Tories from the prime minister downwards, and (to their shame) some relics of New Labour, lose no opportunity to lambast the Human Rights Act, which the Conservatives (but not the coalition) still threaten to repeal and replace. The latest attack on the HRA has been prompted by outrage over the widely reported failure of a campaign to deport an Iraqi convicted of running down and killing a little girl in Blackburn. The driver, Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, left the child under the wheels of his car and ran away. The child’s father has been campaigning for years to have him deported. The Daily Mail and the prime minister have been among those blaming the decision not to deport the guilty driver on the Human Rights Act. Both are wrong.
The facts of the case are lucidly set out in an article by the distinguished human rights lawyer, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, in an article for Our Kingdom on openDemocracy on 29 December 2010[1]. There’s no need for me to set it out again here. The article begins:
It is time not only to defend the Human Rights Act but [also] to counter-attack the falsehoods and distortions of those who misrepresent it. Regrettably these include the Prime Minister as well as more predictable elements of the media, particularly the Daily Mail. Furthermore, it is time for Labour to speak up for the Act which it courageously introduced in the face of bureaucratic opposition to enable people to defend their fundamental rights from arbitrary power – including, of course, the despotic power of the press.
If anyone has earned the right to speak out for the Human Rights Act, it’s Sir Geoffrey Bindman:
Geoffrey Bindman is a former chairman and vice-president of the Society of Labour Lawyers. He is chairman of the British Institute of Human Rights.
From 1966-1976 he was legal adviser to the Race Relations Board and thereafter until 1983 to the Commission for Racial Equality.
He is a Visiting Professor of Law at University College London and at London South Bank University, an Honorary Fellow in Civil Legal Process at the University of Kent, and a Fellow of the Society of Advanced Legal Studies. In 1982 he was Visiting Professor of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles. In July 2000 he received an honorary doctorate from De Montfort University. He also has an honorary doctorate from Kingston University, and is chair of the Board of Trustees at the British Institute of Human Rights.
He has lectured at law schools in Britain, America, and other countries. Geoffrey is a regular writer and broadcaster in the specialist and national media on human rights, media law, anti-discrimination law, and the legal profession.
He has won awards for a lifetime’s achievement in human rights from Liberty (December 1999) and the Law Society’s Gazette (October 2003). In April 2000, he was presented with the International Client Counselling Competition award in recognition of his lifetime contribution to client interviewing and counselling throughout the world. Sir Geoffrey Bindman (born 1933) was knighted in the New Year Honours 2007 list…. [etc]
[http://www.bindmans.com/index.php?id=geoffreybindman, etc.]
The Human Rights Act is one of the achievements of Tony Blair’s Labour government of which all Labour people can and should be proud. The fact that government ministers of all political persuasions sometimes feel frustrated by the constraints it imposes on an anyway over-mighty executive is compelling evidence that the rule of law may conflict with the wishes of the executive and that when this happens, the rule of law must be paramount — a fundamental principle that was tragically breached in the decision to go to war with Iraq. In this specific case, however, the fact that Aso Mohammed Ibrahim was not deported after serving his prison sentence had nothing at all to do with the Human Rights Act, as Geoffrey Bindman shows. We expect the unscrupulous reactionaries of the Daily Mail to ignore the truth in their search for ammunition in their populist campaigns, but we’re surely entitled to something a little better from Mr Cameron.
The prime minister has also been guilty of seriously misrepresenting, by clear implication, the stated policy of the government which he heads in regard to the future of the HRA. As Bindman says, –
The Prime Minister’s suggestion that he will repeal the HRA to prevent anything like this happening again flatly contradicts the coalition agreement and would leave us still bound by the European Convention. He has already been told this by his lawyers.
The scandalous aspersions later cast while still in office on their own Act by some New Labour Ministers, including Tony Blair, are another example of the millstones left round the Labour Party’s neck by too many of the illiberal utterances and unprincipled measures that they left behind. Ed Miliband has shown from the beginning of his leadership that he recognises the imperative need for Labour to take advantage of its time in opposition to liberate itself from the murkier elements of the New Labour record, especially over Iraq and civil rights. A reaffirmation of the importance of the Human Rights Act, and of Labour’s determined opposition to any attempt to repeal or replace it, will be a big step in the right direction.
