Andrew Rawnsley's two-part Channel 4 documentary, The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair (executive producer: an old friend, Anne Lapping), was obligatory viewing last Saturday evening and last night. This was political documentary of a high order, as one would expect of a programme by Anne and Brian Lapping's company Brook Lapping, once described by the Wall Street Journal as "The acme, the Rolls Royce, of documentary makers".
The programme was predictably full of intriguing insights and some trivial but incisive revelations alongside much familar footage, some of it so familiar that one found oneself mouthing silently in synch with the sound-track: "Most people think I'm a pretty regular sort of guy, and I am…"; "She was… the People's Princess," and so forth. Funny to 
think that we shan't be seeing and hearing these greatly loved classics much more, with the departure of the Great Communicator and War Criminal tomorrow, although if he is really going to be the envoy of the "Quartet" — the US, the UN, Russia and the EC — charged with bringing peace and justice to Palestine and Israel, we may be hearing from him for two or three more months, until he can announce, echoing his mentor and role model, "Mission Accomplished!"
I was glad that the Lapping/Rawnsley programme identified, in some detail, Blair's unshakeable belief that he had scored a great personal triumph with his part in the NATO attack on Yugoslavia over Kosovo as one of the prime motivators driving him to disaster in Iraq four years later. I regretted, though, that the usually sceptical Mr Rawnsley seemed to have fallen for the Blair version of what actually happened at and around Kosovo in 1999. I have described at length elsewhere (especially here and here), and needn't repeat now, the powerful evidence that the NATO attack on Yugoslavia (generally but misleadingly referred to in shorthand as Kosovo) was neither legal, nor justified, nor necessary, nor honestly motivated or accurately represented publicly, nor successful in achieving either its pretended or any of its actual objectives: thus in all these respects, a terrible warning of what was to come in Iraq. A defining characteristic of Blair's premiership has been his ability to convince himself, and often others, that everything he has done has been right, honest and necessary: "I did what I passionately believed was right," another lethally revealing Blairism, used indiscriminately of his failures as well as his occasional successes. But I couldn't accept as adequate Rawnsley's account of the Kosovo affair when he omitted any mention of the fraudulent Rambouillet conference (billed as an attempt to negotiate a settlement between the Kosovo Albanian separatist guerrillas and the Serbs, but actually so managed as to provide a pretext for bombing Serbia — and the rest of Yugoslavia); and, almost worse, omitting even to touch on the secret diplomatic initiative by envoys of the US and Russian governments, with the then president of Finland, which devised and negotiated a radically revised set of proposals, differing from the NATO demands in several material respects, thus producing the eventual settlement under which Serbian forces were withdrawn from Kosovo and replaced by an international administration — all on condition that NATO stopped the bombing at once. It was hopelessly inadequate at best, grossly misleading at worst, for the programme to give the impression, as Rawnsley did, that all it needed for Milosevic to be forced to capitulate to NATO — Blair at its head, sword raised aloft — was for Blair to persuade Clinton to say that 'all options were open' (with the unspoken but wildly implausible implication that he was about to send American ground troops halfway across Europe in a land invasion of Kosovo). But this has now become the received wisdom, so I suppose Rawnsley can't be too severely blamed for reflecting it.
One other passage in this otherwise excellent retrospective had me muttering 'No, no!' at the screen. Here too the Blair revised version is in danger of displacing historical truth. It's simply not the case, as the programme claimed, that the then French president Jacques Chirac was personally and primarily responsible for the UK's (and US's) failure to get the vital "second UN resolution" conveying Security Council authority to use force then and there against Iraq. Contrary to British ministers' knowingly mendacious assertions at the time, Chirac had never said that France would veto any such resolution at any time and in any circumstances. Indeed, in his much misquoted television interview of 10 March 2003, just days before the US-UK attack on Iraq, he had pointed out that France would not need to veto any resolution authorising war at that time because there was a clear majority in the Security Council opposed to the use of force before the UN weapons inspectors had finished their work, so if the UK and US were imprudent enough to put any such resolution to the vote, it would be humiliatingly defeated without the need for vetoes by France or anyone else. (The facts and references are in an earlier Ephems piece here.) Chirac was right, and the UK and US never dared to let their draft enabling resolution come to a vote in the Council. Had they done so, it would have been defeated without any need for French, Russian or Chinese vetoes. But the US and UK took their countries to war anyway, with the consequences that we all know.
