UK Intercepts Commissioner Wants State To Have Power To Phone Tap MPs

Protecting 'Our Values' In Rogue State Britain
Land Of The Phantom 'War On Terror'

Oh Really?

"The Security Service did not know that Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, had an extra-marital affair with a leading barrister. Details of the affair, of which the Prime Minister also claimed to be ignorant, immediately raised concerns over the potential threat to national security due to the highly sensitive nature of the Attorney General's position. Whitehall sources have admitted that MI5, the organisation responsible for Britain's national security, had no knowledge of Lord Goldsmith's affair with QC Kim Hollis.... Patrick Mercer, the shadow minister for homeland security, claimed it was the responsibility of MI5 to know about the private lives of Cabinet ministers. He said: 'This is absolutely a matter for MI5. The Attorney General deals with top secret matters on a day-to-day basis. He has access to Cabinet briefings and top secret Government papers. His actions could easily have led to him being blackmailed, and that is a security matter.' Crispin Black, a former Army intelligence officer, said: 'The Security Service has a standing instruction to be aware of any difficulties in the lives of prominent politicians. It is not designed to be intrusive and is entirely protective. MI5 is a clearing house for gossip and information, so it beggars belief that they didn't know the Attorney General was having an affair."
Spies oblivious to Attorney General's affair
Sunday Telegraph, 25 February 2007

In the run up to the Iraq war the United States sought the support of British Intelligence in a bid to tap the phones of Security Council delegations at the United Nations in New York, a scandal exposed by GCHQ whistleblower Katherine Gun.

According to the Observer 8 February 2004 "The operation, which targeted at least one permanent member of the UN Security Council, was almost certainly in breach of the Vienna conventions on diplomatic relations, which strictly outlaw espionage at the UN missions in New York....The information was intended for US Secretary of State Colin Powell before his presentation on weapons of mass destruction to the Security Council on 5 February [2003]. Sources close to the intelligence services have now confirmed that the request from the security agency was 'acted on' by the British authorities..... An operation of this kind would almost certainly have been authorised by the director-general of GCHQ, David Pepper. But the revelation also raises serious questions for Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, who has overall responsibility for GCHQ. Details of the operation were first revealed in The Observer on the eve of war last year, after the leaking of a top-secret memo from the NSA requesting British help. But until today it was not known whether British spy chiefs had agreed to participate."

Later that month former Cabinet Minister Claire Short disclosed she had also seen transcript evidence of the UK's illegal bugging of the office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Riding on the back of 'war on terror' generated public phobias, British intelligence is now seeking the power to tap the phones of MPs and Members of The House Of Lords, legitimising a practice that it would be naive to assume does not already take place given Britain's already known illegal surveillance of the UN.

The latest version of this spurious 'war on terror' call comes via the 'Interceptions of Communications Commissioner', Sir Swinton Thomas. The proposal would formally end the banning of the practice introduced by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1960s. Wilson believed that MI5 was trying to discredit him by exposing him as an adulterer.

Commissioner Thomas' new call arose during a week when the disclosure of an extra-marital affair by the British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, raised questions as to whether he may have been compromised by his adultery during his time in office. Although it is unclear when Goldsmith's affair began it is known that the Attorney General changed his advice on the legality of the Iraq war between 7 March and 17 March 2003, with significant reservations removed between these dates.

The Attorney General's more recent role in the decision to abandon the investigation of the BAE oil-for-arms 'Al-Yamamah' corruption scandal in Saudi Arabia is also controversial. According to the BBC "Lord Goldsmith's insistence that the decision was taken by the SFO [Serious Fraud Office], not himself, is being treated with some scepticism." The decision to abort pre-dates public disclosure of Goldsmith's affair (but not the affair itself which ended 'more than two years ago'), placing the timing of the decision within a period of potential, if albeit reduced, vulnerability to coercive pressures.

On the wider front an exceptionally strong stench continues to be emitted from the BAE-Saudi 'al-Yamamah' contract episode, whose second phase included the supply of 48 British Tornado military aircraft to the Saudi government.

In the words of the London Times 21 February "because of the allegations raised, and the way that the investigation was shut down, there is an impression that something fishy must have been going on....The bribery suspicions intensified after the Government accidentally released to the National Archive documents detailing the cost of Tornados under al-Yamamah."

