Craig Murray reacts to the latest revelations about the probable murder of Jean Charles de Menezes

I am not sure which scares me most ‘ the way the police murdered Jean Charles de Menezes, or the lies they told about it afterwards. It is worth bearing in mind that when the Police and the Home Office went into overdrive to spin their dramatic falsehoods ‘ that he vaulted the ticket barrier, ran through the station, wore a padded jacket and leapt onto the train ‘ they still thought they had killed a terrorist, not a Brazilian electrician.

We now know that Mr Menezes had a ticket and passed the barrier the normal way, walked quietly through the station, picked up a newspaper, boarded the train quietly and sat down. He was then pinioned by a policeman and shot at eleven times by at least two others while immobilised in his seat.

That makes it not just an unlawful killing, but plain murder. And it would still be murder even if Mr Menezes was indeed a terrorist. That was unequivocally established by the Death on the Rock case, where the European Court ruled that it was illegal to assassinate IRA terrorists in cold blood in Gibraltar, whether or not they were engaged in a bombing operation.

The government are acutely aware of that precedent. That is why the lies about his bizarre behaviour were so quickly concocted, and assiduously spread. They did so with the help of a compliant media establishment that repeated these lies ad nauseam to an excited public. And of course, the liar in chief was Sir Ian Blair himself. He must now resign immediately. I have never believed in eugenics, but the evidence of the unique propensity to lying of the clan Blair is pretty compelling, though I confess my sample of two is statistically insignificant.

One of my chief allies in fighting for human rights in Uzbekistan was Professor Douwe Korff, a key member of the legal team that brought the British government to book over Death on the Rock. It is typical of this government that Charles Clark’s reaction in his Evening Standard interview is to threaten British judges with new legislation to restrict their power to defend liberty. He also specifically threatened legislation to remove us from European Court jurisdiction ‘ no more Death on the Rock cases, then.

You could read about Douwe and I working in Uzbekistan in my forthcoming book, except that I have now received four letters and last evening a phone call from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to tell me I can’t publish it. It tells of Jack Straw’s decision that MI6 should use intelligence obtained under torture by foreign intelligence agencies. They don’t want you to know that. I had hoped that Straw’s decision was an isolated bit of over-zealousness.

I now know that it was part of a systematic lowering of our standards on human rights across the board. Blair is, beyond denial, leading the most authoritarian government since Lord Liverpool In fact Blair’s proposals outdo for sheer illiberalism the notorious Six Acts, which every schoolboy for generations learnt of as the most heinous assault on British liberties, happily overcome.

Blair’s media support is of two sorts. The right wing press share this analysis, but applaud it. They have the most populist right wing leader in British history, and are delighted. On the other side The Blair project cheerleaders who dominate the Guardian are stuck with their monstrous delusions.

The BBC remains cowed by the Gilligan affair, and large job losses. The fact that Gilligan told the truth ‘ there were no Iraqi WMD ‘ perversely diminished rather than increased their confidence. Telling the truth gets you shafted. Toeing Tony’s line gets you promoted.

Tony Blair’s new raft of ‘Anti-terrorist’ proposals includes deporting people for visiting certain bookshops and websites. Police continued their policy of ramping up media hype by smashing open, for the cameras, the door of a Muslim bookshop in Leeds. The owners had actually given them the keys and invited them to look around. No propaganda value in that, so out came the battering ram.

The media have carried rubbish in screaming headlines about the bomb attacks on 7 and 21 July. They were perpetrated by Al Qaida, they were funded from Pakistan, the two groups were linked. All rubbish. And of course we had Tony Blair’s repeated assertion that anger at our invasion of Iraq was in no way the cause. To understand was to excuse.

I condemn terrorism unequivocally. It is in every sense immoral and unreasoned. But it is not a natural phenomenon like the Birmingham tornado – Blair’s actions provoked it. The invasion of Iraq based on a tissue of lies, the co-operation with security services of regimes that practice torture throughout the Muslim World, the support for Bush and Sharon on settlements policy, the imprisonments without trial and other attacks on liberty in the UK.

After the 9/11 attacks, I recall the general reaction of the British intelligentsia was to ask why the Americans failed to understand what it was that caused them to be hated in much of the rest of the World. In our own hurt following the London bombings, we are making the same mistake.

It will be little comfort to the family and friends of Mr Menezes, but there is some hope that his death and the exposure of the spin that surrounded it will cause some reaction to the way this country is headed.

It is essential to the survival of liberty in this country that the killers of Mr Menezes stand in the dock. Doubtless the press will mount a campaign to defend them. Isn’t it time we were given their names? I don’t recall the identities of other alleged killers such as Barry Bolsara or Peter Sutcliffe being protected before their trial. The police have happily given out the name of several people who turned out to be completely uninvolved, including a Leeds muslim chemist who went on holiday to Egypt (dead suspicious).

Let’s have the names of the killers. At least we can avoid sitting next to them on the tube. Given the manner of cold-blooded execution, I suspect they may turn out to be SAS or MI5. But the blame must not stop with the men who pulled the triggers. Nor does it lie solely with the people that provided the so-called intelligence identifying Mr Menezes. The real blame lies with those who sanctioned the ‘shoot to kill’ policy defended in such macho fashion by Jack Straw and Charles Clarke.

They must now resign. British liberty will not recover until Charles Clarke and Ian Blair stand in the dock for their part in this murder.

Despite what the Prime Minister says, the rules of the game have not changed

By Steve Crawshaw, London Director of Human Rights Watch

In the days after the bombings of 7 July, there were many reasons to feel proud to be a Londoner. Politicians responded with dignity to the terrible events. People of all faiths stood together in the knowledge that those who had commissioned these crimes against humanity should be identified and prosecuted. The rule of law seemed to reign supreme.

Now, all that has changed utterly. The Government seems ready to exploit the national fear by riding roughshod over principles which have long been sacrosanct. In a fearful society, it is easy to persuade people that the old rules no longer exist. Easy, and dangerous.

The Government presents the latest proposal to deport people with supposed guarantees that they will not be tortured as though it were a new idea, devised as an emergency response to the bombings. In reality, it is a mendacious old idea. A year ago the Human Rights Watch report Empty Promises demonstrated clearly and in detail that diplomatic assurances are no guarantee against torture. Four months ago, a 90-page report Still at Risk, confirmed the point, with yet more evidence. Human Rights Watch and Liberty wrote to the Prime Minister, pressing the point. The Government, however, seems uninterested in facts. It proudly announced this week that it has struck a deal with Jordan on sending people back; it wants to strike more such deals with a clutch of torturing governments in the region.

The evidence shows clearly how flawed such agreements can be. Sweden sent two men back to Egypt in 2001, after receiving assurances that they would not be tortured. They were, of course, tortured. Bizarrely, the United States even claimed to believe Syria (a paid-up member, after all, of George Bush”s “axis of evil”) when Washington received what it called “appropriate assurances” that Damascus would not torture Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian handed over in 2002. (Arar, too, was tortured.)

The phrase “assurances” was not always so polluted. Assurances are given in cases where a suspect is extradited for trial to a country with the death penalty, such as the United States. On such occasions, America assures the delivering country that the (otherwise legal) death penalty will be suspended. Such assurances are within the framework of the law and wholly verifiable. In short, they work.