However, this flaw was handomely offset by a splendid description in the programme by Sir Stephen Wall, possessor of perhaps the sharpest brain in the Diplomatic Service of his day, of a call on Chirac by Blair, accompanied by Wall, several months before the Iraq war when Bush's ambition for such a war was beginning to be widely rumoured. Chirac had told Blair that he, Chirac, had experienced the ugly reality of war as a young soldier in Algeria, and it was not to be undertaken lightly — an obvious reference to Blair's lack of any personal military experience. It would not, Chirac continued, be difficult to topple Saddam in a military attack on Iraq, but it would be extremely difficult to establish anything resembling a democracy thereafter. Giving the vote to the Shia majority would not be democracy. There would be bitter inter-communal fighting between Shi'ites, Sunni and Kurds with wholly unpredictable consequences. Wall said that as they left the meeting with Chirac, Blair said to Wall: "Poor old Jacques! He just doesn't get it, does he?" Wall adds the devastating comment: As we all know now, poor old Jacques 'got it' a lot better than we did. A wonderful story!
It would be nice to think that Chirac's far-sighted analysis and warning were being replicated by the professional diplomats and policy experts in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; and that their Secretary of State at the time, Jack Straw, was faithfully relaying them to the prime minister and to his other Cabinet colleagues. If so, it's hard to understand how they could have been so comprehensively ignored — and how the Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary could have stayed in office while his department's fears and warnings were being so irresponsibly binned. But we shan't know the truth of these things for at least another 30 years when the files are opened, and possibly not even then, thanks to the Blair administration's self-serving habit of not keeping written records of its deliberations and decisions.
Brian
No one man or woman has done more than the prize-winning journalist Stephen Grey to expose the scandal of Extraordinary Rendition — the procedure under which American intelligence in one form or another kidnaps people it suspects of involvement in terrorism, plucking them off the streets in foreign countries, and secretly and illegally flies them to other countries where they can be interrogated by methods that would not be tolerated even in the United States; in layman's language, probably in legal language too, tortured.
The results of Stephen Grey's latest investigations were vividly recounted (by Grey himself) in his Channel 4 programme Dispatches, broadcast on 11 June. Here's the account of this important programme provided on Grey's website:
Dispatches: Kidnapped To Order
Dispatches exposes a new phase in America's dirty war on al Qaeda: the rendition and detention of women and children. Last year, President Bush confirmed the existence of a CIA secret detention programme but he refused to give details and said it was over. Dispatches reveals new evidence confirming fiercely-denied reports that many of the CIA captives were held and interrogated in Europe.
Those prisons may now be closed but the programme is by no means over, it's just changed. A new front has opened up in the Horn of Africa and America has outsourced its renditions to its allies. Reporter Stephen Grey (author of Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Programme) investigates America's global sweep for prisoners – obtaining exclusive interviews with former detainees who claim they have been kidnapped and flown halfway across the world to face torture by America's allies. The film opens with an examination of the most notorious rendition story to date – the kidnap of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar. This month in Italy the trial opens of twenty-five CIA officers accused of snatching Omar from the streets of Milan in broad daylight and flying him to Cairo four years ago. Grey travels to Egypt to secure an exclusive interview with Omar who defies the warnings of his interrogators not to speak publicly about his treatment. He details the torture that was inflicted upon him in his fourteen-month detention and the number of other 'ghost detainees' he encountered – people who are being held in secret, without charge.
The film then turns to Pakistan – one of America's most significant allies in the 'war on terror'. Since 9/11, the state's intelligence services have apprehended over five hundred people as terror suspects. Grey investigates what happens to the 'disappeared' amid claims that America pays Pakistan a bounty for every suspect they capture.
Turning his attentions closer to home, Grey gains exclusive access to an official European investigation which has found evidence that CIA prisons housing al Qaeda suspects have also existed in Europe and reveals the interrogation techniques that have been used against such high-value prisoners. The Bush administration claim such techniques stop short of torture but Grey discovers that many in the CIA disagree and are concerned that using them may leave them open to criminal proceedings in the future and make the evidence gained inadmissible in a trial – preventing terrorists from being convicted in court.
