Blair ’still determined to quit’

Tony Blair says he is not tempted to fight a fourth term as prime minister, despite a Newsnight poll suggesting a quarter of people want him to stay on.

Hey, Scott Adams has a blog.

And it has comments enabled.

I wonder; in all the fuss and furore over the current anti-terrorism bill, in every effort being made to scare and coerce parliament and the British people into supine compliance in the face of police demands for more and more powers, including the power to suspend habeas corpus for ninety days, are we missing something important?

Is there some deeper and unexpected truth here that we’re just not seeing. Could it possibly that through his efforts to infect us all with ‘The Fear’ that Blair has, himself, succumbed to infection?

Yet, how else can one adequately account for Blair’s petulant display in the face of a rebellion amongst his own members which almost put paid to his plans to outlaw the ‘glorification of terrorism’ – whatever that actually means – and which caused proposals to extend the period that terrorist suspects could be held without charge to ninety days to be withdrawn, pending further negotiations at the last minute in avoidance of a sure and certain parliamentary defeat

One almost begins to feel a little sorry for Charles Clarke.

As a Minister he did what he had to in order to avoid the government being defeated for the first time in a vote in the House of Commons - he ordered a tactical retreat in the face of opposition on both sides of the House which would surely have taken David Winnick’s amendment, which proposed an extension of police powers of detention to twenty-eight days, over the government’s own proposals. And yet, publicly at least, what thanks does he get from his boss for preserving the government’s record of never having lost a vote in the Commons when it mattered?

None at all.

Instead, we find Blair railing against the perceived injustices of a democratic parliament which, for the first time in his career in the top job, has had the temerity to turn around and say ‘no’, accusing parliament of ‘woeful complacency’ for the refusal to see things his way. His opponents he suggests in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, “have failed utterly to confront the reality of the post-9/11 world and the "existential" threat of global terrorâ€?.

‘Existential’ threat? Does he know something we don’t?

Are we now to be confronted not only by bombers screaming ‘God is Great’ as they detonate their suicide belts but by middle-class intellectuals proudly announcing that “Life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning and value is nothing else but the meaning that you chooseâ€?; before letting rip with their AK-47s?

One half begins to suspect that if this carries on he may eventually resort to announcing that he’ll “thcweam and thcweam and thcweam until he’s thick!â€? if he doesn’t get his way soonâ€?.

Clarke, so it is believed, privately harbours serious reservations about handing the police the blank cheque of ninety-day detentions without charge yet with ‘his master’s voice’ ringing in his ears he finds himself forced in making statements such as this; “"We want 90 [days’ detention], not 80 or 100, because that is what the police want.", without any shred of irony in recognition of the fact that it is parliament that is the sovereign body of the United Kingdom and not the Metropolitan Police.

But then, if reports are to be believed, Clarke is not alone in operating with one arm forced up behind his back by his imperious leader; in the last couple of weeks its been strongly suggested that both Ruth Kelly and even David Blunkett, before his ignominious departure from office, have been subjected to similar treatment for suggesting that Blair may be pushing things too far, too fast, in his race to secure his personal political legacy before his time as Prime Minister comes to an end

…

When you come to think about it, there’s something inescapably brazen in a man who spends his life shadowed by armed guards and who works within what has become, under this very government, a concrete-block cordon through which not even the best Hollywood stunt-driver could successfully navigate a car-bomb to target, lecturing the public about it’s ‘complacency’ in the face of the threat of future terrorist attacks on British citizens. It’s an irony completely lost on Blair when he says:

"I still think there is a woeful complacency about a lot of the public debate about this. The police told me, and the security services back them up, that they may have stopped two further attempts since July 7.