But the new style of “diplomatic assurances” is very different. Torturers do not like to tell the truth. Governments which practise torture routinely assure the world that they do not do so. What, then, is the point of yet another assurance? If a government regularly breaches international treaties against torture which carry criminal penalties, why should they respect a bilateral agreement which neither government has any real interest in enforcing?

The idea that occasional prison visits will reveal the truth is equally far removed from experience – a person being visited occasionally cannot speak the truth for fear of being sent right back to be tortured.

There are two possible interpretations of what has happened. Either the Government does not understand the significance of all the broken promises that have gone before. Or, on the contrary, it understands all too well and calculates that, in the current climate, many in Britain will be unbothered about unsavoury characters being sent back to face torture. Some judges might be unhappy, admittedly but, as the Lord Chancellor and others have made clear in recent days, who cares about judges anyway?

Certainly, it could be easy to persuade those who fear being blown up on their way to work that rules no longer quite matter just as we saw that the US administration played on American fears, with a lawless Guantanamo, after 9/11. Guantanamo was (presumably) supposed to make the world safer. In the UK, some had hoped for a more intelligent approach. It is depressing if our political leaders fail to understand the importance of the rule of law. Sending people back to the torture chambers is in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Nor is this just a European issue. Such deportations are also in obvious breach of the UN Convention against Torture whose enforcement the UK once worked so hard to ensure. Changing national laws will not make the UK less in breach of international law.

Despite what the Prime Minister says, the rules of the game have not changed or they should not have done, unless politicians (cynical, foolish, or both) decide that they wish unilaterally to change the rules. Those who have committed crimes, or plotted serious crimes, can be prosecuted. Those whose activities give cause for concern can be placed under surveillance as happened many times in Northern Ireland. But if the rules of the game now read “Torture is always bad–except as part of the war on terror, when we no longer care”, then that is a betrayal of all the values that this country once stood for. If the Government refuses to acknowledge that basic point, we will all be the losers.

Newly added to the archives:

The ‘war on terror’ must not become a cover to support repressive regimes, by Robin Cook, Independent, October 24 2003.

I turned on my television to watch the news, and when it warmed into life, was surprised to see myself looking at a picture of Raigmore Hospital in Inverness.

For many years my parents lived close to Raigmore, at Incheswood, and that was the road from which the BBC were taking their picture. I have many happy memories of Inverness, and the hospital itself is a wonderful facility with cheerful and helpful staff. But I visited both my father and my grandfather in that hospital shortly before their deaths, and a chill enters my heart when I see it.

I now learnt of the death of Robin Cook, and felt a real sorrow.

I was one of a few enthusiasts in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who welcomed the arrival of Robin Cook as Foreign Secretary and his declaration of an ‘Ethical foreign policy’. The majority were hostile and cynical, but not nearly so much as was Tony Blair.

Within a very few weeks, Blair arranged Robin Cook’s defeat at Cabinet when Cook wanted to stop the export of British Aerospace Hawk jets to the Suharto regime of Indonesia, which has a strong history of vicious repression of its disparate peoples. I was told by a Cabinet Minister who sided with Cook, that Blair managed Cook’s cabinet defeat in as confrontational and humiliating a manner as possible.

Plainly there would be no ethical foreign policy under Blair, and ‘New Labour’ would be even snugger in bed with the arms industry than the old version. One of Blair’s lead men on Hawks to Indonesia was Jack Straw, who declared in the register of members’ interests that 50% of his election expenses had been paid by Lord Taylor, a Director of British Aerospace.

By one of life’s sad ironies I was closely involved in an episode which held the ethical foreign policy up to media ridicule, from which it never recovered. A mercenary outfit called Sandline claimed to have been given the go-ahead by the FCO to ship weapons to Sierra Leone, to help President Kabbah recover his country from rebels. The problem was this breached a UN arms embargo. Both the Tory media and the pro-Blair Murdoch media had a frenzy, attacking Cook for claiming to be ethical while breaching UN law.

In fact, while Sandline had close connections with the British High Commission in Sierra Leone, they were simply lying about being given permission to ship arms. I can say that with certainty, because it was I they claimed gave the permission.

The storm passed, but ethical foreign policy disappeared as a term of art. The crisis brought me into closer and more intense personal contact with Robin Cook than I might normally have expected, and for that I am grateful.

His famous gnomic and ginger appearance is much commented upon, but I have never seen anyone describe his eyes, which is a pity. He had really startling eyes, of an extraordinarily light, bright, limpid blue. They absolutely held you, and as you spoke they were searching you out. I found him both funny and kind.

He had his faults. Very self-obsessed, the first time I ever met him I was kept waiting in his outer office for over three hours. No respecter of persons, he famously once did much the same to Princess Diana (well, maybe not three hours, but a lot longer than she was used to).

I met him again in Ghana, when he accompanied the Queen on a State Visit. He got so deeply into a conversation with a journalist that he missed the convoy as it departed from a Durbar, and had to be rescued from the massive crowds, having apparently lost interest in what the Queen and the Government of Ghana might be doing.

At that time, he was interviewing for a new Private Secretary. Deciding that this would be a useful way to fill out the hours spent as a courtier, he had the candidates flown out to Ghana at public expense to be interviewed ‘ including at least one candidate, then Head of the FCO’s United Nations Department, whose London office was a thirty second walk from his.

So I observed him as self-centred and irascible, but at the same time kind, witty and deeply intelligent. I agreed with him on ethical foreign policy, and on the Iraq war. But where we will now miss his influence most of all, was his passionate commitment to individual liberty and balanced democracy.

Cook was the country’s most influential advocate of proportional representation, the surest safeguard against abuse of power by narrow and unrepresentative government. He also wanted to see executive authority checked by a powerful and fully elected House of Lords. This was the great work of his second ministerial post, as Leader of the House. It should not be forgotten that just as Blair deliberately blocked Cook over ethical foreign policy, so he blocked an elected House of Lords. And Blair blocked it for exactly the reason Cook wanted it, because it would be a brake on the Prime Minister’s authority.

It amazes me that, when Blair made clear he wanted a largely appointed House of Lords, most people still didn’t tumble to just how power-mad the man is. Now we face proposals to hold people for three months without charge, and to deport people for entering the wrong bookshop or visiting the wrong website. We are to accept ‘assurances’ from murderous regimes that they won’t torture or kill dissidents we hand over to them.

Blair bangs on as if it wasn’t already illegal to be a terrorist, to kill people, to make or supply bombs or assist those who do. It is noteworthy that the alleged London bomber now charged is facing longstanding laws, like murder and conspiracy to murder, without any need for the raft of new legislation already in place, let alone Blair’s latest proposals.

What kind of society are we turning into? Blair talks of designating suspect bookshops, and I have just received my fourth official letter from the government reminding me that my own book, which I haven’t even finished yet, is banned from being published.

Robin Cook was a man of principle and lover of liberty, and he hated all of this. The last, brilliant, Guardian article I read by him was arguing against purchasing a replacement for trident missiles, while claiming that Blair had already taken that decision. He also stated baldly that the policy of Bush and Blair was creating terrorism, not defeating it.

