During last week’s heavily moderated (i.e. no hard questions) webchat with Home Office ball-breaker-in-chief, Louise Casey, on the Respect Agenda, several bloggers, including Nosemonkey, noticed what looked to be a fair blatant bit of astroturfing going on involving a ‘Jimmy Devlin’, who posted this…

Jimmy Devlin: Louise, empowering communities and fully supporting tenants and residents associations to fight ASB and criminal behaviour is the best way of ensuring that the Respect message is delivered into the heart of the community and everybody will stand as one and demand respect . The problem minority will then be forced to alter their attitude and behaviour or else they will become isolated very quickly. Return power to the decent majority. Zero Tolerance and harsher sentences would be a good starting point.. Too often they are given far too many chances . They need a real shock to turn them away from crime/ASB. Families , schools and the community all have their part to play but if local people don’t take a stand and demand change , nothing will deter future ASB etc.

Perhaps the best comment on this came from Kitty Killer, who doesn’t post nearly often enough, who observed:

Softball? This was practically a handjob:

All of which begs the question, if you’re bored enough, as to who is Jimmy Devlin? Especially when idle curiousity leads you to this, from Labour’s recent exercise in communal banality - ‘Respect: Your Stories‘

I formed Greenbank Tenants & Residents Association in May 2003.

Implemented Home Watch and was elected by St.Helens Community Empowerment Network Panel members to represent the St.Helens Community on the CDRP.
Affiliated to the Social Landlords Crime & Nuisance Group and have become involved with Urban Forum , to lobby for major changes which I hope will help empower Communities to demand Respect from all residents in future.
Locally , we work closely with the Police and some members of Greenbank TRA carry out Speedwatch with CSOs etc.
I am also a Community Volunteer with Merseyside Police and was involved with the National Reassurance Policing Project.

We bombard the neighbourhood with newsletters explaining the benefits of dealing with ASB and send out the message that anybody who passes information to us or the Police is not a grass, but that they are helping our Community for everybody to enjoy a better quality of life free from ASB, Drugs and crime.

I really appreciate the support we receive from the police and am delighted that the Government (very ably fronted by Louise Casey) is progressing the Respect Action Plan , which can only improve the lives of often already vulnerable and disadvantaged people .

Although it may seem harsh that any person needs to be evicted , it is the best and only way to ensure that the victims and community gets some respite (they have usually suffered for years ) , although it does not help when pretty soon, the housing organisations allocate the property to another similar problematic tenant and their chaotic family members.

The Dundee project must surely be copied in every town and city across the UK to ensure that these miscreants not only receive the help they need, but also so that the communities are afforded the opportunity to regroup and engender the spirit which usually disappears when communities are under pressure .(Through fear etc.)

in my opinion, poor housing organisations use the “Homelessness” legislation as an excuse to repeatedly house problem tenants simply to ensure income from properties via housing benefit.
We experience this on a permanent basis.
A revolving door situation becomes the norm because of the allocations and lack of vetting /proper consideration by housing professionals .

If only our TRA committee could have an input in lettings,I am sure that the difference would be astonishing.

I can say that I fully support the measures announced earlier by the Prime Minister and hopefully communities like ours will see improvements in behaviour as a result.
I truly believe that “Togetherwecan” .
jimmy Devlin (Chairman) Greenbank TRA
Jimmy Devlin, St.Helens , Merseyside

Same guy? The similarities are too obvious to be coincidental, in which case Jimmy’s list of registered interests, as a member of St Helens Community Empowerment Network, run to the following:

Greenbank Tenants and Residents Association
H8 Pathways St Helens (ESF funded labour market project)
Helena Housing Allocations
St Helens forum
North West Tenants and Residents Assembly
St Helens Federation of Tenants and Residents Association
TPAS Northern Regional Committee
National Consultative forum
Social Landlord Crime & Nuisance Group
Reassurance Project (national)
Town Centre Neighbourhood Renewal Fund Group
Town Centre Key Individuals Network Group.
St Helens Crime & Disorder Reduction Partnership (Community Safety Thematic Group)

I’ll leave you to decide whether that supports the astroturfing contention or not.

