04.03.2004

Short lifts the curtain

Imperialism’s Iraq adventure is turning more and more sour. Just ask the residents of Kabbala. But you can also ask Tony Blair as well. Instead of basking in the post-war adulation which he no doubt thinks he deserves, Blair is coming under increasing pressure. Robin Cook and Clare Short resign from his cabinet. No WMDs ready for launch at 45 minutes notice found. A Hutton enquiry which is instantly dismissed in the popular mind as a mere whitewash. Michael Howard’s boycott of Butler, etc, etc. Try as hard as he might to shift the agenda, Iraq just will not go away.

This was dramatically emphasised by last week’s revelations about the grubby spying activities of the UK state in the run-up to the Iraq war. Harold Macmillan once said that any public discussion of ‘national security’ was “dangerous and bad”. There can be little doubt that Tony Blair and Jack Straw share the fundamentally anti-democratic instincts of the former Tory prime minister. The ruled must not know what the rulers are doing - even if it is all done in their name. Hush-hush, old chap.

So we have the story of Katherine Gunn, a former employee at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, the UK’s premier ‘listening base’ (ie, spy and surveillance centre). Gunn - whose central duty was translating Mandarin Chinese into English - was arrested nearly a year ago and charged eight months later under the 1989 Official Secrets Act. Her crime had been to pass on to a journalist friend a top-secret memo from a member of the US National Security Agency (NSA), Frank Koza, asking the UK to help mount a “surge” operation and gather intelligence about the voting intentions of the six ‘swing’ states on the United Nations security council. US imperialism and its junior but loyal partner, the UK state, were going to war and nothing or no one was going to get in their way.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, these ‘swing’ states - Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Pakistan, Mexico, Chile - were the focus of intense activity, not all of it entirely diplomatic. In his leaked email, Koza asked for “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”. Gunn was outraged when she read the email, believing it to be in violation of international law, especially the Vienna Convention, which theoretically forbids such spying operations on diplomats.

However, the case against Gunn was suddenly dropped - with the prosecution announcing that there was no “realistic prospect” of convicting her. The real reason, of course, was that the prosecution team did not want to disclose the fact that the very legality of the Iraq war itself had been questioned by the entire foreign office law team - so much so indeed, as we now know, that the team’s deputy head, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned at the time because she was unhappy with the legal advice proffered up by the attorney general, Lord Jerry Goldsmith.

This brings us to the interventions by former cabinet minister Clare Short. You could almost hear the establishment jaws dropping to the ground when Short casually mentioned on the BBC’s Today programme that the British intelligence services had been bugging the office of Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general - why, she had even read the transcripts of his ‘private’ telephone conversations. Furthermore, and potentially more damaging for the Blairite/pro-war camp, Short had been informed at the time that the British armed forces “would not move without the attorney general’s authorisation” - which is why she found something “smelly, fishy” about Goldsmith’s legal advice. Blair needs a legal fig leaf for his imperialist war - and, lo and behold, his old buddy and flat-mate, who just happens to be the attorney-general, provides him with one. Nothing sleazy or corrupt about this, of course.

Only a few days later, Short compounded her treachery by appearing on the Jonathan Dimbleby TV programme and reading out a “threatening” letter from cabinet secretary Sir Andrew Turnball, the UK’s most senior civil servant. Hinting that she might be kicked out of the privy council - or worse - Turnball sternly warned: “I hope that you will take no further part in interviews on this issue. I also reserve the right of the crown to take further action as necessary. I have to admit to being extremely disappointed at your behaviour. I very much regret that you’ve seen fit to make claims which damage the interests of the United Kingdom.”

Here is Short’s real misdemeanour in the eyes of the British establishment - to damage the ‘national interests’ of the UK state. In their pursuit the agents of the state have virtual carte blanche to indulge in whatever dirty tricks are deemed necessary. In many ways this licence to bug and burgle is codified by the Official Secrets Act - which all servants of the crown have to sign.

First introduced in 1911, it was heavily revised in 1989, following a succession of incidents involving whistleblowers, most notably Clive Ponting. A ministry of defence civil servant, Ponting was prosecuted for leaking information about the sinking of the Belgrano in 1982 to the Labour MP, Tam Dalyell. The trial judge torpedoed Ponting’s defence by ruling that the interests of the state were whatever ministers decided they were - and hence directed the jury to convict. However, the jury spurned the good judge’s advice and acquitted Ponting.

