30th March 2006
Another Parliament Misled
The British Government has confirmed that the Norwegian governmet lent it four radars to help with the invasion of Iraq:
Adam Price: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence whether the United Kingdom used Norwegian Government radar equipment as part of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. [61151]
Mr. Ingram [holding answer 27 March 2006]: Yes, we made use of Norwegian radar equipment. The United Kingdom and Norway enjoy close defence relations, and the UK remains grateful for the protection these assets offered our Forces.
The trouble is the Norwegian Government didn’t tell the Norwegian Parliament (the Storting). Norway earned 17m kroner (about £4 million) for renting out its Ericsson built radar equipmet that were used in targeting missiles in the early “shock and awe” phase of the military campaign.
According to television journalist Erling Borgen, the then UK Defence Minister, Geoff Hoon, wrote to his Norwegian counterpart, the Conservative Kristin Krohn Devold on 27th March 2003, just eight days into the war thanking Norway for their support. Borgen also claims that British soldiers were trained in using the radar in advance of the invasion at a time the British Parliament was being told that no decision had been taken.
Now we’re told this war was about creating democracy in Iraq.
At the expense of democracy virtually everywhere else it seems.
27th March 2006
Britain bounces Afghan cheques
The international security think-tank, the Senlis Council, claimed yesterday in Kabul that millions of pounds of compensation promised to farmers in the troubled Helmand Province in south-western Afghanistan in return for poppy eradication has not been paid.
According to local community leaders British officials met with them in 2002 and agreed to pay $350 per jerib (about one-fifth of a hectare) for the voluntary eradication of 62,000 jeribs. Up to $21 million of the compensation remains unpaid four years later, and, according to the Council, four hundred cheques have bounced at a local bank in Lashkar Gar because the British Government account has insufficient funds.
As the Council points out, it’s not just British Government credit that has suffered: goodwill and trust, which were already in short supply, have now all but evaporated – along with the impoverished farmers’ only source of income. And all this on the eve of a major British deployment to this war-ravaged region. This sounds as if it has all the hallmarks of yet another lions-led-by-donkeys blunder, destined to makes an already difficult mission all the more dangerous for Service men and women.
When I challenged Defence Secretary Reid on the Council’s allegations today, he shrugged it off, arguing the Council, who support the (eminently sensible) idea of licensed opium production for pharmaceuticals like codeine and morphine, are not a reliable source of information because they have an ‘agenda’. We’ll see who’s right when the farmers sue the British Government in the British Courts for “breach of contract”.
26th March 2006
Labour Government Hypocrisy Shocker
Truly wonderful news about the release of Norman Kember. But there is another British citizen being held in Iraq in indefinite detention who has received scant media attention. And this time it’s the British Army that’s doing the detaining.
Hilal Abdul-Razzaq Ali Al-Jedda, a UK citizen, with four sons born and bred in London, was arrested by British soldiers on suspicion of being involved in terrorist activity on October 9th 2004. He has now been held for almost eighteen months without charge at the Shaiba Divisional so-called Temporary Detention Facility in Basra.
The Court of Appeal is about to deliver its judgement on Al Jedda’s petition to be allowed to return to the UK. The Government is seeking to resist this, claiming Mr Al Jedda is a security threat but freely admitting they have insufficient evidnece to put before a court.
It was all the more surprising, then, to hear the Attorney General argue last month in his speech at the LSE that ”…determining if a particular person is or is not a terrorist requires more than mere assertion on the part of an authority, however genuine and well-intentioned that authority may be. Our tradition requires such an assertion to be subject to testing by an independent and competent tribunal.”
It’s sheer hypocrisy for Peter Goldsmith to support the right-to-trial when he is at the very same time attempting to deny that right to a British Citizen who has been held in legal limbo in our very own one-man Guantanamo for nigh on eighteen months. Goldsmith says there should be no “non-persons” as far as the law is concerned but that’s precisely how this UK citizen has been treated – held without charge, by our own admission, on insufficient evidence to put before a court and then even denied the most basic consular assistance – he hasn’t even had a single visit. If there is sufficient evidence to put before a court then this man should be prosecuted; if not he should be released and allowed to return to the United Kingdom. That is the principle the Attorney General says he supports, while, in fact, he does the opposite.
It’s high-time Ministers stopped grandstanding on the US Administration’s Guantanamo “anomaly” and started admitting their own increasingly shameful record on the denial of fundamental human rights. After all, the other British Citizen in long-term detention in Iraq, Mobeen Muneef held by the Americans at Abu Ghraib, has at least had his case referred to the Central Criminal Court of Iraq.
As final proof of our own double standards compare this statement by Jack Straw on the plight of the British Guantanamo Three in the House of Commons on February 19, 2004:
”….our position remains that the detainees should either be tried in accordance with international standards or they should be returned to the UK.”
with this parliamentary answer on the fate of Mr Al Jedda:
“Adam Price: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs whether Mr. Hilal Al Jedda will be tried according to international norms or returned home to the United Kingdom. [45387]
Ian Pearson: Mr. Al Jedda is detained in Iraq pursuant to UN Security Council resolutions 1546 (2004) and 1637 (2005) and Iraqi legislation, which authorise the Multi-National Force in Iraq to detain persons where this is necessary for imperative reasons of security. He is not currently facing any criminal charges. Mr. Al Jedda travelled voluntarily to Iraq and the UK Government are under no obligation to return him to the UK.”
BTW I offered this story to the Independent, Independent on Sunday, Guardian and the Today programme but none were interested. Maybe the fact that Mr Al Jedda was born in Iraq put off our liberal media.
