OPEN LETTER TO ALL UK POLITICAL PARTY LEADERS RE. PARLIAMENTARY OVERSIGHT OF INTELLIGENCE AFFAIRS

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF PEACE STUDIES AND GLOBAL PHILOSOPHY

Director, Dr. Thomas Clough Daffern  B.A. (Hons) D.Sc. (Hon) Ph.D.

 
July 26, 2016

 

Dear Tim Farron MP, Leader of the Liberal Democratic Party,  David Ford MLA, Leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, Colum Eastwood MLA, Leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party,  Leanne Wood, AM, Leader of Plaid Cymru, Mike Nesbitt, MLA, Parliamentary Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, Caroline Lucas,  Parliamentary Leader of the Green Party,  Nigel Farage,  Leader of UKIP,  Gerry Adams,  Leader of Sinn Fein, Arlene Foster, MLA, Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party,  Theresa May MP, Leader of the Conservative Party,  Nicola Sturgeon, Leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party,  Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party,  Patrick Harvie  MSP, Co-Convenor of the Scottish Green Party.

 

I am writing to you as a historian and philosopher specialising in peace issues, interested in the question of who has political control over the intelligence services in the UK style system of democracy and constitutional monarchy. I have some historical observations and questions to share with you, as the leader of one of the UK political parties, simply in the interests of truth and ethics.

 

1. I think the British people should have every confidence that its intelligence services are never, under any circumstances, ordered to investigate our own politicians and parliamentarians. They should be able to feel confident that the espionage services are never used to subvert democratic leaders and MP’s. Sadly at present we do not have this confidence. What we need to discover is: what are the parliamentary oversight responsibilities over our intelligence services ? Do the intelligence services have a duty to report if they are snooping on, or subverting, elected parliamentarians ? And who gives the green light for this kind of thing, at present ? In other words, before we legislate to change the system, we have to know how it is currently operating.
2. There are historical instances of British intelligence probably concocting the infamous Zinoviev Telegram to destabilise Labours electoral chances early on in its history. Also, recently it has come out that British intelligence helped fund Mussolini’s rise to power and basically bankrolled his early career. It could be said then, with some truth, that the whole European fascist movement was partly a product of British military intelligence that was at the time terrified of the Bolshevik success in Russia. “Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage fromMI5. For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to “persuade” peace protesters to stay at home. Mussolini’s payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5’s man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time. Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: “Britain’s least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia’s pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today.” (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/13/benito-mussolini-recruited-mi5-italy
3. If British intelligence has historically intervened politically to such an extent already, and there are innumerable other such instances that can be cited, I think it is time to put on statutory footing a few principles, which should be tabled by parliamentary legislation. I hope you will agree with me.
4. a) no British politicians should be subject to surveillance from the intelligence services
5. b) no British political parties should be infiltrated by the intelligence services
6. c) no UK parliamentary politicians (Lords or Commons) or party political leaders should be assassinated, denigrated, smeared or otherwise attacked either physically or verbally by any UK intelligence agents, who are sworn to protect democracy, not to attack it. If they have been involved in this kind of activity in the past, it should be brought to light and apologised for.
7. c) no British political party members or leaders should be simultaneously serving as UK intelligence agents – we need to differentiate the two functions.
8. d) there should be no attempt to infiltrate, subvert or denigrate British political parties by UK intelligence agents
9. e) UK intelligence agents should be forbidden by law from misusing social media to denigrate, blacken or demonise UK political party leaders or members
10. f) UK parliamentarians should not be recruited to work for MI5 or MI6 as it would compromise them and their future political careers could be subject to blackmail
11. g) UK parliamentarians should take a pledge and oath not work for foreign intelligence agencies under any circumstances
12. There are still some people who claim, perhaps rightly, that Tony Blair once worked for MI5 as an agent and was deliberately planted into the Labour Movement to destroy it from within. Questions need asking and answering to establish if this was in fact the case. If so, this is matter of political scandal and shows the over-reach of the intelligence services interfering in domestic democratic politics. This is why we need such legislation. Otherwise, parliament is corruptible and MP’s and Lords can be blackmailed by those operating behind the scenes, and we do not live in a democracy, but what could be called a “demonocracy”. Other questions remain about strange aspects of the deaths of John Smith, Robin Cook and Michael Meacher, and the British public deserve the right to know if their own or any foreign intelligence services were involved.
13. Agreement also needs to be reached with friendly allied governments’ intelligence services to the effect that their intelligence agents likewise would be forbidden by UK law to infiltrate, subvert, damage, assassinate or otherwise interfere with Britain’s legitimate democratic political party members and leaders. No UK political leaders and parliamentarians should be allowed by law to be serving members of any foreign intelligence agency whatsoever and if found to be so serving, they would lose office automatically.
14. All parliamentarians (of both houses) should be required to take a Parliamentary Veracity Oath, and if they are found to have lied on any official matter, they would lose office automatically. See my blog on this matter at THE VERACITY OF MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT AND HOLDERS OF PUBLIC OFFICE BILL : at https://thomascloughdaffern.wordpress.com/2015/03/30/the-veracity-of-members-of-parliament-and-holders-of-public-office-bill/