The fact is there are people we are tracking the whole time, and the important thing about this terrorism is that it is terrorism without limit. There is a desire to cause the maximum loss of life - there is no compunction about it on the part of the terrorist. I find it really odd that we’re having to make the case that this is an issue, when virtually every week, somewhere in the world, terrorists loosely linked with the same movement are killing scores of people."
Blair’s comments here are in all respects as curious as his reference to the existence of an ‘existential’ threat. The police ‘may have stopped two further attempts since July 7′…

…and I ‘may’ have sat down to write this piece this morning having spent the last forty-eight hours in rampant sexual congress with the entire cheerleading squad of the Dallas Cowboys.

I didn’t. But for all any of my readers know of my personal life I may have.

We’ve seen this same trope; either warnings that an attack of some sort may be imminent or that the police/security services may have foiled a planned attack on a regular and routine basis both here and in the US since the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon – an almost always such statements come at a politically opportune moment; just before an important vote or just at the point where things have become politically rather sticky.

So consciously have governments, here and in the US, made use of the tactic of building and releasing public tension by announcing that ‘there may be a heightened threat’ or ‘a threat may have been averted’ – all without ever substantiating their statements - that one begins to feel that you’ve spent the last four years in a movie scripted by Hitchcock and that, any moment, you’ll bump in Cary Grant on a train or find Robert Donat hanging from the face of Big Ben; so concerted has been the effort to keep the public permanently on edge

Then we have the statement that “the important thing about this terrorism is that it is terrorism without limitsâ€?. Is that really the problem here, that we’re no confronted by terrorists who don’t want to play by the ‘rules’ of the game – whatever those rules are. Just on the face of it this seems to imply that in the past, during the thirty-years of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, there was some sort of cosy little relationship in place between us and the terrorists – news indeed, were it true, to those on both sides of the sectarian and political divide who lost family members to terrorist attacks over that period.

And, of course, we have “virtually every week, somewhere in the world, terrorists loosely linked with the same movement are killing scores of people.â€? Note the studious avoidance of any reference to the fact that the ’somewhere in the world’ where there are weekly, almost daily, terrorist attacks is actually Iraq.

It seems obvious that Blair is responding to opposition and to the adversity of finding himself in a situation where he lacks the majority support needed to get his own way in the manner he knows best; by putting the propaganda machine into full swing.

Despite it previously being reported that Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, was unconvinced as to whether the police had made a convincing case for the extension of detention without charge to ninety days, still Charles Clarke, speaking to the Commons in last week’s debate on the current anti-terror bill managed to suggest that 90-day detentions had Goldsmith’s full support – only then to have to apologise to the House the following day when it emerged that only Goldsmith’s political support had been secured; his views as the government’s legal counsel had not been solicited. One cannot help but be reminded, quite obviously, of the controversy that arose around the precise nature of Goldsmith’s advice on the legality of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in circumstances in which his full legal advice was not disclosed even to members of the Cabinet who were given, instead, a summary which lacked entirely the equivocation of his full thoughts on the invasion and, in particular, his clear assertion that regime change alone offered no legal basis for way.

Having abused the public trust on a previous occasion by manipulating the advice of its own senior legal counsel to suit its own ends, how can we now possibly place any faith in that same government when if offers us its own version of Goldsmith’s advice in the absence of direct corroboration from the man, himself. It seems to me that there is a distinct constitutional issue here – why should it be a convention in parliament that legal advice given to Minister’s by the Attorney General in matter of the legality, or otherwise, of legislation being debated by the House should not be disclosed to the House itself. Surely, if MPs are being asked to make laws they should at least have the benefit of being clearly advised as to the legality of those laws in relation to Britain’s over-arching commitments in international law and treaty by the Attorney General himself. Is it not better that any such concerns are disclosed fully as legislation is being debated by the House such that adjustments may be made before the fact, than to discover afterwards – as happened only last week in relation to withholding welfare benefits from asylum seekers – that certain provisions of a particular law are, of themselves, unlawful.