Postscript: Labour should never be taken in by the flawed Tory mantra that “with rights go responsibilities” — used to explain the intention to repeal the HRA by a new law designed, we’re told, to spell out the responsibilities of the citizen as well as her rights. The implication of this can only be that the exercise of our rights are conditional on the fulfilment of our responsibilities, a completely unacceptable proposition. Stalin, Mao and Hitler all sought to justify trampling on the fundamental rights of their peoples by asserting that failure to fulfil civic responsibilities, as defined by the state (i.e. themselves), entailed the loss of those rights. The American Founding Fathers got it right, as usual: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Please remind your MP of this if she (or he) tries to tell you that the thousands of our fellow citizens currently filling our prisons to bursting-point should not be allowed to vote in UK elections because by breaking the law, they have lost their rights. No, they have not. They have temporarily lost the right to liberty, as recognised and authorised by the Human Rights Act and its parent, the European Human Rights Convention. Their other rights remain intact; at any rate, they should.
[1] A shorter version of Sir Geoffrey Bindman’s article appeared in The Guardian on 28 December.
Brian
Julian Assange, the Australian founder of Wikileaks, is spending another night in Wandsworth prison, in solitary confinement in the segregation wing, forbidden to have any contact with other prisoners, in conditions described by his lawyer as ‘Dickensian’. Apparently he is not allowed the use of a telephone (beyond two calls a day) or television set; he is not allowed to see newspapers; an envelope that had contained a copy of Time magazine with his picture on the cover, sent to him by Time, did reach him but with the magazine missing; other mail is also not getting through to him; visitors are rationed and limited. He is confined to his cell for 23-1/2 hours of every 24. He won his appeal today against the denial of bail, but as the Swedish authorities have given notice of their intention to appeal against the grant of bail, he will remain behind bars for at least another 48 hours and perhaps longer.
One might well ask of what heinous crime Mr Assange has been convicted by a jury of his peers to deserve such harsh and humiliating punishment? None. Then with what crime has he been charged, to be required to be kept behind bars pending his trial, among murderers and robbers? None. His sole offence is to be wanted in Sweden for questioning. He has volunteered to answer any Swedish questioning, conducted by Swedish policemen, in Britain, perhaps in the Swedish embassy or in a London police station, but the offer has been declined — or ignored.
So what evidence of a reasonable suspicion that he might have committed some offence in Sweden has been produced to the court to justify removing him against his will to a foreign country on the application of the Swedish authorities? None. What behaviour has he been accused of by some private Swedish citizens that is, on the face of it, an offence or offences under both Swedish and English law? None.
None of this has the slightest formal connection with Mr Assange’s recent activity in releasing the celebrated Wikileaks. We are asked to believe that this monstrous injustice is being visited on him purely on the basis of some vague and so far unsubstantiated accusations by some ladies with whom he once had sex, and that all this would be happening to him even if Wikileaks had never been invented. It’s pure coincidence, we are to suppose, that in the United States quite reputable political leaders are demanding that Mr Assange be extradited to the US, put on trial for treason (on the basis, presumably, that as an Australian he has a duty of loyalty to the United States), and executed. But this has nothing to do with the Swedish application for his extradition to Sweden to answer questions about a possible offence for which he has not even been charged. And meanwhile he remains a prisoner, incarcerated in an English prison.
By what possible right do our own authorities dare to deny this man, who is doubly entitled to the presumption of innocence (not having been either charged with or convicted of any offence), the ordinary facilities available to a free man? Why can’t he telephone whoever he likes, for as long and as often as he chooses? Why can’t he have whatever visitors he wants? Watch television and receive all his mail, unopened and uncensored? Send out for his meals? Wear his own clothes, including his ties and shoe-laces? His treatment is a slap in the face of English justice. If in the end he is extradited, the injustice will be even more grotesque.
