The Green Ribbon

One week: two worlds - Brexit and the US election

It's been a surprisingly quiet week in Brexit negotiations, given that the end of the withdrawal period is now less than two months away.

 

That this is probably a good sign was confirmed by Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney on Tuesday, when he suggested that some form of long term agreement is now likely. The outstanding question is whether that will include a trade agreement. Even if it does, it is not likely to be an ambitious one.

 

This week's US election is arguably the biggest unknown factor. The FT reports that Boris Johnson is concerned about British diplomatic isolation in the event of a Biden victory, particularly after antagonizing the Democrats over Ireland. Part of this might simply reflect a decision by the Biden campaign to close down diplomatic contacts generally. Some commentators claim Johnson is closer to Biden on issues such as climate change and (oddly enough, given Brexit) multilateralism. Nevertheless, Johnson's populist style may look distinctly passé if Biden is elected.

 

Yet a Trump victory is still a real possibility. While the national polls favour Biden, some of the key states are much closer, and the polls wouldn't need to understate Trump by much for an upset to happen.

 

UK-based pundits are notorious for their willingness to pontificate on US elections, and I'm not about to defy the stereotype. For my money, the 'Blue wall' swing states that Trump took from Hilary Clinton in 2016, like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and perennial swing states like Ohio and Florida, are more likely to be decisive than Democratic stretch goals like Georgia and Texas.

That said, if Biden has a good night, the latter states may be important in the down-ballot race for control of Congress. (Although it's a conservative site, I tend to use RealClearPolitics to follow US elections because of the usefullness of its maps. Alternative suggestions are welcome!)

 

By this time next week, the world could be facing one of two very different political outcomes. If there is lingering uncertainty, that may favour Trump given conservative dominance of the Supreme Court.

 

Yet for Brexit, the possibilities are narrowing. Biden makes a trade deal more likely, Trump a deal without a trade element. But any trade deal will not be far-reaching, and the prospect of an unmanaged no deal breakdown seems to be receding.

British Intelligence in Ireland: The Colonial Connection

Subscribers will have noticed a few new profiles of intelligence officers on my Patreon recently, most notably Alastair Crooke of MI6, and John Deverell of MI5, both of whom contributed to a tradition of covert diplomacy that formed one strand of the roots of the Irish peace process.

It's a format that I hope shows some of the potential that can be developed in further narrative chapters of British intelligence in Ireland. 

One thing that struck me while researching them is how much the development of a back-channel between the British Government and the republican movement in the early 1990s coincided with the progress of Sir John Stevens' investigation into collusion between the security forces and loyalists. How far was the peace process promoted by the unravelling of a harder-edged alternative?

Another lesson was the strength of the connection between MI5 and the old Colonial Service. Director General Stella Rimington memorably described in her autobiography how intelligence officers were recruited from among the redundant British officials of newly independent colonies in the 1960s, in waves such as ‘the Malayan Mafia or the Sudan Souls’.  

The problem with the Quilliam Foundation

This post originally appeared on openDemocracyUK on 7 November 2016.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) has a long history of fighting racism, extending back to roots in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, so its Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists published last month, attracted widespread interest from those involved in combatting Islamophobia. Unfortunately, this latest publication has been controversial because it includes Maajid Nawaz, the co-founder of the UK counter-extremist think-tank Quilliam Foundation.

Nawaz has denounced this characterisation as 'Islam-splaining', describing himself as 'a brown, liberal, reform Muslim' and denouncing his critics as the 'regressive left', a charge echoed by Nick Cohen in the Spectator. Some elements of SPLC's critique of Nawaz were indeed questionable. It is not clear that the inclusion of some of his more personal peccadilloes shed any light on the charge of extremism. To accuse any self-identified Muslim of anti-Muslim extremism should always give one pause, given the risk of setting oneself up as arbitrator of others’ religious beliefs. There should be a high bar, and the scattershot nature of some of the SPLC's criticisms suggests that bar has not been met, even if other points do illustrate the profoundly illiberal impact of Quilliam's brand of counter-subversion.

This does not mean that a Muslim can never be said to be an anti-Muslim extremist. A good example is provided by a previous row involving Quilliam and a close British analogue of the SPLC, Hope Not Hate. In December last year, Hope Not Hate published a report on the so-called 'counterjihad movement', a self-identified coalition of hardline, far-right anti-Muslim groups, which spawned among other organisations, the English Defence League in Britain.

Bilderberg 2013

My piece for Spinwatch earlier this week on the Bilderberg meeting in Watford:

A remarkable collection of politicians, diplomats, industrialists, bankers, royalty and other notables assemble in Watford today for the 61st Bilderberg meeting, a discreet high-level transatlantic policy forum that has met almost annually since 1954.

In recent years Bilderberg has taken to publishing its guest list and a brief agenda, in a bid to dispel the aura of conspiracy that has traditionally surrounded the event. (The data has been uploaded to the Bilderberg 2013 Watford page at Spinwatch's Powerbase wiki, which hopefully provides a more illuminating format than the Bilderberg site).

Read the rest here.