A couple of days later the Guardian reported that "Ministers have begun working on proposals to disband the Serious Fraud Office, merging operations with other agencies... The plan comes three months after relations between the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, and SFO director Robert Wardle reached an all-time low over the latter's two-year investigation into kickback allegations linked to a BAE Systems contract with Saudi Arabia.... Mr Wardle had only reluctantly been persuaded to drop the BAE inquiry after Lord Goldsmith insisted it could jeopardise 'national and international security'. When the case was abandoned, Lord Goldsmith infuriated him by adding that he considered a successful prosecution would have been unlikely.... Weeks later, with Mr Wardle's tenure as SFO director coming up for review, Lord Goldsmith extended his term by a year rather than the customary two.... Disbanding the SFO would prompt fresh criticisms that Lord Goldsmith has been pursuing a political battle with the agency as an EU anti-corruption watchdog is considering whether it was wrong for the attorney general to halt the BAE investigation."

Although the most controversial allegations against BAE relate to Saudi Arabia, the Serious Fraud Office's continuing pursuit of BAE corruption charges in relation to other countries (Chile, Tanzania, South Africa, Czech Republic and Romania) exposes the application of a revealing double standard. The President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, openly mocked this hypocrisy at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January.

The original Mark Thatcher embroiled $40 billion Saudi Al-Yamamah deal, already the largest export order ever signed by the UK, is now due for another contract extension, known as 'Al-Salam'. This is worth a further $20 billion to BAE for 72 Eurofighter Typhoons.

With so much money at stake the British 'security' services are no doubt continuing to 'monitor' with intense interest how political figures and public servants handle on-going developments. It is, of course, important that we protect 'our values' during the 'war on terror' (a counterproductive term that has now been quietly dropped by the Foreign Office) which Prime Minister Tony Blair says may take 'a generation' to end. Along with oil, the arms trade is at the pinnacle of this steaming heap of non-negotiable 'values'.

The other major party to the West's corrupt relationship with the Saudi dictatorship (one which former CIA agent Robert Baer has described in his book 'Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude'), is the Arab kingdom's other major arms supplier, namely the United States of America. Since 1990 US Arms Sales to Riyadh have been worth $40 billion or more.

But it would appear the full nature of the relationship is much more corrosive than that.

Bob Graham is a former Chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence in the United States. He maintains that the congressional joint inquiry into 9/11, conducted by both the House and the Senate in 2002 under his co-chairmanship, found "compelling evidence that the Saudis played an active role in assisting two of the [9/11] terrorists in Southern California, including being the means of substantial funding for those two terrorists. And this question of whether their support was limited to those two, or may have extended to others of the 17 terrorists, is still an unsolved mystery because the FBI did such an inept job of conducting that investigation".

This was not just any old Saudi or two, but included government officials, as confirmed by Graham in the formal Congressional Record.

Whilst the Saudi government as a whole (particularly since the 2003 US led invasion of Iraq) may have been engaged in a confrontation with Al Qaeda, a grouping which has sought to topple the House of Saud on account of its perceived traitorous relationship with the United States, it would appear that at least some individuals within the Saudi government have been involved with Al Qaeda.

America's influential Council On Foreign relations reported 11 November 2003 that "Saudi Arabia has been blamed for financing terrorism while simultaneously fighting it .... The government agreed to cooperate with FBI and Internal Revenue Service investigations of Saudi terror funding, but [former FBI counterterrorism analyst Mathew] Levitt says the U.S. investigators have not received access to all the documents they need."

However, it would appear the obstruction problem does not rest solely with the Saudi government.

Bob Graham accuses the President Bush and the FBI of stonewalling his committee's investigation into 9/11, including requiring 27 pages of the inquiry's final report covering this area to remain classified (some believe the redacted text may also refer to involvement in 9/11 by Pakistan, in part because elsewhere Graham has also referred to more than one foreign government being involved in the attacks).

The later official 9/11 Commission report also joined in the cover-up. Unrevealingly it simply concluded that "that the 19 operatives were funded by al Qaeda" and there was "no evidence that any foreign government—or foreign government official—supplied any funding." Which means that either the Commission didn't see the full text of the joint congressional inquiry report co-chaired by Graham, or it lied.

Besides the Saudi dimension, the 9/11 Commission report also makes no mention of the alleged role of Lt General Mahmoud Ahmed, head of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service. The General is widely reported to have authorised the wiring of $100,000 to 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. The transfer is understood to have been conducted via Omar Sheikh, a British Pakistani recently described by President Musharraf of Pakistan as a former MI6 agent (already convicted in Pakistan for the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl, neither Britain or the United States are pursuing Sheikh for his alleged role in 9/11).