Dispatches then examines the new battleground of America's war on terror – the Horn of Africa. Grey travels to Kenya and Ethiopia to investigate allegations of mass renditions involving women and children – where prisoners thought to have al Qaeda connections have been illegally transferred from country to country for imprisonment and interrogation. Grey uncovers evidence of secret rendition flights on which suspects were flown from Nairobi into war-torn Somalia – a state with no effective law or government. Amongst the suspects were women and children – he hears a first-hand account from one Briton who was on one of the flights who describes being beaten, interrogated and finding himself in a prison cell opposite a woman and a five-year-old boy. Another woman who was rendered to Somalia describes being flown on to Ethiopia with other women and children – where one pregnant woman gave birth to her child whilst in detention.
Dispatches questions the legality and effectiveness of America's rendition programme and asks whether the way detainees have been interrogated will undermine the legal process to bring real terrorists to trial and conviction.
Some highly questionable things have been done by British civilian and military authorities under cover of the so-called 'war on terror' (not in fact a war at all), but I would like to think that nothing has been done in Britain's name that approaches the prolonged, systematic and deliberate abuse of due process and the rule of law represented by extraordinary rendition (and Guantanamo, one of the destinations to which some of the kidnapped suspects have indeed been 'rendered'). But even here Britain's hands are not by any means clean: there are strong grounds for believing that some parts of the British government machine, probably including some ministers, have been complicit with the Americans in knowingly providing the use of British airports and airspace for US flightscarrying out extraordinary rendition. Ministerial denials and heavily qualified admissions have been extremely carefully worded, seemingly hingeing on how they define 'torture' and whether they have been able to turn a blind eye to the kinds of ill-treatment, clearly amounting to torture, to which the victims of extraordinary rendition are subjected.
It's really hard to comprehend how a mature democracy such as the US, with its long-standing constitutional commitment to due process and the rule of law, its elaborate checks and balances, its extraordinary openness that makes the keeping of official secrets so difficult, and the sweeping investigative powers of the Congress, can tolerate for so long such scandalous malpractices as those which Stephen Grey's investigations over the last two or three years have revealed. Why has civilised liberal opinion in the States been so slow to wake up to such shameful wrong-doing, and so seemingly reluctant to raise the roof with such deafening protests as to make it impossible for these criminal misdeeds to continue? I'm genuinely baffled. I wonder if Grey's Dispatches programme could be shown on US television — and, if so, whether it will be?
Full disclosure: Stephen Grey is a friend. Keep up the good work, Stephen — and don't go out alone after dark….
Brian
Today's Guardian's first leader on the G8 summit at the charmingly named Heiligendamm is full of Guardianesque bloopers, linguistic and substantive. Here's a selection. Emphasis is added throughout:
[the agreement refers] to there being 5 million HIV/Aids sufferers. It is accepted that the total is much closer to 10 million.
"It is accepted" by whom, and on what basis? A prime example of a classic journalistic evasion. "It has been said…" "It is believed…" "It is reported…" Unless we know by whom in each of these cases, and can thus judge the weight to be given to the reported belief, acceptance, or whatever, the statement is completely worthless. It may well be the case that there are "closer to 10 million" (how close?) HIV/AIDS sufferers than 5 million, but since such figures are inevitably largely guesswork, we are entitled to be told on what authority the guess is quoted.
This was not some student error borne of an essay crisis
"Borne of an essay crisis"? Borne as in carried? Carried of a crisis? Or does the writer mean "born"? Even if so, the thought is so obscure that you're forced to re-read it, interrupting the flow, and then to try to work out what it means, if anything.
…the bold Gleneagles promise – to provide $50bn extra in development cash by 2010… Up until the last day it looked like the commitment could be dropped this time around.
Not only are both the first and last words of the second sentence irritatingly superfluous: the formulation "it looked like…" as a conjunctive phrase is unforgivable in the editorial of a serious newspaper laying claim to a certain standard of literacy. No doubt this wretched usage, already approaching acceptability in spoken English in the eyes (or ears) of some linguistic appeasers[1], will eventually replace "it looked as if", even in otherwise good written English, but that time has unquestionably not yet arrived. Bad show, Guardian.
Nor did the summit produce the anticipated froideur between Vladimir Putin and his counterparts.