These are the most dangerous times for liberty in the UK since the government of Lord Liverpool. Those of us who believe freedom is important, face a huge battle over many years, and against great odds. We have lost our best leader.

by William Norman Grigg

By claiming the power to imprison terrorist suspects without trial, or to send them abroad to be tortured by foreign secret police, President Bush is creating precedents that imperil the rights of U.S. citizens.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

‘ O’Brien, torture specialist in George Orwell’s 1984

Roughly a century and a half before Orwell published 1984, his cautionary tale of endless dictatorship through perpetual war, British statesman Edmund Burke warned that “criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.” That which we authorize our government to do to anyone, it can do to everyone. If we permit the government supposedly protecting us to ignore the constitutional limits on its powers, it will quickly become the single greatest threat to our own lives and liberties.

The Bush administration, and those who dutifully echo its rhetoric, insist that everything changed on 9/11. “There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11,” Cofer Black, the onetime director of the CIA’s counterterrorist unit, insisted in congressional testimony in 2002. “After 9/11 the gloves came off.”

As Burke observed, once a government removes those “gloves,” it will only put them on again when it is forced to do so. And once a state ‘ any state ‘ gets the scent of blood in its nostrils, it tends to become less than discriminating in its targets.

Many conservatives consider it something akin to sedition or treason to criticize the Bush administration for claiming that the president has unlimited power to deal as he sees fit with anyone he designates as an enemy in the “war on terror.” This perspective rests on two completely unjustified assumptions. The first is that George W. Bush, being a better man than Bill Clinton (hardly the highest hurdle to surmount), can be entrusted with extraordinary powers. The second is that the powers in question would always be used against “them” ‘ that is, the “worst of the worst” ‘ rather than against “us.”

Mr. Bush’s trustworthiness, or lack thereof, aside, he is constitutionally required to step down in January 2009. His successor could very well be a second president Clinton (or a first president Rodham), or someone of similar ideological inclinations who might look on “right-wing extremists” as the domestic equivalent of al-Qaeda. Once again, that which we authorize the government to do to anyone, it can do to everyone.

In defiance of centuries of Anglo-Saxon common law, the Bush administration claims that the president has the power to render any individual an “un-person” with respect to the protection of the law by designating him an “enemy combatant.” Those thus designated may be imprisoned, without legal recourse of any kind, for as long as the president sees fit, and be treated in any manner the president deems suitable. This could include the delivery of such hapless people into the hands of foreign governments ‘ such as those ruling Egypt, Syria, Morocco, or Uzbekistan ‘ that employ torture as a means of interrogation.

None of this is theoretical. Our government is doing these things today, and anticipates making use of these criminal means for the foreseeable future. And, once again, under the doctrines being devised by the administration, U.S. citizens could be subject to such treatment at the president’s discretion.

The Padilla Case

For three years, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, has been detained in military custody, without trial, at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina. Padilla was arrested by federal agents on May 15, 2002, after he arrived from Pakistan at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft claimed that Padilla, an ex-convict whose unsavory background includes participation in ethnic street gangs and other suspicious associations, had been involved in a plot to smuggle a radioactive “dirty bomb” into the country.

There is ample reason to believe that Padilla was involved in criminal activity, and some circumstantial evidence that he may have had contacts of some sort with Muslim radicals. He’s poorly cast in the role of martyr for the cause of civil liberties ‘ which is probably why he was chosen as the first test of the president’s supposed power to incarcerate U.S. citizens at whim.

President Bush designated Padilla an “enemy combatant” by executive order on June 9, 2002. This was done on the basis of evidence compiled, after the fact, by Michael H. Mobbs, Special Adviser to the undersecretary of defense for policy. The administration insists that the so-called “Mobbs Declaration” satisfies the requirements of Due Process in Padilla’s case.

From the administration’s perspective, a document written by a third-tier executive branch functionary justifying the president’s order to imprison a U.S. citizen nullifies the need for a trial ‘ or judicial review of any kind. The administration also claims that the presidential “enemy combatant” designation renders moot the habeas corpus guarantee, under which an incarcerated individual must be brought before a judge and either formally charged with a crime or released.

Then-Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement argued in a July 2003 brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals that Padilla’s imprisonment, as a “wartime” measure, falls entirely within the president’s discretion and cannot be subject to the scrutiny of the courts. Judicial review “of the Commander-in-Chief’s wartime judgements would raise serious separation-of-powers concerns,” insisted the administration’s brief. Such review “could extend no further than assessing whether there is some evidence supporting that [presidential] determination. To that end, the government submitted the Mobbs Declaration setting forth the evidentiary basis for the President’s determination.”

The administration’s reasoning, if that word applies, is perfectly circular: Padilla, as an enemy combatant, is not entitled to due process of law beyond the president’s determination that he is an enemy combatant.

In a December 13, 2003 decision, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against this sweeping claim of presidential power, since even in wartime “presidential authority does not exist in a vacuum.” While the Constitution does provide for the suspension of habeas corpus (which would permit emergency detention of suspects), that power is assigned exclusively to Congress. Rather than enacting legislation to permit such summary detentions, Congress in 2000 had passed a law called the “Non-Detention Act” expressly forbidding the summary imprisonment of American citizens. Since Padilla’s detention was not authorized by Congress, the court observed, “the president does not have the power ‘ to detain as an enemy combatant an American citizen seized on American soil outside a zone of combat.”

The Bush administration appealed the Appeals Court’s ruling to the Supreme Court, which has declined thus far to rule on the substantive issues raised by the case. In a similar case involving Yaser Essam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, the High Court upheld the detainee’s right to mount a court challenge to his imprisonment. Writing on behalf of the majority, retiring justice Sandra Day O’Connor explained: “A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.”

The administration continues to hold Padilla in military custody and will likely have a second opportunity to challenge the lower court’s ruling in his case. Furthermore, the retirement of O’Connor may offer President Bush a chance to build what legal reporter Rick Montgomery calls “a wartime Supreme Court.”

Leader Principle

One essential principle of Anglo-Saxon Common Law since the Magna Carta is that the government, as represented by a king or a president, cannot imprison an individual without due process. Standing in direct opposition to that concept is the “leader principle,” under which the executive ‘ monarch, president, or dictator ‘ answers to no one.

In a section defining the leader principle (fuhrerprinzip), the Organization Book of the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party states that the power of the chief executive “is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited…. He is responsible only to his conscience and the people.” Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin, who invented modern totalitarianism, summarized his version of the “leader principle” as follows: “The scientific concept of dictatorship is nothing else than this ‘ power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.”

Ritually invoking September 11, the Bush administration ‘ with the aid of its surrogates in talk radio and other conservative media outlets ‘ has made astonishing progress toward enacting an American version of fuhrerprinzip. The basis of that doctrine is the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against terrorists. That resolution has been treated by the Bush administration as a wholesale transfer of authority, both legislative and judicial, to the president in his role as commander-in-chief. In a constitutional sense, this claim is tantamount to a blank check written against a non-existent account in a fictitious bank.

In December 2004, the Justice Department quietly released a legal memorandum entitled “The President’s Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations Against Terrorists and Nations Supporting Them.” The document, composed by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo, had been circulated within the administration on September 25, 2001, but hadn’t previously been made public.