The case of the computer hacker Gary McKinnon, whom the Americans want to extradite for hacking into the Pentagon’s secret computer system from his bedroom in Wood Green, North London, has aroused widespread concern about the manifestly unequal provisions of the UK-US extradition treaty, now at last being reviewed by the new coalition government. Now we see the utterly unacceptable consequences of the European Arrest Warrant, under which anyone may be extradited from any EU member country to another on application, without a shadow of due process or any other legal protection against abuse. Anyone who suspects that I must be exaggerating the scandalous character of this system only has to read the article in today’s Guardian by the newspaper’s admirable legal affairs correspondent, Afua Hirsch:
Now followers of the WikiLeaks story wonder how Assange could be extradited with so few questions asked. Why, for example, can our prisons detain someone (Assange is currently on remand in Wandsworth prison) for an offence under Swedish law that does not exist in British law? And how can a judge agree to an extradition without having seen enough evidence to make out a prima facie case?
The 2003 Extradition Act originated in an EU decision agreed just one week after 9/11. It was sold to voters as a way of ensuring cross-border cohesion in prosecuting suspects wanted across Europe for terrorism and serious crime. The level of cohesion in criminal justice systems across Europe, the argument went, and their common obligations under the European convention on human rights, provided a sufficient basis of trust that an arrest warrant by an EU country could be agreed by the UK with little scrutiny.
It’s been downhill from there. Around three people per day are now extradited from the UK, and there is little to suggest that the majority are terrorists or serious criminals. In fact those involved in the process agree that many of the cases are “trivial”… [Emphasis added]
It’s beyond belief that not only the previous government but also our elected parliament, supposedly the sturdy guardian of our ancient liberties, indolently sat on their hands while these travesties of fundamental rights were passed into law. Our present government has promised to make a bonfire of the illiberal measures for which a succession of Labour home secretaries were shamingly responsible. That bonfire can’t be lit a moment too soon.
Brian
The Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, introduced his proposals for reform of sentencing policy in the house of commons this afternoon (7 Dec 2010). These concentrated on reducing re-offending by more effective rehabilitation of offenders in and outside prison, and ensuring that people who should not be in prison are no longer sent there. His proposals for reform of ‘Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection’ (IPPs) include drastically reducing to the most serious violent or sexual offences the range of crimes for which IPPs are awarded , and giving more realistic guidance to parole boards to “focus indefinite imprisonment on those who clearly pose a very serious risk of future harm” — by implication removing the onus on the IPP prisoner to satisfy the parole board that he will not reoffend if released, and instead setting demanding conditions for refusing to release post-tariff IPP prisoners.
In his parliamentary statement and in reply to numerous mostly positive questions, Mr Clarke placed heavy emphasis on the need to punish offenders and repeatedly ridiculed any suggestion that his proposals would entail the release of thousands of murderers and rapists onto the streets. But the substance of his proposals, including those on IPPs, is strikingly liberal and enlightened. They will clearly be ferociously resisted by the obscurantists on the right wing of the Tory party and by the most reactionary of the tabloids, so their publication in much the form that has been foreshadowed in the past few months is an act of considerable courage on the part of both Ken Clarke and the prime minister. The proposals are now published in a government Green Paper for public consultation until 4 March 2011, and comments from interested persons and organisations as well as from private citizens are invited. The Green Paper lists 59 specific questions to which replies and reactions are invited. None of these relates specifically to IPPs.
The initial response of the Labour opposition to Ken Clarke’s statement was, in my view, disappointing. Sadiq Khan, the shadow Justice Secretary, concentrated on accusing Clarke of abandoning all the pledges in the Conservatives’ election manifesto designed to demonstrate a commitment to being “tough on crime” (in reply Clarke pointed out that Sadiq Khan had not criticised or opposed a single one of his specific Green Paper proposals, which was true, later claiming equally credibly that there was widespread support for his new approach in all three major parties in the house of commons). Sadiq Khan was of course in a difficulty: to have given the unreserved welcome to the proposals that they manifestly deserve would have been taken as a repudiation of the record of a succession of Labour home secretaries and justice secretaries, some of whom are still members of parliament. One of them — Jack Straw, predictably — claimed that the measures envisaged by Clarke would probably result in an increase in crime, a singularly ill-judged and unhelpful intervention in a situation where Ed Miliband’s new start requires a discreet abandonment and implicit repudiation of New Labour’s authoritarian and illiberal assaults on basic civil liberties when in office. Clarke’s new approach very clearly deserves strong support and the Labour party’s willingness to give it will be a vital litmus test of whether it has learned any lessons from past betrayals.