If nothing else, this seems to me to be to provide the strongest possible case in favour of a Supreme Court with the authority to strike down unlawful legislation in the manner of the US Supreme Court rather than the anaemic, watered-down and subservient version that the government is to put in place to replace the office of the Lord Chancellor. Parliament may be the sovereign body in the British system of government but this country’s history and tradition is such; going back to Anglo-Saxon law and the Norman Conquest; that even a sovereign must, at time, bow before the law of the land – a matter of historical fact which, like so many others, seems entirely lost on this present government.

Of course the surest signs that the party propaganda machine are now working overtime are not always to be found in statements coming from government itself.

So it is, today, that we have old chestnut of reporting disquiet amongst opposition ranks that they could be seen to be getting ’soft on terror’ in response to a YouGov poll (.pdf)which appears to show solid public support for the extension of detention without charge to the full ninety days - but, wait; there’s rather more to this than might first be apparent.

In times of trouble, lets not forget that like his counterpart over the big pond, Blair knows exactly who his friends are and who he can rely on – so step forward Rupert Murdoch to try to save the day.

Not only do we have The Sun entering the fray in its own inimitable style – decrying moves by MPs to protect habeas corpus as a ‘victory for terror’ and throwing in the usual ‘angry mom of terror attack victim’ angle for good measure – not to mention the obligatory asinine editorial complete with the assertion that “terrorists may be plotting chemical, biological or even nuclear attacksâ€? - oops, there’s the ‘M’ word again – but it turns out that the YouGov poll on which this claim of public support for a ninety-day detention period was commissioned by…

…Sky News.

Yep, it’s the Murdoch press again.

And what a poll it is too - all of four questions leading inexorably – and quite obviously - to a single answer.

Here, to kick things off, is your starter for ten…

Which of these statements comes closer to your view?

The threat to people in Britain from terrorism has fundamentally changed, partly because some terrorists are willing to commit suicide during their attacks, and partly because of they way they use modern technology - such as mobile phones and the Internet.

Terrorism is nothing new, and the task of preventing attacks and catching and prosecuting people suspected of terrorist offences is not fundamentally different from the task that the police and intelligence services have faced in the past.

Don’t know.

71% of those surveyed took the first option – that terrorism has changed. The problem with the question, however, is the juxtaposition of suicide bombers and the use of modern technology to create a false syllogism.

In the case of the July 7 attack on London there’s been no particular evidence to show that either mobile phones or the Internet were used extensively in the planning of the attack; the bombers may have used mobiles to keep in touch and talk to each other but no more than anyone else would contact their friends by the same means. In most respects, the manner in which this group was recruited, brought together and trained for the attack made use of wholly conventional methods of communication. The presumed ringleader had travelled to Pakistan and studied at as Islamic school which had a reputation for radical teaching. The group, itself, hung around together in their local neighbourhood, used the same gym; the same Islamic bookshop, etc. - all very conventional and low-tech.

It neither follows that the advent of suicide bombing coincides with the use of mobile phones or the Internet by terrorist groups nor does it follow that a terrorist group which does communicate with its members and supporters used modern technology will necessarily give rise to suicide attacks; so include references to both is this one, initial question?

The sole purpose this question serves is to create a link, in the minds of those being surveyed, between suicide bombing and the use of modern technology – indeed, had the question asked only if people thought the nature of the threat had changed on the sole basis that terrorists are willing to commit suicide in carrying out their attacks then the response would not have differed to any significant degree to that recorded in response to the actual question that was asked; the use of modern technology being an entirely secondary issue in the public perception of terrorism.

It’s also the case that a willingness to commit suicide in the course of carrying out a terrorist attack is nothing new – Gavrilo Princip, the assassin whose murder of Arch Duke Franz-Ferdinand precipitated the First World War, attempted to commit suicide (unsuccessfully) rather than be captured and tried for his crime. It is only our collective experience of IRA and Loyalist terrorism, in which suicide attacks have not been a factor, that has conditioned us to see such things as unusual or outside the terrorist ‘norm’.