 

I understand the proposals in this letter are innovative. I would appreciate your response in writing to my ideas.  Perhaps you could let me know your own understanding of the current system as it is currently functioning; in your view, who actually exercise democratic oversight of the UK’s intelligence services, and to whom are they accountable to ensure they do not overstep the bounds of ethics, morality and lawfulness ? The danger of the current system is that it is all too opaque and nobody knows where they stand, or who to trust. If we are going to function as an effective and fair democracy this needs to change. As a historian, I know it is a hallmark of totalitarian systems that they are run by their intelligence services in cahoots with a small cabal; it is a hallmark of real democracies that they are run by their parliamentary representatives. I believe the leaders of all  political parties in parliament should also be interested in seeing such legislation put on the statute book, otherwise our democracy is not really playing by fair rules, is it ?

 

Finally, I would like to add that I am myself neither a member of any political party. Nor, of course, a member of the UK or any other intelligence service. I am merely a philosopher and an academic, and so regard myself as a member of the “Wisdom services”, which is something entirely different, and so I am writing merely as someone who has the best interests of our country at heart.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Dr Thomas C Daffern

 

The above letter was emailed to all heads of political parties in the UK with representation in Westminster or in one of the devolved assemblies. I was moved to suggest this after reflecting on the Chilcot Report and its  failure to address the deeper questions of why the UK was dragged into an illegal war in Iraq, against the obvious wishes of the British people, such as the role of 9/11 in the background, and Blair’s apparent willful sell out to US foreign policy interests. the blatant demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn in the media is another obvious matter of concern, and the way that whenever a genuinely left wing Labour leader raises his head over the parapet of consensual myopia in UK politics, they are found dead in mysterious circumstances. As yet, there appears to be no statutory right of protection for politicians from their own intelligence services, which is a bizarre situation, nor from the intelligence services of even “friendly countries”. The letter suggest that we amend this situation by providing a statutory right of protection for all parliamentarians, either in Westminster or in devolved assemblies. It also prevents the absurd situation of one political party (whoever happens to be in government) misusing the intelligence apparatus to infiltrate or spy on their political opponents. Such behaviors are the hallmarks of totalitarian regimes, not effective parliamentary democracies. There are enough serious security risks to the UK and to its politicians as it is, so that at least this one layer of concern could be removed.

The media has reported on ongoing legal uncertainty regarding these matters. the Independent said: “British intelligence agencies have been spying on MPs and peers in contravention of a decades-old convention prohibiting surveillance of politicians’ communications, a tribunal has heard. Hitherto-secret MI5, MI6 and GCHQ documents revealed in court that the agencies amended internal policies on surveillance of parliamentarians eight times in the past 12 months. The updated internal rules fail to comply with a 50-year-old political convention, known as the Wilson doctrine, which states that no parliamentarian’s telephone can be tapped unless there is a major national emergency and that changes to the policy will be reported to Parliament by the Prime Minister.Green Party politicians Caroline Lucas MP and Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, together with former Respect MP George Galloway, brought the legal action following CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about surveillance and the collection of metadata. The trio believes it is likely their communications were intercepted. Their case, contested by the intelligence agencies, is being fought in a rare public hearing before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, although some parts of the Government’s defence will be kept secret. The IPT panel is being asked to confirm that the Wilson doctrine has force in law. Ben Jaffey, representing the Green party politicians, said the case was about what safeguards were required before members of the legislature were subject to intercept or surveillance. He said MPs need to communicate privately with their constituents and potential whistleblowers. The tribunal heard that officers from the three spy agencies have operated under eight different policies concerning interception of parliamentarians’ communications in the last 12 months alone. GCHQ introduced a policy in March this year that did not require approval by the Prime Minister, or any Minister, before deliberately targeting the communications of a parliamentarian. The policy was then revised in June 2015″. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-intelligence-service-spying-on-mps-in-defiance-of-laws-prohibiting-it-10411996.html

 

 

Some Prelimenary Observations on the Chilcot Report

I have been reading the Chilcot report.. very interesting reading.. pretty damning of the whole enterprise. It is well written and clearly articulated, with a thoroughness that marks the mind of Sir John Chilcot. It is also well presented and numerated to make it easy to navigate.

