Britain pays off WWII debt
Thursday, 28 December 2006, 13:17
Amazing factoid of the day: Britain is this week due to make the final £45m repayment to the United States Treasury for the World War II-era Lend-Lease loans. That is all.
USA Today: Tony Blair is more popular in the United States than in Britain. Oh, and 66 per cent of Americans, including Bill Clinton, would like to see Blair running the United Nations. Comments Jan 29, '06
Channel 4 reports that tomorrow’s New Statesman will report a leaked Foreign Office letter that indicates that the UK government was informed about the use of British airspace for so-called “extraordinary rendition” flights by the CIA.
Update: The story is now online. Comments Jan 18, '06
SNP foreign affairs spokesman Angus Robertson MP has released a dossier of CIA flights that landed at airports in Scotland. Comments Jan 18, '06
Al-Jazeera won’t get its memo
Tuesday, 17 January 2006, 23:20
Al-Jazeera has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Cabinet Office, asking for a transcript of the 2004 meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair during which Bush allegedly suggested bombing the station’s headquarters in Qatar.
When somebody beat them to this approach by nearly a month, the response was predictable — although the Cabinet Office admitted holding the requested information, they refused disclosure based on the section 27 (detrimental to international relations) exemption to FOIA.
But Newsnight tonight reported that a Downing Street spokesman responded to questions about al-Jazeera’s request by denying that the document contained any reference to bombing al-Jazeera.
I suspect that when it comes 19 working days from now, the formal FOIA response will look a lot like the one Steve Wood received last month (PDF).
Lawyer seeks disclosure of al-Jazeera memo
Wednesday, 11 January 2006, 16:21
The lawyer of one of the men accused of violating the Official Secrets Act over the leak of a document allegedly showing that George W. Bush had proposed to bomb the headquarters of al-Jazeera will seek disclosure of the document during the trial.
Former parliamentary researcher Leo O’Connor and former government communications official David Keogh are facing charges over the leak. The trial date was set yesterday with little fanfare. The New York Times today reports:
Neil Clark, a lawyer for Mr. O’Connor, said he was shown the memo for the first time on Tuesday on condition that he discuss it only with his client. But, Mr. Clark said, he would seek the disclosure of the document in court. “I didn’t think there was anything in there that could embarrass the British government,” he said.
Hundreds of bloggers have vowed to defy reporting restrictions by publishing the document if it comes into their possession. So far has not been seen publically. Even the Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire, who broke the story, based his account entirely on the recollections of individuals who had seen the document.
Yesterday, we learned that Labour MPs Tony Clarke and Peter Kilfoyle had in October 2004 revealed the contents of the document to a British expatriate in California, John Latham. Although they admit this violation of the Official Secrets Act, they are not facing charges.
British and European MPs want answers on CIA renditions
Wednesday, 23 November 2005, 01:51
A new cross-party committee of backbench MPs will investigate the UK’s role in the CIA’s &;dquo;extraordinary renditons” flights, the Guardian reports today.
Andrew Tyrie (Conservative), Sir Menzies Campbell (Lib Dem) and Foreign Office minister Chris Mullin (Labour) are leading the effort.
While the UK government is strangely silent on CIA flights stopping over on its own soil, other European countries are more concerned about the practice, leading to rather strange situation reported by the Associated Press:
Britain has agreed to write to the United States on behalf of the European Union requesting clarification of reports of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, a diplomat said Tuesday.
Britain, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, was asked by several nations including Finland and the Netherlands to write the letter during a EU foreign ministers meeting Monday, the European diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (which, contrary to some headlines, is not an EU body despite confusingly using the same flag) is also looking into CIA rendition flights and their connection to the alleged CIA “black site” prisons in Eastern Europe.
Swiss liberal senator Dick Marty, who is leading the COE parliamentarians’ investigation, says that he has no proof of the existance of the “black sites”, but is investigating 31 flights that landed in Europe and seeking satellite images of sites in Romania and Poland.
Another Downing Street memo?
Wednesday, 23 November 2005, 01:26
Ho hum. Nothing to see here:
… Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, informed newspapers editors including that of The Times that “publication of a document that has been unlawfully disclosed by a Crown servant could be in breach of Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act.”
…
Under a front-page headline “Bush plot to bomb his ally” in the Daily Mirror yesterday, a secret minute of the conversation in April 2004 records the President allegedly suggesting that he would like to bomb the channel’s studios in Doha, capital of Qatar. …
According to the Mirror, the transcript turned up in the office of former Labour MP Tony Clarke, who lost his Northampton South seat in May.