Within its supposedly comprehensive 585 page report, the 9/11 Commission includes a section headed "The Funding of the 9/11 Plot". This crucial subject is covered in just three short paragraphs, and is immediately preceded by the extraordinary statement that "To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance."

Terrorism retaliated jiggery pokery is not confined only to official circles in the United States, however.

Downing St has refused to hold an inquiry into the London suicide bombings of July 2005, which appear to have been organised by Haroon Rashid Aswat, another alleged former MI6 asset. Aswat is now due, following an apparent tussle between Scotland Yard and MI6, to be extradited from the UK to the United States where his reported embarrassing history of involvement in British intelligence's covert sponsorship of Islamic terrorism in the Balkans before 9/11 is less likely to surface.

All these skeletons in the cupboard can be expected to be promptly buried thanks to what will be Aswat's alien 'enemy combatant' status under the Military Commissions Act, which came into effect in the United States at the end of October 2006. The Act provides wide scope for the holding of trials in secret on the grounds of 'national security', with the cases of other detainees already being reviewed in conditions of complete secrecy.

With only minimal press coverage, a British court approved Aswat's extradition to the United States in November 2006, although the decision may yet be subject to an appeal to the House of Lords.

Meanwhile questions also remain on the British side of the 9/11 Saudi issue.

Given the Anglo-American 'special relationship', how likely is it that British intelligence has not been fully aware of the contents of those 27 blanked out pages on Saudi Arabia (which also possibly covers other foreign governments) contained in Bob Graham's joint congressional report? If 37 Congressmen led by Senator Graham have seen those pages, it would seem improbable that such information has never reached MI6.

Much more likely is the prospect that this information is known and understood in London, and that there is no one in Whitehall who is interested in taking the matter any further. To do so would all but guarantee the wrecking of all those giant oil and arms contracts nestling in lawyers' safes in London, Washington, and Houston.

As Craig Unger's book "House of Saud, House of Bush" points out, "[Former US Secretary of State] James Baker's law firm, Baker Botts, represented both the giant oil companies who did business with the Saudis as well as the defense contractors who sold weapons to them." Baker Botts has also been hired to defend Saudi Arabia in a $1 trillion law suit brought by 9/11 families wishing to sue members of the Saudi Royal family and Saudi businessmen for their alleged role in 9/11 (Newsweek, 16 April 2003).

The suit constitutes the biggest class action in legal history.

Although later granted diplomatic immunity from prosecution in America under the US Foreign Service Immunity Act, the defendants in this case originally included Saudi Defence Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, and Prince Turki al-Faisal, formerly head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency. Both were accused of knowingly contributing money and support to al Qaeda through Islamic charitable organisations (CNN, 17 October 2003).

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef was also named as a defendant, but immunity from prosecution was granted to him also because, like the others, he was an official of the Saudi government. According to a court ruling, only the US president, not the courts, has the authority to label a foreign nation as a terrorist supporter.

The suit is being conducted on behalf of the families of 1,431 of the people killed on 9/11 and 1,325 of the injured. More than 100 of the claimants are British. Over 100,000 documents from around the world tracking the financial links between the Saudis and Al Qaeda are reported to have been collected in the search for evidence, and the resulting database on Islamic terrorism is considered to be the best in world even though held in entirely private hands.

The Sunday Times reported 13 February 2005 that investigators for the case had discovered that the July 2001 meetings of the 9/11 hijackers in Spain included individuals who later took part in the Madrid bombings of 2004. One of the lawyers involved told the Sunday Times that "We also discovered transfers from the Saudi ministry of interior directly to the Madrid cell”.

Nevertheless, it is estimated that it may be several more years yet before the case against the remaining Saudi defendants, including the bin Laden family construction group and the International Islamic Relief Organization, reaches trial.

The lead lawyer in the suit, Ron Motley (previously best known for winning a historic $350 billion settlement from the tobacco industry in the 1990s), told the Sunday Times that whilst his legal team had received government help in 19 countries, it had received none from the British government despite the considerable number of British claimants.

So perhaps Britain has got something out of the post 9/11 'special relationship' after all. It's just that Downing St can't talk about it.

