Home Office

The row over the arrest of shadow immigration minister Damian Green is not going away. Nor should it, all it takes is some evidence to emerge that either the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister did have prior knowledge of the arrest and they're toast. What is interesting is Ms Smith's latest outburst on the Andrew Marr programme where she said it would be wrong for ministers to intervene in a police investigation.

I'm wondering now if we could have a statement from Ms Smith condemning the ministerial interference in the Police investigation into the corruption at BAE as 'Stalinism'. After all it's something Ms Smith is also involved with.

A shameless attempt to win the prestidgious Order of the Brown Nose from the Home Office minister, currently in Washington DC. She's aware of the primaries and has announced her startling opinion: gordon Brown is better than Hillary and Barack combined.

Gordon Brown had successfully managed both to build on the experience that he has as being part of the Labour Government over the last 10 years and to register to the British people that there was a change of emphasis and that there were new challenges that his premiership was going to be able to address”.

She added: “He combines the best of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

We offer a pound to the first reporter who asks either candidate if they think they're half as good as the dour Scot.

Just a quick update to the previous buggers story - Nick Robinson is claiming that it was Thames Valley Plod, not the Met, who bugged Mr. Khan and Mr. Ahmad.  Probably reasonable given the location of the prison, so apologies to the incompetent murderous mendacious bastards at the Yard.

However, given that it seems to have been initiated by a TVP copper acting on his own initiative, it's quite possible the Met and indeed every other force in the country is happily reaching for the RIPA 2000 and bugging anyone and everyone without bothering to inform a judge or the Cabinet.  This leads to the following bit of speculation:

If you or I went round blabbing details of anti-terror surveillance operations we'd be in Paddington Green trying to remember Gareth Peirce's phone number* before too long.  Doesn't seem to apply to the Sunday Times and the Tories, however, who evidently both received this information, so who leaked it?  Whose noses would be put out of joint by a lot of ordinary coppers getting in on the domestic surveillance game?  Whose paper is the Sunday Times?  Answers on a postcard (left in a dead letter drop in the Brompton Road) and addressed to 'MI5, Thames House, London'.

OK, so what would the spooky calculation be?  Let slip that the fuzz are bugging MPs and suddenly Straw and the boys (and the Tories, hence the leak to them) are put on the back foot, realise what a monster they've created in allowing the police unchecked surveillance powers, put uppity Plod and his Acme Listening Kit back in his box and go running back to the professionals.  Perhaps.  All seems rather neat, really, but there's a plausible case here to say that genuine MI5 anti-terror surveillance operations (which I'm certainly not opposed to, see Shami Chakrabarti's comments) could easily be badly compromised if there's a police operation unknown to them going on.  If that's the case, the leaker's done us all a favour.

The only unanswered question is what on earth TVP thought they'd pick up - Sadiq Khan MP isn't a terrorist, he's Jack Straw's PPS FFS.  I suggest they did it because they could and because there's no accountability *at all*.  Thus are police states run, you don't have to have a reason to be arbitrary.

Talking of which, Olbermann is in fine form (via ChickYog).  There's more from SpyBlog too, and Tony Benn makes the obvious, if paranoid, point that the Wilson Doctrine never meant that much anyway.

Now for some light relief.  The Metropolitan Police clearly concluded long ago that their job was to enforce the law, but not to follow it.  What other construction can we put on this?

Gordon Brown was drawn into a dispute yesterday over a claim that police secretly bugged one of his MPs during meetings with a man suspected of links to terror groups.

An inquiry was ordered into the allegation that Sadiq Khan, now a government whip, was covertly recorded during two visits he made to Babar Ahmad in the prison where he is being held. The Conservatives said that they had given warning to Mr Brown six weeks ago that an MP had been subjected to surveillance, in breach of a convention against bugging MPs, and accused him of doing nothing.