Another Day. Another Home Office Bill. Another example of badly drafted legislation:

The New Police and Justice Bill includes this gem of an amendment to Computer Misuse Act, which is intended to criminalise the development, distribution or possession of ‘hacker tools’:

3A

Making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in offence under section 1 or 3

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he makes, adapts, supplies or offers to supply any article—

(a) knowing that it is designed or adapted for use in the course of or in connection with an offence under section 1 or 3; or

(b) intending it to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3.

(2) A person is guilty of an offence if he obtains any article with a view to its being supplied for use to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3.

(3) In this section “article� includes any program or data held in electronic form.

(4) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable—

(a) on summary conviction in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;

(b) on summary conviction in Scotland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;

(c) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or to a fine or to both.�

The offences under section 1 and 3 are basically accessing computer systems without authorisation (hacking) and a revised offence of acts carried out with intent to impair the operation of computers, which extends the law to cover denial of service attacks as well as the old staples of hacks and viruses.

Of course as any techie will spot immediately, there are actually very few, if any, so-called hacker tools which don’t have completely legitimate and valid uses, which renders this particular part of the bill near enough useless.

For example, software which could be used to mount a illegal denial of service attack can equally be used legally to stress test a network.

Password crackers and decryption tools which can be used to gain unlawful access to computer systems and secure computer data can equally be legitimately used for password security auditing, network security testing and datafile recovery. Trust me, one the absolute banes of an IT support techs existence is the user who discovers how to password protect MS Office documents and then forgets the bloody password they’ve used on something important.

Bulk mailers, which can be used for legitimate, if irritating, marketing purposes can equally used to mount larrge scale spam attacks which clog up mail servers and act as a denial of service.

Only in rare cases, and only when the clear purpose of a piece of software is destructive, as in the cases viruses with a harmful payload, or perhaps certain types of covert surveillance software such as some trojans and occasional keylogger, could it reasonably be said that that a piece of software might fall foul of this new law.

The rest of the time, its not what the software does that makes it potentially unlawful, but what you do with it.

This is the equivalent of banning the production, sale and ownership of pencils because they could be used to write a poison pen letter - in short, the usual ill-thought out, ill-considered crap we’ve come to know and love as the hallmark of the Home Office’s efforts to tackling things they don’t understand.

A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.

Hmm. Somehow the word ‘irregularities’ seems rather to downplay what’s been going on here, still lets see just what some of the irregularities are in detail…

Agents from the inspector general’s office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.

One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general’s office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.

Potential fraud? $100,000 to polish pumps in a swimming pool is only potential fraud?

More to the point, shouldn’t someone be asking question like why swimming pools were being refurbished at a time when sizeable areas of the country were lacking reliable supplies of water and electricity?

But much of the material in the latest audit is new, and the portrait it paints of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and American money…

…”It does not surprise me at all,” said a Defense Department official who worked in Hilla and other parts of the country, who spoke anonymously because he said he feared retribution from the Bush administration. He predicted that similar problems would turn up in the major southern city of Basra and elsewhere in the dangerous desert wasteland of Anbar province. “It’s a disaster,” the official said of problems with contracting in Anbar.

No records were kept as money came and went from the main vault at the Hilla compound, and inside it was often stashed haphazardly in a filing cabinet.

That casual arrangement led to a dispute when one official for the provisional authority, while clearing his accounts on his way out of Iraq, grabbed $100,000 from another official’s stack of cash, according to the report. Whether unintentional or not, the move might never have been discovered except that the second official “had to make a disbursement that day and realized that he was short cash.”

Oops…

Then there is:

In one case, an American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money. Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.

American Excess? That’ll do nicely sir!

And finally we have…

Sometimes the consequences of such loose controls were deadly. A contract for $662,800 in civil, electrical, and mechanical work to rehabilitate the Hilla General Hospital was paid in full by an American official in June 2004 even though the work was not finished, the report says. But instead of replacing a central elevator bank, as called for in the scope of work, the contractor tinkered with an unsuccessful rehabilitation.