Still, having been set up nicely by the first question, the survey goes on to ask:

Currently suspected terrorists can be held by Britain’s police for up to 14 days. After that they must either be charged with an offence, or released. The police want to extend this time to 90 days, because it can take up to three months to analyse material such as computer files in order to obtain the evidence needed to charge suspects.

Which of these statements comes closer to your view?

The police genuinely believe that the current 14-day rule is not enough to protect Britain from terrorist attacks.

The police don’t really need the extra time; they are simply using the debate about terrorism to extend their powers to hold people without being charged.

Don’t know.

First let’s not that having set up a spurious connection between suicide attacks and new technology in the first question; this second question now goes on to make a specific reference to the police needing more time “to analyse material such as computer files in order to obtain the evidence needed to charge suspectsâ€?.

The second question is carefully constructed to follow on from the first such that if one accepts the premise that the threat of terrorism has ‘changed’ with the advent of new technology it must – seemingly logically – follow that police must be right in wanting more time to analyse evidence that is derived from such technology. What the question does not disclose is that, in relation to evidence held in the form of computer files, the main problem the police face in analysing computers for evidence arises where those files have been encrypted and the police have not been able to secure the keys needed to decode the information in those files. Nor does it disclose the fact that, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, it is a criminal offence for anyone to refuse to turn over decryption keys to the police in the course of an investigation where they require access to encrypted data, one which carries a maximum sentence of (from memory) at least two years imprisonment. In such a situation, the mere fact of a refusal to turn over the decryption keys required to decode the information the police wish to analyse is sufficient to charge a suspect well within the present 14-day limit and given that such a charge would be accompanied by disclosure of the police’s suspicions that the data they have been denied access to relates to terrorist offence to the Court, should the accuse make an application for bail, its seems unlikely that any competent magistrate or judge would do anything other than remand the suspect into custody while investigations continued.

When it comes to encrypted computer data, there is no evidentiary reason why a suspect could not be held on a lesser charge relating to their refusal to turn over decryption keys while investigations continue into more serious matters – and that is without considering a situation where the suspect is a foreign national who could be held under the provisions of immigration law and dealt with via an immigration tribunal.

Now, again, look closely at the options given for answers to this question.

The first option does not ask whether you believe that ninety day detentions without trial are justified or whether you support such an extension to the existing provisions for such detentions in law.

What it asks, instead, is whether you believe that the police genuinely believe that the period for which they can hold suspects without charge should be extended beyond 14 days.

Well of course they do. The answer is a tautology; if the police did not believe that they needed such an extension to their existing powers then they wouldn’t be asking for it in the first place. However, the fact that the police are asking for such an extension to their powers does not prove that such an extension is justified or warranted, nor does the question specifically address the matter of whether such an extension to ninety-days is, in the public opinion, merited. One can just as easily answer yes to that question but only support an extension to twenty-one or twenty-eight days.

Conversely, where the ‘yes’ answer asks what the respondent think the police believe, the ‘no’ answer asks what the respondent believes – these are two fundamentally different things and not a matter where one could choose to support only one possible response. It is perfectly possible to believe that the police genuinely do believe they need their powers extended but still think that the current fourteen-day rule is sufficient to meet their needs. The two answers are not mutually exclusive.

Question three is, in its own way, equally as bad:

Critics of the 90 day proposal say that it would be bad for civil liberties, and won’t in practice help the task of catching, arresting and convicting suspected terrorists.

Which of these statements comes closer to your view?

Critics of the police are genuinely concerned with the need both to protect civil liberties and also reduce the threat from terrorism.

The critics are more concerned with the civil liberties of suspected terrorists than the rights of everyone else to be protected from terrorism.

Don’t know.