Now, I'm not sure what's the more laughable suggestion here, that Sadiq Khan is a prominent campaigner for civil liberties (he *was*, but his voting record since being elected to Parliament hardly does him credit on this, backing ID cards, anti-terror laws and Trident but opposing investigating Iraq), that the Met decide who to bug without asking anyone or that Gordon Brown's administration apparently lose letters from senior opposition politicians (hint: try asking top government couriers TNT).  Possibly none of them are quite as laughable as the case against Mr. Ahmad, a beneficiary of David Blunkett's enlightened attitude to justice and democracy as demonstrated by the 2003 Extradition Act.  In case anyone's not following the Register coverage of the associated trial in the USA, here's a taster:

Abu-jihaad has been charged with e-mailing information on the transit of his naval battle group through the Straits of Hormuz to Babar Ahmad and Azzam Publications in London in 2001. At the time he was serving on the destroyer Benfold. For the purpose of the case, Babar Ahmad - now awaiting a court decision in February on whether or not he is to be extradited to the States - is considered by the US government to be a terrorist. The government alleges Abu-jihaad's communications with Ahmad and the purchase of Chechen resistance videotapes from the Azzam website to be aiding terror, with the defendant an agent of a foreign power.

A glaring problem with the government's case against Abu-jihaad is that the evidence against him is thin. Although the US has submitted e-mails to Azzam which they have claimed are from Abu-jihaad, prosecutors admitted in pre-trial filings this month that "the Government had no recorded statements or testimony personally linking Abu-jihaad to the e-mail account from which [the communications to Azzam in question] were sent."

Of course, SpyBlog have been on the case from the start, in usual exhaustive detail, plus the bugging story.  Useful to correct some bias and poor details in the original Sunday Times story.  Also, remember the old rule, the Sunday Times is MI5's paper, the Sunday Telegraph is MI6's.

There's a growing blog movement which you may have seen, starting at Dan Hardie's place, to pressure the Government into following Denmark's lead and give asylum to Iraqis who helped British troops and are therefore likely to get left to fend for themselves when we pull out.  There are two ways to look at this - first, collaboration with an occupying power is generally not a good thing, particularly if it prolongs the occupation.  On the other, the occupation is ending, the insurgency will win, which in British controlled areas will mean a nasty internecine fight for supremacy between various Shia mobs.  In all this there will be no protection for people who, whatever they have done, are not neo-cons and don't deserve to die.  The same is true, only more so, for their families.  I have a rooted objection to the neo-con attitude that individuals don't count, and this campaign, in direct opposition to this attitude, is therefore worthy of support.

There's a third point, which is that British acknowledgment of the immense Iraqi refugee crisis has been entirely lacking under Blair, since it involves recognition of reality and consequence, which Tony didn't really do.  If Brown really wants to be different, we can give him the opportunity with a campaign.  This is, of course, only a step, and isn't as morally acceptable as, say, offering to help on the scale we're forcing Syria and Jordan to help, but it's a start on the road to acknowledging the debt of honour we have created for ourselves.  We need to start paying back for Tony's mistake just as much as we need to make him pay.  It's the right thing to do.

*Davide adds*

There is now a petition up on the Downing Street website which asks the PM to grant the right to asylum in the UK for Iraqi citizens employed by the UK armed forces. Please take a moment to sign it and, if you have a blog, link to it. Thanks.

A major plank of the Government's case against holding an Independent Public Inquiry is that the ISC committee has already looked at everything, and that is sufficient.
Listen to the attack dog's robust defence of the ISC here from last night's C4 news...

Now listen to Paul Murphy, Chair of the ISC demonstrate his grasp[sic] of the brief on last night's newsnight.
I can't quite work out if he is saying that his committee was not given the full facts about the identification of MSK, his committee failed to understand the information it was given, or was lied to by the securuty services.
I suspect the wriggle defence will be that by 'Identified' - Murphy will claim he meant identified as being on the list of primary terrorist targets, but that does rather leave one wondering how someone can be on the list of primary targets before they have been identified...

Finally, listen to Mrs Rachel North and Paul Lever, former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee destroy what is left of the reputation of the ISC.

Now, if you haven't already...

[just a holding post, as this isn't going away any time soon...]

The Operation Crevice Trial is over.

So how much did MI5 know about MSK?
MI5 to plead poverty over 7/7 failure.
MI5 knew of bomber’s plan for holy war
The July 7 questions that still haunt victims

Independent Public Inquiry anyone?

UPDATE:

Mrs Rachel North is back:

Meanwhile, the spin on the few Radio Bulletins I have caught this afternoon seems to be split along two lines, depending on whether it is the government, or the security services doing the spinning: 

- That the correct decision was made when it was decided not to follow up the involvement of MSK and ST because, as suspected fraudsters associated with the biggest 'terror investigation in the UK they weren't important.

- Or that the security services really would have quite liked to follow them up, but there weren't sufficient resources.