The Green Paper, ‘Breaking the Cycle Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders’, is online at http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/docs/breaking-the-cycle.pdf (PDF). It runs to 96 pages and it will take some time to absorb it in detail. Its comments and proposals on IPPs are quoted in full below. They demonstrate that Clarke and his colleagues and officials have taken careful note of the powerful case against IPPs and especially against the way they are currently used, involving real injustice, even cruelty, for many of those serving them. The logical implication of the Green Paper’s own criticisms of IPPs is that the whole system should be abandoned. This however is clearly politically impossible. Given that IPPs are bound to continue in some form, Clarke’s proposals for reforming them are as good as we could possibly have expected, and far better than many of us feared. Here are the passages on IPPs:
40. Chapter 4 sets out proposals to reform adult sentencing so that we: …
- reserve Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPP) for the most serious offenders, and reform the release test applied by the Parole Board to strike a better balance. This will focus indefinite punishment on those who most clearly pose a very serious risk of future harm;
…
173. There has not been enough clarity in the way that prison sentences have been explained to victims and public. This has created confusion about how sentences work… This confusion has been exacerbated by the … growth in the use of indeterminate sentences where release is at the discretion of the Parole Board and no-one is clear how long the offender will actually spend in custody.
…
183. Public safety remains our primary concern and indeterminate sentences will always be appropriate for the most serious crimes. The Government has no intention of changing life sentences. However, we believe that indeterminate sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPPs) should only be available for the most dangerous offenders. These sentences are imposed subject to an assessment of what offenders might do in the future rather than based simply on what they have actually done. Release is not automatic, but is at the discretion of the Parole Board.
184. The sentence of IPP was introduced in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and has been used on a much wider basis than expected. IPP prisoners are required to serve a minimum term after which the Parole Board can decide whether or not they are suitable for release. It was only intended and expected to be used in a limited number of cases, but there are already around 6,000 prisoners on an IPP sentence.
185. The current arrangements require offenders to satisfy the Parole Board that they do not present unmanageable risk in the community. Demonstrating this negative criterion can be extremely difficult which has led to a very low release rate of about 5%.
186. The limitations in our ability to predict future serious offending also calls into question the whole basis on which many offenders are sentenced to IPPs and, among those who are already serving these sentences, which of them are suitable for release.
187. The widespread use of IPPs has also further confused the sentencing framework, and can undermine public confidence since the court, the victim and the public have little or no means of knowing how long an individual spell in custody is likely to last or whether it will ever end.
188. It is also important that those who receive IPPs are able to reform themselves and that proper arrangements are in place for their rehabilitation. The larger the number of prisoners who are subject to the sentence, the more difficult this becomes.
189. For all these reasons, we believe that there is a strong case for ensuring IPPs are restricted to the exceptionally serious cases for which they were originally intended. We intend to bring forward reforms in order to achieve that. The previous Government took steps towards this in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 by removing the option to impose the sentence on those who would not otherwise have merited a sentence of at least four years (two in custody with the remainder on licence) but they are still used too widely.
190. This Government intends to restrict the sentence to those who would otherwise have merited a determinate sentence of at least ten years (i.e. at least five years in prison and the remainder on licence). This change ensures that the sentence applies to serious rather than broad categories of crime and will capture very serious sexual and violent offenders. Offenders who no longer receive an IPP would instead receive a determinate custodial sentence for the crime for which they have been convicted …
191. When IPP prisoners are released they are managed in the community under robust licence arrangements. All IPP offenders are also subject to Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements. The Parole Board performs a vital public protection function, but we need to consider whether the release test it applies for IPP prisoners achieves the right balance. Currently, the Parole Board is only able to release a prisoner where it is satisfied that the risk of doing so is considered to be no more than minimal. For an offender who has already been convicted of a serious offence, it can be extremely difficult to demonstrate minimal risk of re-offending particularly whilst the offender is living in the closed prison environment.