By publicly releasing its contents when it did, the Bush administration ensured that there would be no discussion of its plainly totalitarian concept of presidential power during the 2004 campaign. Significantly, once securely reelected, George W. Bush referred to the election as an “accountability moment” that bestowed the electorate’s blessing on everything his administration had done in its first term. Presumably that “accountability moment” ratified the expansive claims of presidential power in the Yoo Memorandum, which had been kept from the public.

“We conclude that the Constitution vests the President with the plenary authority, as Commander in Chief and the sole organ of the Nation in its foreign relations, to use military force abroad,” proclaims the Yoo Memorandum. The document specifically claimed that Congress cannot “place any limits on the President’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.”

One wonders which “Constitution” Yoo refers to, since nothing in the charter created at Philadelphia in 1787, and ratified by the original states, invested powers of that variety in the president. In our constitutional system, no branch of the federal government has “plenary,” or absolute, authority; this is particularly true of the president, whose powers as commander-in-chief are contingent and limited. Congress controls all power to appropriate funds, including those for the military, and it has the sole authority to establish regulations governing the armed forces. Additionally, only Congress can declare war.

The Yoo Memorandum claims: “During the period leading up the Constitution’s ratification, the power to initiate hostilities and to control the escalation of conflict had long been understood to rest in the hands of the executive branch.”

This is a bit like an adulterer justifying his infidelity by pointing out that “during the period leading up to” his marriage, he had been free to indulge his carnal whims. Prior to adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the power to conduct war had been exercised by the British monarch. As Hamilton pointed out in The , No. 69, the war power delegated to the president through the Constitution was “in substance much inferior” to that of the British monarch, with the power to declare war and raise armies given exclusively to the legislature.

Rather than being rooted in the U.S. Constitution, the Bush administration’s doctrine of executive power has more in common with the “Enabling Act” passed by the German Reichstag in 1933, which gave the German chief executive ‘ Adolf Hitler ‘ the legal basis for building the National Socialist dictatorship and conducting aggressive war against Germany’s neighbors.

In December 2001, another secret Justice Department memorandum (not disclosed to the public until it was leaked in mid-2004) instructed the Defense Department that no federal court could “properly entertain” appeals from “enemy aliens” held in detention at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Asserting that Cuba has “ultimate sovereignty” over Guantanamo (which would mean, if this claim were said in earnest, that U.S. military personnel at that facility are under Fidel Castro’s authority), foreign nationals held there are beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

That memorandum essentially consigned foreign nationals detained at Gitmo to legal limbo: They were to be treated neither as prisoners of war nor as criminal suspects. The designation of Jose Padilla as an enemy combatant opened the gates of that legal limbo to U.S. citizens. An August 1, 2002 memorandum written by former assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee (now Judge Bybee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) made the explicit claim that the president can order the torture of detainees as he sees fit.

The Bybee memo was written on behalf of Alberto Gonzalez ‘ at the time, chief Legal Counsel to the president, currently the incumbent attorney general. In it Bybee professed to discover a “sweeping grant” of authority to the president in the form of an unenumerated “Commander-in-Chief Power.” Acting as an agent of the commander-in-chief, interrogators enjoy immunity from prosecution under laws against torture, since (according to Bybee) “enforcement of [an anti-torture] statute would represent an unconstitutional infringement of the President’s authority to conduct war.” Thus “the Department of Justice could not bring a criminal prosecution [against someone] who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the President’s constitutional power…. If Congress could do so, it could control the President’s authority through the manipulation of federal criminal law.”

It bears repeating that even (or perhaps especially) in wartime, the president’s powers are contingent, not absolute. And the president is required to see that all constitutionally sound laws ‘ including those prohibiting torture ‘ are “faithfully executed.” The Bush administration, however, is wedded to a doctrine of executive power alien to our Constitution and unmistakably akin to the doctrines devised by Lenin, Hitler, and their totalitarian heirs.

In his August 2002 “torture memorandum,” Bybee asserted that interrogation techniques “may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering or the requisite intensity” to meet the legal definition of torture. Only acts that inflict pain “equivalent in intensity to ‘ serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death” could be considered torture. And as Bybee concluded elsewhere, acts of unambiguous torture are “legal” when committed by those acting on behalf of the president.

Not everyone within the Bush administration agreed with the Bybee memo’s assertions. FBI Director Robert Mueller has stated that interrogation methods used by CIA interrogators in Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq “violate all American anti-torture laws and would be prohibited in criminal cases of the most serious kind.” Mueller has actually instructed FBI agents in Guantanamo Bay to leave the room when CIA or military intelligence interrogators begin their work, in order to avoid implicating the Bureau in acts the director regards as clearly criminal.

Outsourcing Torture

Many of those detained and interrogated by the Bush administration are removed from U.S. jurisdiction entirely and flown ‘ via a fleet of Gulfstream V executive jets ‘ to countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Uzbekistan. This process, known as “extraordinary rendition,” has been labeled “outsourcing torture” by its critics. That description is entirely reasonable, given that its chief selling point is the fact that the recipient regimes are all notorious for the use of torture.

In a March 12 Boston Globe op-ed column, Representative Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) offered a capsule description of the “rendition” process at work:

An unmarked plane arrives in the middle of the night carrying men who aren’t wearing uniforms but have on black hoods. The men grab prisoners out of the hands of government officials, cut off their clothes, drug them on the spot, shackle them, force the prisoners onto the plane and take off into the night. When the “torture” plane disappears, no one knows where and when the captives will appear and what will happen to them: electrocution, beatings, sexual abuse?

At first guess, you might imagine that this terrible operation is the work of a drug cartel or a rogue member of the “axis of evil,” but the scene described involves U.S. officials as a routine part of the Bush administration’s practice of “outsourcing torture.”

In fact, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” like many other constitutionally impermissible counter-terrorism policies followed by the Bush administration, actually began under Bill Clinton. Former CIA Director George Tenet testified before Congress in 2002 that over 70 people had been subject to rendition prior to September 11, 2001. Another official cited by Rep. Markey estimated that “over 150 renditions have been conducted since 9/11.”

The Bush administration and its supporters insist that rendition is an unsavory but necessary method to extract information from the “worst of the worst.” But the problem, once again, is that it amounts to summary imprisonment and torture of individuals by presidential decree. As the case of Canadian citizen Mahar Arar illustrates, innocent people can suffer tremendous harm by being swept up in the net of “extraordinary rendition.”

Snatched to Syria

Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was returning from a family vacation abroad in September 2002 when he was detained at JFK Airport by agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. For several hours, Arar was kept in a semi-secure area by officials who insisted that he was undergoing a “regular procedure.” Arar (who had gone home alone ahead of the rest of his family) was denied access to a telephone and required to surrender his Canadian passport. Eventually he was joined by an interrogation team, including an FBI agent and a New York police officer.

“I told them I wanted a lawyer,” recalled Arar more than a year later. “They told me I had no right to a lawyer, because I wasn’t an American citizen…. They swore at me, and insulted me. It was very humiliating. They wanted me to answer every question quickly. They were consulting a report while they were questioning me, and the information they had was [very] private…. I told them everything I knew.”

The questioning focused on Arar’s relationship with a man named Abdullah Almalki, whose brother worked with Arar at a hi-tech consulting firm in Ottawa. The Almalki family had emigrated to Canada from Syria at roughly the same time as Arar’s, and he told his interrogators that he had a “casual” relationship with Abdullah.

