David Miliband: slashing the cost
Meanwhile, our standing in the world, the extent of our so-called ’special relationship’ with the US, the lengths we as a nation are prepared to go to fight The War Against Terror, and the morality of our leading politicians are there again for all to see.
Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, has asked the attorney general to investigate possible “criminal wrongdoing” by the MI5 and the CIA over its treatment of a British resident held in Guantanamo Bay [...] The dramatic development over allegations of collusion in torture and inhuman treatment follows a high court judgment which found that an MI5 officer participated in the unlawful interrogation of Binyam Mohamed. [...] It emerged tonight that lawyers acting for Smith have sent the attorney general, Baroness Scotland, evidence about MI5 and CIA involvement in the case, which was heard behind closed doors in high court hearings [...] The evidence was suppressed following gagging orders demanded by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and the US authorities. [...] In court hearings in Britain, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has said that documents believed to show Mohamed was tortured must not be released because the US wants to keep the evidence secret. The US has warned that if the UK courts ordered the release of the documents, America might stop sharing intelligence with Britain.
Some of the evidence suppressed to spare Miliband’s blushes was that Binyam Mohamed had his genitals slashed with a scalpel after being extraordinarily rendered to Morocco for torture and interrogation.
I’d love to have been there when Miliband read the account of what our Moroccan proxies did to Mohamed’s wedding tackle. Did he pull a face? Did he feel sick? Did the thought ‘Oh Christ, look at the people we’ve made deals with’ cross his mind? In the end Miliband literally put Mohamed’s balls on the line in the name of keeping the Bush Administration sweet. His own? Not even figuratively.
Miliband likes to talk of the ‘universal values of human rights’. Really. How Miliband’s personal theory of the brotherhood of man accommodates Mohamed’s suppurating pipe is for more sophisticated and morally limber thinkers than me.
Our government and other assorted patriots like to boast of how we stride the world like a titan, a force for good and democracy. We brag of our friendships with the governments of America and Saudi (‘shared values‘) Arabia. Nations who then turn around and threaten us at the merest sniff that we might question their interests or what they get up to in their dungeons. What a nation of pussies we turned out to be.
Posted on October 31st, 2008 at 11:04am under New Labour, T.W.A.T.
America might stop sharing intelligence with Britain.
On the evidence I’ve seen America doesn’t have any intelligence to spare.
Well, amongst America’s governing elite there is a clandestine attitude towards Britain which takes great pleasure in seeing us debase and abase ourselves before the bared fangs of US power. It has been one of the supreme achievements of almost every British government since the end of WW2 (along with Fleet Street’s lack of spine) that Britain`s relationship has been seen, here, as a partnership. There’s just one problem – a partnership is a relationship between equals, which the ’special relationship’ most certainly isn’t. No, what we have is the relationship between a sidekick and a mobster chief – that’s right, we`re the Don’s lieutenant, his henchman, ready and willing to get in there, break legs, bomb defenceless brown people, while proclaiming that we are following the highest moral purpose.
American sharing intelligence with Britain? The only thing a henchman gets told is what he needs to carry out the hit, nothing more.
We’re not even the Don’s henchman – we’re his fucking gimp. We live chained to a radiator in the basement and only occasionally get let out to savage people.
As for how Miliband felt, I wouldn’t be surprised if his mouth went dry, his heart-rate sped up, and he popped a semi… Welcome to the world of politics as psychopathology.
I wonder what Agent Smith is getting out of this. Has Gordon set her to search-and-destroy the upstart Miliband, or has she independently run out of real human beings to be mean to?
That’s a very good point. Turf war?