He or she who writes Guardian editorials could be expected to know that "anticipate" means something different from "expect", even though intensive and ignorant abuse has no doubt led some dictionaries which ought to know better to surrender the point (they could at least label it vulgar and incorrect). What action were the rest of the G8 supposed to have taken to forestall, pre-empt or otherwise take action in advance of the expected froideur? And speaking of froideur, what's the matter with good English words such as 'chill' or 'coldness'?
The Russian president skilfully wrongfooted George Bush by offering to put a Russian-operated radar in north Azerbaijan at Washington's disposal, obviating the need to locate a similar station in the Czech Republic. The proposal will not come to anything, but with it Moscow gains the initiative.
This (skilfully or otherwise) neglects to explain the real significance of the Putin offer, namely that it exposes the falsity of the American (and British) pretence that the star wars system with its proposed station in the Czech Republic is not designed to protect the United States or western Europe against a missile attack from Russia. If, as Bush straight-facedly maintains, the system was really intended only to counter missiles from Iran and North Korea targeted on the US or western Europe, then a radar detector station in northern Azerbaijan would be just as effective as one in the Czech Republic, and moreover it could be located there without upsetting the strategic balance. But we all know that it's really directed against Russian missiles, and that's why "the [Azerbaijan] proposal will not come to anything". Without some such explanation, the Guardian's comment seems to suggest that some kind of special skill is required to present any old counter-proposal, however impracticable, in order to "gain the initiative".
On Britain's demand for the murder suspect Andrei Lugovoi to be extradited, there was no meeting of minds between Mr Putin and Mr Blair. But there was a meeting and, in the current strained atmosphere, that is better than nothing.
But is it? Even Mr Blair can hardly pretend not to know that the Russian Constitution forbids the extradition of a Russian citizen to another country (if only we had a proper constitution with such a provision!) and that demanding action by the Russian President which is patently beyond his constitutional powers can achieve nothing except to aggravate the relationship, irritate the Russians, and make our prime minister look silly. Rule 94 (or thereabouts) in diplomacy is not to put your political capital and public reputation on the line for something that you know, or reasonably believe, you can't achieve. So is a mere meeting of the two heads of government, on a basis that's bound to result in failure to agree, really "better than nothing"? I'd have thought that 'nothing' (i.e. anything) would have been better than a charade from which our side predictably emerges as having failed. Once again, though, Mr Blair's overriding purpose seems to be to protect himself from any possible accusation of having "failed to act" or of having failed to take a strong line on some problem that might later turn out badly. Instead of recognising that extradition to Britain is simply not on, and proposing instead some sort of trial inside Russia with British legal participation and safeguards, perhaps on the lines of the Lockerbie trials, as a practical escape route from the impasse, Mr Blair prefers to ram his head against a visible brick wall — just so that he can say, "Well, I tried." When even the Guardian tells him that the brick wall option is "better than nothing", it can only encourage him in this short-sighted, unimaginative, self-serving folly. But as he has barely two more weeks in office, perhaps it doesn't matter.
* * * * *
Not bad for a single editorial of fewer — or, as the Guardian's editorial writer might say, "less" – than 700 words!
[1] Readers of Ephems who are interested in linguistic solecisims, and in the appeasers' argument that it doesn't matter how you say something so long as you make your meaning clear, might care to spend a few minutes visiting a newish language group discussion forum designed precisely for those interested in language, how it works, and whether it matters if people contrive to foul it up: start here. You may find some of the existing debates on language issues amusing, annoying, futile, pedantic, or worth-while: better still, you may be moved to add your own contribution, perhaps asking a question in a new 'topic' or thread. No need to register unless you want to, e.g. to protect yourself against others using whatever username you have chosen for the forum. All are welcome — well, all of good will and good manners, anyway. Here it is again: http://www.invisionplus.net/forums/index.php?mforum=languagegroup. And for more detailed guidance on using it, see http://tigergrowl.wordpress.com/2007/06/08/language-group/ .
Brian
J and I went the other evening to a preview of the film wittily entitled 'Taking Liberties', exhaustively chronicling the relentless assault on our civil liberties by the Blair government, that assault enthusiastically led by Tony Blair himself and his successive home secretaries, each more illiberal than the one before (with the possible, highly qualified, exception of Charles Clarke, who sometimes gave the impression that he understood the wrongness of what he was doing; no doubt the reason for the fact that he didn't last long in the job).