The report continues, narrating the observation of the inspector general’s agents who visited the hospital on Sept. 18, 2004: “The hospital administrator immediately escorted us to the site of the elevators. The administrator said that just a couple days prior to our arrival the elevator crashed and killed three people.”

Which I suppose only goes to prove that cowbouy builders are the same whereever you go…

I’ve saved the most interesting comment for last, which is simply:

The money, most from Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from Saddam Hussein’s government, also easily found its way out of the compound and the country.

So let’s get this straight.

You go to their country. Invade. Shoot the place to shit. Promise to rebuild the place - with their own money…

…and then you rob them blind.

Free market war - you gotta love it.

via

I’d like to put the following challenge to any Member of Parliament, of any party, who may be considering voting to overturn the amendment to the Identity Cards Bill passed in the House of Lords which makes registration on the National Identity Register on application for a passport or driving licence and receipt of an identity card entirely voluntary when the Bill returns to the Commons.

In no more than one side of A4, please explain in your own words how a system which requires anyone applying for a passport or driving licence to be automatically entered into the National Identity Register and issued with an identity card in any way ‘voluntary’.

To assist you with this, please refer to the following definition of the word ‘voluntary’:

Voluntary adj

1. Done or undertaken of one’s own free will: a voluntary decision to leave the job.
2. Acting or done willingly and without constraint or expectation of reward: a voluntary hostage; voluntary community work.
3. Normally controlled by or subject to individual volition: voluntary muscle contractions.
4. Capable of making choices; having the faculty of will.
5. Supported by contributions or charitable donations rather than by government appropriations: voluntary hospitals.
6. Law.
1. Without legal obligation or consideration: a voluntary conveyance of property.
2. Done deliberately; intentional: voluntary manslaughter.

Answers may be submitted via the comments system on this blog or by e-mail to address in the sidebar and all answers will be published in full on this blog, should any be received.

Hat Tip

Back in my own university days, pretty much the only attention that the Student Union paid to its various clubs and societies was to use them as a means of exercising their slightly perverse sense of humour during Fresher’s week.

Fresher’s week, of course, meant the obligatory ‘Fresher’s Fayre’, where the Union bars would be temporarily turned into an kind of jumble sale for interest groups trying to attract new members from the naive and newly unwashed ranks of new entrants, which amounted to little more than give each of the clubs and societies a table to decorate as a ’stand’ and leave them to get on with it.

The humour in this half-arsed ritual lay in the perverse pleasure that whoever was responsible for allocating these stands took in allocating them in such a way to accentuate the various natural rivalries that existed between certain societies.

So it was that, as a matter of course, all the political societies would be grouped together, with the Tory club flanked on either side by as many hard left groups as humanly possible, leaving the various Trotkyists and Communists with the dilemma of not knowing quite whther they should be arguing with each other or joining forcing to give the Tories in-between a hard time.

Similar arrangements were made in relation to the relgious societies, which inevitiably resulted in the Pagan Society and the Christian Union being parked next door to each other. Chuck in the little matter of putting all the music clubs in the same bar, much to the chagrin of everyone by the Rock Society who were the only club to ever figure out that they could easily dominate proceeding by the simple expedient of hiring a sizeable PA for the event, when all the others relied on whatever portable system one of their members had managed to buy from Dixons over the summer, and you should get the general picture - the purpose of the Fresher’s Fayre was less about recruiting new members to societies and more about building up a nice solid reserve of friction and resentment to take the various clubs through the upcoming year.

I mention all this only as preamble to the latest apparent addition to the annals of ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’, the decision of the Birmingham University Guild of Students to disavow its Evangelical Christian Union and freeze its bank account after its apparent refusal to open up its voting membership to people of all religions.

Now, at other times this might create something of a dilemma - what with me being a committed atheist and no great lover of religions in general. But this is not an issue I find particularly difficult, for as much as I have no particular time for religion, I have even less time for idiotic bouts of hypocritical authoritarian bullshit, which appears to be what’s going on here.

