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Brought to book on the War on Terror
Spies, Lies and the War on Terror.
By Paul Todd, Jonathan Bloch, Patrick Fitzgerald. Zed Books.
HE doesn’t much look like a ruthless war crimes prosecutor.
Erudite and cheery, Paul Todd seems more a good-natured bloodhound than vicious attack-dog. Yet the evidence he’s helped amass in this book is exactly the kind that might put the men behind the War on Terror into the dock.
Despite its billing as our very fight for survival, the War’s in fact been a dirty affair in which our governments have often been as thick as thieves with the terrorists, lavishing cash and even weapons on them, this book proves. Meanwhile our governments have also been busy building secret prisons, writing torture manuals,
spinning propaganda and a web of laws and eavesdropping networks that have extended their reach into our lives.
The roots of all this go much further back than September 11th, 2001. A lot of today’s terrorism is what the experts euphemistically call ‘blowback’ from the squalid wars of recent history, like Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 1979 Soviet invasion when America and Saudi Arabia pumped $10bn and more than 60,000 tonnes of weapons a-year to their proxy Cold War warriors, fanatics who became the Taliban.
The CIA sub-contracted training the terrorists to Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency and Britain’s cash-strapped MI6, using techniques honed in Northern Ireland. (It’s worth recalling water-boarding and other torture methods were routinely used in Northern Ireland in the 1970s). CIA regional chief Gust Avarakotos ordered them to “teach the Mujahadin how to kill: pipe bombs, car bombs.
But just don’t ever tell me how you’re doing it in writing. Just do it … The Brits were eventually able to buy things that we couldn’t because it infringed on murder, assassinations and indiscriminate bombings … They basically took care of the ‘How to Kill People’ department’”.
Things were supposed to change after the Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s when the CIA was caught secretly selling weapons to Iran – then at war with Iraq, which was also supplied by America – and using the profits to covertly fund death-squads in Nicaragua. But the emergence of Al-Qaeda and Islamism has proved the lie.
Since the 1950s Western governments have been using Islamist groups to subvert socialist and national liberation movements in the Middle East and Indian sub-continent. Since the 1990s these networks have come in very handy in wars against Yugoslavia, Iraq and Lebanon.
Some of the Islamic charities despatching aid to Muslims caught in the Yugoslavia wars of the 1990s were well funded by the Saudi government and enjoyed top-level links in Washington and London.
Yet among the aid convoys were young men travelling to military training camps, including many young Britons. Some had been whipped up by firebrand preachers like Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Qatada, Abu Hamza – each, it emerged, had ties to Special Branch or MI5, and became recruiting sergeants for terrorist attacks here.
A veteran of the camps with links to Pakistani, British and American intelligence was former London School of Economics student Omar Saeed. Arrested in India for kidnapping British and American tourists, he was freed in a prisoner exchange after an ISI-linked airliner hijacking. He was allowed into Britain despite protests from families of the kidnap victims, operated openly in America where he was pivotal in a Pakistani scheme to fund the 9/11 bombers, and had known links to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.
After leading an attack on American offices in India and helping mastermind the beheading of American reporter Daniel Pearl, he was eventually tried secretly in Pakistan. Top-level links mean he’s never faced the death sentence the judge handed down.
Another who almost had his collar felt was Saudi security chief Prince Bandar. At the heart of Middle East scheming, a former Taliban pay-master, fixer in the Iran-Contra deal and close friend of the Bush family, he was accused of trousering $1bn in an investigation into a British Aerospace arms deal three years ago.
Faced with awkward questions Tony Blair stepped in to shelve the case.
Yet for the rest of us the War on Terror has been less forgiving. In America sweeping phone-tap and internet surveillance has been used, even against Quaker religious meetings. Here more than 200 terror laws have been passed, undermining the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and European Human Rights laws. British agents have been involved in more than 2000 interrogations in countries using torture. Thousands of civilians have been pulled up by police under stop-and-search laws last used on such a scale during the Northern Ireland Troubles, though with virtually no actual arrests to show for it. A similarly disheartening roll-call of high-profile flops include Operation Crevice, dogged by interventions from America and Pakistani intelligence, and outlandish claims of deadly threats that turned out to be just that – plots to blow-up Heathrow Airport and Old Trafford football stadium, ricin poison factories in Wood Green (where co-author Jonathan Bloch is a councillor) and terrorist networks in Forest Gate.
Blair may be hauled in front of an Iraq war inquiry but co-author Paul Todd is sceptical he’ll get much more than a rap over the knuckles. “I just don’t think anything new will come out. Most of the information is somewhere out there in the public domain already. I suppose Gordon Brown will have to answer questions about short-changing soldiers, perhaps so will [former defence secretary] Geoff Hoon because he was in charge when abuses took place.” Blair’s spin-doctor-in-chief, Kentish Town resident Alistair Campbell, may also be hauled over the coals but Todd reckons there’s little chance these men he dubs “desk-killers” will ever face a real tribunal for the War on Terror – unless perhaps this book stirs up an unexpected hue and cry. |
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