Judicious inaction or collusion on the US Saudi 9/11cover-up, combined with Britain's own BAE corruption stonewalling, is worth at least $20 billion in additional arms sales for Britain - or, if you like, just a little bit more than the newly inflated cost of the London Olympic games in 2012.

As part of the effort to glorify Hitler's Third Reich, the now iconic Olympic torch ceremony was originally introduced at the Berlin games of 1936. Each torch then bore the logo of Krupp, the huge steel and munitions conglomerate that armed Germany for two world wars. Despite its origins, the torch ceremony has continued ever since.

On 6th July 2005 Britain won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic games in a surprise victory over France. It was probably the proudest moment of Prime Minister Tony Blair's office. A headline on the Downing St web site had proclaimed in anticipation a day earlier that the "Olympic legacy can last for generation".

A day later, however, on 7 July, four 'home grown' Muslim suicide bombers detonated a series of bombs in central London killing 52 others and injuring many more. After decades of battling the IRA, an new era of international terrorism on English soil was immediately presumed to have begun.

In a video recorded before his suicide and subsequently released after the bombings, one of the 7/7 bombers threatened more attacks "until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq". This demand echoed that of Irish Republicans who had sought the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland in preceding decades.

Although a traumatic experience for Britain, the number of people killed and maimed in the 7/7 attacks is small compared to the total losses endured in the earlier conflict over Northern Ireland (the last IRA bomb in mainland Britain was in 2001). That bitter struggle (also concerned with a perceived British occupation) cost the lives of thousands of Britons. Although most of those lives were lost in Ulster, 125 also died in attacks on the English mainland. Many more were maimed or injured.

Each and every year from 1971 to 1994 the number of deaths in the Irish 'troubles' was greater than the total killings in Britain caused by Islamic militants during the whole of the now more than five year period arising since 9/11, when the new 'war on terror' was declared. At that point most seemed to quickly forget that Britain had been calmly fighting another terrorist struggle for more than thirty years, and ironically against an Irish Republican movement that had been funded in substantial part from within the United States.

During the course of the Irish conflict bomb attacks were executed against the London home of the Conservative leader of the opposition (used by Ted Heath in 1974), the House of Commons (killing shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Airey Neave in 1979), and 10 Downing St (during a Cabinet meeting lead by John Major in 1991).

Most traumatic of all was an attempted attack on the British Cabinet at the Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984. Five people were killed, including MP Anthony Berry.

Among the injured were Trade and Industry Secretary, Norman Tebbit, and Government Chief Whip, John Wakeham. The bomb had been planted several weeks earlier by Patrick Magee, who was subsequently sentenced to thirty five years imprisonment (Magee was later released as part of a political settlement negotiated with the Irish Republican movement by the ensuing Blair government under the terms of the 1999 'Good Friday' agreement).

Despite the carnage Margaret Thatcher was steadfast in the face of the unprecedented Brighton bombing, stating "This attack has failed. All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail." And, indeed, despite these direct attempts to strike at the very heart of constitutional government in Britain, the 'Wilson Doctrine' banning the interception of MPs communications by the security services remained in place.

A very different approach is in danger of being taken today. But then the agenda is also very different.

During the Irish troubles there was, after all, little economic incentive to politically exploit the fears arising from the conflict. Today, however, the world faces an immediately looming global energy crisis which has precipitated the projection of British and American military power into those parts of the globe where the bulk of the world's remaining conventional oil and gas resources are to be found. A campaign to combat Islamic terrorist threats is the ultimate 'politically correct' smokescreen for such interventions, provided a sufficient level of fear is maintained at home.

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher promoted a climate of fearless resilience in response to the constant threat of terrorist attacks by Irish Republicans.

In the new century by contrast, a more timorous Labour Party, easily frightened by real or imagined threats of on-going terrorist attacks, has been unwilling to call to account the government of Tony Blair which has promoted both a climate of fear, and a policy of subservience to the authoritarian tendencies of itself and the Bush administration.

The consequences have been stark. The most visible has been the creation of the grotesque quagmire in Iraq, a country whose supposed threat to the 'free world' was conveniently propagandised by the likes of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld through what he called the 'prism' of 9/11.

This 'prism' was essentially a bogus perspective strategically aimed at facilitating military action against Iraq, as part of a scheme of aggression which had been planned well before 9/11.