Still, before going off the deep end I thought I’d see if I could find out in more detail what’s actually going on an unearthed this from the Guild’s minutes:

“The Evangelical Christian Union has been derecognised as per TITLE H Appendix VIII Mandatory Clauses of Standing Society and Society Constitutions.

Explicitly

1.3 If there are any contradictions between a Society Constitution and any of the mandatory clauses, the Society shall cease to be recognised by the Guild.
The Evangelical Christian Union constitution limited membership by requiring all members to sign a doctrinal basis and explicitly the mandatory clauses (because the Guild constitution does) require that a society be open to all members of the Guild (i.e. they cannot be prohibited based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, beliefs etc). Secondly they did not allow all members to run in the elections for their committee, but rather the current committee nominate their chosen successors (and have the capacity should they choose after 2 weeks of advertisement to allow nominations from the rest of the society at their discretion). Again this is significantly different from the clause saying all full members are eligible to run for committee positions in an AGM. Therefore the Evangelical Christian Union (BUECU) was derecognised�

Now there are two points raised here which merit consideration. First is the matter of membership being open to all Guild members regardless of gender, sexuality, etc. Looking through the Guild’s own constitution and related documents, it certainly does appear that it operates an unnecessarily severe and proscription regime, one that is lacking in simple common sense.

Societies that wish to apply restrictions to membership have to obtain an exemption from the Guild - only two such exemptions are in force at present - yet common sense dictates that a Christian group should be able to restrict its voting membership to Christians, much as a Muslim group would restrict its voting membership to Muslims or a political club would not giving voting rights to people who are not members of the political party to which it relates.

As such this argument is absurd because it creates conditions in which the Christian Union could be taken over and run by non-Christians, just as if applied to the letter, you could have a Labour club runs by Tories and a Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Society where none of the members are actually Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual.

The only justification I could see for citing this a grounds for derecognition is is the ‘doctrinal basis’ cited is unnecessarily proscriptive and discriminatory - i.e. it specifically and unreasonably excludes people from membership for reasons other than their faith or puts unnecessary constraints on legitimate religious beliefs, i.e. if it excludes Catholics, Methodists or Non-conformist Christians.

Unless this is what’s happening here then in this respect the Evangelical Christian Union have good reason for complaint as it represents a triumph of the rule book over common sense.

The second point, regarding the Christian Union’s particular version of ‘democracy’ has altogether greater merit - a system in which the outgoing committee is permitted to annoint its successors and only open itself up to selection if it’s short of bodies to fill all the avaialable places, and then only when it feels like it, is not a democratic system at all, and as the Guild insists that its societies should operate on a genuinely democratic basis this point clearly justifies their decision to derecognise the Christian Union.

On that basis, there is rather more to this story than simply ‘politial correctness gone mad’ although if one is honest, the Guild can have no real complaint about getting bad press over this issue due to its failure to apply a common sense approach to the matter of membership, which has clouded what should otherwise be a strightforward issue of a rule breach on the matter of internal democracy.

If Birmingham’s Student Union has any sense, which remains to be seen, it should revisit its own rules and put in place regulations which allow for a little more common sense latitude in the matter of restrictions on open membership - i.e. it is entirely reasonable for a single faith religious group to restrict membership to believers provided it makes no other discriminatory restrictions, much as it is reasonable that political societies should restrict membership to those who share a particular political outlook, or women’s groups should restrict membership only to women.

Clubs and societies are, after all, only a formalised expression of the concept of community and like all communities their are times when what the community needs is space to debate issues and make decisions for the community without having the rest of the world looking over its shoulder. The sensible solution, if the Guild wished to retain the principle that membership of societies should be open to all is to permit societies a form of associate membership without voting rights which allows those ‘outside’ the community to register their support and participate in the soceity without inhibiting the ability of the society to confine matters solely to voting members where it is necessary to do so. All the Guild need to then is monitor societies to ensure that such privileges are not being abused in a discriminatory fashion.