Which begs the question, if the correct decision was made at the time, then how can it have been a resource issue...?  You don't need resources to NOT follow up on somebody.   Either MI5 wanted to pursue these 2 men's involvement but couldn't, or they didn't feel they needed to. 

The government and establishment are still resisting an Inquiry.  Given their collective duplicity and evasive wriggling over the last 2 years, it appears protecting their own reputations with spin and flannel is still a higher priority than protecting us...

Hindsight is a poor tool for altering history, but a damn fine tool for planning ahead.

*Davide Adds*

Tonight's edition of Newsnight should be interesting. I've just received their e-mail alert:

For anyone who missed the show, it can be seen from here (briefly).

What does the Home Office do when a teenage Zimbabwean asylum seeker, who was married to a member of the persecuted opposition party and claims to have been raped by a senior ally of the Mugabe regime, exposes a major sex-for-asylum scandal in the Immigration Service in which she herself was a victim and which resulted in a Home Office minister being moved from his post?

Answer: It deports her to Zimbabwe.

Despite Tony Blair calling what is happening in Zimbabwe "appalling, disgraceful and utterly tragic", he is still prepared to deport hundreds of Zimbabweans and to try and convince hundreds more to return to that ruined country.

What was that about "our values" again Tony?

The UK Passport Service has been underperforming for many years. Staff in some foreign embassies have also been handing out passports to anyone who walks in the door.

So, something needs to be done. Naturally New Labour turn towards their authoritarian tendancies and announce that new applicants for passports will have to attend a personal interview and answer 200 questions, about themselves, who they live with, their finances and credit history and other questions to establish their 'social footprint'. In a nod to Stalininsm, these interviews will be recorded and kept for... well, they're not saying.

One in four interviews is expected to fail, and yes, this is a dry run for ID Cards.

I wonder how many questions we will have to answer to get an ID Card...

28,000 people signed the petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme, one of the largest responses since the e-petition service was set up. The petition is now closed but the Prime Minister has decided to e-mail the people who signed up to tell them why he is going to ahead with the scheme anyway. The e-mail is too long to post here in full so I've just put in a few excerpts. I've saved the whole message as a pdf file which you can download from here. Needless to say the Prime Minister fails to acknowledge the abuse of civil liberties and privacy his scheme entails and the numerous experts and officials who have said that the scheme is impractical and too costly.

It will increase fraud. Hackers have already found a way to crack the security codes and clone biometric passports. Doing the same to ID cards shouldn't present a problem to them.

I thought fingerprinting was something that happened to suspected criminals when they are arrested, not everyone. My new Italian passport will last ten years and I can go anywhere with it. It has no biometric data or computer chips in it, and what's more it only cost 30 quid. Even without the new biometric data, my British passport cost more than double that some years ago.

The difference is, of course, that store cards are voluntary, no shop has forced one on me. Also with the ID card and National Identity Register scheme more information can be added later, like medical details, despite an earlier promise not to include such information.

Er... no, not really. Terrorists and criminal gangs will carry on regardless, possibly with cloned ID cards.

The EU-funded FIDIS (Future of Identity in the Information Society) has warned that implementation of the current generation of biometric travel ID will dramatically decrease security and privacy, and increase the risk of identity theft. Sounds like a gift to terrorists to me. This little exchange between David Davies and Joan Ryan last year is revealing; David Davies pointed out that Microsoft’s National Technology Office says that ID cards could “trigger massive identity fraud”, and one of the FBI’s leading identity fraud consultants said that the ID card could be replicated perfectly by criminals within six months. Joan Ryan's response is priceless.

Iris recognition has been dropped from British biometric plans because it has been found to be useless. Other countries will probably follow suit.

I'm not even slightly reassured. What exactly are these "strict safeguards"?

It is also the law-abiding majority who are losing valuable civil liberties. How much support there is for compulsory ID cards rather depends on how you ask the question doesn't it? I haven't even gone into the costs of this scheme, but needless to say I don't believe Blair's claim that it will cost less than £30. Sending an e-mail to the tens of thousands of people who signed a petition because they wanted this scheme scrapped, and telling them why their demands will be ignored isn't really a successful exercise in democracy. A referendum on the issue would give a far more revealing picture of national sentiment on the issue but we all know why Blair won't want to do that.

Blair's e-mail did also mention that James Hall, the official in charge of delivering the ID card scheme, will be answering questions on the Downing Street website on 5th March. So in another exercise in futility, we can put some questions to him. I wouldn't know where to start.