Binyam Mohamed and British intelligence oversight
This week, to quote Kings of War blogger, Robert Dover,
“a veritable poo-storm hit the British Court of Appeal yesterday as a private exchange of correspondence – between the government’s lawyer Jonathan Sumption QC and the Court – became public. The government had asked that part of the judgment relating to the alleged torture of Binyam Mohammed be redacted (or removed) in the interests of protecting the reputation of our Security Service (known to nearly everyone as MI5).”
Amongst other things (such as the conflation of national security with national embarrassment), the case of Binyam Mohamed (see this piece for starters, see also this piece for the various court rulings in pdfs, see Scott Horton’s feed for a more holistic appreciation of this week’s news on this) is indeed a very interesting case of flawed British parliamentary intelligence accountability.
Although the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has dealt with this case in its ad hoc Renditions report (2007), the most intriguing information is to be found elsewhere: In Mohamed v. Foreign Secretary, the British High Court revealed (already in 2008), how the ISC, which supposedly operates from within the ring of secrecy, has been kept outside of the loop in this (and arguably a number of other cases that will gradually come to the fore). Actually, it is even worse: Not only has crucial information been withheld (which amounts to more regular stone-walling), this time, upon questioning, the principal was positively misinformed by MI5 …. and was caught “red-handed”, too.
So what? We note that the fox has rarely been caught munching like this before. Against the backdrop of popular assertions that the ISC is fully informed, this revelation comes at a very high cost. It severely challenges the very credibility of Britain’s intelligence watchdog. (Arguably, we may have crossed the tipping point as the ISC has already been severely criticised for its haphazard role in the Iraqi WMD investigation.)
Three points, I believe, should be born in mind with respect to (hopefully pending) intelligence oversight reform in the UK:
First, the ‘ring of secrecy’ arrangement, needs to seriously reconsidered – if not abandoned, altogether. Its underlying assumption that the ISC is in a very privileged position as concerns its access to information is highly exaggerated. The committee’s access to information proved to be poorest when information was most critical. Naturally, this has more worrisome consequences. With a view to the subsequent ISC reports, the British public may be led to believe that its representatives have things ‘under control’. Instead, (at least with respect to the ISC rendition report this was the case), it may depict a highly distorted account of crucial foreign policy activities.
Second, the BM case shows how the ISC members, by and large, prefer a consultant’s position to that of a democratic controller. Granted, the restricted ISC mandate ties the hands of individual committee members but they have pursued a very narrow interpretation of the mandate at a time when a bolder approach would have been necessary in the interest of a more balanced parliamentary-executive relationship. Granted, too, the very pursuit of ‘propriety’ dimensions isn’t (yet?) part of their formal remit so, yes, one should give the ISC credit for having pushed the envelope on this. Still, once they are in the business of investigating malfeasance allegations, they seem too readily satisfied with earning in-put legitimacy. Just because a parliament is ‘looking into’ matters shouldn’t, by itself, lead to high legitimacy scores…
Third, despite the fact that political divides inside the ISC are less noticeable (compared to the intelligence oversight committees in the US Congress and the PKG in the Bundestag), we are still a long way from impartial oversight in Britain. This became clear throughout and after the renditions investigation. For example, one can point to various conflicting interests and revolving doors. (Consider, for example, the fact that the current ISC chairman was twice the addressee of letters from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Renditions – each time in very different capacities though, see the archive of http://www.extraordinaryrenditions.org; equally ’sub-optimal’ is the fact that the former foreign secretary M. Beckett has steadily refused re-opening the renditions investigations (during her brief spell as ISC chairperson)