Again, the answers are loaded to ensure the survey provides the response that those who commissioned the survey – Sky News – wants. Note the phrasing of the second option - “ critics are more concerned with the civil liberties of suspected terroristsâ€? - as if such civil liberties are somehow different from those enjoyed by the vast majority of law-abiding citizens and thereby implying that support for the civil liberties of ’suspected terrorists’ is somehow a form of misguided support for terrorism itself and not a recognition that the rights that government are seeking to deny terrorist suspects are actually our rights; that the removal of habeas corpus, once put into practice, is something which affects us all.

To this point, all three questions are clearly loaded in favour of generating a response which supports the government’s plan to extend detention without charge in terrorist cases to ninety-days – and not just in terrorist cases either, it seems, as only this weekend Blair has also been talking up the possibility of extend similar powers of detention to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, but then what else can one expect from someone who favours ’summary justice’ over British justice, where the accused is innocent until proven guilty.

By the time we get the poll’s final question - whether you support the government’s actual proposals, the outcome is inevitable and support for banging up suspected terrorists for 90 days without charge is safely assured.

What other response could the survey have possibly generated but the one given above when those questioned have been so clearly and obviously led by the nose to the conclusions that Sky News wanted – conclusions which support Rupert Murdoch in his support for Blair and the government.

The loading on this poll is so obvious that one has to wonder why YouGov would risk its growing reputation to participate in something so obviously biased towards a particular outcome. I guess not even the pollsters can be relied upon for an unbiased perspective when its Murdoch paying the piper and calling the tune.

…

In all this, the one thing that hasn’t been clearly examined has been the actual case the police are putting forward to justify extending their powers of detention to ninety-days.

Fortunately, we can do just that, courtesy of the Home Office having published a letter from Andy Hayman, the Met’s Assistant Commissioner in charge of Special Operations – although one must note, of course, the convenience of this having been published by the Home Office but not the advice of Attorney General.

What can one say about Hayman’s arguments.

Well first, the Met has clearly picked up a few pointers from the government’s handling of intelligence in the decision to invade Iraq, so we get several references to the possibility of terrorists making use of chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons, including references to a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Met’s ‘theoretical case study’ – despite there being a complete absence, to date, of any evidence to suggest that terrorists who may be targeting the UK have developed any such capabilities – even the so-called ‘Ricin plot’ fell due to a distinct absence of actual ricin.

Much of reasoning the police put forward seems to relate not so much to building a case against suspects held in custody but is directed more towards trying to wrap up the networks to which it is presumed they belong such that one begins to suspect to a significant factor in police thinking has more to do with concealing the identity of those arrested for as long as possible so as not to spook their contacts into shutting down those networks and lying low – if that is indeed part of the police’s thinking in this matter then that can surely be accomplished just as easily by placing restrictions on the reporting of such arrests by the media who could surely have little complaint about a delay in being able to report the identity of suspects if such reporting might jeopardise efforts to trace and arrest accomplices.

As noted earlier, technical arguments regarding access to encrypted computer files really don’t stack up – it’s a function of such encryption that if the person doing the encrypting is careful and knows what he’d doing then it wouldn’t much matter if the police were given 90 days or 90 years to investigate, the chances of them cracking a strongly encrypted system in the required time would be about the same.

References to the problem of having charged some of those involved in the so-called ricin plot with terrorism offences only then to have to downgrade the charges to ones of fraud and forgery appear to have little or nothing to do with the actual detection of terrorism itself. Rather the complaint here seems to be that having laid such charges and been forced, then, to back off on the actual evidence, this left the police looking ‘bad’ for having overplayed their hand and jumped the gun on the charges themselves. If that is a problem then I’d argue its one of the police’s own making – they can hardly expect much in the way of sympathy if, having ‘crowed’ prematurely about their successes, they then have to swallow a little humble pie when it transpires that they were speaking way too soon. This is an issue best address by reigning in personal egos and getting better PR staff than by extending powers of detention.

