George Galloway's conversion to Islam
In a wide-ranging interview in this week's issue of the New Statesman, George Galloway MP talks about his spectacular by-election victory, Ed Miliband's fortunes, Middle East dictators and mass unemployment. Interviewer Jemima Khan also exclusively reveals the background to Galloway’s conversion to Islam.
Read exclusive extracts from the NS Profile here
NS Investigation: Rendition
How much did senior figures in the Labour government really know about rendition and torture and was there a high-level cover up?
As part of a special New Statesman investigation, James Grant is granted extraordinary access to the security services and speaks to top American officials, including General Michael Hayden - until recently director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - to build up the fullest picture yet of Britain’s role in rendition and torture.
Key points from the investigation:
1. With Jack Straw facing legal action for authorising rendition to torture, the question of ministerial oversight for the intelligence agencies could not be more important. The most remarkable thing about this story has been the failure of ministers to take ultimate responsibility when things went wrong, even if they did not know all the details.
2. MI5, which took the lead in interviewing detainees overseas after 9/11, did not have a practice of seeking ministerial approval for operations. As a result, Labour ministers can plausibly deny knowing all of the details. There is a real danger, then, that low-level officials—as in the famous case of Binyam Mohamed—will be treated as scapegoats for a high-level failure to ensure that the right policies were in place. When MI5 did brief David Blunkett on the mistreatment of detainees, Blunkett and his officials took no action, because they assumed that the Foreign Office and MI6 would take the lead in formulating an effective policy.
3. MI6 officials say they were unprepared for the post-9/11 environment. They did not have adequate policies or guidance on the mistreatment of detainees, and were therefore also slow to brief ministers. Even in relation to Jack Straw’s authorisation of the rendition of Abdul Hakim Belhadj and others to Libya, insiders say that the potential ramifications may not have been spelled out to Straw.
4. According to Ian Cobain in the Guardian, ministerial authorisations in these cases were “section 7 authorisations”, which are designed to ensure indemnity for operations that would otherwise be unlawful. This is wrong. The authorisations in these cases were “political rather than legal”, designed to ensure political cover.
5. Many accused David Miliband of trying to cover up Britain’s complicity in torture, as the revelations grew between 2008 and 2010. He tried to block the High Court’s disclosure of US intelligence material which would show complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed. He claimed that it would cause serious harm to US-UK intelligence relations. The coalition is now using a similar argument to justify extending the highly controversial system of closed material procedures. According to investigative journalist David Rose in the Mail on Sunday, the argument was based on a lie, designed to cover up wrongdoing. Rose cited US officials claiming that the relationship was undamaged. However, well-placed US sources, including a former CIA Director, say that the Binyam Mohamed case did cause difficulties for intelligence sharing, hence the move by the government to make terror courts even more secret.
In the Critics
Opening our Spring Books special in the Critics this week, Sarah Churchwell considers the year 1922: TS Eliot and Ezra Pound published their masterpieces, while F Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf would become best known for novels set in that annus mirabilis. Elsewhere, the NS’s lead book reviewer John Gray reviews Ferdinand Mount’s anatomy of the new “oligarchy” in Britain, The New Few, Nina Caplan talks to Peter Carey about his idea of Australia and the “rage of the periphery”, and Helen Lewis exposes the number jumbling in Brooke Magnanti’s The Sex Myth. In the Books Interview, Jonathan Derbyshire talks to Michael Frayn about his new novel Skios. Asked what he will be working on next, Frayn replies:
“I don’t think I shall ever write anything again. I’m going to go out to a clockmaker’s, buy a clock and present myself with it.”
Elsewhere in the New Statesman
• In Observations, Catherine Fieschi, director of the think tank Counterpoint, on the mainstreaming of the far right in Europe; Sophie Elmhirst on politicians’ boastful lack of sleep; William Cash reports on the continued battle over the government’s planning reforms, and Michael Brooks, in the Science column, considers the applications for the first true invisibility device.
• In the NS Diary, Roger Mosey, BBC senior executive and director of the London Olympics 2012 coverage, says the broadcaster’s next Director General shouldn’t forget Lord Reith’s mission: to inform, educate and entertain.
• As the local and mayoral elections approach, a curious phenomenon has become apparent: the Tories are losing, while Labour isn’t winning. In the NS Essay, “Stalemate”, Rafael Behr asks: How did British politics become like the Western Front?
• In the Letter from America, Nicholas Wapshott examines Rupert Murdoch’s resentment of the “toffs” and the implications for Cameron come the next election, whilst in First Thoughts, Peter Wilby considers political fall-out from a dramatic week at Leveson.