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Demonstrators hold placards as they attend an anti-war and anti-trident demonstration near the Houses of Parliament in central London on July 18, 2016.
Demonstrators hold placards as they attend an anti-war and anti-trident demonstration near the Houses of Parliament in central London on July 18, 2016. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
Demonstrators hold placards as they attend an anti-war and anti-trident demonstration near the Houses of Parliament in central London on July 18, 2016. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

Terrorism, Trident, and Torture – a valedictory dispatch

This article is more than 7 years old
  • And Official Secrecy and Arms Sales as well

Alas, this is my last security and defence blogpost for the Guardian. I have appreciated your comments – both critical and supportive. However, I intend to continue to pursue the most serious issues that have preoccupied this blog in the past and will continue to confront all of us in the future.

TERRORISM. The threat of violent terrorism will last – a generation, successive prime ministers have said. If air strikes continue to put pressure on Isis on the ground in Syria and Iraq, Isis will spread its messages even more aggressively through the internet and social media, urging followers to attack targets in the west and elsewhere. More “lone wolves” - extremist and disturbed individuals of all kinds, religious and secular - may in turn be encouraged to commit violent attacks on soft targets.

Professor Rik Coolsaet of Ghent university has argued that Isis means Europe is entering a new era. Isis has become “the object of all kinds of fantasies for all kinds of individuals, from thrill-seekers to the mentally unstable”, who want to part of the group and that has made the job of security services much harder in what he has called the “new normal”.

TRIDENT. Terrorists will not be deterred by the threat of an attack by nuclear-armed inter-continental missiles. Trident, I have argued , is not only useless from the military point of view, it is not a credible deterrent. Theresa May and the UK defence secretary, Michael Fallon, suggest it is needed to deter a resurgent Russia. Putin’s Russia is not posing the kind of threat that needs nuclear weapons to deter.

Trident will cost more than £200bn over a 30-year lifespan, according to estimates which have not been challenged by the government. Indeed, ministers refused to give an estimate of the total cost when persistently pressed to do so by Angus Robertson, the SNP leader at Westminster, in the recent Commons debate on renewing Trident. It seems that Trident is necessary whatever its cost.

I simply note that the eminent military historian, Sir Michael Howard, has observed that cyber warfare is more credible than nuclear warfare.

TORTURE. For decades ministers in successive governments denied that Britain was ever involved in rendition operations- abducting terror suspects and alleged Islamist extremists and secretly flying them to jails where they were tortured. That myth was blown when ministers had to correct parliamentary answers that claimed no UK territory had been used in rendition flights. They belatedly admitted the large US bomber base on Diego Garcia, in the British Indian Ocean Territory, had been used for CIA rendition flights, contradicting earlier denials. British troops in Iraq had also handed over detainees to US forces and were subsequently mistreated, ministers admitted contradicting earlier statements to parliament.

Then in 2011, ironically as a result of Nato bombs, documents discovered by journalists in Tripoli revealed that MI6 was directly involved in the rendition of two opponents of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in an operation leading to their torture. After well over a year investigating, the Crown Prosecution Service announced in June it could not bring any criminal charges.

The case is now being investigated by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, a body that has failed in the past to get to the truth because of the failure of MI5, MI6, and Whitehall officials to provide it with the evidence. We can rely, among others, on the human rights group, Reprieve, and the Tory backbencher, Andrew Tyrie, to keep up the pressure.

ARMS SALES. British manufacturing skills may be in decline (we spend huge amounts of money on Trident but cannot build civil nuclear powers stations) while UK arms exports continue to flourish. British governments have not dared to admit that you cannot promote human rights at the same time as promoting arms sales -especially to such countries as Saudi Arabia (the UK’s biggest single arms market) and Bahrain (home to a new British naval base). Campaign against the arms trade (CAAT) does excellent research.

Whether or not the move was triggered by the impending high court case over UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the government – on the day the Commons broke up for its long summer break - corrected previous statements about the supply of British weapons to Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign in Yemen.

In a written answer published on Thursday, the Foreign Office said written answers in February 2016 had stated: “We have assessed that there has not been a breach of IHL (international humanitarian law) by the coalition.” The correction said these should have stated: “We have not assessed that there has been a breach of IHL by the coalition.”

The Foreign Office also corrected a written answer by the then foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, who stated on 4 January 2016: “I regularly review the situation with my own advisers and have discussed it on numerous occasions with my Saudi counterpart. Our judgment is that there is no evidence that IHL has been breached, but we shall continue to review the situation regularly.”

The correction published on Thursday said it was important to note that the government had not reached a conclusion as to whether or not the Saudis were guilty of IHL violations in Yemen. ”This would simply not be possible in conflicts to which the UK is not a party, as is the case in Yemen,” it said.
The written answer added that it was not for the UK government to assess Saudi bombings.

Now we learn that the UK licensed £3.3bn worth of arms to Saudi Arabia during first 12 months of the bombing of Yemen.

OFFICIAL SECRECY. Despite its promise of greater openness and transparency, the government shows little sign of it. In the most recent release of files, Whitehall has withheld all files belonging to Mark Thatcher’s dealings with Oman over a hospital contract; 32 Cabinet Office files on the Peter Wright Spycatcher case from 1986 and 1987, most of which are said to be “temporarily” retained by the department; and files on the Profumo scandal which are closed for an apparently arbitrary period of 84 years and therefore due for release in 2047.

Section 3 4) of the Public Records Act, says documents can be retained, indefinitely, by Whitehall departments “for administrative or any other special reason”.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) recently admitted that it keeps a list of files it has destroyed. That list remains an official secret. “The routine publication of destruction lists would create additional work for FCO staff during the process of transferring files to The National Archives”, it explained to the author and literary agent, Andrew Lownie.

The increasing use of electronic communications, notably emails , in Whitehall will mean records are even more vulnerable to unscrutinised destruction. A click of a finger and all could be deleted for ever.

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