The questioners, accusing Arar of lying, produced a copy of Arar’s 1997 rental lease agreement, which Abdullah had signed as a witness. Arar, understandably, had forgotten that Abdullah had substituted in that role at the last minute when his brother hadn’t been available. “But they thought I was hiding this,” he related. “I told them the truth. I had nothing to hide. I had never had any problems with the United States before, and I could not believe what was happening to me.”

The interrogation lasted until midnight. Arar’s pleas to speak with an attorney were ignored. Eventually he was shackled in chains, stuffed in a van, and taken to “a place where many people were being held in another building by the airport.” There his questioning soon resumed, this time focusing on “what I think about bin Laden, Palestine, Iraq. They also asked me about the mosques I pray in, my bank accounts, my e-mail addresses, my relatives, about everything.”

An INS official demanded that Arar “volunteer to go to Syria.” Arar, a Canadian citizen by choice, asked to be sent to his adopted homeland. He was given a document and told to sign it without being allowed to read it. Weary and thoroughly intimidated, and still convinced that what he believed to be a misunderstanding would soon be straightened out, Arar signed the paper. He was shuttled to New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was finally afforded a few basic decencies, including an opportunity to call his family.

Roughly two weeks after Arar’s ordeal began, he was roused at 3:00 a.m. on Tuesday, October 8, by a prison guard who informed him that “based on classified information that they could not reveal to me, I would be deported to Syria.” Chained and shackled, Arar begged not to be delivered into the custody of a regime identified as a terrorist state by the U.S. government ‘ a regime his family had fled over a decade and a half earlier. Responding to Arar’s protests that he would be tortured at the hands of Syrian officials, his captors “read part of the document [he had earlier signed under duress] where it explained that INS was not the body that deals with Geneva Conventions regarding torture.”

Shoved into a car and taken to New Jersey, Arar was bundled into a small private jet. “I was the only person on the plane” apart from the flight crew, Arar recalled. “I was still chained and shackled.” The plane made stops in Washington, D.C.; Portland, Maine; Rome, Italy; and then Amman, Jordan. During the flight Arar overheard unnamed officials “talking on the phone, saying that Syria was refusing to take me directly, but Jordan would take me.”

On arrival in Amman, Arar was blindfolded, chained, and thrown into another van. His captors immediately began to beat him. In short order he was delivered into the custody of an even rougher crew that was identified as “the Palestine branch of the Syrian military intelligence.” Like the Americans who had originally seized Arar, the Syrians had a detailed dossier. But their methods of interrogation were much more severe.

“If I did not answer quickly enough, [the colonel and chief interrogator] would point to a metal chair in the corner and ask, ‘Do you want me to use this?'” recounted Arar. “I did not know then what the chair was for. I learned later it was used to torture people.” Taken to a basement, the hapless Canadian ‘ who to this day has never been charged with a crime by Canadian, American, or Syrian officials ‘ was thrust into a tiny earthen cell he came to call a “grave.”

“It was three feet wide,” he recalled. “It was six feet deep. It was seven feet high. It had a metal door, with a small opening in the floor, which did not let in light because there was a piece of metal on the outside for sliding things into the cell.” There were two blankets, two dishes, and two bottles ‘ one for water and one to use as a urinal.

For 10 months and 10 days, Arar shared his “grave” with a shifting population of cats and rodents. Denied any semblance of basic human comforts, Arar would be taken out of his cell every day and beaten with heavy rods and thick electrical cables. He was constantly threatened with electrocution. He constantly heard the anguished screams of others whose treatment was even worse.

After several weeks of torture, Arar received visits from Canadian consular officials, who seemed oddly indifferent to his treatment. Several months after the ordeal began, amid incessant torture and reiteration of the plausible threat that “tomorrow it will be worse,” Arar broke down and signed a document stating that he had attended “a training camp in Afghanistan.”

On October 5, 2003, after Arar made that confession, he was released without being charged. After serving a sentence of nearly a year in a Syrian gulag, suffering incessant torture at the hands of KGB-trained interrogators, Arar was sent back to Canada without explanation, without apology, without ever being permitted to confront the witnesses against him or examine the evidence.

Bestial Methods

Though Arar was treated brutally at the hands of the Syrian secret police, it could have been much worse. According to an investigative report compiled by the New York Times, the Bush administration has used the former Soviet Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan as a “surrogate jailer” and interrogator of terrorist suspects.

According to a 2001 State Department report, the Uzbek regime of “ex”-Communist Party thug Islam Karimov regularly employs torture in dealing with both political dissidents and common criminal suspects. Beatings, asphyxiation, electroshock, and boiling of various body parts are among the methods preferred by Karimov’s secret police, which is a direct outgrowth of the Soviet-era KGB. As described in a 2002 State Department report, two detainees killed by Uzbek prison authorities “had likely been suspended in boiling water.”

According to Craig Murray, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan, “CIA flights flew to Tashkent [the capital] often, usually twice a week.” In a July 2004 confidential memo to the British Foreign Office, Murray described evidence he had obtained of U.S.-sanctioned torture of suspects “rendered” to the Uzbek regime. “We should cease all cooperation with the Uzbek security forces ‘ they are beyond the pale,” Murray urged the Foreign Office. Murray’s superiors, the former ambassador told the Times, were “furious” over his objections, claiming that intelligence obtained through torture was of value to the counterterrorism effort. Rather than acting on Murray’s recommendations, the Foreign Office cashiered the whistle-blower.

For its part, the Bush administration has treated Karimov’s regime ‘ a throwback to Stalin-era Communist totalitarianism ‘ as a valued ally in the “war on terror.” Mr. Bush formalized the relationship during a March 2002 Oval Office meeting with Karimov, and the administration has lavished at least a half billion dollars on Tashkent for use in “security matters,” reported the Times.

On March 5, during Karimov’s visit to the U.S., White House press spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the propriety of sending suspects to Uzbekistan, where they would almost certainly be tortured. McClellan breezily defended the practice by stating “it is important that we gather intelligence to protect the American people.”

During a White House press conference in April, Mr. Bush was asked about the methods used by Uzbek security forces in questioning suspected terrorists. Refusing a direct answer ‘ as is his wont ‘ the president offered the meaningless assurance that his administration seeks promises “that nobody will be tortured when we render a person back to their home country.” But as the case of Mahar Arar illustrates, “rendition” does not involve deportation to a suspect’s “home country” (in his case, Canada), but rather delivering him into the hands of hired torturers in a country outside of U.S. jurisdiction.

Chain the Beast

When criticized for abuses of power ‘ torture, summary detention, “rendition” of suspects to terror regimes ‘ the Bush administration and its defenders have typically employed a three-stage defense that runs as follows: “The government’s not doing things like that. You can’t prove they’re doing things like that. Well, all right, they are doing things like that ‘ but what’s the problem, as long as it’s only being done to ‘them’?”

At the foundation of every defense of the Bush administration’s abuses of power is the notion that George W. Bush can be trusted with the extraordinary powers he claims. Similar claims were made with respect to the powers the administration of John Adams had claimed through the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which were enacted during a time of national crisis in some ways similar to the present one.

