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Baroness Ludford: flights illegal and inhumane |
Baroness with a mission… to unmask secret terror war
WHAT political boxes can you tick for Baroness Sarah Ludford? She started out as a Lib Dem councillor in Clerkenwell in the 1990s and later became one of nine MEPs for London.
Her political identity? Liberal, of course. But she can also be identified with the ideals that led to the birth of Labour more than a century ago.
In recent months her passionate denunciation of powers, including Britain, for secretly allowing prisoners – caught in the Middle East or Afghanistan – to be flown to interrogation centres in Poland or Egypt and then tortured, put her to the left of most Labour MPs and every cabinet minister, all of whom have kept their thoughts to themselves.
You could say, of course, that she is true to good old Liberal traditions.
Other Liberal figures such as Lords Tony Lester or Andrew Phillips match her enthusiasm for exposure of flights known as “extraordinary rendition”.
On Friday evening she spoke about her fears on “rendition” at a meeting organised by a human rights organisation at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in Holborn.
It was chaired by Frances Webber, a senior figure in the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers.
She spared few supporters of the hidden war of rendition – including the co-conspirators in the British government – in her 30-minute description of the efforts to unmask this secret war against terror.
Her hero is Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who has steered the EU to accept that something fishy is going on among decision-makers in Britain, for instance, where CIA-controlled flights have landed at Prestwick, in Scotland, on their way to secret jails in Poland.
It turns out, according to Baroness Ludford, that a decision taken secretly on August 4 2001, by a high-ranking NATO committee gave “carte blanche” to shackled and hooded prisoners being tortured in countries where US law officially hasn’t got any jurisdiction.
In condemning these practices, a typical liberal might seek refuge in spin... But political nuances aren’t part of Baroness Ludford’s game when it comes to the secret traffic of political prisoners. To the baroness it’s illegal and inhumane. No nuance or qualification there. Right to the point, illegal and inhumane, she said as she leaned back, winding up her talk.
As we left after the meeting, I pressed her about her early days in active politics. She talked enthusiastically about her time as a Clerkenwell councillor and how she had fought for her constituents against red tape and thoughtless decisions taken by the then Labour council.
Suddenly, she switched to the fate of her husband, Steve Hitchins, former leader of Islington Council, who lost his seat at the last local election.
“He was such a good leader,” she said.
She admired the present-day administration at the Town Hall and thought that at last sound “strategic” decisions were being taken by the Lib Dems.
Nothing seemed to lead up to it, but then she turned on the Islington Tribune, which she accused of being biased against today’s Lib Dem-led council.
Something may have stirred in her at that moment for then she added: “But I suppose as a newspaper you are always against whoever is in power.”
I let her make that point. |
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