The Al Yamamah oil fund

Very interesting thread on Sic Semper Tyrannis about the US investigation into BAE:

the biggest aspect of the BAE/"Al Yamamah" story is the offshore fund. To summarize: BAE delivered about $40 billion in arms and services to Saudi Arabia. BAE padded the bills substantially, up to nearly $80 billion. The pad was used, in part, to bribe Saudi officials who helped swing the deal, including Bandar and Prince Turki bin-Khaled, a top official of the Saudi Ministry of Defense. That part is fully detailed in the Guardian and other British coverage of the BAE scandal, going back three or four years. What is not covered in the British press is the fact that Saudi Arabia paid for the arms with oil. The oil was sold on the spot market, and this generated an estimated (in current dollars) $160 billion in cash. I am told by former U.S. Treasury Department officials that the funds generated from the oil sales, after BAE got their cut, went into offshore bank accounts.

As Jamie notes at Blood and Treasure there's not a lot of evidence offered, but the allegation about the oil fund has come up before. In his book In the Public Interest, the former chairman of Astra, Gerald James, highlights a partially blacked out memo that was sent to Jeff Rooker MP, which suggested some of the funds found their way to the Conservative Party.

"Cheap propaganda tricks" - The neocons on Obama

Tony Karon points us to a remarkable attack on Barack Obama by Edward Luttwak in the New York Times:

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive). (New York Times)

Luttwak reckons this would 'compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism.'

Pat Lang suggests that this argument doesn't pass the smell test:

The Litvinenko Affair revisited

David Habbakuk will be familiar to readers of Col Pat Lang's blog Sic Semper Tyrannis. He has some very interesting thoughts on the November 2006 death of Alexander Litvinenko over at Yuri Mamchur's Russia Blog:

Uncritical acceptance of claims by [Oleg] Gordievsky about how Litvinenko died is particular bizarre -- given that he has made different and incompatible claims at different times, so as a simple point of logic some of what he has claimed has to be false. A further curious feature of Gordievsky's accounts, however, is that much of what he has claimed directly contradicts central elements of what has become the official British version of Litvinenko's death. And in fact, while one would be ill-advised to take anything Gordievsky says at face value, some of what he has claimed fits in distinctly better with the publicly available evidence than the official version does.

Sic Semper Tyrannis: A Nuclear Proliferation Network in Washington?

Interesting series of posts over at Sic Semper Tyrannis, about the case of Sybil Edmonds, a former FBI translator Sybil Edmonds who claims that the Bureau is sitting on evidence that corrupt US officials are part of an international network trading nuclear secrets.

Col. Pat Lang picks up The Times' reports on the case:

There are a number of countries sponsoring espionage against the US government.  Espionage is a felonious crime in the US whether it is on behalf of a "friendly" state or an enemy.  Some people think that unauthorized delivery of US classified information to a US national is not espionage.  They are mistaken.  One could be charged with a lesser crime, but that is at the option of the government. (Sybil Edmonds: an Unresolved Case?)

David Habbakkuk suggests that the network may have been penetrated by the US and allowed to run:

a key statement in the original Sunday Times story is that the nuclear network Edmonds describes 'has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain's Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.' In addition to this, there is the 'small team' investigating the 'same procurement' network referred to in the third story -- to which Valerie Plame belonged, and for which Brewster Jennings was a front company. One quite possible explanation for the appearance of this story in the Sunday Times is that important elements in this 'joint Anglo-American intelligence effort', either in London, or in Washington, or in both, decided they wanted this network shut down, and saw the disclosures by Edmonds as a means of securing this end. (Sybil Edmonds 2 by David Habbakkuk)

This kind of penetration operation sounds very similar to the one Richard Tomlinson claimed he was involved in, infilitrating the Nahum Manbar network for MI6.

 

Clinton, Obama, and America's Mercenary Army in Iraq

Jeremy Scahill has been doing some good work trying to pin down the US Democratic contenders on the issue of mercenaries in Iraq (hat tip:The Spy Who Billed Me):

A senior foreign policy adviser to leading Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has told The Nation that if elected Obama will not "rule out" using private security companies like Blackwater Worldwide in Iraq. The adviser also said that Obama does not plan to sign on to legislation that seeks to ban the use of these forces in US war zones by January 2009, when a new President will be sworn in. Obama's campaign says that instead he will focus on bringing accountability to these forces while increasing funding for the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the agency that employs Blackwater and other private security contractors. (Hillary Clinton's staff did not respond to repeated requests for an interview or a statement on this issue.) (The Nation)

In the wake of Scahill's article, Hilary Clinton issued this statement:

Afghanistan, Ireland and MI6

Moon of Alabama offers a compelling reconstruction of the blown MI6 back-channel operation in Afghanistan, about which new details have emerged in the past few days.

He also draws attention to Syed Saleem Shahzad's allegations in the Asia Times, about Irish official Michael Semple. It's worth noting that the British official expelled from Afghanistan along with Semple, Mervyn Patterson, is from Northern Ireland.

This is highly suggestive given MI6's long history in Ireland of involvement in back-channel negotiations that did not always have universal support on their own side, a feature that appears to have been repeated in  Afghanistan.

One interesting question is whether the Irish Government could have wittingly co-operated with such an operation. It could be interpreted as consistent with its commitment to export the peace process model.

It may also be significant that there are seven members of the Irish Defence Forces working at ISAF HQ in Kabul, four of whom are employed in the liaison and negotiations branch.