It’s not difficult if you think things through and take a reasonable, common sense view of things. It also avoids being caught out indulging in hypocrisy when, at the same meeting which remitted the appeal against the derecognition of the Christian Union back to for further consideration by committee, motions such as this are passed:

Motion: suspension of students from Matthew Boulton College

Guild Council Notes:

1. On Friday 6th January two students at Matthew Boulton College in Birmingham, Assed Baig and Darrell Williams were expelled for distributing a student newsletter they had produced.

2.The newsletter contains the students’ views on the war in Iraq, student apathy and several criticisms of college policy. It is in no way offensive.

3.They have been given one week to appeal. A protest has been called for Friday 13th January 8.30-10am and statement of support has been launched.

Guild Council Believes:

1. Students have a right to organise, to express their views on political questions and to criticise their institutions policies and practices.

2. These students were acting within their rights ad should not have been expelled

3. The expulsion is jeopardising their academic progress as they are unable to obtain a college reference necessary to complete their UCAS applications and will not be able to sit their exams.

Guild Council Resolves:

1. To support the protests on Friday 13th and 27th January

2. To sign the petition in support of the ‘Matthew Boulton Two’ and encourage students to do the same.

3. To send a letter of support to the students.

4. To write to Christine Braddock, their college principle, to question their expulsion.

5. To assist their campaign for re-instatement in other practicable ways.

What follows is the full and unexpurgated text of the Foreign Office memo relating to renditions through UK territory and airspace that was leaked to, and published by, the New Statesman last week - now in a usable format, the scanned PDF having been put through OCR software to generate a new text-based PDF.

I have added my own annotations to this post, in italics, together with the text of Jack Straw’s Ministerial Statement about this memo, given to the House of Commons on 20th Jan 2006.

For those of you who just want the memo without my own ramblings, you can download it in PDF format by clicking this link.

UPDATE: Tim at Bloggerheads has his usual excellent selection of links to various reports relating to this issue - well worth visiting.

MEMO BEGINS…

Dear Grace,

Detainees

Summary

1. An explanation of what is normally meant by “Rendition’1 and “Extraordinary Rendition”, though these are neither legal nor precise terms. Discussion also of their legality: Rendition could be legal in certain limited circumstances; Extraordinary Rendition is almost certainly illegal. Further advice, too on what we and the US mean when we talk of “torture” and “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” (CID). And to what extent knowledge of, or partial assistance in, these operations (e.g. permission to refuel) constitutes complicity?

2. Advice too on handling. We should try to avoid getting drawn on detail, at least until we have been able to complete the substantial research required to establish what has happened even since 1997; and to try to move the debate on in as front foot a way as we can, underlining ail the time the strong counter-terrorist rationale for close co-operation with the US, within our legal obligations. Armed with Rice’s statement and the Foreign Secretary’s response, we should try to situate the debate not on whether the US practices torture (and whether the UK is complicit in it): they have made clear they do not - but onto the strong US statements in Rice’s text on their commitment to domestic and international instruments. A debate on whether the US test for torture/CID derives from their commitments under the US Constitution rather than international law is better ground than the principle of whether they practice torture.

This is as it appears, a quick overview of the contents on the memo plus the author’s recommendations on the press line to take which amounts to dissemble, obfuscate and don’t get drawn into answering direct questions. The most interest comment is that which relates to shifting the debate on the definition of torture from that in international law to one based on what is permitted under the US Constitution, which, as is later noted, does permit treatment that has been ruled unlawful under international law.

Detail

3. You asked for further advice on substance and handling, following my letter of 5 December, including with a view to PMQs on 7 December.

Specifics:

What do we mean by “Rendition”?

4. This is not a legally defined term. But it is normally understood to mean the transfer of a person from one jurisdiction to another, outside the normal legal processes such as extradition, deportation, removal or exclusion. It does not necessarily carry any connotation of involvement in torture.

