When is a Terrorist not a Terrorist?

So, Haiti is under new leadership. American involvement in President Aristide's fall from power depends on which story you believe. Certainly, Bush publicly encouraged Aristide to resign and accept exile. Even if US marines kidnapping Aristide is a conspiracy theory too far for you, you have to wonder - why did Bush choose the side he did?

Now, I'm not going to claim Aristide was a saint. If nothing else, I don't have the in-depth knowledge of Haiti's recent history to make such a claim. But the stories emerging from Haiti are worrying. This was a coup d'etat conducted with the backing of the US. If no earlier, the moment the coup was achieved, US troops were sent in to help establish the new status quo. Yet the people behind the coup - including forcibly retired army officers, death squads, and murderers - are exactly the sort that Bush warns us against elsewhere in the world. He cannot even claim that his new allies have renounced violence - this was hardly a velvet revolution.

Imagine if these people had been Palestinians. There, Bush requires the entire people renounce violence as a necessary pre-requisite for Israel to comply with international law and opinion, and withdraw from the occupied territories. Not simply marginalise the extremists, but eliminate them totally. Which hands an automatic veto to anyone capable of handling a gun or explosives, with predictably disastrous effects on the road map.

By publicly supporting a violent coup against a democratically elected government, President Bush has revealed the War Against Terrorism for what many of us always suspected it was - an empty, rhetorical tool, aimed only at improving Bush's own political position. Now we know that violence against democratic governments other the US is acceptable, when it suits US interests. What those interests are in this case is not clear. Personally, I lean towards incompetence and expedience. A civil war off the American coast would lead to floods of refugees. And in an election year, too. I believe that Bush wants that flood stopped in the most expedient manner. The incompetence comes in not realising the seriousness of the situation in time.

The Haiti decision echoes the worst excesses of the pragmatic foreign policy of the Reagan era. You remember, the one that saw the US supporting Hussein in Iraq, the Mujahaddin in Afghanistan, and all those other nasties round the world. Whatever the reason for the decision, Bush has shown that when it suits him, he is happy to fight on the other side of the War Against Terrorism. That War is portrayed as a coalition of governments opposed to terrorism. By siding with political violence, Bush has proved that the War is only about protecting US interests. At any cost.

Graham Robinson. 3rd March 2004.

Political Intelligence

Clare Short's accusations that Britain bugged the UN Secretary General make good headlines, but the evidence she has offered is flimsy to say the least. Without stronger proof, the story would appear to be one for the conspiracy theorists only. However, it does raise interesting questions about the intelligence we gather, and how it is used.

Short's evidence is easily dismissed. Her claim that we were bugging Kofi Annan is based on transcripts of telephone conversations she claims to have seen. Yet even if these transcripts exist, there could be any number of sources for them, including entirely legitimate ones. What is more interesting was Tony Blair's dismissal of the claims. If we are to believe him, British intelligence services never violate international law.

Are we really to believe that the British Prime Minister is that naive? Of course the intelligence services violate international law. That's their job. Surveillance of a suspected terrorist or international organised crime figure can't stop just because it violates the boundaries of an embassy or UN office. Intelligence gathering is always of dubious legality and morality, but sometimes it is necessary.

The real issue is when is it acceptable for the intelligence services to violate the letter of international law. Aside from the obvious justification for an investigation, there are many questions to be answered here - who will have access to the information, how long will it be retained, to what extent may the information be used in areas unrelated to the original inquiry. Yet, the justification is the over-riding one. We may tolerate a degree of law-breaking in an attempt to capture a major terrorist, while at the same time abhorring the intrusion into innocent people's lives.

It is this justification that is called into question by the claims of Clare Short, along with Katherine Gun, Hans Blix, and others. While it hasn't been proved that we spied on Annan, there seems little doubt that the British and American intelligence services at least considered spying on UN personnel during the build up to the Iraq invasion. The question is why?

Surely, we didn't view the UN security council members and the weapons inspectors as potential terrorists. The only possible reason for such spying was political - to allow the US and UK leaders to win a vote that they increasingly looked like losing. In short, this spying was for entirely political reasons.

While spies breaking the law may be justified by national interest, it cannot be justified simply on the basis that it is in the interest of the government of the day. No one should be more aware of this than a leader of the Labour party, who should be immediately reminded of the seventies and early eighties, when the security services spied on senior Labour figures. Political spying sets a dangerous precedent, and left-wing governments especially should be incredibly wary about letting that genie out of the bottle.

In all likelihood, this is all irrelevant. The rest of the civil service has become increasingly politicised over the last two decades, and it seems highly unlikely that the same has not happened in the intelligence community. It would be naive to assume that it is not already common to spy on the UN, embassy staff, and even UK political organisations and individuals. But just because it's already common, doesn't make it acceptable. The revelations of Short and Gun have given us a reason to examine the behaviour of the intelligence community, and introduce safe-guards to ensure that the sort of misbehaviour they have alleged cannot recur.

Graham Robinson. 3rd March 2004.

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