And guess what, two people have already been charged under the Official Secrets Act for leaking the document:
Last week, Leo O’Connor, a former researcher for Mr Clarke, was charged with receiving a document under section 5 of the act. David Keogh, a former Foreign Office official seconded to the Cabinet Office, was charged last week with making a “damaging disclosure of a document relating to international relations”. Mr Keogh, 49, is accused of sending the document to Mr O’Connor, 42, between April 16 and May 28 2004.
And CNN has the official denial:
“We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response,” a White House official told CNN. A Pentagon official called the Daily Mirror report “absolutely absurd.”
Al-Jazeera said it wanted to be “absolutely sure” the memo cited in the report is genuine and urged 10 Downing Street to confirm the information if true.
If the memo is accurate, the network’s statement said, “it would be incumbent on them to explain their positions on statements regarding the deliberate targeting of journalists and news organizations.”
Downing Street spokesman Ian Gleeson said Blair’s office would have no comment since the memo the Daily Mirror cited is the subject of court action.
It seems the contents of the document are “outlandish” enough to warrnet a very public prosecution a civil servant and a Parliamentary aide for leaking it.
UK role in CIA rendition flights
Monday, 12 September 2005, 11:44
The relaunched Guardian has a big feature about the UK’s role in “extraordinary renditions” — CIA flights that take terror suspects for interrogation in friendly third countries with dubious human rights records.
Precise numbers are impossible to determine. A report on renditions published by New York University school of law and the New York City Bar Association (PDF) suggests that around 150 people have been “rendered” in the last four years, but that is only an estimate. A handful have emerged from what has been labelled a secret gulag, and have given deeply disturbing accounts of horrific mistreatment.
Previous media reports have uncovered sketchy details of a British link to CIA abduction operations, but the full extent of the UK’s support can now be revealed. Drawing on publicly available information from the US Federal Aviation Administration, the Guardian has compiled a database of flight records which shows the extent of British logistical support.
Aircraft involved in the operations have flown into the UK at least 210 times since 9/11, an average of one flight a week. The 26-strong fleet run by the CIA have used 19 British airports and RAF bases, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Birmingham, Luton, Bournemouth and Belfast. The favourite destination is Prestwick, which CIA aircraft have flown into and out from more than 75 times. Glasgow has seen 74 flights, and RAF Northolt 33.
Denmark recently banned CIA rendition flights from its airspace.
The Guardian illustrates its feature with pictures of a U.S. military transport plane of a type thought to be used for renditions. But chartered private jets are also thought to be used in the practice, including one owned by the owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team and a Gulfstream V with the fuselage number N379P.
Stealth expansion of government secrecy
Tuesday, 16 August 2005, 19:35
In many countries, Freedom of Information laws are gradually emasculated by later legislation that specifically prohibits the disclosure of information.
This has even been a problem in the United States. As Julian Sanchez reports in Reason, it’s one of the things legislators are looking to strengthen in America’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):
One section of the OPEN Government act has already passed the Senate as a stand-alone bill. That law would attempt to eliminate “stealth exemptions” to FOIA by requiring Congress to explicitly identify any statues that would limit the public’s right to access information under FOIA. [Lucy] Dalglish, explains that as the law stands now, “I could spend a year going through the federal code and not know what’s covered. This gives us a warning: If a bill is proposed that limits FOIA, it’s not going to fly under our radar.”
It’s also a problem in the UK, where section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 prohibits any disclosure that “would breach another enactment or would constitute a contempt of court”. It’s an absolute exemption that can’t be overridden by a public interest test.
Unlike the Americans, British lawyers, activists and journalists don’t have to trawl the statute books to find out the true limitations of their FOIA: The Government has done it for them. According to a review (PDF) published earlier this summer by the Department of Constitutional Affairs, there are 210 British laws that bar disclosure under FOIA.
The DCA went to all this trouble for a pretty positive reason: They were looking for secrecy laws that might be worth repealing under Section 75 of the Freedom of Information Act.
The Americans should take a look at Section 75 of the UK FOIA, which allows the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs to Order laws that conflict with government openness. Unfortunatly, its first use only rendered eight secrecy provisions inoperative.
A further 40 have been earmarked to be removed, and another 19 will have had sunset clauses added. (Oh goody. This means you will now be able to get information collected under Schedule 2, paragraph 7 of the Energy Act 1976 after 1985.)