“Extraordinary Rendition�

5. The use of this term is even more varied. In its recent letters to Chief Constables and Ministers. Liberty has defined it as transfer from one third country to another. But it is normally used to connote the transfer of a person from one third country to another, in circumstances where there is a real risk (or even intention) that the individual will be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (CID). Indefinite detention without legal process could be argued to constitute CID.

So what we have here is a explanation of plain old vanilla ‘rendition’ – a.k.a. extra-judicial transfers between states or, more commonly, kidnapping – and extraordinary rendition, which is rendition with added testicular electrodes. Interestingly, the memo notes that indefinite detention without legal process – as in Guantanamo - could be argued to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, which is outlawed under the UN Convention Against Torture and, of course, the Geneva Convention.

Is Rendition lawful?

6. We need to look at the facts of each case. In certain circumstances, it could be legal, if the process complied with the domestic law of both countries involved, and their international obligations. Normally, these international obligations, e.g. under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), would prevent an individual from being arbitrarily detained or expelled outside the normal legal process. Council of Europe countries would also be bound by the ECHR, which has similar obligations in this sense. Against this background, even a Rendition that does not involve the possibility of torture/CID would be difficult, and likely to be confined to those countries not signed up to e.g. the ICCPR.

7. Rendition could therefore be legal in certain tightly defined circumstances. Rice’s Statement claimed two such examples (the World Trade Centre bomber, Ramzi Yousef, and Carlos the Jackal). But such cases will be rare.

If having signing up to the UN Convention on Civil and Political Rights is an indicator that rendition is likely to be unlawful, then legal renditions will be extremely rare indeed.

The ‘certain tightly defined circumstances’ in which rendition may be legal are therefore much as one would expect and best characterised as circumstances in which those in which the US is able to operate in the cracks between the law

Could Rendition ever be legal in the UK?

8. This depends how we are using the term “rendition”. In most circumstances and in most uses of the term, it will not be legal, including if it contravenes the law of the state from which the individual is transferred. In some limited circumstances, eg where there is no extant extradition procedure between the UK and a third country, transfer without formal extradition might be legal.

This is pure legal sophistry. Britain, as a signatory to both UNCCPR and ECHR could not permit renditions to take place on its territory, irrespective as to whether the country to which the rendee is taken has an extradition treaty with the UK or not. As for people being rendered into the UK, against UNCCPR applies, so such an idea is only applicable in cases where renditions take place from a non-signatory state. Moreover, the matter of unlawful extraditions was settled long ago by the notorious 1981 case in which an attempt was made to ‘render’ Ronnie Biggs back to the UK from Brazil by way of Barbados, an attempt which ultimately failed allowing Biggs to return to Brazil

Is Extraordinary Rendition legal?

9. In the most common use of the term (i.e. involving real risk of torture), it could never be legal, because this is clearly prohibited Under the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT). But the CAT prohibition on transfer applies to torture only, not to CID. (This may explain the emphasis on torture in Rice’s statement.)

10. The US government does not use the term “Extraordinary Rendition” at all. They say that, if they are transferring an individual to a country where they believe he is likely to be tortured, they get the necessary assurances from the host government (cf Rice’s Statement: “The US has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured. Where appropriate, the US seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured”). (Comment: We would not want to cast doubt on the principle of such government-to-government assurances, not least given our own attempts to secure these from countries to which we wish to deport their nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism: Algeria etc).

So the ‘assurances’ that Rice talked of in denying that the US are rendering captives to states which practice torture are no more substantive that those we are seeking or have already obtained, with countries that are known to practice torture such as Algeria and Libya.

The comment here (point 10) is extremely revealing and amounts to nothing more than ‘keep your mouth shut and say nothing, it might screw things up for us as well’.

What about the US reservation and “understandings” with respect to the CAT?

11. The US reservation to the CAT stales that the US considers itself bound (Article 16) to prevent CID only insofar as this means the CID prohibited by the US Constitution, but not as defined in international instruments such as the ICCPR. So, for example, the US would not (logically enough) consider themselves bound by the ECHR findings in relation to UK practice in Northern Ireland in the 1970s which ruled that five types of treatment did constitute CID (eg sleep deprivation, constant exposure to loud noise).

