Thoughts from London

Who cares about law, just bug them all
Her Majesty's Secret Service is looking more soiled than secret. Its dirty tricks and incompetence are raising such a stink that it is competing with Prime Minister Tony Blair to be the No. 1 smell in the civic nostril.

In recent years the British spy system has been exposed and ridiculed not only because of the quality of its intelligence but also as it appears to have succumbed to political manoeuvring and pressure.

Its intelligence agents seem more like the bungling fictional character Inspector Clouseau than the illustrious James Bond. Much of this so-called intelligence is nothing more than bits and pieces of information picked up from newspapers or club gossip from half drunks as a long time friend of mine Peter Heap, a former British ambassador who also served in Sri Lanka, said in a scathing article in The Guardian about a year ago. There are two problems. Because these snoopers are called intelligence agents they and their bosses really think what they send is intelligence. Some of it is hardly intelligible.

The other is that they believe they can do anything and not be accountable to the people - at least in democratic countries. In his book "Spycatcher" Peter Wright accused the secret service of plotting to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson which shows that all this talk of national security is only a cover for illegal machinations. If they could use dirty tricks to oust an elected British prime minister what would they not do to foreign leaders and others perceived to be inimical to British interests?

We know only too well the British hand in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh with a little help from the CIA. And what did this "regime change" in Iran bring? The pro-western Shah of Iran and his dread secret police the Savak who collectively suppressed the people, threw thousands in jail without trial and brought misery to millions.

Remember the MI6 operation in the 1990s when they tried to create anti-Iraq hysteria in order to help Britain's devious plans? Read Scott Critter, a former UN weapons inspector to know all about "Operation Mass Appeal".

When Tony Blair, playing second fiddle to George W. Bush, was scratching around for excuses to justify plans for the Iraq invasion, British intelligence came up with the story that Saddam Hussein tried to acquire nuclear material from an African country, Niger. Blair grabbed the story with glee. President Bush was sold on it too and even referred to it in his address to the nation when this so-called intelligence had already been thoroughly discredited by the UN as false and based on forged documents.

Blair led Britain into a war based on false and cooked-up intelligence, bad legal advice and a highly dubious prospectus that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent and real danger to Britain and British interests.

If he thought that Lord Hutton's report that whitewashed his government and himself of wrongdoing had let him off the hook, a bitter lesson was learned last week - the ghost of Iraq is not simply going to fade away.

The first blow came when the Old Bailey case against Katherine Gun, an official working at GCHQ that continuously eavesdrops on communications traffic from around the world, was unexpectedly withdrawn. She was charged with violating the Officials Secrets Act by disclosing a United States-United Kingdom information bugging operation against countries with which Britain not only had diplomatic relations but were also considered friendly nations. They were six members of the UN Security Council - Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico and Pakistan.

Their support was vital if the US-UK resolution on using force against Iraq was to succeed at the Security Council. So the two big powers wanted to know how they would vote. The US could not win without the votes of the undecided six.

The US asked for the help of the British Government and its intelligence agencies to get information on their voting intentions. The one sure way of getting that information was through electronic surveillance of communications traffic (to use the more sanitised phrase for spying) between the diplomatic missions of the six countries and their capitals.

Deeply shocked and concerned by what she saw in the e-mailed memo from the US National Defence Agency, Katherine Gun leaked the story to a Sunday newspaper.

She later admitted disclosing the UN spying operation. Last week the Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith on behalf of the government, tried to explain away the sudden withdrawal of the charges against her saying there was no "realistic prospect of conviction."

That, of course, was nonsense. The real reasons lie elsewhere. It was Goldsmith who advised the government that successive UN resolutions on Iraq provided a legal basis for invading Iraq.

Blair and Goldsmith feared that the demand made earlier last week for the documents relating to the AG's advice be made public would rekindle the public debate on Iraq and the illegal war. When Goldsmith's opinion was originally made public, it was not accompanied by any reasons for that opinion. The defence would have cited the law of necessity for Gun's actions. She wanted to save lives and serious injuries and this could have gone down well with a jury. The government ran scared. It feared serious damage would be done to its claim for a legal basis for the war.

It is now known that senior legal advisers in officialdom, including lawyers at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Defence Ministry had questioned the legality of war.

While the government was eating humble pie it choked on more bad news. Appearing on BBC Radio's "Today" programme, a former cabinet minister Clare Short dropped a bombshell. She claimed that British intelligence had been involved in bugging the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's private office and she had seen transcripts of Annan's private conversations. Short's unexpected attack had Blair rattled. His only response was that she acted "irresponsibly". On the question of bugging, he would neither confirm nor deny. But nobody seriously doubts that with today's technology even more sophisticated bugging is happening daily.

Blair claimed that British intelligence had never violated domestic or international law. Well, then he should not be worried should he? But he was so defensive at his monthly press conference last week? Bush and Blair are great preachers of morality and civilised values. They are good at preaching, not practising.

The United States and the United Kingdom are united in bugging. It does not matter whether it is friend or foe. Nothing appears sacred to the two Bs. First they undermined the authority of the United Nations by defying it and invading Iraq. Such is the morality of big powers. Those who follow them blindly should stop to think, unless of course they prefer Mammon to morality.

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