The DCA decided that the remaining 111 secrecy provisions should remain untouched.
The UK, on the other hand, should look at the provisions of the OPEN Government bill that require notification of any “stealth exemption” to FOIA carved out as a result of secrecy provisions in new legislation.
Why? Seven new restrictions on government openness were passed between the day the Freedom of Information Act was passed on 30 November 2000 and the day it came into force on 1 January 2005. They probably won’t be the last. Journalists and other people who care about openness in British government need to keep an eye out for the creeping narrowing of the Freedom of Information Act via “stealth exemptions” injected via Section 44.
What’s better in Britain than in the US
Tuesday, 16 August 2005, 16:09
Lionel Shriver returns to the United States and reminds Brits what she is missing:
I’ve been exasperated to witness the same dwindling and consolidation of small dairy concerns in the UK that has destroyed the cup of coffee in the United States. British milk is merely pasteurised, whereas American agri-business deconstructs the stuff like Derrida, heats it to temperatures common to the planet Mercury, and then puts Humpty-Dumpty together again, a project famously unsuccessful. So dreary is even the full-fat version in the US that on cereal I actually prefer rice milk. As British superstores drive milk’s price to rock bottom and the country’s dairy farmers out of business, here I am yearning to pay more for this rare product. You have wonderful milk. Nurture it. American milk is rubbish.
Also better in Britain is the price of breakfast cereals, television news, and — if you’re in New York in August — the weather, believe it or not.
London media scooped on bomb photos
Thursday, 28 July 2005, 18:07
Was the grainy, black-and-white x-ray photograph of a nail bomb that was splashed across the national papers’ front pages today a blow to the so-called “special relationship”?
The photos were leaked to ABC News, allegedly by sources in US law enforcement agencies with whom British police shared the evidence.
Despite a plea from the police last night not to publish the photos, a number of national newspapers — broadsheet and tabloid — carried them on their front pages.
It wasn’t the only recent leak of British materials in the United States. According to the BBC,
Soon after the bombings a Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre report leaked to the New York Times revealed that three weeks before the attacks British intelligence officials thought there was no group with the intent or capacity to attack the UK.
Now CNN that Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair is concerned that the leak came from US agencies:
“I am concerned that some of the photos were supplied in confidence to some of our colleague agencies in the U.S. and were published there and subsequently around the world,” Blair said.
…
In the U.S., leading Congressman Pete Hoekstra said the leak could affect the relationship between intelligence agencies in Britain and the U.S.
Hoekstra, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said: “We work on this stuff hand in hand and we can’t be looking over each other’s shoulder wondering who is leaking whose information.
“It’s impossible to know how tight police are being with the details in London but if the investigation is put in jeopardy, that would be a tragedy.”
In the age of the internet, asking people not to publish material already readily available in another jurisdiction is a futile excercise.
ABC did ignore the police request not to publish, but can perhaps be forgiven because publishing material from an ongoing investigation isn’t as big a problem in the US as it is in more Britain.
But what was the leaker(s) thinking? What interest is served by putting these images in the public domain? Am I missing something here?
Update: Via Liberal England, I learn that foreign media with foreign law enforcement sources have been beating their British counterparts since the very day of the bombings.
US Congress wants materials on 2002 UK Iraq memo
Tuesday, 5 July 2005, 20:45
Fifty-two members of the US House of Representatives have filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Pentagon, State Department, and White House asking, among other things, for documents regarding “the subject matter of the Downing Street Minutes of July 23, 2002” regarding a possible invasion of Iraq in 2002.
It’s a huge, broad request, for more or less everything to do with Iraq since George W. Bush became president, but it should be interesting to see what the Representatives get back. Some of it might also make waves here in the UK.
Who leaked the Downing Street Minutes?
Wednesday, 15 June 2005, 13:18
Now that Deep Throat, the most most famous confidential source in journalism, has been outed, Kevin Drum has a new object for speculation: Who leaked the Downing Street Memo Minutes to the Sunday Times? Unlike here in the UK, the Times’ story on the 2002 meeting in Downing Street about Iraq is now a hot story in the US blogosphere.
Drum points to a story suggesting it could be Sir Christopher Meyer, the former UK ambassador to the United States.
The problem with this speculation is that the Sunday Times may not know the answer themselves. There is probably no smoke-filled scene in an underground carpark for the movie version of this story. For all we know, a brown envelope just happened to end up at the Sunday Times’ front desk.
Update: Freiheit und Wissen doesn’t want to know.