192. At least 40% (over 2,400) of IPP prisoners have already completed the minimum punishment term of their sentence in custody, known as the tariff.
193. We are exploring whether a new test for those who have served their punishment would focus indefinite imprisonment on those who clearly pose a very serious risk of future harm. There is no question of releasing any IPP offender into the community without some clear assessment of risk. The Parole Board would still refuse to release offenders where it is clear that this was necessary to keep the public safe.
…
227. … We also plan to change the law to provide for foreign nationals who are IPP prisoners to be removed from the UK at tariff expiry.
…
250.Consistently with the proposals for adult sentencing set out in Chapter 4 we also propose to make the following further changes:
…reform Detention for Public Protection (the juvenile equivalent of IPP) in line with the reforms for adult Indeterminate Public Protection sentences; …
We may expect a blizzard of misrepresentation (and rather less misunderstanding) of these and the Green Paper’s other proposals, accompanied by the usual knee-jerk populist (and entirely false) accusations that any liberalisation of policy of the kind envisaged is “soft on crime”, neglects the rights of victims, and will unleash huge gangs of violent crooks and paedophiles into the community. All the more reason for those of us who welcome the Green Paper (and wish it had been the product of a similarly enlightened Labour government) to respond positively to the invitation to contribute to the public debate on it, both by sending messages of strong but very specific support to the Ministry of Justice (see addresses below) but also by sending letters to the newspapers, especially in reply to ignorant attacks by others) and writing to one’s MP or to the shadow Justice Secretary to urge all-party endorsement of what, in the circumstances, is a brave and indeed revolutionary set of enlightened ideas for remedying many of the defects in the justice system bequeathed by New Labour.
Here is the Green Paper on responses to the consultation initiated by its publication today:
306. The consultation period will end on 4 March 2011, at which point all of the responses received will be analysed and considered.
307. Responses to the consultation can be submitted directly through the Ministry of Justice website at www.justice.gov.uk, via email to breakingthecycle@justice.gsi.gov.uk or by post to Breaking the Cycle, Ministry of Justice, 10.08, 10th Floor, 102 Petty France, London, SW1H 9AJ.
Finally, I should stress that these can only be one person’s instant reaction, written within a couple of hours of listening to the mini-debate in parliament and skimming through the Green Paper’s 96 pages. No doubt more careful study will reveal flaws and ambiguities that will need to be resolved or remedied. Still, I have no doubt that the general thrust is to be welcomed and supported, and that the specific proposals on IPPs, if implemented, will eventually remove most, if not quite all, of that system’s worst and most repressive features. But it will take time.
Footnote (9 December 2010): For examples of the hardship and injustice that IPPs are liable to inflict (on the relatives of offenders as well as on the offenders themselves), please see the three case histories recorded by Charlotte Rowles on the Guardian website on 7 December.
Brian
More than a quarter of a million American diplomatic cables have been leaked by Wikileaks, which seems to have got them (or some of them) from an American private soldier who had accessed them, perfectly legally, and saved them, perfectly illegally, onto a CD or DVD so as to leak them. (This was seemingly not a case of hacking.) What are we to make of this? Does a leak on such a heroic scale of so many secret exchanges between American diplomats overseas and the State Department in Washington bring all diplomacy throughout the world to a shuddering halt? Should the original leaker and the founder of Wikileaks be hunted down, tried, and subjected to the most condign available punishment? Or have they performed a public service, either by publishing information to which we’re all entitled, or by exposing hypocrisy or wrong-doing, or by demonstrating the absurdity of a system which classifies as ‘secret’ information that’s mostly so strikingly trivial and banal?