There are also point at which Hayman’s arguments lapse into the realms of the absurd – one hardly needs to extend detention without charge to ninety-days to accommodate the fact that suspects are allowed regular breaks for religious observances. One can’t help but be strangely amused at the thought of a burly Detective Sergeant commenting exasperatedly to his boss:

“I swear we would have had him. Five more minutes and he would have broken, only then we had to stop for prayers�

I wonder, in Islamic TV cop shows, when the Captain yells at his maverick detectives that he give them only another twenty-four hours or they’re off the case, does one of them shout back; “Better make that twenty-five. It’s Friday tomorrow and I can’t miss prayers!â€?

Other aspects of this letter are equally troubling.

The fact that multiple suspects may engage the same firm of solicitors as legal counsel, causing delays as consultations take place with several clients hardly seems cause to extend powers of detention. Again, as with the reference to religious observances, what’s coming through here is a more general set of complaints that things would be so much easier for the police were they not required to consider trivial matters like a suspect’s human rights, up to an including their right to legal counsel and to mount a defence.

Then, in the case studies, and after noting that the case against those responsible for the failed attack of July 21 is sub judice, Hayman goes on to note that “one of the suspects has already raised the defence that he intended to do no more than cause a demonstration of some sort, but not to kill anyoneâ€?. Apart from noting that one would suspect that evidence as to whether the devices used on the day were capable of being detonated had they been put together correctly will be a key determinant in this case, I’m rather troubled by this – I may be wrong but I would have thought that statements as to nature of the defence a suspect intends to mount would be as much subject to the sub judice rule as anything else related to the case, given that such a statement lends itself all to well to media speculation of the ‘pull the other one it’s go bells on’ variety and may even be thought potentially prejudicial.

In all it’s difficult to see from this letter quite what it might contain that would so thoroughly convince Blair that the police have an overriding need to detain people for ninety-days at a time without charge – until of course we come to the ‘theoretical case study’ at the end of the letter which has clearly been written with its target audience in mind and lays it on not with a trowel but with a JCB by painting a picture of a planned and coordinated attack on parliament, itself, plus three British embassies, involving a ‘dirty bomb’ as well as a chemical device and conventional explosives.

What better way can there be to sell such a proposal to parliament that by sending them the message that next time around ‘It could be you’ – always worked well enough the lottery so why not for the Met?

All of which brings me more or less full circle to a comment made by the BBC’s Political Editor, Nick Robinson, during a report on the Cabinet’s deliberations as to ‘what next’ on the anti-terror legislation.

On the face it, it was nothing more than the usual gossipy aside that political correspondents are inclined to tack on to their reports, as much to reinforce the point that they get speak ‘off the record’ to people and are, therefore, ‘in the know’. But what Robinson said was both intriguing and, perhaps, reveals rather more about Blair’s thinking on this issue that he would really like us to know.

What Blair, reportedly, told the cabinet last week – according to the unnamed Minister who spoke to Robinson – was simply that he would continue to push for ninety-day detentions for the simple reason that, if there was a future terrorist attack in the UK, then at least he could not be blamed for not trying to do enough to prevent it.

So much for the safety of the British public, eh? Never mind ‘you have a right to be secure’ what about ‘I have a right to not be blamed if something does go wrong’.

Sadly Robinson didn’t report that the meeting broke up after being led by Blair in a rousing chorus of ‘This is the Self-Preservation Society’ although one can’t help feel that would have been appropriate.

So there we have it folks. If, over the next few days, Blair and others appear to take on the countenance of Harry the Haggler from Monty Python’s Life of Brian - “Ten for that? You must be mad!â€?, at least you can rest safely in your beds knowing that it all because Blair has his own best interests at heart.

Blair’s got ‘The Fear’ alright, but only the fear that a future terroist attack may leave him with egg on his face.

As for the rest of us? Why should he care, it’s not like he has to worry about fighting another general election is it?

Update: Spy Blog has their own short but punchy fisking of the Murdoch’s YouGov poll - well worth a read.