But it is limited in its scope and didn’t ask all the questions that the UK public are entitled to know answers to, in my opinion.

Some of the several things it doesn’t address at all are:

1. The whole raison d’etre for war on Iraq and the false use of 9/11 to justify it in the Bush and then Blair establishment
2. Whether, as I believe to be the case, Bush and Blair are both active Freemasons and that Bush invoked this Freemasonic pledge of loyalty from Blair, and that this appeal transcended the use of rationality or indeed the cogent advancement of national self interest from a British serving Prime Minister
3. What other pressures were put on Blair to so convince a seemingly rational man that the 9/11 attacks were a casus belli for war against Iraq ? (skeletons in the cupboard ?)
4. Chilcot says in effect It is obvious that the intelligence was deeply flawed and was gerrymandered to be a pretext for war against Saddam – so while Blair asserts he “acted in good faith on the intelligence he was shown” one has to wonder why he didn’t actually ask on what basis the intelligence had been cobbled together (fantasies based on watching movies…)
5. From my reading so far there are two conclusions: either Blair was totally Machiavellian and knew he was lying about there being a justification for war on Iraq, and still does, or he was a simpleton who was out of his depth and simply didn’t ask the right questions of his advisers, and had already made the illogical determination to invade Iraq “based on 9/11” in which case both Blair and Bush should have gone to an insane asylum – or he was so frightened of his freemasonic oaths of obligation that he simply caved in to moral blackmail and pressure, and daren’t tell the British public what was going no. This would explain his later flight to the Vatican as a refuge of retreat, since by and large the Vatican is antipathetic to freemasonry.
6. My sense is simply that Blair is not as intelligent a person as he would like us to think, and was simply truly ignorant, and his ignorance operated in many spheres, such as the false causes given for the war, the lack of true and genuine intelligence for WMD, the failure to ask for cast iron proof of who was behind 9/11, the failure to challenge the assertion that it had anything to do with Saddam whatsoever, the failure to insist the USA delay the invasion until we were ready to adminster the aftermath, the failure to get true international and UN support for the invasion,and the failure to realise that it would stir up an endless hornet’s nest which has led to endless bombings and civil war in Iraq, that has now led to the formation of Isis and the meltdown in Syria, as well as ignorant in not listening to the warnings on all these matters that were a matter of common public discourse among the 2 million people who marched against the war in February 2001, myself among them. Blair also showed ignorance in thinking that he was advancing global freemasonic solidarity by launching the war on Iraq. Saddam Hussein had abolished freemasonry in Iraq and its once flourishing lodges had been pushed deep underground or simply destroyed by the use of Saddam’s secret police. (there are several definitive academic studies documenting Saddam’s war against freemasonry). Saddam’s anti Zionist rhetoric was also anti Masonic and he took whole swathes of ideas in this regard from Hitler’s similar hatred of freemasonry and the Jews. (Most anti-Smites in history have also been anti-masonic). However, the Bush and Blair invasion of Iraq actually played into the hands of the anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic Saddamist networks and further convinced the extreme anti Zionists and anti-Masons that the West is truly an evil and demonic entity and that freemasonry is really a diabolic secretive cult aiming at world domination, and that the only way to fight it is with blood and iron. This had been Hitler’s creed, it had been Saddam Hussein’s  and now it has become the creed of Isis and its henchmen. However, what Bush and Blair betrayed was the legacy of actual genuine freemasonry intended by its founders and transmitters – not a cult of secretive power and megalomania and imperialism but a genuine force for educational improvement and moral development, such as evidenced by the Lodge of the 9 Sisters in Paris, which was called by historian Nicholas Hans “The UNESCO of the 18th century” and which included in its members Helvetius, Thomas Jefferson, Jeremy Bentham, Lavoisier, Antoine Court De Gebelin, Voltaire,  and many others. This kind of freemasonry brought us the “enlightenment” (la siecle des lumieres). The Bush and Blair kind of freemasonry has brought us polarization,and endless wars on terror, mass killings throughout the Middle East by Isis affiliates, random attacks in the USA and the West, violence in Turkey, killings on a daily basis, the destruction of Syria (an enclave of enlightenment Gnostic Islam based on Alawite beliefs which are probably one of the sources of medieval Templar freemasonry) and so on. But of course the Chilcot commission cannot have been expected to go into all this – they are not dealing with ideas, philosophies and motivations or what is often called “psychohistory”.  but I think they should have at least asked some of these questions as to Blair’s hidden motivations, as not to do so is to betray truth. But intellectual historians like myself can ask these supplementary questions. After all my doctoral thesis was precisely in the field of “transpersonal psychohistory and the search for peace”.
7. The real question is – how can states, especially democracies, ensure that they get leaders who are genuinely intelligent, good, truthful and wise leaders ? One small but significant way would be to bring in the Duty of Parliamentary Veracity Bill, so that any parliamentarian who lies is immediately stripped of office.. An other way is to improve our higher education institutions and to ensure that our future politicians are actually educated in the classics of political philosophy, where they will learn that virtue is the best guard against disaster.Compulsory reading of Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas, Hobbes, Montesquieu,  Hegel,  T.H Green, Whitehead,  for all MP’s in their first year, followed by exams !  I fear however we have got neither of these – we have got a class of politicians for whom truth is less important than power, and universities that are forced to assess research quantitatively rather than qualitatively and are more or less penalized if they hire actual living philosophers, rather than scholars who merely trail over the footnotes of dead philosophers.