The answers to those questions turn largely on the nature of the documents that have been leaked. If we look at those which have been analysed and published so far, the surprising thing about them is how unsurprising they are, with remarkably few exceptions. Almost all these reports confirm what we already knew, or could easily have guessed: that many Arab countries are terrified of Iran getting nuclear weapons and would love to see the Americans doing some selective bombing to stop it; that Russia is run by a Mafia-like kleptocracy; that David Cameron and George Osborne, our new prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer, came into office with little or no experience and no evidence of depth of judgement; that China is profoundly uneasy about the sinister antics of its unprepossessing protégé, North Korea; that many western countries have been troubled and embarrassed by such US follies as water-boarding, rendition and Guantanamo; that Prince Andrew holds and no doubt sometimes expresses crass and reactionary opinions (but he’s one of the few royals who has risked his life fighting for his country, so we forgive him); and that the Americans, like most of the rest of us, are scared that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists. So what else is new?
Perhaps the most interesting revelation in the leaks published so far is the instruction issued in the name of the State Department to US diplomats to look out for any opportunities to get samples of the DNA of senior UN staff, including the UN Secretary-General whose name no-one can remember, and the numbers of their credit cards – on the face of it a ludicrous task, since no such opportunities are at all likely to present themselves to ordinary journeyman diplomats, and it’s far from clear what the US security and intelligence services would do with such material even if they somehow got hold of it. However since the Americans have not yet, it seems, invented chip-and-pin protection for credit cards, possession of Mr Ban’s credit card number alone might enable the top brass of the State Department to take some expensive foreign holidays at his expense. (Not, of course, a serious suggestion.) Contrary to common belief, this is not the kind of thing that ordinary diplomats do, and the instruction to them to do it (if possible) was strictly out of order, as well as being distinctly weird.
The leaks have performed one useful service in bringing home to some members of the chattering classes the perhaps counter-intuitive reality that certain kinds of valuable diplomatic activity comprise private and confidential exchanges of information which would be seriously inhibited, or even made impossible, if the participants couldn’t rely on their interlocutors not to leak what they are being told. The acquisition, exchange, reporting and assessment of information about what is going on in the world are at the heart of diplomacy, and it’s in everyone’s interests that these processes should not be unduly hampered, still less completely prevented, by constant confidence-sapping leaking. Diplomats certainly do other things besides acquiring and processing information: they seek to influence events, but can’t act effectively unless action is based on accurate information. However, fears that the wikileaks affair will inflict serious damage on the process of sharing information among diplomats and governments are surely exaggerated. Other countries’ diplomats and officials are hardly likely to stop swopping confidences with the representatives of the most powerful country in the world when such exchanges are so obviously in both parties’ interests. But confidence in confidentiality will need to be quickly restored. Diplomacy is a potent and indispensable form of peace-keeping and some of it can’t be conducted in a fishbowl.
One misapprehension needs to be knocked on the head. The (fictitious) fact that a First Secretary in the American embassy in, say, Tashkent reports to Washington a conversation in which he has been told by a Counsellor in, say, the Tashkent embassy of Bulgaria that the Bulgarian government is about to break off diplomatic relations with Armenia, doesn’t mean that (a) the Bulgarian’s forecast is necessarily accurate, (b) the US government on receipt of the report will necessarily believe it, or (c) it will necessarily have any impact whatever on US foreign policy – although it might be true, it might be believed, and it might affect US policy in some unpredictable way. The report is just a fragment of diplomatic raw material, potentially but not necessarily useful, but worth passing on anyway in case it might provide the missing piece of some jigsaw.
Two things are, I suspect, doing far more harm to the reputation of the US than the release of these routine and mainly banal cables. First, there is the revelation that the US government has committed the extraordinary, inexplicable folly of giving around three million Americans, including thousands of GIs, unfettered access to a huge archive of documents classified Secret or below, a breach of the most elementary principle of security (that access to classified material should always be confined to those with a ‘need to know’); such enormous access to secrets almost amounts to their publication, and the 
wonder is that there haven’t been numerous leaks before now. Secondly there are the widely publicised demands by a number of right-wing American commentators and public figures, including Mike Huckabee — a former state governor, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, a musician, political commentator and past and probably future Presidential wannabe – for Julian Assange of Wikileaks to be tried for treason by the United States and executed (he’s actually an Australian!). Such barbaric and vindictive demands, apparently made in all seriousness, can only bring the US into uncomprehending contempt in the rest of the civilised world. Assange is wanted in Sweden on suspicion of rape and sexual assault, all of which he denies, and it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that this is designed to shut him up and stop Wikileaks in its tracks. “Cui bono?” is not a bad question to ask in such circumstances.