In a resolution published on November 10, 1798, Thomas Jefferson condemned the Alien and Sedition Acts as an assault on constitutional liberty and the foundation of an executive dictatorship. Under their provisions, he warned, the federal government “may place any act they think proper on the list of crimes, and punish it themselves”; the president, or any of his agents, could “himself be the accuser, counsel, judge and jury, whose suspicions may be the evidence, his order the sentence, his officer the executioner, and his breast the sole record of the transaction.” Under this doctrine of executive power, Jefferson continued, all American citizens would be “reduced, as outlaws, to the absolute dominion of one man, and the barrier of the Constitution [would be] swept away.”

While many esteemed President Adams as a model of piety and rectitude, Jefferson warned that “confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism ‘ free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence…. In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

If we do not act soon to shackle our government in the metaphorical chains of the Constitution, we will in short order find ourselves bound by the very tangible chains of despotism.

Craig Murray is supporting a protest this Monday (August 1st, 2pm) against the government’s new exclusion zone.

Due to come into effect from 1 August, this exclusion zone prohibits demonstrations, even one-person demonstrations, unless the police expressly permit them. Failure to comply can lead to arrest. The zone covers a very wide area around Parliament as far as the London Eye, Charing Cross embankment and up to (although not including) Trafalgar Square.

For futher details click here. For arguements on why you should support the protest go here.

By Craig Murray

What is most worrying about the sad death of the Brazilian Mr Jean Charles de Menezes, shot to death by police on the tube, is that it is used by the government to further ratchet up the climate of fear. While regretting the death, Jack Straw tells us that the “Shoot to kill” policy must remain, while Sir Ian Blair says that more innocent deaths cannot be ruled out. All this boosts the politics of fear, talking up the perpetual war scenario that justifies increased government authoritarianism.

Our tactics for dealing with potential suicide bombers are apparently borrowed from the Israelis. This is appalling. It is not so long ago that the UK was horrified by pictures of a fourteen year old girl being shot down at an Israeli checkpoint, and an Israeli officer emptying a magazine into her head. Now we are adopting precisely the same tactics ourselves ‘ the unarmed Mr Menezes took eight bullets to the head, not the five originally reported.

What is more, we are now adopting Israeli rhetoric. Any attempt to explain or understand the phenomenon of terrorism is dismissed as “justifying” or “excusing” it. Blair rants that Muslim anger has nothing to do with Iraq, or Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, or our support for torturers of Muslims like Karimov. It is rather a spontaneous development, sufficient unto itself, arising in a vacuum from the evil teachings of Wahibbism.

But the truth is that Muslim hatred feeds on some very real injustices. That in no way justifies or excuses acts of terror, which are warped and evil. But the growth of that evil is not, as Blair and Bush appear to believe, the spontaneous work of the devil. There are a few masterminds of terror who are simply psychopaths. But by removing injustice we can remove their ability to recruit, and to operate within a sympathetic community milieu. Announcing a firm intention to withdraw troops soon from Iraq would be a start. Announcing an end to all government to government co-operation with the Uzbek regime would be another good move. We need to reduce the causes of tension.

What will not help is the Blair proposal to introduce detention without charge for three months for terrorist suspects. Over 1200 people have been arrested under government anti-terrorism legislation. Only 18 have actually been convicted ‘ and only a handful of them on anything to do with terrorism. Most were found to have some minor criminal involvement.

Almost all of these were Muslims. Nearly all were innocent and released after the current fourteen days. Holding large quantities of innocent Muslims now for three months is hardly going to reduce tension. Let us not forget that one of the first reactions to the 7 July bombings was to arrange the arrest by Egyptian authorities of a Leeds chemist on holiday there. This was trumpeted on the front pages by our press as a great example of international intelligence co-operation against terror. There has been much less ‘ indeed almost no ‘ coverage of the fact he was found to have no connection at all to the bombs. He just happened to be a Muslim, from Leeds, a pharmacist (Aha! Potential Bomb Maker!) and to have gone on holiday at the time of the bombings. His was one of hundreds of British Muslim names falsely publicised in the UK media in the last three years as part of Al-Qaida.

Do not forget that on the afternoon of poor Mr Menezes’ death, the Evening Standard carried the massive triumphalist headline “LONDON BOMBER SHOT DEAD”. The Standard has not apologised.

There is another point that has not been made about Mr Menezes’ death. He died because of his skin colour. As a Brazilian, his skin tone was not so different from that of the average British Muslim. Had someone with a complexion as white as mine been running around on the underground, they would not have been gunned down by the police.

Of course, Mr Menezes almost certainly died in terror having absolutely no idea who was chasing him. He was not asked to stop by uniformed police. He was suddenly chased by men in plainclothes waving guns. Is it surprising he ran? An eyewitness said that the police did not pull on Baseball caps saying “Police” until after he started running from them. At which point, chased by men with guns, he probably did not spend much time looking back and admiring his pursuers’ headgear. He jumped on a tube, tripped and they shot him dead.

It is time we pulled back from this. To declare this part of an unending war, and the new normality we should live with, shows what a failed and irresponsible government we now have.

The BBC are reporting that another series of terrorist bomb attacks have been targetted at london.

“A number of Tube stations have been evacuated and lines closed after three blasts in what Met Police chief Sir Ian Blair says is a “serious incident”. Sir Ian appealed to Londoners to stay where they were and said the transport system was effectively being shut down.”

For those wishing to follow up-to-the minute headlines from different news sources a news feed is available at the London Friends of Craig Murray Blog.

THE IRAQ WAR AND THE LONDON BOMBINGS

There is a heated discussion in progress at the moment about whether the war in Iraq caused the London bombings. Jack Straw was quoted yesterday dismissing the notion that it had anything to do with Iraq, pointing out that bombers had also struck in countries which did not have troops in Iraq. Tony Blair has made the point that on September 11 2001 Iraq had not yet been attacked. Which is true, although he and Bush had already agreed to do so.

But unlike the bombs in New York and Turkey, these involved young British Muslims. To pretend that the anger of young British Muslims is not stoked by Blair’s foreign policy is just absolute nonsense. Following along with the George Bush international agenda, including the attack on Iraq, has made us deeply unpopular with Muslims everywhere.

On 18 March 2003 I sent Jack Straw an official telegram from Tashkent about US foreign policy in Central Asia, and our support for it. An extract reads:

“4. Democracy and human rights are, despite their protestations to the contrary, in practice a long way down the US agenda here. Aid this year will be slightly less, but there is no intention to introduce any meaningful conditionality. Nobody can believe this level of aid – more than US aid to all of West Africa – is related to comparative developmental need as opposed to political support for Karimov. While the US makes token and low-level references to human rights to appease domestic opinion, they view Karimov’s vicious regime as a bastion against fundamentalism. He – and they – are in fact creating fundamentalism. When the US gives this much support to a regime that tortures people to death for having a beard or praying five times a day, is it any surprise that Muslims come to hate the West?”

It is Iraq, but not just Iraq. It is a foreign policy of oil grab cloaked in hypocrisy, and the impact of that policy on Muslims, that has caused this hate. And that is squarely the fault of Blair and Straw.

None of which justifies the terror. It is probable that most of the people who got killed and injured on 7 July were opposed to Blair and Bush. Only 23% of eligible British adults voted for New Labour. Several of the victims will have marched against the war. Violence just begets more violence.

