The influence of spies has become too much. It's time politicians said no

[cobben]

John le Carré on secret courts, surveillance and the excessive influence of the CIA and MI6 on democratic institutions

The influence of spies has become too much. It's time politicians said no


. . .

You have made an enemy of Colonel Gaddafi and are on the run from him? Your wife is pregnant, you constitute no danger to the west, but British intelligence has decided to organise your rendition to Libya as a favour to its old pal the colonel? And you were tortured, and now you'd like redress? Money, yes, you want money, of course you do. Like all your kind, you are grasping.

In reality, Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife are offering to settle their case for the princely sum of £1 per person sued plus an apology and a public admission of liability for what was done to them, something they can hold up and share with their friends, some decent gesture of humanity and regret that will provide closure of a sort.
Well, in the view of the British government, Mr and Mrs Belhaj can sing for their terms, because an apology sheds no glory whatever on our special relationship with the United States, or on the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services. MI6 did not render Mr and Mrs Belhaj to Colonel Gaddafi under their proper names, but only as "air cargo". And the plane that flew the hijacked couple to Tripoli was provided by the CIA. And the credibility and integrity of both services are of course paramount, and must be kept that way at any cost.

The true reason for the existence of these gruesome secret courts, I suggest, beyond the desire to protect our state from embarrassment about the nature of our wrongdoing, is twofold: the disproportionate influence of the US/UK intelligence community on our democratic institutions, and the urgent need of our respective political establishments to import a Bush-style secret state to Britain. For Barack Obama, far from dismantling Bush's secret state when he took power, has diligently recrafted and extended it. In consequence, the CIA has become a fully fledged, unaccountable fighting arm, big on extrajudicial killing and derring-do, but short on the hard grind of intelligence gathering, which is where the Brits traditionally believe they have the edge. As part of his deal with the CIA, Obama, on taking office, promised not to rake up the past, which meant not naming or shaming the agency's torturers, or those at the highest level of the administration who had guided their henchmen's work down to the smallest, awful detail. But the past doesn't go away that lightly, and the most pressing task for our secret courts will be to keep the lid on the CIA's unlawful activities under Bush, and our own complicity in them, thereby incidentally clearing a path for them in the future.

These, then, are the two main players in the creation of our British secret courts: our politicians – who seem barely to understand what they have passed into law – and our spies. The lawyers also played a part, but were a sideshow.

. . .

[Thailandnotes]

Re: The influence of spies has become too much. It's time politicians said no

le Carré

“We know a lot about the fallibility of our parliamentarians. Of our intelligence services, on the other hand, we know next to nothing, which is how it must be, and how they like it. But whoever they are, and whoever they think they are, it would surely be surprising if their organizations were not prone to the same cockups, coverups and bouts of near-insanity that afflict any other British corporate entity these days, from banking to the press to the National Health Service to the BBC.”

Amen


2012 MacArthur grant recipient Laura Poitras’ 8-minute clip in the NYT in August 2012.
(Laura Poitras filmed Edward Snowden)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE

And an interview with Poitras

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/10/qa_w...he_nsa_scoops/

[cobben]

Re: The influence of spies has become too much. It's time politicians said no

Son of a con man, his life run is fascinating, not least in that he claims to not know much of anything about what he writes.


"One of the best things about le Carré’s novels is that, from the start, they’ve hummed with the flavorful and recondite language of espionage, a field that has its jargon like any other. In many cases, le Carré has invented that jargon himself. Terms from his novels — “honey trap,” for instance, to denote using sex to compromise a target — have been adopted by the pros. He can probably claim “mole” as well."

Note that this interview was done "pre Snowden".

John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age

. . .

His readership is vast and influential. When le Carré received an honorary degree from Oxford last summer, the Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi was on hand to receive one as well. In her speech, she declared: “When I was under house arrest, I was also helped by the books of John le Carré. . . . They were a journey into the wider world. Not the wider world just of other countries, but of thoughts and ideas.”

. . .

He has, however, emerged as an outspoken critic of American and British foreign policy in the post-9-11 era. When the subject heaved into view, he sighed and clasped his armchair more tightly. Le Carré has the distinction of being among Bush 43’s earliest antagonists. In January 2003, when many of the world’s prominent journalists and writers were falling in line behind the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, le Carré published a jeremiad in The Times of London with the headline “The United States of America Has Gone Mad.”

. . .

Two of le Carré’s last three novels — “A Most Wanted Man” and his latest, “A Delicate Truth” — have dealt with the global war on terror, probing the kinds of nuances Bigelow avoided. About Islam and the West, he said: “If we spent a fraction of what we spent on war trying to meet people’s misunderstandings about us, we might do a better job.” In “A Delicate Truth,” he directs his attention toward the perils of farming out military duties to mercenaries. “This will sound as if I am speaking large,” le Carré told me, “but Mussolini said that the definition of fascism was when you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between corporate power and government power. I have watched veteran members of our intelligence establishment go seamlessly into these private defense contracting companies.” Maintaining a military, done correctly, he said, is difficult physical, mental and moral work. “It’s so much easier if I come to you and say, ‘Here’s the contract, I want you to liberate Sierra Leone, I don’t give a toss who you take with you and try to keep the killing down.’ ”

. . .

[cobben]

Re: The influence of spies has become too much. It's time politicians said no

(This is for the Le Carré affiicionados, nothing new about Syria or Snowden, but lots of cool anecdotes - I pasted in just one.)


September 6, 2013 2:00 pm

Conversations with John le Carré

By Philippe Sands



After the event he signed books. Some in the queue apparently claimed a connection with his secret past. “They’re all over the place, the old spooks,” he says. “There’s always someone who’ll come up and whisper quietly about the ‘Vienna operation’, or ‘Operation K-32’, reminding you that you were a bit laggardly, back then.”


He’s been on such a line himself, though, knows about that need for “connection” with a writer. During our postmortem tea he tells me about an event he’d been at in Bern in 1949, to celebrate the bicentenary of Goethe’s birth. Thomas Mann, back from exile in California, spoke, and was booed by German students who thought him “anglicised”. Le Carré was so irritated by the absence of precision – “they meant Americanised” – and the lack of respect shown to the writer, that he made his way to the dressing room, banged on the door. The great Mann opened it, looking like the actor Clifton Webb, tall and disdainful: “He said, ‘What do you want?’ ‘Was wollen Sie?’ And I said, ‘I want to shake your hand.’ And he said, ‘Well, here it is.’ So I shook it and he closed the door.” I recognise the tale – used in A Perfect Spy.