Whilst the United States had been an al Qaeda target before 9/11 on account of its continued stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf oil war (witness the issuing of Bin Laden's Fatwa against the United States in 1996, and the attacks on the US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000), Australia, Spain, Turkey and Britain only became targets after they had joined forces with America in its post 9/11 'war on terror' (since when 'al Qaeda' has adopted a strategy of attacks aimed at splitting allies off from the 'interventionist' coalition assembled by the United States, an approach which most notably precipitated the fall of the pro US government in Madrid in 2004).

On 11 March 2007 the Observer drew attention to how British military interventionism has contributed to growing Islamic militancy stating that "Contrary to the British government's public claim, every source spoken to by The Observer, official or otherwise, in Britain and elsewhere believes the Iraq war has exacerbated the threat to the UK specifically and to the West generally. 'It is a huge part of the problem,' one senior British government counter-terrorism specialist said. However, contrary to exaggerated reports, the number of Westerners who have gone to Iraq to fight is said to be 'a handful'."

The Observer also reported that "Significantly, the Taliban in Afghanistan is not considered to be closely linked to the al-Qaeda hard core....Only two of the 140 suicide bombers who have died in Afghanistan since mid-2005 have come from outside Afghanistan, Pakistan or Afghan and Pakistani communities living overseas."

So what of the future, given that the primary cause of the intensifying 'jihad', namely the continuing Anglo-American occupation of Islamic countries in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions, is in reality a mission driven by a desire to ensure that these key areas do not fall under Chinese control as the global competition for oil and gas heats up?

If dissolving the threat of Islamic terrorist attacks was the real priority then withdrawing from these countries would substantially reduce that risk. But as US Vice President Dick Cheney let slip in Australia in February when asked 'what are the stakes here' regarding Iran , the next target on America's interventionist list in the Middle East: "Well, remember where Iran sits. It's important to backup I think for a minute and set aside the nuclear question, just look at what Iran represents in terms of their physical location. They occupy one whole side of the Persian Gulf, clearly have the capacity to influence the world's supply of oil, about 20 percent of the daily production comes out through the Straits of Hormuz."

Meanwhile the phantom 'war on terror' looks set to persist, with not even the retiring head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, believing that the fuel which enflames Islamic militancy is being tackled.

As she recently put it "My service needs to understand the motivations behind terrorism .... The video wills of British suicide bombers make it clear that they are motivated by perceived worldwide and long-standing injustices against Muslims - an extreme and minority interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence. And their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in particular the UK's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

By the time the Olympic torch arrives in London from Greece in 2012, North Sea oil output is expected to have fallen to half its its 1999 peak. A similar fate awaits its gas production as well.

By 2012, and always assuming a continuing failure to introduce a truly coherent national energy policy framework in the meantime, it can be expected that tension both within and beyond Britain's rogue state borders will be substantially greater than it is even today as a result. As a symptom of this security at the London games will be unprecedented, with the budget for that element alone already standing at at least �1 billion.

Perhaps only then will we all be able to savour the true depth of the legacy of the Blair era, and to remind ourselves, as one of George Orwell's 1984 surveillance operatives would have put it, that 'war really is peace'.

'Fight Smart'

Rogue State Britain
Before Arms To Saudi Arabia It Was Arms To Iraq

"My company Astra gave rise to much of the circumstances which created the [Arms to Iraq] Scott Inquiry, the Supergun revelations (we reported it first), the Aitken affair, the murder of Gerald Bull in Brussels in March 1990 and much else..... The story of Astra is too long to recount here but a summary is contained in my book, 'In the Public Interest' published by Little Brown UK hardback 1995, Warner paperback 1996, London. Astra became involved in covert weapons and ammunitions operations organised by MI5 and MI6 and the CIA, the MOD, DOD, FCO and the State Department and the DTI..... All these cases and others and the Astra case involved the gross abuse of power by Government and its agencies and servants, concealment of key evidence, intimidation, threats, false and selective prosecutions, manipulation of evidence, perversion of the course of justice.... As Douglas Hurd told a Commons Select Committee regarding nuclear proliferation they are but two tributaries of the main stream of intelligence..... Each regularly circumvents domestic laws for the benefit of the others under programmes like 'echelon' and agreements between UK and USA. Politicians and civil servants and other leading figures who get out of line can be surveyed or bugged and then threatened, blackmailed, framed up or worse."
My Experiences, the Scott Inquiry, the British Legal System
Gerald Reaveley James, former Astra Holdings PLC Chairman from 1980-90
Extract From Speech Given At The Environmental Law Centre, UK, 2000
(includes typographical transcript errors)