Nor will it help to rush through yet more legislation restricting civil liberties. It is already against the law to incite someone to commit terrorism. An offence of ‘indirect incitement’, now proposed, sounds very dangerous indeed. It could be just what is needed to silence critics like us.

But perhaps most laughable is the government’s claim that the new legislation is needed to ‘prevent further terrorism’. The idea that you can do that by legislation is laughable.

It is also hard to equate with the other government line, that attacks on London are ‘inevitable’. They are not. Had we not thrown our lot in with Bush, we would not have been attacked. Terrorism is a politically motivated act by human beings. It is not a natural phenomenon like the wind.

We should certainly not change our foreign policy in response to terrorism. We should change it because it was seriously misguided in the first place, and is bringing on us consequences that many of us saw and predicted.

Craig Murray

On Friday we posted an article in which Moazzam Begg discussed possible motivations for those behind the horrific London attacks.

Today, a report from The Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House lays waste to the UK governments claim that the conduct of the “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq were not important factors in increasing the vulnerability of the UK. According to the Chatham House press release:

“there is ‘no doubt’ that the invasion of Iraq has imposed particular difficulties for the UK and for the wider coalition against terrorism. According to the paper, the situation in Iraq has ‘given a boost to the Al-Qaeda network’s propaganda, recruitment and fundraising’, whilst providing an ideal targeting and training area for Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists”.

“A key problem for the UK in preventing terrorism in Britain is the government’s position as ‘pillion passenger’ to the United States’ war on terror”.

Click here to read the report in full.

During the British election, the Craig Murray campaign was pleased to receive the endorsement of Moazamm Begg, a British man imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for more than two years and then relaeased without charge. In an article published today, Moazamm talks about what could have driven young British man to blow themselves apart along with so many others.

Gitmo detainee offers motives for bombings

By PAISLEY DODDS Associated Press

LONDON – Moazamm Begg spent more than two years at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, where some fellow detainees were British-born Muslim radicals or self-proclaimed al-Qaida operatives – the same sort police believe carried out last week’s suicide bombings in London.

During his imprisonment, Begg got to know Muslim extremists who spoke of their anger at the United States. Some talked of attacks. Many were recruited by foreign radicals.

As members of the Muslim minority agonize over how some of their own might have caused such carnage and brace for revenge attacks, Begg – who denied U.S. allegations that he was an aide to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden – offers a glimpse at the possible motives.

Racism in Britain, non-assimilation in some communities, and anger over Iraq, Afghanistan, and the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay might have been factors, the 37-year-old of Pakistani roots tells The Associated Press, six months after being released from the camp in Cuba. Britain negotiated his release along with three other British nationals.

Like many Muslims, Begg says he grew up in Birmingham – England’s second largest city and ethnically diverse – feeling the pull between Britain and Pakistan.

“I talked to many people who were self-declared members of al-Qaida while I was in Guantanamo, and there’s definitely indoctrination taking place in a lot of communities in Britain,” Begg said in a telephone interview with the AP while in London.

Begg described racism that he encountered when he was growing up in the 1980s. Some of his Pakistani friends were beaten up by skinheads, he says. “Almost everyone back then was harassed at some point for being dark-skinned, for being Pakistani,” he said.

But the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims was more acute in regions such as West Yorkshire, which includes Leeds, the northern city where at least three of the four suicide bombers in last week’s attacks are believed to have grown up. The fourth is believed to have been Jamaican-born.

Unlike Birmingham, Begg said pockets of West Yorkshire are dominated by immigrants from specific regions. Many of the groups have not assimilated into British culture, making it easier for radical recruiters to deepen the divide and fan hatred, he said.

The neighborhood where the three suicide bombers are thought to have come in Leeds – 185 miles north of London – is predominantly Pakistani.

Begg says many Muslims living in Britain have been recruited by Pakistani groups to study and fight in Kashmir, a Himalayan border region that both India and Pakistan claim.

“Just like the military doesn’t recruit the old, these groups know to go after the young,” Begg said. “They’re stronger fighters; they’re more impressionable.”

Beyond targeting the young, however, Begg says other issues have fueled hatred in the community – particularly the issue of the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“That is the one issue that has unified the Muslim community recently,” says Begg, who is unemployed but working on a book about his time in Guantanamo. “Even though there are people from more than 40 countries there, most of them are Muslim and that’s what people talk about.”

More than a dozen cases of abuse and mistreatment have been documented at Guantanamo Bay, including details of a military investigation reported on Wednesday where interrogators forced a detainee to wear underwear on his head and attached a leash to his chains.

Another Briton who was jailed at Guantanamo Bay – Feroz Abbasi who grew up in the Croydon, south of London – wrote in his melancholy memoirs penned in prison that he battled shyness, loneliness and suicide attempts before discovering Islam on a backpacking trip through Europe.

Inside the biography are clues that could answer how the young bombers in last week’s London attacks could have turned violent.

Abbasi writes that he read books about Islam and jihad, or holy war, and joined an activist group – S.O.S., or Supporters of Sharia, the strict Islamic law – at Finsbury Mosque, one of London’s largest mosques. Meetings at the mosque left him with fliers describing the plights of Muslims in Chechnya. He later became interested in the Taliban’s fight in Afghanistan.

Although Abbasi admits training as a militant in Afghanistan, the Briton denies being an al-Qaida member.

“One thing is clear: they (the bombers) were motivated more by hatred than the faith of Islam,” said Inayat Bungalwala, spokesman for Muslim Council of Britain.

Begg says it doesn’t stand to reason that Muslim suicide bombers would strike Britain, a country with a high-profile Muslim population where religious and cultural freedoms have been enjoyed to a greater extent than in any other Western country.

“I was religious but it never caused me to feel like I had to carry out attacks,” says Begg. “What has happened is that it appears that the lines are being redrawn with the targeting of civilians who had no apparent loyalty to the country where they lived.”

Begg was in Afghanistan during the start of the U.S.-led war before his capture. He said he was there to start a primary school.

“What I, and what other Muslims struggle with, is the question of why any one could carry out these attacks in a country where we have so much freedom,” Begg says. “Unfortunately I think the attacks will have a profound effect on the Muslim community in Britain before that question is ever really answered.”

The United Kingdom Parliament: Sixth report of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs – March 22nd 2005

61. We conclude that, now that the British nationals have been released from detention at Guant’namo Bay, the Government need no longer keep its diplomacy quiet in the interests of increasing leverage over individual cases. We recommend that the Government make strong public representations to the US administration about the lack of due process and oppressive conditions in Guant’namo Bay and other detention facilities controlled by the US in foreign countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. We further recommend that, during the United Kingdom Presidency of the EU, the Government raise the situation at these facilities in the UN Commission for Human Rights…

98. We conclude that the Government has failed to deal with questions about extraordinary rendition with the transparency and accountability required on so serious an issue. If the Government believes that extraordinary rendition is a valid tool in the war against terrorism, it should say so openly and transparently, so that it may be held accountable. We recommend that the Government end its policy of obfuscation and that it give straight answers to the Committee’s questions of 25 February.

Craig Murray reflects on the London attacks

The first thought is obviously that this is appalling; an evil and stupid act. It can have no possible desirable political consequence, and killed entirely innocent people.