The Chilcott Report is important reading and everyone who cares about this country should study it and together we should learn its lessons.

At least Jeremy Corbyn (and Robyn Cook and others) and the Liberal Democrats under Charles Kennedy took a principled stand for wisdom and true intelligence in these matters.

The question remains – who will speak up for peace in the malestrom of lies ? This is why the Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy took the step in 2008 of founding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the Middle East. Without truth there can be no lasting reconciliation. The Chilcot Report has brought us a little closer to truth in these matters. but there is still a long way to go before we get truth in all the related issues such as manipulation of 9/11 as a casus belli, which is not even mentioned by Chilcott.

Finally, whilst it is tragic that 129 British soldiers died in this war, needlessly, it is wrong for the media to largely overlook than perhaps 100,000 Iraqi civilians died as a result of the invasion. the question is, how does one prosecute nations for crimes of aggression ? The International Court of Justice says it is not able to do this. What about the International Criminal Court ? It has jurisdiction over Crimes against Humanity. Article 7 of its treaty defines crimes against humanity as acts “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack”. The criminal court does not as yet have jurisdiction over Crimes of Aggression against individuals, which is absurd.

Enjoy your reading. No doubt many other grave questions will come to the fore in the days ahead. And thank you to Sir John Chilcot and his team. They may not have asked all the right questions, they may not have transmitted all that they know and found out in writing. but at least they have begun a conversation. It is the duty of the rest of us to press home the debate till we get full disclosure and the actual deeper truths emerging which can alone bring peace to a tormented and fractured people of the Middle East and indeed the world. one way to cut through to this, is for people to sign the Interfaith Peace treaty – whether you are Jewish, Muslim, Zionist, Arab, Israeli, British, Scottish, Irish, French, anti-Zionist, Freemason, Secular, Christian, Buddhist, Druid, Pagan or whatever. It is time for peace on this planet and an end to the thought that by creating killing machines, and investing in huge military development projects or weapons of mass destruction we can guarantee peace on earth. This route than can never do that. Its the fantasy land of star wars and star shields. As St John put it, only perfect love casts out fear. The irony of this Iraq war is that whereas “intelligence told Blair that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction” and therefore this was a justification for invasion, in point of fact, it was the USA and the UK and the West (and Russia) who actually had and have the weapons of mass destruction – including nuclear submarines that parade outside the Castle of the Muses here in Scotland, and costs billions of pounds that could otherwise be used to house the homeless, feed the hungry, educate the ignorant, reassure the fearful and clothe the naked. So yes, Blair’s intelligence, ultimately was flawed. No Iraq didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction. But we do.. time to invade ourselves ? perhaps we all ought to be practicing the inner jihad, the search for self mastery that Mahavira and Muhammad talk about.. time for “inlightenment” ?

Tempus Fugit, Stat Jus.

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-report/