Britain meddles in the Middle East.
The irony is that Anthony Eden did not just discuss the possibility of bombing an Arab broadcaster – as President Bush was once reported to have contemplated – he actually did it. Eden was obsessed with the influence of the Voice of the Arabs, the most popular radio station at the time in the Arab world. It transmitted from Cairo and Eden believed that it was damaging British interests in the Middle East. The one and only time he met President Nasser, he asked him to tone down the propaganda.
As Britain prepared to invade Egypt in 1956, the Voice of the Arabs was one of Eden’s first targets. Planners hesitated when they believed it would mean bombing the heart of Cairo and killing civilians. But when they realised that the transmitters were outside the city, they went ahead. They didn’t, however, do a very efficient job: the Voice of the Arabs was up and running again within days. Eden’s plan was to broadcast his own propaganda in Arabic from Cyprus. He requisitioned another Arab radio station and a number of inexperienced Foreign Office Arabists were flown in to man the station – renamed the Voice of Britain – but it was not a success.
History repeats itself, tragic and farcical both times around. Little is learned except that embarrassing and illegal activity must be kept out of the public domain, apparently for all time.
3 May 2007 | Comment, News
BBC reporter Alan Johnston was kidnapped in March, and suddenly press freedom, in the most literal sense, has become a talking point.
Websites and blogs all over the world carry badges calling for his release. Last week, BBC colleagues held a vigil, while an image of Johnston was projected on to the wall of Television Centre.
Johnston’s may be the big story this year, but it’s by no means the only one: indeed, surveys of freedom of the press have discovered a depressing trend as more and more people are now living under regimes where journalistic freedom is either unprotected, or actively attacked, by government.
In Russia, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered, apparently for digging too deep in to the government’s dirty war in Chechnya.
In the Philippines, six journalists were killed last year, and police have done little to stop the wave of threats and harassment media workers face. Environmental journalist Joey Estriber was kidnapped in March, like Alan Johnston. To date, the police have failed even to mount a search for him.
In Zimbabwe, cameraman Edward Chikomba was abducted and murdered, apparently because he had filmed the violent conduct of the security forces during anti-government protests.
In Turkey, the resurgence of the nationalist, statist right has created an atmosphere where journalists and authors fear to voice their opinions. Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has left the country: Agos editor Hrant Dink decided to stay, and was assassinated on 19 January.
The list goes on. And it’s getting longer.
Meanwhile, the hope for freedom offered by the World Wide Web seems to be lost.
Only a few years ago, we convinced ourselves that the web was the wild frontier, an ungoverned new world where everyone with access to a computer could write their own news, challenge official lines, and generally push ever harder at the barriers of censorship.
So what happened?
It seems increasingly obvious that that breach in the fence was only temporary. Throughout the world, the enforcers have caught up with the bloggers. We imagined the Internet to be beyond the reach of the censors. We were wrong. As George Orwell wrote in 1943, “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom — that is the idea, more or less.”
We now realise that this is just as true of the Internet user in 2007 as it was of the dissident diarist in 1943. In Egypt, blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman was jailed for criticizing his country and Islam on his blog. Other Egyptian bloggers have quit, after harassment from security forces. Meanwhile, Iran and China both exercise extensive and ever-widening Internet censorship, with the help of companies such as Google. The Iranian government’s paranoia about the World Wide Web has now stretched to the point where mms messages may be screened, lest they be used for blogging. The Internet once offered the promise of a new ‘citizen journalism’ unburdened by commercial or institutional pressure. But now it increasingly finds itself under the insidious hand of the state censor.
Sadly, as the 21st century progresses, journalists all over the world find themselves struggling to carry out the very basics of their jobs without fear.
The prognosis is grim. Commenting on Freedom House’s Global Press Freedom Report, Executive Director Jennifer Windsor said: “The fact that press freedom is in retreat is a deeply troubling sign that democracy itself will come under further assault.” This is why, on World Press Freedom Day, we must shout ever louder for those who have been silenced.
30 Apr 2007 | Azerbaijan News, Comment
What was initially billed as a celebration of the importance of religious and cultural tolerance and understanding turned into something a bit harder edged when the 56 nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) held a major conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijani foreign minister Elmar Mammadyarov voices pride in his country as a ‘land of tolerance’ where – and by and large it is true – people live in a spirit of ‘harmony in difference’ regardless of ethnic origin and religious affiliation.
The April 26-27 conference on the Role of Media in the Development of Tolerance & Mutual Understanding drew more than 180 delegates to Baku at a timely moment in the wider debate.
The UN has appointed the former Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio as High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, to promote reconciliation between religions, cultures and nations. And the world body’s human rights committee has just passed a controversial resolution aimed at stopping ‘defamation’ of religions in general and Islam in particular.