Unsurprisingly, the establishment took fright at this example of popular justice - and as a result the 1989 act makes it an offence to publish any material encountered in the course of your work, even if the information does no specific harm to the intelligence services. There is no longer any public interest defence. All that remains is a ‘defence of necessity’ - whereby the accused claims to have been forced to reveal such material “to avoid imminent peril of danger to life or serious injury to himself or towards individuals for whom he reasonably regarded himself as responsible”. Of course, this was the defence claimed by ex-MI5 agent David Shayler - and Katherine Gunn too.

Disturbed by this outbreak of openness, No10 announced that the 1989 act would be “reviewed” in the wake of the Gunn case. However, the authoritarian Blairites are all too aware that, no matter how oppressive a law they frame and enact, at the end of a day a sympathetic jury might well acquit the miscreant whistleblower anyway, regardless of the exact legal niceties. No wonder David Blunkett is hatching plans to curtail the right to a jury trial.

Communists, on the other hand, unambiguously and militantly defend the right to jury trial and call for the abolition of the Official Secrets Act - and, indeed, demand the end of all state secrets and the abolition of the secret intelligence services. There should be transparency and accountability in all state transactions.

For communists and socialists last week’s bugging scandals serve to expose the true nature of the UK state - rotten and secretive to the core. We entertain absolutely no illusions about bourgeois state power and the ruthless lengths it will go to in order to defend itself from popular-democratic incursions and challenges. For the bourgeoisie and its agents, the ends always justify the means - and virtually any means at that.

Take GCHQ or, for that matter, the NSA at Forde Meade, Maryland. The surveillance operations carried out by the latter are so vast that its computers have to be measured by the acres they occupy. The NSA’s mission statement is to essentially vacuum the entire electromagnetic spectrum, homing in on any ‘key words’ (anti-war, peace march, protest, socialism, etc) which might indicate to any vigilant officer that subversive skulduggery is afoot. Every 60 minutes they intercept millions of telephone calls, emails and faxes. Talk about full spectrum dominance - US imperialism’s ultimate dream. The Forte Meade base costs at least $3.5 billion a year to run and directly employs 20,000 officers - and that is not counting the 100,000 servicemen and civilians the world over whom it ‘controls’ in some way or another.

The NSA’s junior partner in crime in Cheltenham has similar ambitions - with 6,500 staff and ‘sister’ monitoring stations in Cyprus, Germany and Australia and elsewhere. Significantly, a large part of GCHQ’s £300 million budget is funded by the US in return for the right of the NSA to run listening stations in Britain - Chicksands, Bedfordshire; Edzell, Scotland; Mentworth Hill, Harrogate; Brawdy, Wales - and on British territories and dominions throughout the world. Farcically, until 1983 the UK government refused to even reveal what GCHQ’s real role was - we were all supposed to collaborate in the elaborate pretence that it was just another ‘ordinary’ civil service department.

Needless to say, anything which casts even a minuscule ray of light on the workings of the special services or which damages them in some way can only be good from the point of view of our movement. So we communists are grateful for Clare Short and her slightly buffoonish vendetta against Tony Blair - she has helped lift the curtain on the tensions and frantic manoeuvrings of the UK state, as it prepared and agitated for war against Iraq. We say to hell with Andrew Turnball and the Official Secrets Act: she should tell more and tell everything.

The truth can only cause Blair and the warmongers more and worse difficulties. No wonder Short is already the object of so much venom at the moment. She is “irresponsible”, “Calamity Clare”, etc, and, as Blair said at his monthly press conference, those who attack the work the intelligence services are doing “undermine the security of the country. It is wrong and it should not happen - it is as simple as that.”

Not that Short herself is any sort of consistent anti-imperialist. She has remained faithful - for all her outbursts and wobbles - to the UK state and its concerns, as she sees them. Short supported imperialist intervention in ex-Yugoslavia and - after much moralistic dilly-dallying - ended up backing what she now terms Blair’s “reckless” Iraq war.

Communists and revolutionary socialists will do their utmost to exacerbate Blair’s present difficulties - we must keep up the pressure. The Stop the War Coalition has taken up the call for a people’s tribunal to cut through the fog of lies and misinformation surrounding the Iraq war. Meanwhile, on Saturday March 20 tens of thousands of demonstrators are set to take to the streets of London, demanding an end to the occupation of Iraq.

And it has been this, the unprecedented mass movement of 2003, and its continuation into 2004 which breathed courage and defiance into Labour’s once docile backbenches. The rebels no longer just include the usual suspects like John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn and the rest of the Campaign Group of MPs. Indeed to bring the parliamentary Labour Party and mavericks such as Clare Short to heel the Blairite machine has been making dark threats. There is talk of formal warnings, suspensions, expulsions and even prosecution before the courts.

George Galloway could be just the first of many.