This is all very straightforward. The US does not use torture, at least not by its own definition of the term which applies a much lower standard to the term than is acknowledged in either international law or under ECHR. It’s human rights, Jim, but not quite as we know it

12. An “understanding” stated by the US spells out what it understands by mental pain or suffering in the definition of torture. It is not clear whether in practice this gives the US scope to use techniques which would otherwise constitute torture.

Again this is simple to understand. We know what the American’s say they are allowed do, we’re just not sure if its torture or not. Implicit in this statement is, of course, the line about it being best not to ask too many questions

Would cooperating with a US Rendition operation be illegal?

13. If the US were to act contrary to its international obligations, then co-operation with such an act would also be illegal if we knew of the circumstances. This would be the case, for example, in any cooperation over an Extraordinary Rendition without human rights assurances. Conversely, cooperation with a “legal” Rendition, that met the domestic law of both of the main countries involved, and was consistent with their international obligations, would be legal. Where we have no knowledge of illegality but allegations are brought to our attention, we ought to make reasonable enquiries.

Note the magic words at the end of the first sentence – cooperation with a US rendition operation would be unlawful if we knew about it. In other words “what we don’t know won’t hurt us�. I particularly like the last sentence, which suggests that we ‘ought’ to make ‘reasonable enquiries’ about allegations that the UK may have, however, inadvertently cooperated in illegal renditions.

And what are ‘reasonable inquiries’? A proper investigation? Somehow, I doubt it. I may be cynical but I get the distinct feeling that the kind of reasonable enquiries the memo is alluding too are unlikely to be much more than a quick call to the US Ambassador to ask if he’s sure that the US have not been naughty boys

How do we know whether those our Armed Forces have helped to capture in Iraq or Afghanistan have subsequently been sent to interrogation centres?

14. Cabinet Office is researching this with MOD. But we understand the basic answer is that we have no mechanism for establishing this, though we would not ourselves question such detainees while they were in such facilities.

trans: We capture them. We hand them over to the US and then we don’t ask any further questions, because what we don’t know can’t hurt us

What happened in 1998?

15. The Security Service have so far identified two cases:

i) An individual, Mohammed Rashed Daoud AL-OWHALI, was suspected of involvement in bombing the US Embassy in Nairobi. The US asked on 24 August 1998 for assistance with his return from Kenya to the USA for trial. This was originally via Prestwick, but later changed to Stansted because of the flight range of the aircraft. The request was originally for Al-Owhali and one other, who in the event did not travel. The request was agreed by the Home Secretary, Jack Straw.

ii) A similar request the same year was turned down, because the individual concerned was to be transported to Egypt (not yet clear what, if anything, the US said about assurances).

This is rather more interesting, not in the widely reported sense – this being the information that contradicts Jack Straw’s initial assurances about renditions –but in the sense of the second case, where the US were specifically asking for permission to render a captive to Egypt.

Egypt is, of course, amongst the list of countries with which the UK is seeking to obtain a Memorandum of Understanding in order to permit people to be deported to the country even in the face of concerns that they may be subject to torture on being returned.

16. From the information we have at the moment, we are not sure in either case whether the individual’s transfer from the country in which he was detained was extra-legal.

17. The papers we have unearthed so far suggest there could be more such cases. The Home Office, who lead, are urgently examining their files, as are we. But we now cannot say that we have received no such requests for the use of UK territory or air space for “Extraordinary Rendition”. It does remain true that “we are not aware of the use of UK territory or air space for the purposes of “Extraordinary Rendition”". But we think we should now try to move the debate on from the specifics of rendition, extraordinary or otherwise, and focus people instead on the Rice’s clear assurance that ail US activities are consistent with their domestic and international obligations and never include the use of torture.