In Baku the lead conference participants very quickly got to their point: that a key problem was the media’s failure to take proper professional responsibility for its various deeds.
‘Both democracy and liberty are senseless if the citizens, the institutions, the state and the media do not have the highest sense of responsibility in all that they do,’ said keynote speaker Ion Iliescu, former president of Romania.
Iliescu cited the case of Don Imus, the US radio station ‘shock jock’ fired after voicing one racist epithet too many for his employers. Forced to choose between audiences, profit, and social responsibility, they chose the last and dismissed him, he said. ‘(Was that) an infringement of freedom of expression?’ Illiescu asked. ‘Obviously not!’
The Imus case was to Iliescu’s eyes, black and white. There were no greys to confuse his judgment when asked whether it was right to qualify the basic human right of freedom of expression solely in the name of racial tolerance and community cohesion.
Taking up the theme, a series of speakers lined up to call on the western media to stop ‘belittling or denigrating’ Islam, in the words of one Egyptian delegate. Yet often the long term beneficiary of such thinking is not mutual understanding, let alone tolerance, but the ambitions of governments to manage communities and constrain political debate.
Examples were close to hand. Only days before, Azeri opposition journalist Eynulla Fatullayev had been jailed in Baku for criminally libeling – ‘belittling or denigrating’ perhaps – an Azeri community in Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan efficiently manages the activities of its own Muslim Sunni and Shia communities, plus its various Christian communities and 15,000 Azeri Jews through its State Committee for Work with Religious Associations.
The conference debate tracked the issue on through detailed calls from the Muslim delegates for tolerance, mutual understanding and mutual respect. Director-General Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri of the OIC’s cultural agency cited the UNESCO declaration on tolerance, a quality that is ‘above all an active attitude prompted by recognition of the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of others’, and cannot be used to justify infringements of these fundamental values.
Yet the debate still echoed the discussion surrounding the controversial passing of a resolution by the UN Human Rights Council on Combating Defamation of Religions on 30 March. The resolution, though not new – versions of it have been passed every year since 9/11 by the Council’s predecessor body at the UN – has been widely criticised.
Opponents argue that the resolution does little to protect the rights of the believer or their right to freedom of religious belief, and justifies specific controls on the believers’ rights to freedom of expression. The motion puts the focus on confronting defamation, suggesting that artists, writers and dissidents in states where religion has a political context could find their work censored to protect the ‘reputation’ of a particular faith.
In Baku these suspicions were fed by a recurring conference theme; that the western media is a homogenous force with a hostile agenda.
It was not a traditionally censorious position: Mammadyarov was one of many leading speakers to defend the principle of self-regulation of the media. However he argued that it had a ‘key role in preventing irresponsibility of media outlets and (to) encourage media to use its potential for the sake of peace and dialogue between cultures, rather than for the instigation of inter-religious and inter cultural tensions.’
Ironically though, many delegates who accused the western media of simplistically reading Islam as extremist and terroristic, were sometimes just as simplistic in their analysis of the western media itself.
Citing a 2001 Newsweek article by Indian Muslim born US journalist Fareed Zakaria headlined ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ Egyptian senior editor Mohammed Imbrahim el-Desouky of the daily al-Ahram argued that this kind of coverage presented a picture that fostered hostility.
Miklos Haraszti, chief representative on free expression issues at the Organisation for Security & Cooperation in Europe, was not so sure, contending that Zakaria’s article was a self-reflective look at US policy in the post 9/11 context. Western published opinion on US policy was more diverse and self-critical than many speakers from Muslim nations were suggesting.
What about the other side of the coin, asked Reinhard Meier, deputy editor of the Swiss daily Neue Zuricher Zeitung. ‘Is the reporting and information about pluralistic realities more objective and fairer in the media of Islamic countries?’ Furthermore the problem, thanks to the Internet, had gone beyond the realm of the conventional mainstream media.
Haraszti suggested that Islamist groups that issued fatwas that incited violence against writers and journalists should be prosecuted in their home countries. Meier recognized the problem of unbalanced reporting and a tendency to generalize and stereotype among journalists. But the “level of imperfection” was not the same everywhere.
Five journalists are now in jail in Azerbaijan. Fatullayev, jailed for 18 months for a libel in a website post he denies writing, is the editor of Realny Azerbaijan, successor to the opposition weekly Monitor, shut down after the March 2005 assassination of its editor Elmar Huseynov.
Fatullayev’s imprisonment ‘is part of a pattern of increasing repression of independent media in Azerbaijan, often through politically motivated defamation cases,’ says the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Council of Europe secretary general Terry Davis told the Baku conference that freedom of expression is a right that must be exercised in a ‘respectful and civil manner to ensure peaceful coexistence’, but the rights of individuals to express different views and beliefs also needed protection. It is a principle that is still only selectively applied.