It’s worth mentioning that very many of the leaked cables are rather impressive, conveying potentially useful information or instructions with exemplary clarity, and containing what look for the most part like sound and credible judgements. The fact that so many American ambassadors, at any rate those in the more comfortable capitals, are not career diplomats but rich businessmen who have given generously to Democratic or Republican party funds, doesn’t seem to diminish the professionalism of the US Foreign Service as a whole. The great majority of American diplomats have absolutely no reason to be embarrassed by the publication of their reporting cables, however unwelcome publication may have been. If, as is already being reported, any of them find their careers damaged by the publication by others of their frank and conscientious reporting, it would be a great injustice. It’s fair however to ask why so many of these documents were given the high (but not the highest) classification of ‘secret’ when in many cases ‘restricted’ would have been quite sufficient. Some probably didn’t need to be classified at all, and could have been published on the inner pages of American newspapers without causing so much as a passing ripple of interest. Persistent over-classification is another breach of basic security principles. But it’s evident from the texts of the cables that their authors are required to give the reasons for the classification they have given to each document, by quoting the paragraph numbers of, presumably, the US guidelines for correct classification — a potentially useful discipline.
Temporary and superficial embarrassment seems likely to be the worst penalty that the Americans will have to pay for this enormous breach of security. Potential offsetting benefits may include –
- the exposure of appalling standards of security by the US establishment, a shortcoming which America’s allies will hope to see remedied very promptly indeed;
- the spread of realisation by those who are congenitally suspicious of all kinds of secrecy that some confidentiality is necessary and beneficial, especially in the conduct of inter-governmental diplomacy — i.e., of diplomacy;
- more widespread recognition of the high standards of the US Foreign Service and better understanding of what diplomats actually do; and
- implied confirmation from expert sources of many of our suspicions about what is going on around the world.
In other words, this is far from being the national disaster for the United States that Mrs Clinton has chosen to impress on us. If America seriously over-reacts to what is really a fairly minor event, more embarrassing than seriously damaging, the resulting wounds will be self-inflicted. But it’s certainly time to roll a giant boulder into the gaping loophole which a junior US soldier and Mr Assange have discovered and exploited. A quarter of a million classified documents leaked and published are surely quite enough, even if they are mostly rather dull.
Update [4 Dec 2010]: A new irony. We read today of cables from the American embassy in London, reporting conversations with William Hague and Liam Fox among others, in which the embassy expresses scorn for British political leaders’ paranoid obsession with the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US, and their pathetic appeals to the Americans not to abandon it. The embassy debates whether the US should exploit these paranoid British fears in order to extract yet more concessions to American security and other interests from the fawning Brits, but concludes that this is unnecessary, since the British contribution to America’s pursuit of its own interests is already “unparalleled”. Yet all this is happening against a backdrop of a higher level of anti-American sentiment in this country than I can remember in my long life-time, ranging from intense antipathy towards George W Bush and the US-provoked war in Iraq, outrage over America’s gross over-reaction to terrorism with its practice of torture and collusion with torturers, rendition and extraordinary rendition, and the horrors of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, with contempt for the propensity of US forces to kill their allies with ‘friendly fire’, down to the farcical and nakedly hostile security procedures visited on overseas travellers at American airports. There was a huge outpouring of support here for Obama up to and beyond his election as president, but even that has waned as we in Europe have watched with incredulous dismay the reactionary obstructive antics of the Republicans in Congress, the rise of the Tea Party and the daily bile emitted from Fox News, not to mention the increasingly nightmarish possibility that the weird figure of Sarah Palin might actually secure the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2013. It’s sad, in many ways, but it looks increasingly as if the special relationship now exists only in the heads of a handful of Conservative party leaders. The publication of the Wikileaks cables can’t damage US interests around the world half as badly as American behaviour during the G W Bush administration, some of it continuing to this day, has already done. It would (will?) be interesting to know just how frankly the American embassy in London has been reporting this side of the story also.
Brian
