I never imagined I would say this, but Stella Rimington is right. The former head of the British Security Service — MI5 — who made her career running her department’s dirtiest operations in the 1980s, against the U.K.’s miners’ union and the IRA, has warned that Gordon Brown’s government has given terrorists the chance to find “greater justification” by making people feel they “live in fear and under a police state.” Naturally, ministers described her remarks as nonsense and accused her of playing “into the hands of our enemies.”
But the damage is done. To have the woman once hailed as Britain’s Queen of Spies accusing the U.K. government of recklessly counter-productive authoritarianism carries a special weight — and incidentally turns the traditional relationship between Labour and the secret state on its head. Rimington went further, denouncing the U.S. for Guantanamo and torture, but reverted to type by insisting MI5 “doesn’t do that.”
No, as we now know, it contracts out that job to others, while its officers stand by promising to arrange “more lenient treatment” if the victim cooperates. In case after case, British collaboration in the hidden crimes of the war on terror has now been laid bare. But none more so than in the seven-year ordeal of Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident in Guantanamo, the details of whose CIA kidnapping and U.S.-orchestrated torture across four countries the U.K. Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has twisted and turned to prevent being made public.
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11:18 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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