There's a good discussion of this excellent, diligently researched, ruthlessly hard hitting and often wonderfully funny film on the BBC's website, here, and there's no need to repeat it now. The director of 'Taking Liberties', Chris Atkins, uses ridicule as well as rhetoric and indignation to make his points. As Brian Wheeler, writer of the BBC report, puts it,
The film also tries to highlight what Atkins sees as the more absurd aspects of new anti-terror laws. There is much footage of gleeful protesters trying to outfox baffled-looking police officers, struggling to apply the new laws.
But there are more apparently sinister tales too.
In one sequence, climate change protesters picketing an airport are held for a day and a half under anti-terror laws before being released in an unknown location, without phones or money, and told not to speak to each other again.
The film is released tomorrow (Friday 8 June) and should not be missed.
The preview of Taking Liberties at the Clapham Picturehouse was followed by an entertaining and controversial panel discussion chaired animatedly by Clive Anderson and featuring the ubiquitous and unfailingly articulate Shami Chakrabarti (Director of Liberty), Ken Loach (the film director), David Morrissey (the actor, one of the principal narrators in the film), Riz Ahmed (the actor and Oxford PPE graduate, arrested during — and apparently because of — acting the part of a Guantanamo inmate in the film about that atrocity) and Nick Clegg (Lib Dem MP and front bench spokesman on home office affairs). The extent and intensity of the multiple disagreements between these heroes, liberty junkies all, were a welcome surprise. The panel discussion is described in lively terms (here) in a new blog devoted to discussion of the film and tracking its progress. Well worth bookmarking. Have a look, too, at the full synopsis of the film. Most of us are familiar with most if not all of the horror stories it tells, but the cumulative effect is tremendous. How have we let them get away with it? Can we ever get our liberties back?
Update (9 June 2007): Taking Liberties has so far had a very good press, and deservedly so. But today's Guardian carries a surprisingly bad-tempered attack on the film by Martin Kettle. His main discontent is summarised in the heading: No, Labour has not turned Britain into a police state. But to impose that interpretation on the purpose and thrust of the film is almost perverse. The film certainly doesn't claim that Britain is already indistinguishable from Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia. But it does show, with concrete examples, that some of the things that have been going on here, under laws introduced by the Blair government, are consistent with the practices of a full-scale police state, and that taken together, the oppressive provisions of many of those laws lay the foundations for a full-scale police state at some point, perhaps when they become available to a future government even more illiberal and careless of civil liberties than the one we have now, for example acting in response to a new terrorist outrage in Britain. It ill behoves a liberal newspaper such as the Guardian to pooh-pooh such a warning — especially when a sizeable chunk of Kettle's article is devoted to deploring many recent abuses cited in Taking Liberties, in language hardly less severe than that used in the film. There's a clue to the basis for this strange attitude to a notably responsible and well-researched movie when Kettle comments:
Faced with new terrorist threats, porous modern states have to amend their rules or risk unprecedented types of horror.
But these are not true alternatives. Amending our rules simply can't remove the risk of unprecedented horrors: that risk is implicit in the technique of the suicide bomber acting in pursuit of a non-negotiable cause (the replacement of western liberal culture and ideas by Islamic Shari'a law throughout the middle east and eventually throughout the world). Of course there are reasonable precautions that can be taken to reduce the risk somewhat; but it's a cruel deception to claim that by unravelling our historic rights and freedoms in the name of security, we can achieve absolute protection against the risk. The more oppressive and illiberal the measures we introduce and the more we erode the fundamental safeguards against dictatorship in a modern democratic society, the more we alienate minority groups against whom those measures are targeted, and the more we predispose them to listen sympathetically to the voices of unreason and violence. Already we have gone some of the way down that dangerous path. That's the clear message of Taking Liberties, and it's hard to believe that Martin Kettle really disagrees with it.
Postscript to update: Chris Atkins, the writer and director of Taking Liberties, wrote the definitive reply to Martin Kettle's regrettable (perhaps now regretted?) piece in a Guardian "right of reply" piece on 14 June. You can read it here. There are some admirable comments appended to it (including, inevitably, one by me), as well as some remarkably silly ones.
Brian