This is the ‘killer’ section. Remember the accepted definition of ‘extraordinary rendition’ is ‘taking people away to be tortured’. So it is that here the memo’s author is now saying that we – meaning Jack Straw – cannot say that there have been no requests by the US for our complicity in taking people away to be tortured, but because we turned down their request in the case where this was obvious going to happen, as they were shipping their captive off to Egypt, we can say that we are not aware that our territory or airspace has been used in this way.

And how can we be sure? Because no one has ever bothered to ask or investigate such matters properly. Notice in point 16, what is being said is even where permission was give to render a suspect through UK airspace, including a landing on UK territory at Stansted Airport, we have no idea at all whether the rendition itself was legal or not

Handling

18. As far as possible, we should stick to the terms of the Foreign Secretary’s Statement in response to Rice’s, and his letter to EU Foreign Ministers covering her reply. We should also try to bring out the other side of the balance, in terms of the huge challenge which the threat of terrorism poses to all countries, and the need to balance the rights of the suspected terrorist against those of his potential victims.

19. More broadly, we should try to move the debate on from concentrating on whether the US practice torture, which they have clearly said they do not, and try to focus on the US’s constructive reassurance that, in all respects, they have acted in a way consistent with their domestic and international legal obligations, and with the sovereignty of those countries with which they have been working.

20. I am copying this letter to Nige! Sheinwald and Margaret Aldred (Cabinet Office), Ian Forber (MOD), Emma Churchill (Home Office), (Thames House), (Vauxhall Cross), and Sir David Manning (Washington).

(Irfan Siddiq) Private Secretary

Ms Grace Cassy 10 Downing Street

What I want you to do know is read and digest points 18 and 19…

…and now read below, Jack Straw’s Written Ministerial Statement to the House of Commons on 20th January 2006, where he addresses the matter of this particular memo

FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS

Rendition Allegations (Inquiries)

The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Jack Straw):

Some media reports over the last 48 hours, based on a leaked Government document, have suggested that the Government may be aware that there have been cases of “extraordinary rendition” through UK territory or airspace about which it has not informed Parliament.

This is not the case. I have given Parliament clear answers, updated as information has become available to me. The following chronology makes this clear:

7 December: the leaked document was sent by my office to the Prime Minister’s Office, setting out our understanding at that time.

12 December: after continuing searches of official records over the following few days, my written answer to the right hon. Member for North East Fife, (Sir Menzies Campbell), set out the facts as they had then been established: there had been three instances in 1998 where the US authorities had requested permission to render a detainee through UK territory or airspace; and in two of these cases, where the detainee was to be transferred to the US for trial, the US request had been granted. In the other case, it had been refused. I added that officials continued to search the records.

13 December: I discussed these issues at length in my public evidence session with the Foreign Affairs Committee.

10 January: I issued a written ministerial statement saying that Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials had now completed a search of their records back to May 1997. This search had turned up one further case, also in 1998: the Government had declined a US request to refuel a flight carrying two detainees en route to the US.

To summarise the position:

We have found no evidence of detainees being rendered through the UK or Overseas Territories since 11 September 2001.

We have found no evidence of detainees being rendered through the UK or Overseas Territories since 1997 where there were substantial grounds to believe there was a real risk of torture.

There were four cases in 1998 where the US requested permission to render one or more detainees through the UK or Overseas Territories. In two of these cases, records show the Government granted the US request, and refused two others.

Since before September 2001 we have worked closely with the US to achieve our shared goal of fighting terrorism. As part of that close co-operation, we have made clear to the US authorities, including in recent months:

that we expect them to seek permission to render detainees via UK territory and airspace (including Overseas Territories);

that we will grant permission only if we are satisfied that the rendition would accord with UK law and our international obligations, and

how we understand our obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture.

We are also clear that the US would not render a detainee through UK territory or airspace (including Overseas Territories) without our permission. As noted above, the US has sought such permission in the past.

The Government are committed to fulfilling their obligations under United Kingdom and international law. I have sought throughout to keep the House informed of developments. And shall do so again if new information comes to light.

Now having read the contents of the leaked memo, in full, and Jack Straw’s statement, I want to leave you with one simple multiple choice question to ponder.

I know which explanation I find most plausible