23rd March 2006
Iraq Blunders 2: co-opting the militia
For a while now Ministers in the MoD have been forced to admit that the Iraqi security services have been involved in human rights abuses, even, in some cases, atrocities on the scale of Saddam. They have mostly blamed this on Shia militia who have ‘infiltrated’ the police in places like Basrah. John Reid has even sent his old friend, the former RUC Chief Sir Ronnie Flanagan, out to Iraq to see what’s gone wrong.
They are now refusing to publish his report and I think I know why. Because far from the Shia militia ‘infiltrating’ the Iraqi Police, it turns out we deliberately recruited them. Check out this answer:
Adam Price: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence whether it was his Department’s policy following the cessation of major hostilities in Iraq to encourage members of the Badr Corps and Badr Organisation to join the Iraqi security forces. [51619]
John Reid [holding answer 14 February 2006]: Following the end of the conflict in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority sought to re-integrate militia members into civil society. This process included members of the Badr Organisation, formerly known as the Badr Corps, among others.
And if that wasn’t clear enough here’s the Government’s evidence to the Defence Select Committee’s Inquiry on Iraq from March 2004:
(Q2069) The extent to which militias are operating within the UK Area of Operations, both with the consent of the Coalition and without.
Several organisations who may (or have elements who may) be termed `militia’ currently exist within the Multinational Division (Southeast) area of responsibility. The Coalition’s policy is to encourage individual members, from the Badr Corps in particular, to join the New Iraqi Army or another official organisation. The activities of militia, and their parent organisations, vary widely over time and by geographic area. Our analysis of their activities is classified.
What is particularly damning is that the Government were well aware even by the Spring of 2004 of a growing pattern of violence, (more on that in a later blog)especially on the part of SCIRI’s BADR Organisation, but were choosing for policy reasons to ignore or even tolerate it.
Time Magazine (Inside Iran’s Secret War, August 22 2005) carried a fascinating piece on all this in which it was claimed: “A 2004 British army inquiry noted that the Badr organization and another militia were so powerful in Amarah, “it quickly became clear that the coalition needed to work with them to ensure a secure environment in the province.”
The Army must now surely be rueing that decision:
Excerpt from a report by Iraqi Al-Sharqiyah TV on 17 February:
”The British Army has said it is currently carrying out an operation to cleanse the ranks of the Iraqi police in the southern city of Basra from elements it described as death squads. Alex Wilson [commander of the 7th British unit] said that his troops were still arresting what he described as bad and outlaw elements in the ranks of the Basra police. He stressed that the British campaign sought to eradicate death squads from the city’s streets despite the protests he said the campaign was facing, without revealing their source.
Wilson added that the past three months witnessed 141 assassinations, which is double the number of assassinations that took place between May and November 2005. He pointed out that most of these attacks were perpetrated by elements wearing Iraqi police uniform, as well as elements of a special force affiliated with the Iraqi Interior Ministry which was dissolved due to what he described as corruption. He added that most assassinations targeted elements of the banned Ba’th Party, tribal chiefs, members of some minorities, criminals and oil smugglers. (BBC Monitoring)”
The decision to try and co-opt the militant paramilitary pro-Iranian Shia Badr Organisation into the heart of the Iraqi Security Services having just purged all the former Baathist Sunnis from their positions in the Police and the Army was doomed from the start to sow the seeds of the kind of vicious intra-communal violence that we now see daily on our television screens.
The Ministry of Defence – with all the experience at its disposal from Northern Ireland and particularly the dangerous liaisons during the 80s with Protestant paramilitaries – should have known that siding, or being seen to take sides, with one group in a society in the grip of a civil war is foolhardy in the extreme. We have turned so many blind eyes to so much violence – kidnappings, torture and assassinations – it has now become deeply embedded within the new Iraq and even threatens to engulf the entire region. Eventually, in Basrah as in Baghdad, even erstwhile allies, emboldened by our patronage, will end up turning their guns against us.
22nd March 2006
Gordon Goes Native
We’ve become accustomed to Gordon Brown wrapping himself in the Union Jack of late. But in his tenth Budget to date he went one step further and donned the Cross of St. George, mentioning the England soccer and cricket teams, with plenty of good news if you are a high-rolling champagne drinker in the South-East of England but very little cheer for ordinary working people and pensioners in Wales.
With the unemployment rate in Wales now increasing at double the UK average, and a net loss of 7,000 manufacturing jobs in Wales over the last year – and that’s before the awful news at Panasonic – there was nothing specific to raise Wales from the bottom of the UK prosperity league where we’ve slumped to under Labour.
Instead what did we get – a new initiative to boost the financial services sector in London where the average wage for men is already over five times that in Wales. There were two reports on regional policy: one on the labour market in London and the other on economic development in English cities. Wales, along with Scotland and Northern Ireland, were relegated to footnotes in the Chancellor’s 61 minute title bid for the premiership.
Not a penny more, either, for the long suffering workers at Allied Steel and Wire. The Chancellor is happy enough to dip into the unclaimed assets at banks and building societies to fund his own pet projects – the national youth community service – but not to return to these workers their pensions stolen from them through a combination of private greed and Government deception.
Like the Labour Party, and most people under this Government, the Chancellor is massively in debt. The £11. 4 billion of net borrowing for this year is double the figure forecast a year ago. And this is not forgetting the billions of pounds of extra PFI deals which will finance much of the Chancellor’s plans for investment in English education – money that won’t be available in Wales, driving the funding gap for English and Welsh schools even higher.
The Chancellor’s oblique reference to integrate tax and national insurance is a signal of tax rises to come. And the ‘early warning system’ on disruption in the financial markets is a worrying echo of recent discussion in the US on the need for a mechanism to prevent a stock market crash in the event of an American or Israeli attack on Iran. But it’s good to know in the event of a catastrophe those City bonues will be safe.