The second thought is that we must not rush to judgement. There was no intelligence indicating an attack was in the offing. We should be very wary therefore of the instant analysis of politicians. Jack Straw could be right when he said yesterday it was probably Al Qaida, but he could equally be wrong. This was premature and could stoke up anti-Muslim feeling.

There is a real danger here. It is right to be outraged at this mass murder, but we should proceed with caution and reflection. It was excess of outrage that led British police to frame the innocent Irishmen of the Birmingham 6 and the Guildford Four, leading to over 100 man years in jail served by innocent people.

Were I still in the FCO and considering this as a terrorist incident, I would consider the following. In terms of co-ordinated attacks using public transport systems, this bears some Al-Qaida hallmarks. However the blasts, terrible as they were, were nonetheless small for Al-Qaida. This was much less devastating than Nairobi, New York, Bali or Madrid and appears in that sense more improvised. We have to ask why? It is very normal to get on the tube with a heavy suitcase or rucksack, and the risk of detection getting on with 15 kg of high explosive is not much greater than getting on with 3kg.

The other question is the relation to both the Olympic award and the G8 conference. It seems to me the timing is most unlikely to be coincidental, but the purported Al-Qaida responsibility claim on the internet doesn’t stress either of these. A curious omission.

I by no means rule out Al-Qaida or their sympathisers. But I just want to point out it is by no means a straightforward question. We should wait until evidence and investigation starts to answer some of these points before we jump in assigning blame.

UK Watch- Promoting Democracy?:Since 2001 Britain has been using the ‘historic window of opportunity’ (to borrow a term from US Secretary of State James Baker) created by the events of September 11th, to prop up dictatorships in Central Asia. One very prescient example of this was the virtual tolerance of one of our allies in ‘the war on terror’ to commit mass-murder. Uzbekistan’s crackdown on protesters in Andijan was, according to Human Rights Watch, ‘so extensive, and its nature was so indiscriminate and disproportionate, that it can best be described as a massacre’.

Murray was promptly sacked for speaking out against his masters, but sometimes eminent figures are kind enough to communicate Britain’s foreign policy with some level of candour. Before the invasion of Iraq, Robert Cooper, Tony Blair’s ‘foreign policy guru’, laid out the principles at the core of Britain’s international affairs in his article ‘Why we still need empires’, where he stated: ‘when dealing with old-fashioned states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era ‘ force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself.’

The Guardian – We must keep the last taboo: The events of September 11 2001 have sparked a series of counter-terrorist campaigns around the world that are described by the US administration as amounting to a global war on terror. It is easy to laugh at such overinflated language but we should recognise the ambition that lies behind the claim. It involves nothing less than a reworking of our natural responses to cruel behaviour by state authorities from countries of which we approve, replacing what has (at least since the second world war) been our critical, human-rights-oriented response to such behaviour with an excusatory or even justificatory one, rooted in a new and overriding emphasis on national security and the need to respond to the threat of the outsider Other… The foreign secretary’s is the kind of duplicitous moral position that the law lords will have the opportunity to expose and destroy. They should certainly do so, stressing not only the moral repugnancy of torture but also its ineffectiveness. Torture evidence is utterly to be rejected here not only because of its iniquity but also because of its manifest unreliability. Do we seriously think overseas torturers are better or more efficient than ours?

The Independent – Revealed: Western nations that send terror suspects to torturing regimes: Britain and other Western countries are meeting the terror threat by sending suspects to regimes where they risk torture and abuse, it is claimed in a damning report published today… Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has recently accused Britain of complicity in torture… He said many prisoners of Uzbek origin captured by US forces were delivered to Uzbek jails where they were subjected to torture. Information from these interrogations ended up in MI6 reports that he received. “MI6 said they found the intelligence useful,” he said. “I was shattered and disillusioned.”

To read the Human Rights Watch report, follow this link.

Click here to find out how you can help Craig Murray’s campaign

The Guardian – We must not move on : I imagine the ghost of Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty, turning in his grave at the CIA kidnapping their terror suspects in Europe and dumping them in client states for vicarious torture; new US attorney general Alberto Gonzales advising Bush that some elements of the Geneva conventions are “obsolete”; US general Ricardo Sanchez’s memo authorising new interrogation techniques that violate the Geneva conventions; subcontracting of interrogation by private US contractors in Iraq; and UK ambassador Craig Murray, fired from his post in Uzbekistan for “operational reasons”, who coincidentally took up the case of a mother whose son was boiled alive in detention, and who further claimed MI6 had used information gained by torture passed on by the CIA. Torturers are on the march; some have muscle and plastic gloves, others have expensive educations to chip away at legal convention, and most insidious of all, the wordsmiths, who “soften up” public opinion with “sleep manipulation”.

Dissident Voice – Unrest in Central Asia: Freedom’s Shining Hour?: The human rights-/democracy-promotion politics in Central Asia reached its glorious apogee with the ambassadorship of Craig Murray in Uzbekistan. A young idealist, Murray caused a sensation with a scathing attack on Uzbekistan and its leader at the opening of America’s Freedom House two years ago, and was finally removed from his post after more than one scandal, the last one being his denunciation of the British Foreign Office’s use of information obtained under torture by Uzbek authorities.

Sunday Times – Foreign Office faces probe into ‘manipulation’ (by Robert Winnett)

THE Foreign Office is facing an investigation into the way it treats its staff amid allegations that diplomats and mandarins are being “politically manipulated”.

A friend of one of those affected said: “People’s careers are being ruined because they are not toeing the political line.

“The independence and probity of Foreign Office staff is something that is paramount yet recent events have undermined this key principle.”

A number of senior diplomatic staff claim they have been victimised for speaking out against government policy.

They include James Cameron, a diplomat in Romania, who made allegations about Britain’s lax immigration controls, and Craig Murray, the ambassador to Uzbekistan, who claimed that the government was turning a blind-eye to human rights abuses.

Other senior diplomats and London-based officials have also voiced concerns about the management of the department and are thought to be co-operating with the inquiry by the National Audit Office (NAO), the government’s watchdog.

Some of the complaints are believed to be about ministers’ failure to deal with concerns expressed by diplomats and officials in the run-up to the Iraq war.

With a general election imminent, details of the investigation could not have come at more sensitive time. Tony Blair has been heavily criticised for his informal style of government which has prompted complaints about presentation stifling Whitehall.

It is rare for the management practices inside a government department to be subjected to NAO scrutiny.

The First Division Association (FDA), the union representing the most senior civil servants, is also understood to have serious concerns about the Foreign Office.

It has hired an independent consultant to assess complaints made privately about the department by serving officials.

The consultant is thought to have concluded that there is a serious problem.

The FDA’s report has been sent to Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, who will come under pressure from Tory MPs in parliament this week to issue a statement.

The Sunday Times detailed last year how the department’s personnel unit “systematically mistreated” and bullied staff.

A former Foreign Office official claimed that the personnel office had a white marker board on the wall headed “Tosser of the week” on which staff were encouraged to write disparaging remarks about potential recruits and existing personnel.

The official said: “We were encouraged to write derogatory remarks about anyone who was annoying or who we were upset with.”

Clive Howard, an employment law specialist with the solicitors Russell Jones & Walker who has been contacted by dissatisfied diplomats, said: “The Foreign Office appears to have institutional failings in the way it deals with its staff.”

The Foreign Office and the NAO declined to comment yesterday.